My question is to the Premier.

ACTRA artists are gig workers. Almost a year ago, the ad agencies who hire these artists demanded a 60% cut to rates, they demanded an end to retirement contributions, and they demanded to end their benefits. Then, instead of bargaining, the ad agencies locked out ACTRA members and hired scab replacement workers.

My question is, will the Premier commit to passing the NDP’s Bill 90, the Anti-Scab Labour Act, which would prevent the use of replacement workers and protect the bargaining rights of workers?

I’ll tell you what happened, because I was sitting right there. When I was on strike and scabs were crossing my picket line, the Liberal Party counted the number of Conservative members—and my Liberal MPP hid in the backroom while the Conservatives voted down anti-scab.

If they really believe in anti-scab, they could pass it today or table their own.

For more than 60 years, ACTRA performers have made commercials through the National Commercial Agreement.

Instead of bargaining, advertising agencies have locked out the workers. A lot of the government’s advertising is done by ad agencies like FCB and Leo Burnett, and they are using scab replacement workers for crown corporation ads—like the OLG and Metrolinx master band. ACTRA’s members have been locked out for nearly a year. For nearly a year, they’ve been turning their backs on these workers.

Will the Premier commit today that the government of Ontario and the crown corporations that are accountable to it will not use replacement scab workers in any Ontario government-funded ads? Will you have these workers’ backs? Yes or no?

Interjections.

I want to thank Dr. Sally Palmer from McMaster University for circulating these petitions across the province. It’s a petition to raise social assistance rates.

“To the Legislative Assembly of Ontario:

“Whereas Ontario’s social assistance rates are well below Canada’s official Market Basket Measure poverty line and far from adequate to cover the rising costs of food and rent: only $733 for individuals on OW and (soon) $1,227 for ODSP;

“Whereas an open letter to the Premier and two cabinet ministers, signed by over 230 organizations, recommends that social assistance rates be doubled for both Ontario Works (OW) and the Ontario Disability Support Program (ODSP);

“Whereas the recent small budget increase of 5% for ODSP still leaves these citizens below the poverty line, both they and those receiving the frozen OW rates continue struggling to live during a period of alarming inflation”—I can only imagine;

“Whereas the government of Canada recognized in its CERB program that a ‘basic income’ of $2,000 per month was the standard support required by individuals who lost their employment during the pandemic;

“We, the undersigned citizens of Ontario, petition the Legislative Assembly to double social assistance rates for OW and ODSP.”

I wholeheartedly agree with this. I hope we can end legislated poverty. I’ll affix my signature and provide it to page Leonard to bring to the table.

“Petition to the Legislative Assembly of Ontario:

“Whereas the Wolfe Island ferry and Glenora ferry have had serious service disruptions due to a staffing crisis created by the Ontario government; and

“Whereas residents and visitors to Wolfe Island have been trapped on the island for up to 12 hours with no way to leave, even for emergencies or work; and

“Whereas Glenora ferry has had a reduced schedule during this year’s busy tourism season, creating hours of lineups and delays for passengers; and

“Whereas the Ministry of Transportation (MTO) ferry workers are drastically underpaid in comparison to the rest of the marine industry, causing recruitment and retention issues; and

“Whereas instead of paying competitive wages and hiring more permanent staff, MTO has contracted out the work to Reliance Offshore, an out-of-province, private temporary staffing agency, which charges up to twice as much hourly as ministry staff earn; and

“Whereas contracting out the work is a waste of our public funds on a stopgap solution that doesn’t provide long-term stability to our ferry system;

“We, the undersigned, petition the Legislative Assembly of Ontario as follows:

“(1) Fix our ferries—stop the service disruptions and reductions caused by ministry understaffing.

“(2) Repeal Bill 124, which has imposed a three-year wage cut on already underpaid ferry workers during high inflation, and pay them fair, competitive wages”; and finally,

“(3) End the outrageously expensive contracts with private temporary staffing agencies and hire permanent Ministry of Transportation ferry workers to work and live in our communities instead.”

I support this petition, as do many people. I’ll affix my signature and provide it to page Maya for the table.

