The federal government has kept its promise not to distribute $350 million in affordable housing funds to Ontario. Ottawa will pay the money directly to Service Managers upon failure to meet the conditions applicable to receiving these funds.
The money is part of a bilateral housing agreement signed in 2018 and was supposed to be given to the province to invest in affordable housing. Under this agreement, Ontario committed to provide 19,660 units of affordable housing. However, the federal government said last March that its funding was at risk.
In a March 21 letter to Ontario Housing Minister Paul Calandra, officials said the province is lagging behind its targets. They are expected to be able to deliver 1,184 units of new houses by the end of 2024-2025.
At the same time, federal housing minister Sean Fraser wrote to Ontario’s housing minister, saying that would mean achieving 94 percent of the target in the last three years of the deal, which is not realistic at all.
Fraser noted that he would freeze the $357 million allocated for affordable housing until the province comes up with a revised plan on how the target will be met.
The federal government has given the provincial funding conditional approval if certain measures proposed in the revised plan are implemented by September 30, 2024, the federal government said. Additional steps include mandating coservice managers set annual delivery targets, focusing on building new affordable housing units and improving data collection and reporting systems related to these initiatives. Initiatives are good. But Ontario promised to implement a similar initiative last year. They have not yet been achieved.
Fraser said they would get the money if the province could show some progress in fruition.
A month later, the federal government said there had been no improvement.
