Thank you for your question.
The 25% to 30% would encompass all taxes, charges and fees. That would include items like the land transfer tax; the GST in Ontario and other provinces; in some other provinces, the provincial component of the HST; and development charges, which are often the largest components of that stack of government-imposed charges.
In Hamilton, where I'm from, they have a development charge on a single detached home. It's just over $100,000. There are a number of municipalities in the GTA where it approaches $200,000 a door. These are significant charges, and they've increased significantly over the last couple of decades. In Hamilton, they're up 87% since 2021, and they were increased by just over 30% a couple of years ago, through one review of the background study.
We know that infrastructure needs to get built. Development charges are a component of that. I've been doing this for 20 or 25 years, and I often hear that growth needs to pay for growth. I'm appearing before you as an expert witness, and I can tell you I have no idea what “growth pays for growth” means anymore. The definition in 2005 versus 2015 versus 2025 and the different components that go into development charges have changed significantly over the last couple of decades, and, unfortunately, what we're including in development charges, at least in Ontario today, includes a variety of items that benefit the entire broader community rather than having that direct nexus between the new housing developments and the infrastructure required.
Unfortunately, that has created, in my view, a generational wealth transfer or generational inequity in which younger people are being saddled with the cost of infrastructure that previous generations were not. When that is paid for up front and in advance through a development charge on a new home, those younger people are often paying, putting it into their mortgage and amortizing it over 25 years for infrastructure that's being built to last 30, 40 or 50 years, rather than those costs being spread more equitably across the broader community and being a big spread over time.
The development charges system, in my view, is broken. I think we need development charges, and I think there's a role for them in terms of paying for infrastructure. This falls more in the provincial jurisdiction, but I certainly appreciate that this committee is interested and that the federal government, through the build communities strong fund, just a couple of days ago, on Monday, announced some of the parameters around the development charge reduction program. I'm hopeful that many municipalities in Ontario and my home municipality of Hamilton will participate in that program.