One of the things that I don’t understand, and I mean this in a genuine way, is that the bill seems to be solving a complaint the AG had made about Infrastructure Ontario not taking good care of their properties, but the solution to this is to have more properties under the care of Infrastructure Ontario. I fully don’t understand this. Sometimes, with questions, we throw out something that’s a left hook, but I do not understand how a government agency that isn’t doing a good job is rewarded by seeing if it can do a better job with more responsibility. Can the member explain why this is a good solution?

I’m looking forward to talking about government Bill 69. Before I do, though, I want to wish Laura Belanger a happy 105th birthday. And I want to send my regrets to Laura because I was supposed to go present her with a scroll on Friday in Sudbury, but I had a cold, so we sent her a handwritten note to let her know. But I did want to celebrate her birthday and recognize her here. I can’t show the photo because that would be a prop, and we’re not allowed to at Queen’s Park, but if you go to Sudbury.com and look at Heidi Ulrichsen’s article on her, there’s a great photo of her. There is no way she’s over 80. Wow—just amazing. So congratulations again. Happy birthday, Laura Belanger.

We’re talking about Bill 69, Speaker. It has two schedules, and I’m going to talk primarily about the first one. If I have time, I’ll get to the second one.

But I want to preface this by talking about the importance of environmental assessments. That’s something that’s near and dear to me in Sudbury. Sudbury, when they did the first moon landing, is where they trained astronauts, and the rumour at the time was that the reason they trained the astronauts there was because it looked like a moonscape. The environmental damage in Sudbury was so bad that there were barely any trees surviving. The rocks were scarred black as if it was the moon. In fact, growing up as a child, I thought that rocks naturally turn black when they’re exposed to the air; that if you were to rub some soil off them, they would turn black, the same way that a pop can would start to rust if exposed to the environment. I had no idea that it was because of the pollution and the acid rain that had literally scarred the earth. NASA didn’t train there because it looked like the moon; it was because they thought the rocks would be similar in structure. But you can see why most people literally around the world thought Sudbury was the training ground because of the environmental damage and it looked like a moonscape that no one could survive on.

If you fast forward to today—and this is a 50-year journey—the regreening of Sudbury has absolutely changed that landscape. So I feel that people in Sudbury, having lived through that, from a time growing up, where I would watch my grandmother spit out SO₂, because it makes phlegm in your mouth, on the ground—it became a normal environment for people to breathe in so much SO₂, it caused phlegm that you had to spit it out in order to breathe. When you fast-forward to where there’s green space, there’s nature trails and there’s wildlife coming back to the community, we understand the importance of environmental assessments and protecting the environment.

Now, the Conservatives do not have a great track record when it comes to the environment. They don’t. Sometimes in opposition it seems like we’re just pointing fingers and poking, but literally over the last four years, the last term, Speaker, their environmental policy was that they had a bill to encourage people to pick up litter one day a year. I’ve talked in the past about being involved with Beavers, Scouts and Cubs. When I was a little kid, which was a long time ago—I had hair back then—we used to go out and pick up litter one day a year. We are far beyond that when it comes to the environmental issue of the day. Much more needs to be done and it needs to be done immediately.

So, whenever we see legislation where the environment is minimized, where it’s circumvented and where it’s bypassed, we get concerned about that as New Democrats. Frankly, it’s because the Conservative government doesn’t have a good track record on it, and this has been shown over and over again.

If you look at what happened in the greenbelt—now, I think most people are aware, but just if anyone is watching this or reading Hansard, in the greenbelt, there are developers who bought some land that essentially was useless because you can’t develop in the greenbelt. And from what I understand, they took out loans with very high interest rates. So imagine if you took out a loan on your credit card. I don’t know if it was that high, but it wasn’t a subprime loan. And then, magically, by amazing coincidence, that land now is open for development. That feels like just an amazing coincidence. Man, are they really, really lucky. They’re lucky enough to go to the Premier’s daughter’s wedding. They’re lucky to build on this land.

What I’m being told, again and again, is, well, this is being developed because we have to build housing. I think we can build housing in a lot of places without carving up the green space. And saying that we’re expanding the greenbelt doesn’t make any sense to me either, because it isn’t just land; it’s wetland, it’s marshland. It’s important areas that help clean and cleanse the water that is essential to our environment.

