‘We don’t track data as well as we should,’ Ontario housing minister says
Global News
Housing Minister Paul Calandra told a committee at the Ontario legislature he had encountered issues with the data it keeps to measure affordable housing progress.
Ontario’s housing minister says poor data tracking is making it harder for the Ford government to keep on top of how many new units have been built as it targets 1.5 million new homes by 2031.
Housing Minister Paul Calandra told a committee at the Ontario legislature Thursday afternoon his team had encountered issues with the data it keeps during an affordable-housing spat with the federal government.
During the spring, Ottawa and Queen’s Park traded accusations over how Ontario had spent money allocated to it under a bilateral agreement called the National Housing Strategy.
The federal government claimed the province had failed to build almost any affordable housing units with the money and threatened to withhold funding for a plan it said wasn’t up to scratch. For its part, the Ford government said it had made huge strides, focusing particularly on renovating older affordable units.
Calandra told MPPs Thursday that a lack of clear data made that intergovernmental dispute more complicated. The feud ended with Ontario keeping the money it had been promised.
“One of the challenges we were having is we don’t really track as well as we should the number of homes that we’re building,” the housing minister said.
“There was this disagreement specific to that for instance on how many affordable units we had built through the National Housing Strategy… We started at one number and then the number increased, (then) the number increased (again). It really highlighted for us that we’ve got to do a better job of tracking that data.”
Calandra said his federal counterpart, Minister Sean Fraser, had raised the same concerns about how data is compiled and tracked.
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