I want to thank the member from Carleton for speaking today, and I really want to thank the member from Timiskaming. It’s always a pleasure to listen to the member from Timiskaming. I’ve got to say, he’s one of the most entertaining speakers in the house, and he brings a northern perspective and a farmer’s perspective to this House. I think those are two perspectives that we need to hear more often.

One thing he said, though, was that we don’t have unorganized territories in southern Ontario. So far as I know, we may have some, but we do have—even in downtown Toronto here—unclaimed roads. There’s an unclaimed lane behind my office that is not maintained. The city doesn’t own it and no private owner owns it; it’s just a laneway behind my office, and it’s not maintained. The potholes kept getting bigger and bigger, and you needed a four-by-four to get into the parking lot of my office. We actually had to organize a few people to pay for a load of gravel. So we don’t have unorganized territories, but we do, strangely enough, have unclaimed lanes right in downtown Toronto.

Interjection.

But anyway, I’m going to talk today about this Legislature, about some lessons that have been learned in this House.

I’m going to talk about two former Conservative members of this House over the last 100 years who really were groundbreaking in the policies that they advocated for: Adam Beck and Bill Davis. I know it may sound odd for an NDPer to be praising the work of former Conservative members of this House—but I think it speaks to how far the ideological shift has happened in this province. The policies that were pursued by Adam Beck to create public hydro 100 years ago and the policies of Bill Davis to create our public colleges and universities are now considered on the left end of the spectrum. The spectrum has moved so far to the right that—

The member from Eglinton–Lawrence.

Speaker, through you to the member from Carleton, that was an excellent presentation that she just made.

Section 22, Speaker, talks about the Not-for-Profit Corporations Act, and you’ll know from the hard work you do in your own riding that not-for-profit corporations play a significant role in our communities and lifting up certain aspects of our communities. I’d like the member from Carleton—through you, Speaker—to speak about the importance she sees of this particular section in her own riding, because I know she has a very diverse riding.

Thank you to the member for Carleton. I want to refer specifically to schedule 7. In 2020, the Auditor General released a scathing investigation report into this sector. She concluded that the sector is “poorly regulated and there is inadequate ... oversight over developers ... managers and condo boards,” and “condo residents have little recourse if they encounter” any “problems.”

We brought forward a private member’s bill that you voted down. You voted no to providing governance and oversight to the 1.3 million condo owners in the province of Ontario.

So specifically, schedule 7, subsection 4: If you were going to open the act, why did you not open the act and provide the kind of protection that condo owners have been asking for? This is what you say you’re here to do, help people. This act is open, and you’ve done nothing to help people with the complaints that they have about living in condos in Ontario.

Yes, absolutely, and your government is a big part of it. This is part of what the member from—Glanbrook?

Interjection.

One of the things that really bothers me and that I think makes the bad policies—one of the major ideological shifts that this government is pursuing is the privatization of our public services and the sell-off of our public assets, and we’re seeing that again and again. We’ve seen it over the years.

I’ll start with two sections of this bill. I mentioned Adam Beck. I’m going to start with broadband rollout.

Broadband is the 21st-century electricity. Everybody needs broadband. I think everybody in this House agrees that every community, every resident in this province needs access to broadband, because if you don’t have it, you’re cut off from all kinds of educational and work opportunities.

This government is rolling out broadband. They’re spending $4 billion. The initial standard that they set when we met in committee last year was 50/10—so 50 megabits a second upload and 10 megabits a second download—and at the time, at the committee, I told the minister, “That’s simply not adequate. That’s an old standard. It will mean that the communities that you’re providing this to are already behind the curve. If you’re going to roll out broadband and you’re going to be rolling out fibre—the cost is not in the cost of the fibre cable. The cost is in the poles and the tunnels and the conduit—everything that you need to actually roll out the broadband. So you might as well roll out 1 gigabit symmetrical.”

I can give you an example of why that’s so important. A friend of mine, Charles Taylor, is a VFX artist. He’s a compositor. He has worked on some big movies that many of you will know: Shazam!, The Shape of Water. He lives in downtown Toronto, in my riding of Spadina–Fort York. He’s from Haliburton. The company he works for is in Montreal. He actually wouldn’t mind living in Haliburton, where he has a lot of relatives. But he lives in downtown Toronto because he needs 1 gigabit symmetrical broadband in order to do the work that he does. If the government is rolling out broadband that isn’t 1 gigabit symmetrical, with this $4 billion that you’re spending, then you’re cutting off people like him from the opportunity to work in Haliburton. You’re cutting off other communities.

I’ve got a committee that I work with—I’m the tech and innovation critic, so I’ve got a committee. I asked them, “Give me a list of the careers and the jobs that you need 1 gigabit symmetrical for,” and the list I got was computer animation, cloud services, artificial intelligence, machine learning, agri-tech.

