Housing affordability is one of the defining challenges facing communities across the Greater Toronto Area. Families and individuals are priced out of neighbourhoods they have lived in for decades; young people are losing confidence that they will ever own a home, and rental housing is out of reach for far too many.
Today’s passage of the Fighting Delays, Building Faster Act, 2025 (Bill 60) marks another positive step forward by the Ontario Government towards boosting housing supply, improving affordability, and strengthening our rental housing market. Notably, TRREB welcomes the commitment to enhancing Ontario’s rental-housing system, particularly reforms to the Landlord and Tenant Board (LTB) which TRREB has championed since 2024. Bill 60 will speed up hearings, improve procedures for rent arrears, streamline adjudication processes, and place greater emphasis on reducing systemic delays at the LTB. Together, these changes will strengthen the rental housing system for both tenants and rental property owners.
In addition, TRREB welcomes measures in Bill 60 aimed at addressing development charges and other barriers to building more affordable homes for families. For years, high, unpredictable growth-related costs have driven up construction costs, delayed projects, and eroded affordability for buyers and renters. Bill 60 begins to address this by standardizing how municipalities calculate and administer development charges, requiring more transparent reserve-fund reporting, and creating new rules to ensure greater transparency and accountability in how DC funds are collected and spent.
The legislation also clarifies the treatment of local service costs and infrastructure classes, which have historically generated costly delays and disagreements between builders and municipalities. Together, these measures aim to reduce uncertainty, improve consistency across jurisdictions, and lower the cost of delivering new housing.
TRREB has been working closely with partners across the housing and development sector to push for bold, coordinated action to expand supply and restore affordability in Ontario’s housing market. Earlier this year, TRREB led a broad coalition of housing-sector stakeholders calling on governments to act on six core recommendations to restore market confidence and reduce the cost of building homes.
The passage of Bill 60 alone will not solve the challenges. The province, for example, should continue to cut costs for new homebuyers by expanding its HST rebate to include all new housing. We are also calling on the federal government to match any provincial commitment to broaden the HST rebate to all homes. TRREB acknowledges Minister Rob Flack and Attorney General Doug Downey for their essential leadership on Bill 60.
We look forward to continued collaboration to advance the policy changes needed so that families and individuals can find attainable housing.
Elechia Barry-Sproule
TRREB President