Wellesley Institute’s Ontario Election 2025 series laid out our recommendations for what provincial party leaders can do to advance health equity in three key areas: thriving – policies that will help ensure people have what they need to live a healthy life, health system equity, and housing. Below, we examine the parties’ commitments on housing leading up to the election on February 27.
We have incorporated only what has been announced to date and included policies and legislation introduced by the current government in recent budgets. For the purposes of this analysis, we have presumed that all parties used the current “status quo” from the most recent provincial budget as their baseline. We also presume that, unless parties have been explicit about reducing funding from that budget, they do not intend to do so.
Our overall analysis
We are pleased to see that all political parties have committed to increasing funding for new supportive housing units. The Green Party of Ontario and Ontario New Democratic Party (Ontario NDP) have both committed to creating 60,000 new supportive housing units. The Ontario Liberal Party and Progressive Conservative Party of Ontario have provided less details but have committed to build more units. While this is a great step, the next government should support this with a broader strategy to end homelessness within 10 years.
The Green Party has a number of measures to address housing and housing affordability. We are pleased to see they commit to working with Indigenous organizations to develop and build 22,000 deeply affordable homes. They, along with the Ontario NDP and Ontario Liberal Party also include rent control measures that will help tenants by regulating rental increases year-to-year to stabilize rents in private buildings and improve affordability.
All parties must commit to and deliver on a 10-year plan to end chronic homelessness as a first step towards ensuring everyone in Ontario has a home that is affordable, healthy and adequate. We need a publicly available plan, with publicly available targets, to show everyone Ontarian this is a problem we can solve, together.
Below, please find more detail on each of the parties’ platforms, presented alphabetically by party name.
Green Party of Ontario
On homelessness, the Green Party proposes to:
- Immediately support people living in encampments with housing and support needs until permanent housing solutions are built.
- Resume the homelessness census and build a data system for housing indicators.
- Work with non-profits to build 250,000 new affordable non-profit and co-op homes and 60,000 permanent supportive housing homes with guaranteed funding for mental health, addictions and other supports.
- Create an inter-ministerial working group to ensure government investments targeting homelessness are coordinated and appropriately funded to provide long-term solutions.
- Deploy temporary and permanent supportive modular housing projects on provincially owned land, including through the creation of tax credits and investment funds.
- Increase annual funding for women’s shelters and transitional and supportive housing options for women and their families.
On access to housing and housing affordability, the Green Party proposes to:
- Build two million homes within urban boundaries over the next 10 years.
- Work with Indigenous housing organizations to develop and fully fund 22,000 for-Indigenous, by-Indigenous deeply affordable homes.
- Remove HST from affordable housing units delivered by non-profit providers.
- Renew 305,000 community housing units and create a capital repair program, in partnership with the federal government.
- Reinstate rent controls on all units and implement vacancy control.
- Extend financial support to 311,000 Ontario households via the portable housing benefit.
- Place a moratorium on above-guideline rent increases (AGIs) and create a Rental Task Force to investigate the overuse of AGIs.
- Update and strengthen parts of the Residential Tenancies Act to ensure homes are kept in good state of repair.
- Improve access to legal supports for tenants, including information on rights and Landlord and Tenant Board procedures.
Ontario Liberal Party
On homelessness, the Ontario Liberal Party proposes to:
- Provide wraparound supports to help people recover from addictions, including rapidly building supportive housing units.
On housing and housing affordability, they propose to:
- Introduce phased-in rent control.
- Incentivize developers to build more co-op and rental apartments by removing extra taxes that may increase costs.
- Establish the Rental Emergency Support for Tenants (REST) Fund, a provincial rent bank to provide short-term, interest-free loans for tenants facing financial emergencies.
Ontario New Democrat Party
On homelessness, the Ontario NDP proposes to:
- Upload the cost of housing, emergency shelters and homelessness prevention programs back to the province.
- Create 60,000 new supportive housing units across Ontario, with supports for mental health care, addictions treatment and other services.
On housing and housing affordability, they propose to:
- Establish Homes Ontario, which would use grants, low-cost public financing, public land, fast-tracked approvals and other supports to enable the construction, acquisition and repair of at least 300,000 permanently affordable homes.
- Immediately introduce rent control and vacancy control and close the loophole that exempts units built since 2018 from rent control.
Progressive Conservative Party of Ontario
- The current government previously announced in 2023 that they will be investing an additional $202 million annually in homelessness prevention programs to help those experiencing or at risk of homelessness and to support community organizations delivering supportive housing. They also committed to funding for new supportive housing units in their next budget.