The Green Plan

Housing affordability is the greatest challenge facing our province.

For too long, the provincial government has turned the other way while home prices and rents have skyrocketed. As a result, people are living in their parents’ basements, navigating precarious living situations, or in some cases, forced out onto the street. The system simply is not fair. People are growing frustrated by governments that sit idly by while homes prices rise and rents soar out of reach. When a worker making minimum wage cannot afford a one-bedroom apartment anywhere in the province, you know the system is broken.

Multiple generations of people have given up hope of ever being able to buy a home. What used to be an exciting chapter in one’s life is no longer a reality for the vast majority of young or even middle-aged Ontarians. This is a generational challenge, and one that requires a generational effort.

Our housing platform takes a bold and comprehensive approach to building millions of new homes and cutting unnecessary fees so you can afford to live in the neighbourhoods you know and love. It protects renters so you can feel safe and secure in your home without the risk of being priced out or kicked out by a bad-acting landlord. It stamps out the corporate greed that hikes up costs for everyone. Under our plan, everyone can find a safe and affordable place to call home – regardless of income, age, or location.

The key is immediacy—we cannot afford to wait. We need housing now. We’ll start cutting red tape from day one to eliminate the bureaucracy and fees that make building homes next to impossible, and we’ll make ending homelessness our top immediate priority. And we’ll do all of this while protecting the places we love.

The province holds the key to unlocking affordable housing, but Doug Ford is more interested in unlocking profits for wealthy land speculators– stubbornly saying no to building homes people can afford.

It’s time for action. It’s time for housing now. Here’s how we’ll do it:

Create more pathways to home ownership

We believe that everyone should be able to afford to own a home. It’s not just something that should be reserved for the wealthiest or luckiest. But in the past two decades in Ontario, that’s exactly what home ownership has become: a game of haves vs. have-nots. It’s not fair. Creating more pathways to home ownership is about reversing the systemic unfairness that has now locked out multiple generations from the housing market. It’s time for this to change. This is how we’ll urgently build more homes and restore fairness to the housing market so you can buy a home:

• Build 2 million homes in a variety of innovative forms within urban boundaries over the next 10 years.
• Allow single family dwellings to be divided into multiple condominium units to create more attainable home ownership opportunities within existing neighbourhoods.
• Require municipalities to permit developments with the use of pre-approved building designs (starter home designs to allow for more affordable development)
• Identify and plan for a mix of unit sizes (e.g. one-bedroom, two-bedroom) and housing types (e.g. multi-unit houses, low-rise developments) needed and in what quantity, based on demographic and immigration projections.
• Increase housing supply and help new homeowners pay down their mortgage by offering zero-interest loans of $25K for homeowners to add affordable rental units onto their primary residence.
• Update building codes and land use planning laws, financial tools, tax powers, and funding programs to incentivize the use of faster, lower-cost, and labour-efficient construction methods and sustainable materials like mass timber, modular factory built homes, etc.
• Increase financial and legal supports for small-scale builders of missing middle and mid-rise infill homes. Offer low-cost, long-term fixed-rate financing.

There are so many fees on new homes that act as a tax on building and are passed onto purchasers, unfairly locking first-time home buyers out of the market by hiking up prices—disproportionately impacting young Ontarians. Here’s how we will make the system more fair:

• Make homes affordable for homebuyers by removing development charges on homes, condos and apartment units built under 2000 sq ft within urban boundaries. Implement an Affordable Community Fund to reimburse municipalities for lost revenue.
• End the Land Transfer Tax for first-time home buyers to make it more affordable for people to purchase their first home.
• Remove burdensome red tape and costs that make purchasing a unit in a co-housing project challenging.

Build all types of homes

To build 2 million homes in diverse, thriving neighbourhoods means building a range of different types of homes so people at all stages of life have options for where to live. This includes families with kids looking for their first starter home to buy, single renters in a fourplex, a middle-aged couple in a townhouse, seniors looking to downsize, and everyone in between. Unfortunately, in many communities across the province, building these types of homes is illegal under current planning laws. Here’s how we’ll legalize more types of homes and create neighbourhoods that work for everyone:

• Update the Planning Act, Provincial Planning Statement and other applicable laws and regulations to expand zoning permissions to allow for fourplexes and four storeys as-of-right within existing urban boundaries province-wide, and sixplexes in cities with populations over 500,000.
• Set uniform provincial standards for urban design and remove onerous rules around floor space index, setbacks, and angular planes that are barriers to building missing middle and midrise housing.
• Update provincial planning laws to prezone for missing middle and mid-rise housing ranging from 6-11 storeys on transit corridors and major streets in large urban centres with populations over 100,000.
• Increase financial and legal supports for small-scale builders of missing middle and mid-rise infill homes; including offering low-cost, long-term fixed-rate financing.
• End mandatory minimum parking requirements for all new developments to bring down home prices.
• Change planning laws to ensure various building types can be built along main streets, transit stations and corridors, public lands, surplus commercial lands, and residential neighbourhoods to ensure there is a liveable mix of housing in all neighbourhoods.

