It’s always an honour to be able to stand in this House and today speak on Bill 75 on behalf of the official opposition, the third reading of An Act of enact the Queen’s Park Restoration Secretariat Act, 2023, and to make certain amendments to the Legislative Assembly Act and the Freedom of Information and Protection of Privacy Act, and to follow the government House leader.

I’ve been here for 12 years. This is—I believe all Parliaments are, but this is the only I’ve experienced—a unique place, a unique work environment, and a place very few Ontarians have the privilege of ever working in. What we should strive for is that as many Ontarians as possible can experience this place. That’s one of the goals of the restoration act.

But to truly understand what this place means, just think about what we’ve discussed in the last week. Bill 60, a health care act: The official opposition are incredibly opposed to that. We made it very clear, which is our right. The government believes in what they’ve proposed, which is their right. We voted. The vote was over. The mining act: We will be voting on that after. We voted for it in second reading because we believe in the principles. How we vote in the end will be based on what we heard in the committee.

They are both partisan but very important. This one is as important, but this one is non-partisan. We all want to serve. We want this place to serve the people of Ontario, to allow those of us who are lucky enough to get elected to represent the people, who are fortunate enough to work here, to be able to serve the people of Ontario to the best of our abilities and their abilities. I think this bill and how it has come to this point is an example of how sometimes this Legislature can work very well, where amendments are proposed that actually weren’t even in order, but we agreed to put them forward. I will touch on them a little bit, but it shows how, when there are issues that we all—when we need to, when we should, that we all can pull in the same direction, and I think that’s very important.

I think everyone, when they walk through the doors for the first time, and I’m sure the vast majority—I can’t speak for all of us, but I still have that feeling when I walk through the doors that it’s something special to walk through the doors in this place. When I walked through the first time, I thought it was the most—it was like walking into a cathedral for me, a cathedral of democracy. It really was. That’s one thing that we don’t want to lose, ever.

But now that I have worked here for 12 years, there are structural things that prevent or make it harder for the people here to do their jobs. There comes a time when—can you imagine how big a project this was to build in the first place? There was a picture once in the cafeteria—the cafeteria is one of my favourite places, by the way. There was a picture in the cafeteria of this building and University Avenue, and University Avenue was all trees. It was forest. Can you imagine what it took for parliamentarians to decide to build a place like this? And when part of it burned, what it took to rebuild again?

Now it’s time to rejuvenate. If you’re going to rejuvenate the precinct, the legislative building, it is a major undertaking, because, yes, if 12 years ago, before I walked into this building somebody said, “Well, everybody is going to have to move out and we’re going to have to do”—I would have said, “No, no, you can just do a piece at a time.” But that’s not how this place works, because in this hall, in the legislative chamber, there will be a time today where emotions run high and we will, at points, not be very friendly to each other, and that wouldn’t work in a setting where we are much closer. It just wouldn’t work. There is a reason why there are these spaces. There’s a reason: to allow us to do our job, to allow us to debate, to allow emotions to run high, and now to allow them to cool down.

To rebuild, to rejuvenate this structure so that it actually can perform the way modern buildings should, but that it can maintain this cathedral of democracy, is going to take a lot of effort, a lot of planning. The effort and the planning actually have just begun. I would also like to commend the committee for the work they’ve done so far, and I’d like to commend the Legislative Assembly staff for the work they’ve done so far, but the work is just beginning. It’s just beginning, because we have the opportunity now to actually make this cathedral of democracy accessible to all, accessible to all cultures, all people, and that’s not a small undertaking. I would like to say, we—particularly the staff—have all done what we could to make it accessible with what we’ve got. But we have a chance now to truly make it accessible, to make democracy accessible to all Ontarians.

If you look at the carving of the Seven Grandfather Teachings from Indigenous people, we need to take the time—and the committee is going to do that—to truly make not only the structure but our system a partner to Indigenous people in this province so that they see their own history here. Because in many ways, the history of this building starts in 1867, but that’s not when the history of Ontario starts. We should think about what we can do to make sure the history before this building was built is included now that the building is going to be reconfigured.

I don’t want—we don’t want—the building to be rebuilt. There are parts of this building, many parts, that we all treasure, that Ontarians treasure. When schools come, when kids come—my riding is a long ways away; I don’t get as many children, school kids coming as others sometimes. But when I do get them coming, for many, if you’re coming from New Liskeard or Cochrane and you tour through this building, it’s a place like you’ve never seen. We don’t want to lose that. But it has to be a place that functions and a place that includes everyone.