Also, the ministry zoning orders, they were rammed through in the past, and that was rammed through despite local communities’ opposition. And so, there was a lot of discussion during debate about listening to others and the consultation. But time and time again, we don’t really see consultation. Last week, I had to phone many constituents in my riding about the budget because there was 24 hours for them to register. On the provincial budget, people had 24 hours, and they only knew they had 24 hours because MPPs from this side of the House—New Democrats—phoned them and told them.

The history, since I’ve been here—it’s almost five years now—is that the Conservative government, under Doug Ford, they always know what’s best. This is a father-knows-best government. They cannot wait to tell people in Ontario what is the right thing to do, and it doesn’t matter how many times they make mistakes. It doesn’t matter how many times they lose court cases. It doesn’t matter how much money they spend in tax dollars fighting court cases that they lose.

I’ve been watching Futurama with my son and Zapp Brannigan has a line—it’s got all kinds of funny lines. One of the lines, Zapp Brannigan—he’s not an army leader, but a leader of an army. He says he’s willing to send “wave after wave of ... men” to their deaths in pursuit of his cause, and I think of the government’s perspective, when it comes to spending taxpayers’ dollars on losing legal battles, in that same way. They don’t care how much money of the taxpayers they waste on these losing tax battles, on these losing cases, because it’s not their money and they don’t care about being fiscally responsible with taxpayer money when it comes to this sort of thing.

More recently, we’re finding out that they’re spending $650 million of public money to give away—to give away—a massive chunk of Ontario Place to a for-profit company based in Austria. And I forget the lease agreement, but it’s more than 90 years—95?

The other part of this is if we go back in time to the previous time the Conservative government was in government, it was under Mike Harris when they took Highway 407 that all of us had paid for, as taxpayers, and they sold that off as a really good idea. Now, very few people actually take the 407 anymore because it’s so cost-prohibitive. But what we did as taxpayers is we paid for this land, we paid for the highway and the development, we paid for the infrastructure; and the Conservative government, under Mike Harris, sold it off to private entities that are not in Canada. They charge some of the highest rates—I know that my colleague looked it up before. We weren’t sure if it was around the world, but we know it’s definitely the highest rates in North America for people to access a toll highway.

This is what the Conservative government does really, really well: They take public infrastructure that we own and they give it to their wealthy friends for a song, and their wealthy friends get wealthier, wealthier and wealthier, but the public keeps paying more, more and more.

And people are watching this—if you’re able to watch this, because a lot of people can’t afford Internet. A lot of people can’t afford bread; they can’t afford rent. I heard this weekend that nine out of 10 parents are subsidizing their adult children when it comes to food and shelter—nine out of 10. I knew it was a lot of people. I used to say everyone knows somebody; the reason everyone knows somebody is because it’s nine out of 10. Only four to five dentists agree you should chew Wrigley’s gum. Nine out of 10 parents have to pay for their kids to eat or have shelter. This is what’s going on.

The government of the day, they love to blame the previous administration. I’m right with you. For 15 years, Liberals did a terrible job, 100%. But for half a decade, you’ve been in power, and things keep getting worse for people, to the point where they don’t have food, they don’t have shelter.

Let’s look at schedule 1: the Environmental Assessment Act. The first thing that stands out to me is it allows the environment minister to waive a 30-day waiting period at the end of the consultation period. Yesterday, the member from Timiskaming–Cochrane talked about an abandoned mine in his area they were going to use for waste fill and that, at the end of it, there was a comment because everyone in that area knew there was a well in that area. They were concerned about the waste water, the spillage going into the well and affecting drinking water. Literally everyone knew this. The government didn’t know, but everyone who lived there knew. If they had waived that consultation period, they would have poisoned drinking water for that community.

I shared a similar story from going to Nunavut. I can’t remember the exact structure, but the Europeans were looking for the Northwest Passage, and they were lost at sea in the north around Nunavut. Two ships went down, and more than 100 people lost their lives. More people lost their lives looking for these ships. They found one of them; they couldn’t find the second one for almost 200 years.