Tackle speculation and corruption in the housing market

In addition to addressing the unfair loopholes that affect renters, we will also crack down on the loopholes that make the housing market unfair and inaccessible to everyday Ontarians. Rampant speculation and the financialization of housing as a commodity has turned a basic necessity into a playground for investors. This further hikes up prices and locks out the vast majority of people in the province from entering the housing market. The following bold and practical policies will stamp out corporate greed and corruption from the housing market:

• Implement a multiple property speculation tax on those who purchase more than two houses in Ontario. The tax will begin at 25% on the third home and increase with each additional property owned.
• Work with municipalities to implement a province-wide vacant homes tax to make it harder to use vacant homes as a lucrative place to park cash and fix the loopholes.
• Implement a provincial anti-flipping tax on quick turnaround sales.
• Crack down on money laundering and implement a beneficial ownership registry to avoid the practice of nameless companies trading properties.

Build new affordable homes & protect existing affordable homes

Over 90% of Ontario’s affordable housing supply was built before 1995. This has led to the situation we find ourselves in today, with a massive shortage of affordable homes. If we want to address the housing affordability crisis head-on, the Ontario government needs to get immediately back into the business of building affordable homes—specifically, 250,000 affordable homes, as recommended by Scotiabank. We can do so by working directly with non-profits and co-ops to create hundreds of thousands of new homes for people that need them the most, which will have the positive knock-on effect of bringing rent prices down for everyone.

Ontario has a robust network of non-profits like Indwell who run St. Mark’s Place in Kitchener, with deep experience in executing the delivery and operations of affordable homes. Greens will provide funding and a productive ecosystem for building, but let the non-profits work with builders directly. Here’s how we’ll do it:

• Work with nonprofits to build 250,000 new affordable non profit and co-op homes and 60,000 permanent supportive homes with guaranteed funding for mental health, addictions and other supports
• Work with Indigenous housing organizations to develop and fully fund 22,000 for-Indigenous, by-Indigenous deeply affordable homes
• Prioritise and speed up the development approval processes for projects led by or in partnership with non-profit housing providers, and provide low-interest loans via a new revolving fund.
• Lease all public land suitable for housing to nonprofits, co-ops, and community land trusts for permanently affordable housing at no cost
• Remove HST from affordable housing units delivered by non-profit providers
• Reduce multiresidential building property taxes to bring them in line with rates for single family homes

Along with building new affordable homes, we need to protect the existing ones. In communities across the province, affordable homes are being lost at an astonishing rate. In Waterloo Region, for example, for every new affordable home built between 2011 and 2021, 39 other affordable homes have disappeared. In Ottawa and Hamilton, 31; London, 24 and Toronto, 18. This is due to short-term rentals, renovictions and other loopholes in the system. Here’s how we’ll ensure affordable homes stay affordable:

• Renew 305,000 community housing units and create a new capital repair program, in partnership with the federal government, to ensure homes stay well maintained.
• Give non-profit housing providers the support and access to capital needed to purchase market rental buildings to maintain affordability in perpetuity and introduce preemptive right-to-buy for nonprofits.
• Restrict short-term rentals to principal residences and in cities with low vacancy rates so there is more supply available for local renters.
• Support rental replacement by-laws province wide to ensure the continued supply of affordable rental stock.

