Affordable housing is an issue throughout Ontario and across the nation.

It’s no different in the Quinte region, and Trenton native Steve Clark, MPP for Leeds, Grenville, Thousand Islands and Rideau Lakes and Ontario Minister of Municipal Affairs and Housing, says his government is willing to work with anyone to help provide housing opportunities.

Clark made the comments Tuesday morning while on a tour of the new Grace Inn Shelter on Church Street in Belleville with Bay of Quinte MPP Todd Smith, Minister of Children, Community and Social Services. Prior to touring the new 21-bed homeless shelter, Clark and Smith met with Erin Rivers, Hasting County’s director of community and human services to discuss housing issues and the county’s needs. Following the tour they were headed to Belleville city hall for a meeting with Mayor Mitch Panciuk, Quinte West Mayor Jim Harrison and Prince Edward County Mayor Steve Ferguson to discuss a number of issues, including affordable housing. After that they met with the Quinte Landlords Association to listen to the issues they have to deal with on a daily basis.

Panciuk said along with affordable housing, he was going to discuss “the fact that Belleville got short-shifted on the efficiency funding, we’re going to talk about some tweeks the province needs to make to the integrity commissioner process, particularly where it comes to what we call identifiable individuals. Councillors are not considered identifiable individuals and if there is a report regarding them it is made public, but if one of them is involved in launching the complaint they are not involved in it and that’s not fair. We want them to use evidence rather than the process of what’s going on and what not.”

“We deal with our 47 service managers and our two Indigenous program managers, including the County of Hastings, to provide a variety of funds from the province but also through our Canada/Ontario Housing Agreement and so it was a good opportunity for the county to talk about their allocation under the Community Homelessness Prevention Program,” Clark said. “The fact that our allocation was given prior to this facility being opened. So it’s one of those things that, now that the Grace Inn is open, we’ll go back and look at the allocation for homelessness prevention to see if there needs to be an adjustment based on the new facility being here.”

“When we took office 18 months ago we realized that we’re in a challenging fiscal environment, so what I wanted to do as Minister of Housing is to take every dollar that’s in the system and make it flexible for those local service managers. The people at the county, they’re the people on the ground in this riding, they know better than I do the unique needs and we can’t deal with housing as a one size fits all, we have to ensure that we’re flexible to meet the needs. A year ago this facility wasn’t here, so now that it is here and is part of community we want to work with it and we want to make sure that the county is equipped to deal with housing issues,” he said.

He said it was a great opportunity for him to talk about what’s happening in the county in terms of affordable housing.

“We have a lot of great announcements that the ministry has participated in. Probably one of the showpiece announcements was on Dec. 19 where I, along with my federal colleague, the Honourable Ahmed Hussen (Minister of Families, Children and Social Development), announced that Ontario is the first province or territory to sign on to the National Housing Benefit. This is an affordable housing benefit that we’ll have available so we can work with the people who are the most vulnerable, people who are homeless or at the risk of being homeless, people who are fleeing domestic violence, who are fleeing human sex trafficking, who are seniors or who are facing disability issues, to be able to have a portable benefit they can use with a private landlord or with a rental facility to make them more stable,” Clark said.

As for Grace Inn, Clark said, “It’s an amazing facility. I have to hand it to Minister Smith, he’s been very persistent. We sit beside each other in the Legislature and because I live in Brockville, he essentially said either when you’re going home or when you’re going to Queen’s Park, we need to pull off the 401 and we need to see this facility. Now that it is open it became a huge priority for me and I’m just very impressed that the community has come forward to open this shelter. This is the first shelter in the city and I’m very proud of the work the staff and the community has done to provide this option for vulnerable people in the community.”

Regarding the meeting at city hall with the Quinte area mayors, Smith said, “They all have a variety of issues they want to bring up, but they all want to talk about housing because housing is such a huge issue in this region. Steve has introduced and passed legislation that’s already getting positive results as far as new builds. There has been a lot of positive reaction to the new legislation so far as building housing goes, so that’s a good thing. But there’s more that we have to do obviously.”