One day, when they decided to consult with the Inuit people in Nunavut and ask them if they had any idea where the ship could be, they said, “Yes, it’s probably here by this island, because this island, translated from Inuktitut, means, ‘There is a ship here.’” The ship was almost perfectly preserved in the ice. It wasn’t scattered and there were pieces; there was a whole ship there. But because of the arrogance of the people around there, who felt that they didn’t need to consult, for nearly 200 years, they couldn’t find this ship. People died from being lost or from hypothermia while searching for a ship where, if they had just listened to the people who lived there, they would have found that there was a ship beside an island called “There is a ship here.” I know it’s a funny story, but it’s a good reminder of why consultation is important.

When you waive the 30-day waiting period—quite frankly, if we had changed the wording to this, “that the minister is going to waive it if everyone who consulted said there was no issue,” if there was some way to do that, I’m all in favour of that. I don’t want to necessarily drag out anything. But there are concerns when you don’t have a consultation period.

I have concerns, as I said earlier, when we have amendments, when we have community consultations—or deputations, as we call them here, Speaker—when we only give 24 hours for people to respond, when we—last summer or the summer before, I can’t remember; I apologize. When we’re talking about farming and we ask farmers to come and speak to us in the middle of harvesting season, maybe we don’t get all the best information that we need.

Consultation is important and effective. The worst mistake we can make, any of us as MPPs, really, quite frankly, is to think that we know more than the people of Ontario, because we don’t. We all come from diverse backgrounds. We all know a little bit of our own areas, but we are not experts.

I was reminded of this. The first year I was elected, I went to a fundraiser at Science North. As a point of pride for myself, my first volunteer job was at Science North when it opened. I remember going to Sears with my mom to get black pants and everything and working as a volunteer, and it was a big deal for me. So growing up, my kids all went to Science North. I have three kids, four years apart, so it’s basically a lifetime of going to Science North. My oldest son now brings his goddaughter to Science North.

So when I sat down with them and they said, “Do you know what Science North did?” I said, “Oh, yeah,” and I told them my whole history with Science North. I went through the whole range of it. They started talking to me and, I bet you, Speaker, I knew 10% of what they did—10% for an institution that I’m always involved with that’s in the centre of my city.

That’s why consultation is important. It’s a great reminder that we don’t know everything, even though we think we do. There is a big danger of what you don’t know that you don’t know. I’m talking a lot about this because I want the government to listen to this, that consultation is important.

The other thing that the government really has to understand is that this isn’t consultation. That’s not consultation. They believe it is. I saw this with the mining bill. They presented the mining bill, and the day they presented it, they brought it to First Nations communities. They said, “Here’s the bill, here’s what we’re doing” It’s not consultation. It’s not. There’s actually a legal definition of consultation, and you need the time to consult, to review, to provide feedback and to get responses. They believe consultation is showing. I don’t know if they’re stuck in a time warp from the late 1960s, but that no longer exists when it comes to consultation. Consultation really is a meaningful dialogue where you present, you hear feedback, you answer questions and you work in between. It doesn’t mean you’re always going to 100% agree, but you are going to listen. What we’re seeing now and what we’ve seen for the last decade from the Conservative government is not consultation but dictation: “This is what we’re doing. This is what we’re doing.”

We see it right now in our municipalities when it comes to conservation authorities, where they’re slowly moving conservation authorities out of their role and saying municipalities can pay for this. A lot of municipalities don’t have the resources or skills to pay for this, and municipalities don’t get to say no. They don’t get to say no to this.

Really, schedule 1, in a nutshell, is going to make it easier for the Conservative government to ignore public input, and it’s already really hard for the public to provide input. It’s hard because there’s very short notice for people to respond. It’s hard because, when we do deputations, for example, it is always time-limited, time-allocated. It’s always a very short amount of time: “We’re going to get this over with as quick as we can. We’re going to do amendments as quick as we can. We’re going to ram it through as quick as we can.”

We really should be listening to the public. That’s who elected us, and sometimes we’re going to hear—on this side of the House and on that side of the House, we’re going to hear stuff that we don’t want to hear, that does not align with what we thought, what we believed in, what we thought was the case, but we need to hear it because that’s how we make the decisions.

