More than five years ago, when she was but a housing minister, Kathleen Wynne spent the night at a public housing unit in Toronto’s Flemingdon Park neighbourhood.
“The windows were a disaster. There was air coming in,” the premier recalls in a year-end interview with QP Briefing. “There was ice on the windows.”
The experience stuck with her. Fast-forward to August 2017, when her government pledged $657 million in green repairs and retrofits to Ontario’s social housing stock over the next five years, with more than half flowing to Toronto.
“That money that we’re putting into retrofit … is very sorely needed. And what that means is that other money that the city might be able to invest they can invest in other things,” Wynne says.
Toronto Mayor John Tory agreed at the time, while noting that many units “don’t necessarily need energy retrofits.” Social housing issues cut deeper than new insulation and LED lights.
Wynne defended her government’s record on social housing Tuesday, but declined to lay out concrete future commitments for the hundreds of thousands of Ontarians living in crumbling units – or waiting in line for the privilege.
About 185,000 families — or nearly 500,000 people – now wait in the subsidized housing queue, many for years on end. The number of households on Ontario’s wait list shot up 36 per cent between 2003 and 2016, according to the auditor general. Meanwhile, Toronto’s social housing stock faces a repair backlog of $2.6 billion, which threatens to eject thousands of residents over the next decade — 1,000 within a year — if building upgrades aren’t made.
That urgency, critics say, requires action swifter than Ottawa’s $40-billion national housing program, unveiled last month. The plan, while received with open arms by premiers across the country, hinges on whether the provinces opt to ante up with billions of their own. And core components of it won't play out until after the 2019 federal election.
Wynne, talking in her corner office in Queen’s Park's east wing this week, couched the social housing conversation in the context of affordable housing and fairness generally.
“It is about building more affordable housing. It’s about rent supplements. It’s about providing not just housing supports for people who are homeless or who are living in really precarious situations, but providing other services,” she said. “So we’re trying to work across the spectrum.”
The government introduced Wynne’s Fair Housing Plan last April, imposing rent controls of 2.5 per cent or lower on all private units across the province. A $125-million, five year program encourages construction of more rental apartment buildings through a rebate for a chunk of the development charges. Another incentive ensures rental building owners pay the same property tax rates as other residential properties.
Some housing supplements for individual renters can come as cold comfort for those struggling to find a place to live, however. About 4,000 Torontonians, for example, now receive supplements of between $250 and $400 a month to help them land a home in a city that just saw vacancy rates bottom out at one per cent – the lowest in 16 years – amid skyrocketing rents.
Fresh commitments to social and affordable housing may yet come with the New Year, the Liberals’ election platform or the spring budget – if it passes before the writ drops in early May. But if so, Wynne gave no real indication.
“We are by no means the best society that we can be,” she said, summarizing her take on representative democracy: “Government doesn’t exist to protect the status quo; government exists to change the things that need changing.”
To what extent social housing falls into that category may shine through more clearly come 2018.
Photo credit: Jessica Smith Cross

Wynne year-ender: Holding off on a concrete commitment to social housing

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