BarrieToday welcomes letters to the editor at [email protected] or via the website. Please include your full name, daytime phone number and address (for verification of authorship, not publication). The following letter on housing and government spending is addressed to Ontario Premier Doug Ford.
Something is terribly wrong with your government. The longer that you are in power, the more out of touch with the people of Ontario you seem to become.
Recently, Premier Ford went on the record that he would not promote the building of four-plex and eight-plex buildings in Ontario communities.
But that is exactly what we need to help make housing more affordable and to use our existing land more efficiently.
Premier Ford wants to build 1.5 million homes, but the present home prices are far out of reach for even the couples who have two good-paying jobs. There is no point in building houses that the average person cannot afford.
Ontario needs more co-operative housing, more rent-geared-to-income properties and more rental stock. Ontario needs to protect existing rental stock from rent evictions and price gouging when apartments are vacated.
Airbnb-type investment has robbed many communities of rental properties. Premier Ford’s preoccupation with the 1.5 million headline is out of touch with realities of this housing crisis.
There was news today that the Ford government has spent $8 million in advertising to tell the people of Ontario “how great it is to live in Ontario” because we are building more highways and more electric batteries.
I am disgusted to see my tax dollars wasted in shameless self-promotion of a government that is failing Ontario in so many ways — health-care shortages, under-funding of education, lack of affordable housing, increasing homelessness, the cost of living, ignoring the reduction of our greenhouse gas emissions, deaths due to a tainted drug supply…
I can think of so many ways that this $8-million of advertising dollars could have been spent more effectively on the more pressing needs of the people of Ontario.
I would not have thought that I would need to tell Premier Ford this fact.
David Howell
Orillia