Provide security and support for renters

With home ownership out of reach for so many, renting has become the default for millions of Ontarians. Unfortunately, renters are all too often priced out or kicked out of their homes by bad-acting landlords who unfairly exploit loopholes in the system like above-guideline rent increases (AGIs) and ‘renovictions’. Times are tough. It’s hard enough to make next month’s rent as it is. You shouldn’t have to worry about an unexpected and unfair rent hike forcing you out of your home. We will crack down on bad-acting landlords by fixing the unfair rental system, and ensure your home stays your home:

• Reinstate rent controls on all units to regulate rental increases year-to-year and implement vacancy control to limit rent increases between tenancies.
• Extend financial support to 311,000 Ontario households via the portable housing benefit.
• Place a moratorium on AGIs and create a Rental Task Force to look into the overuse of above-guideline rent increases.
• Update and strengthen sections of the Residential Tenancies Act that deal with the state of repair for multi-unit buildings to ensure tenants have homes that are safe and kept in a good state of repair.
• Pass the Keeping People Housed Act to introduce a rental registry and strengthen rules and penalties for renovictions and bad faith evictions. Reform the Landlord and Tenant Board (LTB) to cut wait times down from one year to one month, and ensure the process is fair for both landlords and renters. Strengthen the appointment process by making it more transparent.
• Return to in-person LTB hearings unless otherwise requested by the renter
• Improve legal supports, including access to duty counsel and free information on rights and LTB procedures. Increase legal aid funding.

Take a Housing First approach and end homelessness

The worsening homelessness crisis in Ontario is an abject moral failure on the part of the provincial government. The Association of Municipalities of Ontario reported in January 2025 that over 81,000 people in Ontario are experiencing homelessness—an over 50% increase since 2016. This increase is even more drastic in rural communities, at 154%, and 204% in northern Ontario. Every day of inaction leads to more lives lost in the frigid winter nights. Homelessness is a problem across the entire province. And while previously concentrated in larger cities, homelessness is now growing three to four times faster in rural and Northern communities. The costs and impacts of the homelessness crisis are far-reaching, putting stress on hospitals, first responders and impacting local businesses. People experiencing homelessness are at increased risk of health challenges, and can have difficulty accessing the care they need. The homelessness and housing affordability crisis has also intensified challenges for people in crisis and transition, making already precarious situations life threatening and dangerous. We need urgency and a Housing First approach. Here’s our plan to end homelessness:

• Immediately support people living in encampments with their housing and support needs until permanent housing solutions are built and resume the homelessness census cancelled by the Ford government to ensure we create sustainable, long-term solutions
• Work with nonprofits to build 250,000 new affordable non profit and co-op homes and 60,000 permanent supportive homes with guaranteed funding for mental health, addictions and other supports
• Utilise a Housing First model to ensure that stable, permanent housing solutions are the first priority when helping those in need.
• Engage people who have lived experience with homelessness in program development.
• Create an inter-ministerial working group to ensure government investments targeting homelessness are coordinated, appropriately funded and provide long-term solutions
• Build an adequate data system for housing indicators in Ontario that captures the underlying trends of people with unmet housing needs.
• Deploy temporary and permanent supportive modular housing projects on provincially owned land as quickly as possible. Create tax credits and investment funds to help advance these housing technologies
• Increase annual funding for women’s shelters as well as safe and accessible transitional and supportive housing options for women and their families. Ensure transitional housing is culturally appropriate.

Building better communities

Your home is more than just four walls and a roof—it’s part of a neighbourhood and a community. As we do the hard work needed to ensure everyone in Ontario has an affordable place to call home, we’re also committed to creating thriving, affordable, people-centred neighbourhoods. Neighbourhoods with schools and parks nearby, and a corner store down the street. We can create these types of neighbourhoods without paving over farmland or destroying nature. We can build them near transit, so that long, expensive commutes aren’t your only option for getting around. We can create the kinds of neighbourhoods that you’ll want to rent or buy in, raise a family in, start a small business in, or grow old in.

Build homes, not sprawl

We can create these types of neighbourhoods without paving over farmland or destroying nature. By working within urban boundaries, we have more than enough space to create new neighbourhoods, and create new homes in existing ones. The current government’s approach of sprawling onto farmland and nature (including the Greenbelt) is expensive, worsens air quality, and increases the chances of your basement flooding. But it doesn’t have to be this way. We can build new homes that are within walking distance from public transit stations, so you don’t have to rely on long, expensive commutes as your only option to get around. Here’s how we can protect farmland and nature while creating new transit-connected neighbourhoods and homes:

• Freeze urban boundaries and reverse recent boundary expansions by the Ford government.
• Reverse the Ford government’s changes to the Provincial Planning Statement that encourage sprawl and instead prioritise housing where roads and sewers already exist
• Use taxes and incentives to encourage developers to build within existing neighbourhoods in towns and cities.
• Require minimum housing densities at transit stations and along transit corridors as a requirement in transit funding agreements between the province and municipalities.
• Work with all levels of government to include affordable housing developments above transit stations and on transit station surface parking lots.
• Reinstate the provincial brownfield remediation fund to support municipalities to safely build affordable housing on previously industrial sites.
• Incentivize and remove barriers to the construction of housing on commercial properties, such as abandoned plazas and warehouses.

