Housing help: what the parties are promising in this Ontario election

New Democrat candidate Loren Mick says it's happened a few times in this provincial election campaign.

He'll knock on a door in the Nipissing riding and a "lovely couple" answers and tells him their story about the high cost of housing.

And then their adult children come around the corner to say hello, soon followed by their young children, the grandkids of the home owners.

"And I'm not saying there's any shame living with family, but I think there's no choice for these adult children to move on if they wanted to," said Mick, who is also a town councillor in Mattawa. 

"I don't think anyone planned on being priced out of being able to leave."

Candidates of all political stripes, in every riding in northeastern Ontario, say they are getting a lot of questions about housing costs at the doorsteps.

David Plourde, the Progressive Conservative candidate in Mushkegowuk-James Bay, says he is pushing for a tailored northern Ontario housing plan that "includes governments—provincial, federal, municipal— industry, mining and forestry."

"Everybody's getting pinched everywhere and creativity around the table is what we need to make things work," said Plourde, who is also mayor of Kapuskasing, where they "always had an overabundance of housing," but "find ourselves in a shortage" since COVID.

"Let's get talking and let's make it happen."

He believes a specific northern housing plan can fit into the PC pledge to build 1.5 million homes by 2031 and says he wasn't bothered by Premier Doug Ford suggesting in the last term that municipal politicians were to blame for the housing shortage.

"Lots of times it's white noise out there. If we had time to deal with much of these issues at the municipal level, we'd be doing it already. Because that's what we have to do right?" said Plourde.

The Ontario Liberals are promising to restore the rent price controls that the PC government dropped back in 2017, while pledging to save first-time home buyers as much as $170,000 in cuts to land transfer tax and other fees.

That includes the development charges that many cities, including Greater Sudbury and North Bay, apply to any new construction.

Sudbury city councillors, including Nickel Belt Liberal candidate Natalie Labbée, voted last year to freeze some development charges and drop others altogether, at a cost of $11 million in city revenue.

But Labbée says city staff say they are seeing signs that the move is leading to more housing being built in the city.

"[Ford] has completely failed with the new builds for what Ontario needs. Rents have skyrocketed, home ownership is further out of reach. Seniors can't even afford to downsize in their own communities," she said, adding that a Liberal government would also offer up to $13,500 in incentives for seniors looking to move to a smaller home.

The New Democrats are promising to upload social housing to the provincial government if they win on Feb. 27 and build some 300,000 affordable housing units in the next decade.

In Mattawa, the town recently bought an empty nursing home and converted it into 31 affordable housing units for seniors.

But town councillor and Nipissing NDP candidate Loren Mick says the rents are no longer enough to cover the mortgage. 

"We're scrambling to figure out how we're going to address this issue as a municipality with a limited tax base, right? It's municipalities left filling in the gaps in our supportive systems from the provincial government," he said.

Kris Rivard, the Green Party candidate in Timiskaming-Cochrane, says many subsidized housing units in the riding sit empty because local governments don't have enough money to fix them up, especially considering 90 per cent of Ontario's social housing stock is over 30 years old.

The West Nipissing town councillor says he's hearing "a lot about housing" in every community in the sprawling rural riding.

"You could really hear the stress in their voice, the concern about where they will be, maybe a few months from now," Rivard said.

"The provincial government's kind of let everyone down, and they haven't kept up with the times or the increased demand."