NewmarketToday is taking a look at the issues most important to voters ahead of the provincial election on Feb. 27. Up first, NewmarketToday spoke with candidates, as well as local lawmakers and change-makers about what’s needed to achieve progress in tackling the housing crisis, including building more attainable housing. Complete election coverage is available here.
Cutting red tape, scrapping development charges, or building supportive housing units — Ontario's political parties are offering different solutions for how to get affordable housing built.
Progressive Conservative Party leader Doug Ford won a majority government in the last provincial election while promising to build 1.5 million homes by 2031.
To hit that target, Ontario would have needed to start 34,100 homes per quarter on average, beginning in 2021. Over the past three years, the province has averaged 22,900 starts per quarter — just two-thirds of its goal, according to a November 2024 report by the Financial Accountability Office.
Ford has promised to allocate another $5 billion to the Building Ontario Fund to invest in projects, including housing, plus $2 billion more into the province’s Municipal Housing Infrastructure Program and Housing-Enabling Water Systems Fund if re-elected.
To help boost building, the PCs have sought to cut red tape, streamline approvals and encourage development on the Greenbelt, the latter which landed Ford in hot water.
NewmarketToday reached out to Dawn Gallagher Murphy, Conservative candidate for Newmarket-Aurora, Michael Parsa, Conservative candidate for Aurora-Oak Ridges-Richmond Hill, as well as Jason Cherniak, Liberal candidate for Aurora-Oak Ridges-Richmond Hill with requests for interviews, but did not receive a response.
“It seems to me that there has been now for some time a misplaced and overwhelming preoccupation with trying to solve the housing crisis through municipalities,” said Newmarket Mayor John Taylor in an interview. “That somehow if we could speed our planning process up by a month or two, or reduce DCs (development charges) by 30 or 50 per cent, that an international housing crisis could be solved.”
Cutting development charges could see municipalities become ‘financially unsustainable’: Newmarket mayor
The Liberal platform proposes scrapping development charges on "new middle-class housing," plus reducing the backlog with the Landlord and Tenant Board, and removing the land transfer tax on new home sales for first-time homebuyers, seniors downsizing, and non-profit home builders.
Taylor, who is the chair of Housing York, the region’s public housing body, has previously been critical of a proposal for York Region to reduce its development cost charges, and said doing so provincewide could see municipalities become “financially unsustainable.”
“I would argue that we're in a period of time, right now, that we will look back on and remember as the period when the cities became financially unsustainable,” said Taylor.
Newmarket council also recently backed a call from Aurora Mayor Tom Mrakas for the provincial government to give municipalities a portion of the money collected from the land transfer tax.
He added that the best way to incentivize housing of all types is to build infrastructure.
“What's holding up housing in this province far more than a DC or a zoning amendment in the municipalities is the woeful lack of infrastructure that we need to build housing, particularly water, wastewater, and transit,” said Taylor. “So reducing our ability to build infrastructure by reducing or eliminating DCs does not get infrastructure built.”
In contrast, the Toronto Regional Real Estate Board said “high development charges, taxes and administrative hurdles” slow down house building.
"At TRREB, we believe the solution starts with collaboration. Traffic congestion and affordability are interconnected challenges that require integrated approaches,” the board’s CEO John DiMichele said in a news release. “The current system of high development charges, taxes, and administrative hurdles only exacerbates the issues. This stalls progress on building the housing supply we need to support our growing communities.”
According to the Ontario Real Estate Association’s report card for the party’s housing platforms, all three major parties have backed limiting development charges in some form.
Province needs to get back into public housing: mayor, advocate
Taylor said the province needs to get “significantly and seriously back into public housing.”
“I think we've got to get back to being more strategic and surgical in our efforts to impact housing affordability in the housing markets,” he said. “We need to get housing that will be owned forever by government and offered at reasonable, affordable rates to those who are in crisis, or close to being in crisis.”
Taylor said the region also needs more co-op housing, a model of which Liberal candidate for Newmarket-Aurora Chris Ballard said he was a fan. Ballard also said he would work more closely with the non-profit home sector.
“There's not enough money in the Treasury to subsidize all the housing that needs to be built,” said Ballard. “But there are creative things we can do.”
Michael Braithwaite, CEO of Blue Door, said non-profit housing builders like his organization need not only capital funding, but also pre-development funding.
Braithwaite said a lot of federal funding programs require developments to be “shovel ready,” but this requires non-profits to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars with no guarantees.
“There's a lot of non-profits that actually have land they could develop, but their boards would never say you could spend close to a million dollars with no guarantee that you'll be able to raise the money to do the housing afterwards,” said Braithwaite. “So it's quite a leap to ask non-profits to do that, and many of them, that's a big part of their budget. It's very risky to do.”
The Ontario NDP platform calls for a government body to be established and tasked with building at least 250,000 new affordable and non-market homes, according to Naila Saeed, NDP candidate for Aurora-Oak Ridges-Richmond Hill. There are also plans for 60,000 supportive housing units.
Affordable rental housing, subsidies
Braithwaite said the riding needs more affordable rental housing, and rent subsidies to help those struggling to pay market rents. He said this will help keep people out of shelters.
“There are people in emergency shelters that don't need 24-hour care. They just simply can't afford to pay market rent,” he added. “So if there's more market rent, so if there's more deeply affordable spaces for independent living available, we'd open up more shelter spaces for those who need that 24-hour care and aren't ready yet to live independently.”
While out door-knocking, Saeed said she heard from many residents concerned about rent hikes in the riding, and said the NDP would fix that.
“They are fully committed to reinstating real rental control, closing loopholes that permit landlords to raise rents between tenants, and preventing unethical evictions,” said Saeed.
The Ontario Liberal platform also proposes introducing “phased-in rent control similar to Manitoba” and establishing a “rental emergency support for tenants” to help vulnerable renters avoid eviction during financial emergencies.
Taylor echoed Braithwaite’s comments, saying he would be open to cutting development charges on rental housing because “that’s the housing that supports people who are most in need.”
“When a person can no longer afford to rent, they end up somehow relying on the system, whether that's shelter, rent supplements. That gets very expensive very quickly, “ said Taylor.
“Government policy should focus significantly, if not entirely, on forms of not-for-profit or government housing, and on rental private market rental housing,” he added.
The Ontario Real Estate Association released its own 2025 housing platform and a report card detailing how the political parties stacked up.
The Ontario Liberal and Ontario NDP received check marks across the board, having backed policies identified in the association’s platform, including fixing “the broken" Landlord and Tenant Board, as well as allowing fourplexes as of right.
Ford has stood against allowing fourplexes as of right.
Overall, the OREA said the Conservatives had partially committed to fixing the tenant board, and limiting development charges, while the association gave the party a check mark for its platform’s calls to “promote and help scale innovative approaches to development (i.e. by investing in Ontario’s budding modular home industry),” as it did for the Liberals and NDP.