Making community consultation more inclusive

To build the kinds of neighbourhoods we want requires a collaborative approach between communities and their residents to ensure people are meaningfully involved in the decisions that impact them. However, the traditional consultation process favours people who have the time and freedom to attend consultation meetings, which locks out people working shift work, busy parents, and future residents from having their voice heard. This process favours the status quo and often prevents new homes from getting built. Here’s how we’ll ensure meaningful consultation happens so everyone’s voice can be heard:

• Work collaboratively with municipalities on a province-wide “Yes, in My Backyard” initiative to raise awareness of the benefits of building more housing within existing neighbourhoods.
• Encourage municipalities to meaningfully engage with prospective residents, not only current residents, when consulting on new developments to ensure all voices are heard during the planning process.
• Explore innovative approaches to planning consultation that ensure processes are genuinely inclusive and meaningfully engage all citizens both in-person and online. For example, engaging people in community locations that they frequent such as coffee shops or transit stops, or providing childcare to ensure broader community participation.

Neighbourhood community hubs

Creating vibrant neighbourhoods requires more than just homes. Community hubs like libraries, local community programs, and small businesses are the lifeblood of our neighbourhoods – bringing people together, keeping kids and seniors active and healthy, and providing us with daily essentials. But these community hubs don’t happen by accident— we need to create the necessary conditions in order for them to open, and stay open. Here’s how we’ll do just that:

• Increase funding for local libraries, community centres and neighbourhood coalitions, which play an important role in encouraging community connections and reducing isolation for elders.
• Provide free and low-cost community hubs in schools, including but not limited to covering costs for free evening, weekend, March break, and summer permits for non profit community organizations.
• Support municipalities to create infill greenspaces in all neighbourhoods
• Amend zoning rules to allow for small businesses such as corner stores and cafes to open within residential neighbourhoods.
• Provide start-up funding for community-owned food markets and increase support for community gardens through land gifts and organisational support to eliminate urban food deserts.
• Cancel the Ontario Place Spa redevelopment and parking lot and build a public park and waterfront project

A New Deal for Municipalities

To support the creation of better communities, we’ll support and strengthen municipal governments. The current provincial government has downloaded numerous costs onto municipalities, putting them in compromised financial positions given limited revenue tools. Here’s how we’ll support municipal governments so they can help create better neighbourhoods for everyone:

• Grant municipalities autonomy to implement revenue tools to fund critical infrastructure needs and services.
• Upload costs to the province that had previously been unfairly downloaded onto municipalities like community housing, shelters, and transit funding.
• Provide dedicated and ongoing funding to municipalities to address the mental health and addictions crisis
• Reinstate upper-tier regional planning authority to ensure coordinated and sustainable planning to build the housing we need while protecting agricultural and natural heritage.
• Increase collaboration and consultation between municipalities and the province,
• Assess the use of City Charters as a mechanism to empower major Ontario cities, such as Toronto, and prevent inappropriate interference in local democracy by the provincial government.

Connect people with better broadband

• Make broadband internet an essential service and roll out high-speed access across the province
• Use regulations to level the playing field for small, local internet service providers
• Enact policies to ensure affordable access to high-speed internet, particularly for low-income households and small businesses.

Our plan for workers and economic fairness

People in Ontario are working harder than ever before, but it’s never been harder to get ahead. Income inequality has never been higher, and the gap between the have and have-nots continues to widen. Grocery store workers can’t even afford to shop at the very stores they work at. Meanwhile, corporate executives like Galen Weston are raking in billions. How is it fair that it takes Canada’s richest CEOs just eight hours to make what the average worker makes in an entire year?

It’s time to fight for fairness. Billionaire CEOs are profiting off the back of hard-working Ontarians, exploiting loopholes in legislation that keep working conditions poor and workers even poorer. People who are unable to work due to disabilities or other barriers are facing wholly insufficient support programs that lead to legislated poverty. The system is not fair. Here’s how we’ll do the hard work to create a fairer economy so you can get ahead:

Cutting your taxes and making the richest pay their fair share

The richest need to pay their fair share. By asking those who have a little more to pay a little more, we can cut income taxes for people who are lower- and middle-income earners. We can also build affordable housing, improve public transit and open more affordable childcare spaces. So many of Doug Ford’s priorities are about helping the rich—whether it’s the $7 billion electricity subsidies that disproportionately benefit the wealthiest households, or overturning energy board decisions that would have made your energy bill lower to benefit the profits of Enbridge’s CEO who makes $19 million a year.