I would also like to speak to the two fundamental changes that have been made—“fundamental” is perhaps not the right word—to the bill itself. One is the clarification of, as the project continues, what is subject to freedom of information and what won’t be. Quite frankly, that is a concern among some people, and rightfully so. Sometimes, this is a fractious place. This is and would be a G20 economy, this province.

Just to clarify, what is not subject to freedom of information for 20 years is any documentation that comes from the assembly itself. As for what comes from the new secretariat—the contracts to build—that would still be subject. It’s not that we’re throwing this in a big dark hole and no one will ever know how much this is going to cost or did cost. That’s not the case. But there is very sensitive information that the assembly holds, and some of that is going to be needed for the secretariat to make these decisions. That documentation is also not subject to freedom of information now, so when that is going to be used in the future, it should also not be subject to freedom of information laws for 20 years. That, I think, is a good clarification.

The second, regarding legislative protective services: When—it’s a word I have never used before until I got here. When we do decant, when we move en masse to another location, the legislative protective services are going to have to not only follow us, but protect not only us but the information that flows. It’s going to be much more spread out, so it makes sense that they should have the ability to do that off this site. It makes sense. Also, it makes sense that they have the training—in the subject matter where they are trained, they are equivalent or better trained than any other police service in this province. It also makes sense that they should have the ability to be peace officers outside this legislative precinct; for example, in our constituency offices. I think in both cases, those changes make sense.

This is going to be a long, long road. There’s no doubt about it. I think there are times we are all going to shake our heads and wonder what we’re going to do next. When we toured the Parliament buildings in Ottawa—I personally didn’t truly understand the scope of the project until I did that tour. I can’t remember his title, but to the person who was giving us this tour I suggested it would be the best reality home reno series ever seen, because it was incredible.

I look at this place differently now. When I walk through and I see cables taped to the wall, I say, “Well, they’ve got to go, but wait a second, that moulding, that can’t go. That is going to have to be taken apart, to be coded, stored somewhere, perhaps refinished—for sure—and placed back.” That is a lot of—I’m a bit of a rough carpenter myself, and I like to demo; you just take the sledge hammer and demo everything, you buy all new and put it back in. That’s not the case here, and it certainly shouldn’t be. We want to rejuvenate, but we also want to protect so people who walk through these doors for the next hundred years have the same feeling that we do. If we can use the spaces in this place that aren’t used efficiently now, because times have changed—the legislative library was full of books. We don’t use a lot of those books anymore. It’s digital.

There’s room for big ideas, and I encourage Ontarians to think big. We encourage Ontarians often: “Don’t settle. Think big.” With this project, I encourage parliamentarians from all sides, because there isn’t really a side on this one, to think big. If you think too big, you know what, it’s not going to happen, but we’re at the point where there’s no such thing as a bad idea right now. Now is the time for ideas. The first big one is that we are deciding to actually take this step, and it’s a big one. Now that we’re deciding, now we have the chance to really envision what our forebears envisioned when they built this place in the middle of a forest, what they envisioned and what Ontario has become.

We disagree on some of the things that happen in this province, but we all agree that it is one of the greatest places in the world to live. That is why we work so hard to get here to represent the views of the people in our various part of the province. Always in the back of my mind is, what can we do to envision the next 100 years?

We are in favour of Bill 75. We want to work together with all parliamentarians, with all the staff, with all Ontarians. Often when we introduce people, we say, “Welcome to your House.” We now have a chance to do everything we can to make sure that people from all walks of life, all parts of the province, all races, all colours, all creeds, feel like this is their House. I encourage all parliamentarians, all Ontarians, to think big and to take that chance.

With that, Speaker, I would like to move the adjournment of the debate. Thank you.

Last week, I made the House aware of three events that happened near the town of Engelhart on Highway 11: a tragic head-on transport crash, a transport driver who forced a school bus into a ditch and fled the scene, and another transport who passed another transport on a hill.

On Saturday—and I posted the video—a transport passed another transport with another car plainly in view and pushed it off the road. This is within a few kilometres of a little town. This happens right across our two-lane Trans-Canada Highway.

I am imploring the government: We want to work together with the government to make sure that transport drivers and all drivers are adequately trained, but that we actually get aggressive drivers off the road and the companies that hire them. The names of the companies are on the sides of the trucks. We know it’s happening. It’s happening every day—four times in a month just outside my hometown.

We cannot keep on letting this go, because the next people who get killed—it’s on us because we know it’s going to happen. We all know it’s going to happen.