Now, the courts—it sounds sometimes like, as New Democrats, we’re just saying the Conservatives got it wrong, but, literally, they got it wrong twice. There are two good examples here where the courts found that the Conservative government violated the Environmental Bill of Rights two times.

The Environmental Bill of Rights guarantees the public’s right to be notified and consulted on matters affecting the environment and also the right to have their comments considered prior to the government’s decisions. That’s that consultation point where I was saying that you just don’t tell, you have to listen and respond as well. That was your Environmental Bill of Rights. It took a while, actually, for the public to get this Environmental Bill of Rights to come forward. It’s an important right that we have. Like all of our rights and freedoms, this is one of the ones that should be a core value. I’ll tell you, if you guys are not paying attention already—sorry, Speaker. If they’re not paying attention already, this is a major issue for any voter who is under 30 years old. It’s a major issue for a lot of voters, but if you talk to young voters, environment is at the top of their list.

The Auditor General had warned the Conservative government they violated the environmental rights again by passing Bill 109 at third reading while public consultations were still under way. They passed it in the middle of consultations. That is how little they care about what the public has to say. It is a formality. They might as well not even show up at the consultations; they might as well just pass it. That’s what this bill is saying: “We can pretend to wait for 30 days to review it, but we don’t even want to pretend. We just want to go and get it done, because, honestly, the people of Ontario are not as smart as we are. The Conservative government is much smarter, so we don’t need to listen to you, as Conservatives. What we need to do is get this done. We’re going to get it done no matter what you think is right or wrong.” They’ve been doing this all the way through.

I’ll remind you, Speaker, they’ve been getting it done, and more and more people are in poverty. They’ve been getting it done, and more and more people are unable to afford rent. They’ve been getting it done, and more and more people working full-time are going to food banks—getting it done; people can’t afford food. That plan, for five years, half a decade, is failing Ontario, and as much as they want to crow and say, “Why don’t you support it and why don’t you do this”—your plan is failing, that’s why. It is not working, because, every single time, you vote it through anyways and life gets harder for the people of Ontario.

They violated it the first time. Then, in 2020, the Conservative government severely weakened the Environmental Assessment Act with amendments that they slipped into Bill 197. That was an omnibus bill. The bill was supposed to be about COVID-19, but it was about weakening the Environmental Assessment Act. I don’t think anyone during COVID was thinking about the Environmental Assessment Act and wasn’t expecting us all to be sitting around talking about it in a COVID bill, weakening the Environmental Assessment Act. They jammed that through the Legislature. They didn’t have consultations because they didn’t go to committee and they denied the public an opportunity to provide comments.

There are a whole list of issues—I’m going to run out of time. There’s a whole list that the Narwhal has that I was going to read. I had them all here. I can’t—it’s a prop if I hold it up, but I was going to read them here. There are all kinds of examples where the Conservative government literally proved time and time again that they don’t care about the environment, they don’t care about assessments and they don’t care about consultations. What that says, when you don’t care about the environment, you don’t care about assessments, you don’t care about consultations, is that you do not care about the people of Ontario. You simply don’t care about them. They are not important to you. We’ve seen this time and again.

They can stand there and they can talk about the election results as much as they want; there were very few people who came out to vote. But the reality is, they’re not listening to those people at all. They’re not listening to them. If you’re a deep-pocketed developer, absolutely you’ve got their ear. You’ve got front-row seats to their kid’s wedding. But if you’re an average person struggling to make ends meet, they do not care. They don’t.

I was speaking to injured workers earlier today. They asked why we couldn’t fix WSIB. Speaker, it’s because they don’t care. ODSP protest outside the front office: New Democrats were there. No one from the Conservatives was there. You know why, Speaker? They don’t care. They are bragging that a 5% increase is going to help—which doesn’t help anyone on OW, who’s even lower. But when you have the government providing money that is so low that people can’t afford shelter through OW and ODSP, what they’re telling those people is, “You are worthless to us.” The Conservatives are saying, “We do not care about you. You are worthless to us. We don’t care if you can afford food or shelter. We do not care about you.” They do not care the same way they don’t care about these consultations.

