Remarks by the Deputy Prime Minister on removing barriers to build more homes, faster in Toronto

December 21, 2023 - Toronto, ON

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This is a great day for Toronto.

Thank you so much, Prime Minister, for supporting our city, our country, and for leading on housing.

I also want to give a shout out to all of my Toronto MP colleagues here today.

The Toronto Caucus has been so focused on housing.

Because we know that this matters so much to our constituents and to our communities.

And I’m really happy that we are here with our essential partner, Toronto’s great Mayor, Olivia Chow.  

All of us recognize that housing is the central challenge in Canada right now. It’s the central challenge in people’s lives, it’s the central economic challenge, and we know that what we need is to build, build, build. And we need supply, supply, supply.

I also want to thank all the people who are here with us in hard hats and vests. We had a chance to talk to some of the people who are building this project, and every single person I talked to was so proud of the work they are doing, and rightly so.

Because they are literally building our city, building beautiful homes for their neighbours and their community.

We are here to look at some of these homes and celebrate an amazing thing, which is an agreement on the Housing Accelerator Fund.

We launched that Fund in our 2022 Budget, because we knew then that we needed to build more homes, faster.

We needed to do it in partnership with municipalities across the country, and we needed to bring something to the table to help cities build more housing faster.

And we knew that each city is different, so we needed to have great ministers prepared to do the work with great mayors – to do deals that work for each city – and get more homes built faster.

Those 16 deals that Minister Sean Fraser and our team have done, will fast-track the construction of more than 380,000 new homes for people across Canada.

Today’s announcement alone will fast-track nearly 12,000 new homes in Toronto over the next three years, and more than 53,000 homes over the next decade. 

And this is just part of our plan. Toronto is a growing city, and it needs governments at all levels to respond to those needs.

Just last month, I was able to announce two major rental housing construction projects being built right across Toronto through our Apartment Construction Loan Program, including 2,700 new rental homes.

The people who are building this project told me that it’s a great program that helps create incentives for builders to build rental construction rather than condos.

These are homes that supply exactly that essential niche in our market. That’s why we were so glad to add $15 billion more dollars to that fund in the Fall Economic Statement.

I am so glad that we are able to support this amazing city.  

Toronto, this amazing city, is such an important part of our government’s economic plan.  That is why our government has and will continue to invest in Toronto. In fact, our federal government has provided more support to Toronto than any other government in Canadian history.

I am very glad to be working with Mayor Chow and the City of Toronto. I greatly appreciate our collaboration.

And I love doing announcements with the mayor.

We also have a special connection because she’s my mayor, and I’m her MP. She’s my constituent. So, we both are responsible to each other, and to our constituents in this amazing city.

Thank you very much, everyone, for being here. It is my privilege to introduce a really important partner for the federal government – the mayor of Canada’s biggest city, Olivia Chow.