About The Backgrounder:
Premier Doug Ford and Municipal Affairs Minister Steve Clark have invited Ontario’s Big City Mayors and Regional Chairs to a meeting that’s been billed as a Provincial-Municipal Housing Summit. While the government has asserted this meeting will aim to “tackle the issue of housing affordability,” the Minister’s recent statements suggest it may be little more than an attempt to reanimate discredited claims about the roots of Ontario’s crisis. At worst, it could derail the broad and growing consensus among housing advocates, environmentalists – and many developers – in support of the public policy measures that will be required to make housing affordable.
To help the Premier and mayors avoid these pitfalls – and to help observers attempting to parse their statements – Environmental Defence has assembled some key facts to keep in mind.