I have about 30 seconds on the clock, Speaker, so I’m going to end it there.

I feel like during the debate, I was very clear about fiscal responsibility. The reference point that I used was when the Conservative government sold off Highway 407. We had paid, as public taxpayers across Ontario, to build Highway 407 to make transportation more effective for the people of Ontario. The Conservative government sold it for a song—literally pennies on the dollar. They sold it and gave it away to rich developers. It’s not even provincially owned as a private contract anymore, so the people who own it don’t even spend money in Ontario. They’re all outside the country now. That isn’t fiscally responsible.

I hear time and time again about fiscal responsibility, but I don’t hear anything about an investment in people who can’t afford to make ends meet. I don’t hear any sort of investment in housing that is affordable for anybody. They talk about the number of housing starts again and again and the number of development that has started for housing. There is no rent control on anything built after 2018. Of course developers are going to build housing, because it is an endless, bottomless bucket of wealth for them handed on a silver platter by the Conservative government.

Sophia Mathur, who I talk about in Sudbury many, many times, is an environmental champion. She is the first person outside of Europe to have a Fridays for Future climate strike. Sophia has been saying for years now to just listen to the experts, and they are not listening to the experts. They’re ignoring the experts and pretending that there is not an environmental crisis.

We had the people from cystic fibrosis here a couple of months ago, talking about Trikafta. This medication will save lives. The problem with it is that if you have any sort of medical coverage at all, you have to pay out of pocket for it and try to get reimbursed. If you don’t have medical coverage, it’s covered by the provincial government. And so, people are choosing to remove their personal medical coverage in order to have it covered for their children. That’s red tape we can cut.

The other one—and we brought this forward as an opposition day motion—is take-home cancer medication. If you’re in the hospital and you have cancer medication in the hospital, it’s covered by the government. If you take it home, you have to pay in advance and then get reimbursement for it. That’s red tape that would make life easier for people.

This idea of taking a bunch of failed Infrastructure Ontario projects and bundling them under Infrastructure Ontario: That is red tape that no one can see the point of.

We know that housing is the number one issue. We know that in Toronto now it’s three grand for rent, the highest it has ever been. We know that where I live, you’re lucky if you can find a one-bedroom or a bachelor for $1,000, and you are lucky to find that. For people who make less than $1,000 a month, it’s unaffordable.

When you’re helping developers build McMansions, it’s not going to help people who are first-time homebuyers. It’s not going to help people who are struggling to pay rent. It’s not. It simply is not. When you’re investing in developers to build new, purpose-built rental units that are built after 2018 and the Conservative government has removed rent control, it is going to be $3,000 or more for those units. It is not going to help anybody.

There is no plan. It’s just, “Do whatever you want, and then say the opposite.”

Listen, the stock line from the Conservative government is “the Liberal-NDP coalition,” and God forbid, I sure as heck hope I’m not gamed for propping you guys up for your bad ideas—their bad ideas, Speaker.

Listen, the Conservatives and Liberals have more in common than we do. The Liberals are out of power. You know why? They sold Hydro One. You know what the Conservatives love to do? Sell off private infrastructure to reward their wealthy friends. I already talked about Highway 407. The only reason they’re mad at the Liberals is that the Liberals were able to sell it under theirs because the Conservatives weren’t able to.

You talk about us not supporting you and voting against stuff. We vote against it because it’s a bad idea or there’s a poison pill or because there’s an amendment that you won’t pass that makes absolute sense. It’s deliberate, the way they write the bill, Speaker, and they deliberately do it so they can argue things like this. The reality, though, is that for the people of Ontario, life is getting harder and worse for them, and if their plan was working over the last five years, the last half decade, the plan would be demonstrated to the people of Ontario, and they’re not seeing it.

Thank you to the member from Durham. He talked about environmental protections not being weakened and he said it very loudly, as if loudly makes it true.

One of the things he said is that Indigenous consultations will happen, but what we saw with the mining bill is that they didn’t happen and that they haven’t been happening. And then when we tried to pass an amendment to ensure that environmental free, prior and informed consent consultations happened, it was voted down. So I’m wondering, to the member opposite, if it’s going to happen with this bill, why isn’t it happening before this bill?