As we’ve all heard, it is Niagara Week here at Queen’s Park. So, in addition to welcoming those who have already been mentioned, I want to also note that we have the regional councillor for Lincoln, Rob Foster, in the House, and we also have Diana Huson, the regional councillor for the town of Pelham. I also want to acknowledge CAO Ron Tripp and Daryl Barnhart, who are here today. Welcome to Queen’s Park.

It’s gone forever. That will be your legacy. That’s what we’re going to remember about you guys—well, there’s going to be another thing: I believe you’re going to get defeated on the private health care.

The one that tears at my heart—and I know some of my colleagues kind of make fun of my voice or whatever when I get passionate around long-term care. I want to be clear, because the Minister of Long-Term Care said that the NDP doesn’t believe in building long-term care. That’s a lie. I supported building long-term care long before you guys came into government in 2018. I can hold up picture after picture where I was cutting the ribbon in Fort Erie, again in Fort Erie, in St. Catharines. We supported long-term care, but what we didn’t support and we still don’t support is the fact that it’s for-profit.

Regional homes—which Mayor Redekop would know about; he’s a regional councillor as well as being a mayor. He knows all about this. But let’s talk about the one that I raised the other day. I challenge anybody—you can ask me a question on this; I’ll write it for you, if it helps you out. Orchard Villa, a long-term-care facility, privately run—I want to be clear: I’m not blaming the staff; I support the staff. But the problem with that place is that it was about profit, not about care. They didn’t have enough staff to take care of those residents. People were dying. And guess what we had to do? We had to call in the Canadian military into a long-term-care facility. Madam Speaker, here’s what they found: 80 people died in the long-term-care facility, some from dehydration. You see this water here? That would have kept them alive. They didn’t have it. They sat in soiled diapers for days. They found somebody dead 24 hours after that person had died. They had rotten food. So when they brought a proposal forward to the Pickering city council, they turned it down because the government was going to give them a 30-year lease—the same company that had to have the military called in where 80 people died.

I’m asking my colleagues over there: Does anybody think that’s fair and reasonable? Would you want that to happen to one of your parents? Your mom, your dad, your grandparents, your brother, your sister? I hate to break it to you, but there’s a good chance that a lot of us are going to end up in a long-term-care facility, and it should be at a point and time in our lives when we can enjoy the last part of our lives. It shouldn’t be a place where I’m going to be mistreated, disrespected, allowed to die from a simple thing of not having a drink of water. So yes, I’m opposed to building that and I’m supporting the council. I’m supporting that area. But I actually think it’s fair and it’s reasonable and it’s consistent with what I’ve been talking about for the last eight or nine years that I’ve been here. So I’m saying to my colleagues across there: Don’t support that.

The other part I don’t support: I don’t think we should be handing out 30-year leases, or 99-year leases, by the way, at Ontario Place. We thought we would have learned our lesson with the 407. That was another 99-year lease that, quite frankly, is a disgrace. Have you ever tried to drive down there? You have to get a loan to go from one end of it to the other with how much they’re charging us, because we didn’t put any safeguards in place. We didn’t put anything in where we can buy it back. I remember that it was the Conservatives who said, “If we get in this government, we’re going to buy it back.” Actually, it was the Liberals; I apologize. It was the Liberals who said that.

What else do I have on my page? I’m not going to get to my speech; it’s pretty obvious. Oh, Bill 124: spending taxpayers’ money over and over and over again in the courts fighting Bill 124, as you say that nurses are heroes. How do you say that when you bring in Bill 124 and attack their collective bargaining rights? As a matter of fact, even in their bargaining rights, they don’t have—in their agreement, they had mental health, but because of Bill 124, they don’t have that now. And they capped their wages at 1%. And when my colleagues stand up and say, “Hey, everything is great in the province of Ontario,” they got capped at 1%. Inflation was running at 6.5% to 7%. It looks like it has cooled down a bit, but at the end of the day, can you afford a mortgage at 5%, 5.5%, 6%, 7%? Can you now buy a car that’s now running at 7%? Can you afford that? The answer is no—but Bill 124.

The last one I’ll talk to—I’ve only got a minute—is Bill 60. This is the worst piece of language. I thought privatizing hydro was terrible—even though the Conservatives started it—under the Liberals. Bill 60 is the worst bill ever. You’re going to privatize our health care system. I’ll give you an example of exactly what’s going to happen in hospital after hospital that’s publicly funded. Take a look at the Ottawa: 21 doctors put together a corporation. They’re now operating on the weekends in a publicly funded hospital with the same nurses that are working Monday to Friday. The difference is they’re being paid more money or they’re agency employees, agency nurses that, by the way, are between $150 to $300 an hour. Some friends of the Conservative government are probably getting pretty rich under that deal.

And then what really tops it off—I’ve got 30 seconds left—on the Friday night before they do the operating on Saturday, guess what staff they use to clean the operating rooms? Public nurses and public cleaners. And on Sunday, after they finish doing their operations, guess what they use? Publicly funded, publicly delivered nurses and janitorial workers. It’s a terrible bill.

I’ve still got a few more that I’m not going to get to. I do appreciate the intense listening by my colleagues. I’m looking forward to any questions they may have.

But I can tell you exactly when—you guys are standing up talking about the 300,000 jobs that you lost. I can tell you what it was—the dollar was $1.10 when they lost the jobs. Do you know why I know that? I was the president of a local union, and I had to go to Edshaw and watch them lose 300 jobs because the German company said, “We can’t afford that, to continue doing that work.” I had to watch as some of our plants closed in the province of Ontario because the dollar was a $1.10. And you can’t deny that. It was a petrodollar. All it did was support the west, and it divided Ontario into a manufacturing crisis that we had—and we’re just starting to get it back now. Do you know why? The dollars is at 72 cents. If it had been at 72 cents, I wouldn’t have lost Edshaw, I wouldn’t have lost those manufacturing plants, because they would still be working there. People would have retired out of those plants. I wouldn’t have had to go get them other jobs.