Cost of Living
A Place To Grow Your Family
An elected Liberal government will:
- Eliminate HST on more food purchases
- Replace the minimum wage with a regional living wage
- Build 1.5 million new homes and deliver rent control
Save you money on meals
Food is getting more expensive, eating into your monthly budget. We’ll go after the giant grocery stores driving up those costs. To lower your costs right away, we’ll remove the provincial HST on prepared food under $20 – like meals at restaurants or to-go counters. The plan will be fully funded by a 1% surtax on companies operating in Ontario whose profits exceed $1 billion a year, and a 2% income tax increase for individuals on income earned over $500,000 annually.
Raise the minimum wage
If you have a job in Ontario, you shouldn’t struggle to meet your basic needs – especially if you’re working full-time hours. One of the very first things the Ford Conservatives did was freeze the minimum wage at $14 an hour. We’ll increase the minimum wage to $16 an hour and then develop a living wage that factors in the local cost of living in different regions of the province.
Build 1.5 million new homes
The average price of a home under the Ford Conservatives went up half a million dollars. One of the biggest reasons why housing costs are so high is because demand is much greater than supply. To meet this demand, we’ll get 1.5 million new homes built in Ontario over the next 10 years – doubling the pace of building from the past decade. But it’s not just about building more homes, it’s also how these homes get built and used. We’ll go after the rules and red-tape that are driving home costs and prices up – and we’ll make it faster and more affordable to get new homes built where people want to live, such as unlocking more provincial land by burying electric transmissions lines and redeveloping underutilized strip malls and offices. We’ll also introduce new taxes on vacant homes in urban areas and developers sitting on land.
Deliver province-wide rent control
The Ford Conservatives ended rent control to help their well-connected friends, making renters’ lives unpredictable and less affordable each year. We’ll prevent sudden rent hikes by reinstating rent control everywhere in Ontario – putting an end to the two-tiered rental market and providing much-needed stability to renters.