It’s always an honour to be able to rise in the House and today on Bill 102, An Act to amend various Acts relating to the justice system, fire protection and prevention and animal welfare, as the critic for the Solicitor General. I think the one thing I’d like to open with: The Official Opposition, under Marit Stiles, and I think the government as well, all want to improve community safety. We perhaps have different visions of how to do that, but we all want to do that.

Before I go through the bill, I want to lay out a few facts. This is a technical bill, and it makes some important, relevant changes. It was introduced, I believe, yesterday. I’m not complaining. These are the facts for us, so we live with the facts. But it was introduced yesterday. It’s technical. The Solicitor General’s lead and the government’s lead was an hour ago. I listened intently. I like to listen to what people are talking about—people who have had time to study it; people who have made changes they feel are relevant, have had their ministries look into it.

It’s our job to give credible critique. Quite frankly, it’s impossible to give credible critique on 12 hours’ notice, so it’s going to be a very high overview of this bill.

Both the Solicitor General and the Attorney General—I’ve dealt with them many times, and they are thoughtful people, but the way that this bill has been presented to the people’s House is not thoughtful at all.

There have been other bills where at least the lead, the hour from the government, is done on a different day, so that gives you some time to actually listen to what the ministers say and think of tough questions. It’s our job to look for problems, because, as the parliamentary assistant said, no legislation is perfect, and if we can help find something, that’s a benefit to Ontarians.

The way that this bill is being put through the House—we will likely vote on second reading tomorrow—is not a benefit to Ontarians. It’s not using this House and the official opposition at their full potential. I can understand that the government perhaps doesn’t want us to do our job—and we will do our job despite the roadblocks that the government is seemingly trying to put in front of us. I don’t believe that the members sitting here, regardless of side, want to do that, because deep down, we all want the best for Ontarians. But that’s actually not how this bill is being presented.

There are many people and many organizations that are impacted by this bill—all Ontarians, but many individual organizations. We’ve reached out. They don’t even have time to call us back. So I don’t know how much consultation the government has done with some of these organizations, but they haven’t allowed the official opposition the benefit of that, or Ontarians.

There’s a reason we have an owl and an eagle on two sides of this House—especially on technical bills, on issues that impact everyone, on policing, on fire safety.

I’m going to talk a little bit later on the PAWS Act. We all voted in favour. All the livestock groups voted in favour. There are issues with the PAWS Act. They’re not reflected in these changes. Why not?

So that’s what I’d like to open with—that in this Legislature, the government could do a lot better at how it actually puts bills forward. I think you would find that the Legislature would be less fractious if that was actually the case. When the government puts bills forward under such short notice that it is physically not possible to actually contact stakeholders and have them turn around and tell us what their issues are with a bill, you think that somebody is trying to hide something. I’m not sure that’s the case, but you’re always looking for that, and perhaps for no reason.

If I go to buy something from a business and the push is really hard—“You’ve got to sign now”—I often walk away; I just don’t trust it. That’s the same feeling I’m getting. “We hope that the opposition fully supports this.” We have not had 24 hours to look at it. I wouldn’t buy a used car from somebody with that pitch. That’s a problem. But with this bill, it’s a big problem.

Anyway, let’s go talk about the bill and talk about the issues surrounding the bill. I’m going to try to follow the schedules as they’re presented in the bill. The first part of the bill, schedule 1, talks about community safety and policing. I think we all want to see safe communities. We also want to have—I think everyone wants police officers to be safe as well. They play a critical role in our society. They don’t play the only role in community safety, but they play a critical role.

I think everyone knows this: I often tell personal stories in this House as a way—well, to fill up the hour. I tell it like it is, okay? But I have a reason to tell them too: There’s usually a moral at the end of the story.

Everyone knows I was involved in this big issue locally, and we did some things that I probably wouldn’t do now. One time, I organized a protest, and we blocked the train for two hours. We let the police know before we did it, and 80 tractors—we parked our tractors on the tracks in my hometown. It was very tense, not with the local police, but it was a big issue in our area at the time, and there were tactical police officers. I don’t know what their exact term is, but there were tactical police officers, a lot of them.

Thank you to the member from Oshawa. During her debate and during responses, Speaker, she talked about how little time we’ve had to look at this bill. It has been a trend for the government where they table bills in the afternoon and then we begin debating the very next day on them. Tonight we’ll be sitting late, possibly to midnight, talking about this bill.

It’s ironic, because yesterday, I was sitting here and we were debating Bill 69 and talking about consultation. Time and time again, the Conservative Party kept telling me how great consultation was, how effective consultation was, but we can’t do it even in this House, let alone outside of the House. So could the member just expand on how more effective we could be, as all parties, if we were able to reach out to speak to our constituents and our stakeholders about bills like this instead of having them carpet-bombed on us with no warning.