Anyone who thinks, at this late date, that the Progressive Conservative party might be willing to address Ontario’s housing crisis with serious reforms to provincial and municipal planning policies might want to turn their attention to the riding of Parry Sound-Muskoka, where PC candidate Graydon Smith (himself a former mayor) is railing against the local Green candidate Matt Richter for the party’s pledge to liberalize planning rules around the province. The Greens would allow fourplexes and four-storey buildings as a rule across Ontario (a pledge matched by the Liberals and New Democrats) and have previously introduced a bill that would have allowed up to 11 storeys on major streets. Smith has fixated on the latter, issuing dire warnings about “towers across our towns.”
Let’s set aside the question of whether 11 storeys makes a “tower.” The context here is that aside from Green leader Mike Schreiner’s riding of Guelph and Kitchener Centre, where the party successfully elected Aislinn Clancy in a 2023 by-election, Parry Sound-Muskoka is the riding in which the party has the highest hopes of electing another MPP in this election. Richter came in second in the riding in 2022, about 2,000 votes behind Smith, and the Green platform, released Wednesday, features a photo of Schreiner, Clancy — and Richter. This is, in short, a riding where the Greens are putting a lot of effort into winning, and it will bear watching on election night.
The Greens seem to have retreated under fire, albeit modestly: the platform released this week promises mid-rise permissions in cities of 100,000 residents or more, a qualification that was not specified in their original bill, or even in the first-time homebuyer plan announced last week. The entire population of Parry Sound-Muskoka is just over 100,000 spread over numerous municipalities, so the riding would be spared any compulsory mid-rise rules. Surely a coincidence.
(Cecilia Stuart, a Green Party spokesperson, explained the change via email. “We made the urban areas distinction explicit in our platform to acknowledge the unique infrastructure limits facing smaller communities. Under our plan, smaller communities would be able to meet their housing targets by implementing fourplexes and four stories as of right,” she said.)
There’s two weeks left in this election and room yet for surprises, but all of this is charitably a tempest in a teapot: a Richter win in Parry Sound-Muskoka would be noteworthy, but it would mean a Green caucus of three MPPs at Queen’s Park (if Schreiner and Clancy are re-elected). That would leave them well short of official party status, and the odds are slim of the party having more than a rhetorical effect on the housing policy of the next government.
What’s more noteworthy is that as a reasonably close observer of provincial politics and someone who’s somewhere between obsessive and monomaniacal on the topic of housing policy, this might be the only case in this election so far of the parties actually debating housing policy, albeit using a generous definition of “debate.”
This is confusing (and somewhat frustrating) since it remains the case that the province’s housing crisis is one of the issues that is top of mind for voters. To pick just one recent example, a Leger survey from last week found that housing affordability was tied with U.S. tariffs for second place as an issue of concern — behind only a more generalized inflation/cost of living, but ahead of doctor shortages or high taxes. This survey isn’t cherry-picking complaints from a bunch of malcontents hostile to the Ford government, either: it’s one of the better polls for the Tories we’ve seen lately, showing 47 per cent support across the province.
To be clear, the other parties all have their housing policies. The Tories had largely given up reforms to planning rules but did make more money available to help municipalities expand the infrastructure needed for new homes, particularly water. The Liberals have promised to exempt new homes from development charges and other fees if they’re under 3,000 square feet. (The Greens have a similar promise for homes under 2,000 square feet.) The NDP would substantially expand social housing commitments and introduce stronger tenant protections. There will be more to come, as the Liberals and NDP are still expected to release their platforms. There’s been no shortage of ideas proposed. But in the campaign so far, housing just isn’t rising to the level of a major point of distinction between the parties.
This omission isn’t an accident, exactly. The PC Party undoubtedly realizes that if they tried to boast about their housing record (amidst a province with cratering housing starts and developers of every stripe pleading for more urgent action) they might actually be laughed out of the room. In any event, Ford and his advisors have picked a campaign centred on dealing with the threat of U.S. tariffs and they’re sticking to it. The larger opposition parties — the NDP and the Liberals — have focused instead on the more traditional ground for an Ontario election, the province’s health-care system and the proper funding thereof.
This is all understandable, perhaps even predictable given how Ontario elections have been won or lost in the past. But elections are what we make governments out of. If the next government is going to have to deal with the housing crisis with solutions commensurate to the problem this election should probably include a substantial, even boisterous and acrimonious debate about what the parties have on offer — and a debate not confined to a single riding in cottage country.
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