Here’s how we’ll make the richest pay their fair share:

• Cut taxes for low and middle income earners under $65,000 and households making under $100,000, saving people up to $1700 per year.
• Increase the employer health tax exemption to $1.5 million so that small businesses can hire more workers
• Make billionaire fossil fuel companies pay municipalities for the right to use our land for their infrastructure.
• Stop giving hydro rebate cheques to the wealthiest Ontarians and redirect that money to help low and middle income earners pay their bills.
• Introduce strict anti-gouging and collusion laws to stop grocery corporations from gouging people on their grocery bills.

Improve workers’ rights and wages

Workers deserve a minimum wage that reflects the hard work they do and one that keeps up with the rising cost of living. The fact that a minimum wage worker cannot afford a one bedroom apartment anywhere in the province is a clear indication that wages are far too low based on today’s prices and economic conditions. It’s time to fight for fairness.

Here’s how we will make life better and more fair for workers:

• Increase the minimum wage to $20 and index to inflation each year.
• Implement ten provincially-legislated paid sick days for all.
• Ban employers from requiring a sick note from a medical practitioner when an employee is ill.
• Immediately end the practice of deeming, whereby the Workplace Safety and Insurance Board (WSIB) unfairly cuts benefits for injured workers.
• Make it easier to form unions by extending card-based certification to all sectors and implement an industry-wide bargaining model
• Legislate equal pay for equal work and put an end to wage theft.

Strengthen rights and protections for gig and temp workers

For too long, corporations have exploited loopholes in legislation by classifying workers as ‘gig’ or ‘temp’ to skirt responsibility for providing safe working conditions. These loopholes disproportionately impact recent immigrants, workers from disadvantaged communities, and racialized people. It’s not fair. Gig worker jobs in particular are one of the fastest-growing types of jobs in the province. It’s estimated than one in 10 workers in Canada are gig workers. We need worker protections that reflect the realities of the modern economy.

Here’s how we’ll fight for fairness and improve working conditions for gig and temp workers:

• Protect gig workers by expanding the Employment Standards Act to include all workers, close loopholes and end exemptions to the law. This means ensuring at least minimum wage for all hours of work from app sign-in until sign-out.
• Classify gig workers as employees with full employment rights and full and equal access to benefits programs like EI, CPP, and WSIB.
• Make gig work count towards Permanent Residency applications.
• Mandate that temp agency workers earn the same and have the same workplace protections as directly hired workers when they do the same work, and that temp workers must become full hired employees after three months.

End legislated poverty

Poverty in Ontario is escalating. More than 80,000 Ontarians experienced homelessness in 2024, an alarming 25% increase since 2022. And 1 in 5 children in Ontario were living in poverty in 2022. Despite these deeply concerning statistics, limited action is being taken by the provincial government to address poverty in the province. The Ontario Disability Support Program has increased by only 4.5% since 2018 and Ontario Works rates have remained at 2018 levels. Both programs are wholly insufficient in providing people with disabilities and in poverty with the necessities given today’s affordability challenges. People with disabilities shouldn’t be forced to make the impossible choice between keeping a roof over their head or putting food on the table. In a province with as much wealth as Ontario, it is unconscionable that so many people are forced to live in deep poverty without the assistance they need. In addition to raising the rates of ODSP and OW, we’ll take an urgent and comprehensive approach to tackling the housing affordability crisis and ending homelessness. For more details, please see the Housing NOW section. Ontario Greens are committed to ending poverty in the province.

Here’s how we’ll do it:

• Phase in a Basic Income, with the first step being to at least double the Ontario Disability Support Program (ODSP) and Ontario Works (OW) rates and get rid of aggressive and unfair clawbacks, including clawbacks from the Canada Disability Benefit. .
• Eliminate any unnecessary red tape, reporting requirements, and other barriers typically faced by those needing financial support.
• Remove ODSP from the purview of Employment Ontario.
• Ensure shelter allowances reflect the shelter costs where people live.
• Include meaningful consultation with people who have lived experience with poverty and existing social assistance programs in the design of all programs and services aimed at client-centred approaches for reducing poverty.
• Annually report disaggregated data on the proportion of the population that experiences chronic food insecurity.
• Prohibit “payday” lending that takes advantage of those facing financial hardship and work with credit unions to develop a low-cost, small loan alternative to help people get out of debt.