Agri-tech now is really fast-developing, and it relies on image capture and processing online for decision-making around processing and sorting. In addition, the latest machinery is embedded with real-time error and fault management. So the modern farms that we have across this province need 1 gigabit symmetrical just to operate the equipment in the most efficient way possible.

People think of farms being a southern Ontario thing, and I used to think that, too, until I moved up to Geraldton, Ontario, a number of years ago. When you drive north of Toronto on the 400 or Highway 11, you get up to Orillia, and there are very few farms—you get into the Canadian Shield; you see all forests. And then you get north of North Bay, and you get to the Clay Belt, and all of a sudden, the land opens up again. There’s this huge area of farming in northern Ontario. That’s actually where the member from Timiskaming is from, and that’s where he farmed.

The farmers up there need—if you’re going to be rolling out broadband to the community, and we absolutely should, then you should be rolling out 1 gigabit symmetrical broadband to those communities so the farmers will be able to use the most modern equipment and operate in the most efficient way possible.

The other areas: Virtual reality—you also need 1 gigabit symmetrical, and supply chain inventory and fleet management. The latest supply chain technologies use blockchain for identification and security, and blockchains require heavy storage and processing powers to pack and unpack. And poor infrastructure will directly impact the rollout of the latest supply chain technology. So I’m asking the government to change the standard of these contracts for the last mile of broadband so that they’re 1 gigabit symmetrical. That’s what you should be rolling out. If you’re not, people will be happy because you’re replacing a horse and buggy, but you’re replacing it with a Model T, and really what they need is a modern vehicle.

The reason I mention Adam Beck in this is, 120 years ago, at the turn of the 20th century electricity was a new thing. They were just starting to put power generation stations on Niagara Falls, and they created, in 1906—Adam Beck, who was a member of this House, created Ontario Hydro to roll out hydro, and they actually ended up nationalizing our hydroelectric system. It ended up costing four cents a kilowatt hour from the 1920s until 1995. That’s how much we were paying for electricity. Our electricity rate, because it was delivered at cost through a public utility, was one of our biggest competitive advantages.

And then the Conservatives, in 1995, started to break up Ontario Hydro and sell it off, and then the Liberals finished off—

Interjection.

So when you look at the lesson from Adam Beck, if we had learned the lesson in 1995 and the early 2000s, we would have created a public broadband network or given it to Ontario Hydro to roll out broadband, and then every community—the advantage of Ontario Hydro was that they rolled out electricity to everyone in the province, because they recognized that everybody needed access to electricity. So that’s one of the lessons.

The other lesson—and this is from this bill as well. This bill is 37 schedules, 150-odd pages. We just got it recently, but the other thing that really piqued my interest in this is, they’re changing the name of private career colleges to career colleges. They’re taking away the term “private.” This means that people, when they’re registering or when they’re applying, won’t know whether they’re applying to a public college or a private college. The distinction is really important, although it’s a distinction that this government and the last Liberal government have been blurring for decades.

We used to have—and I mentioned Bill Davis. In the 1960s, Bill Davis created our CAAT colleges, our community arts and applied technology colleges, and they were delivered at cost. He also expanded our public university system. He created many public universities and expanded the universities that we had, so that Ontario became one of the best-educated jurisdictions in the world. It’s one of our biggest competitive advantages.

The other big competitive advantage of our public colleges and universities: Every one of them has an innovation centre, and those innovation centres partner with local businesses and researchers. Those businesses benefit from the research that’s being done in those colleges and universities, and the students get hands-on experience developing and doing that kind of research with real-world applications. So Ontario is the fastest-growing tech ecosystem in North America. We’re growing faster than Silicon Valley. We’re not as big as Silicon Valley yet, but we could possibly overtake Silicon Valley one day if the trajectory continues.

But this government is privatizing our public colleges and universities. You’re undermining one of our biggest competitive advantages. This is a real concern and it’s being done just like the Liberal government.

I’ve got a bit of time here, so I’ll just backtrack a little bit. Until 1995, our university tuition fees were about $2,500 per student per year. That was for all programs. That was undergrads, that was med school, that was grad school, that was engineering, that was dentistry, that was veterinary. Whatever program you wanted at university, it was about $2,500 a year, and college was about $1,200 a year.

The Conservatives—and those were created, the colleges and universities, as I mentioned, by Bill Davis, who in the 1960s was the Minister of Education. Then he became the Premier through the 1970s until 1984. He was incredibly proud of the work that those public colleges and universities were doing and he was proud of the contribution they were making to the economic development of this province.

But since then, in 1995, the then Conservative government got into power and they began privatizing our public colleges and universities. They doubled tuition for undergrads from $2,500. By the time they left, in 2003, it was over $5,000 for undergrad tuition.

They delisted professional program tuition fees, so they went from $2,500 in 1995, for law school and med school at the University of Toronto in 2003, to $12,000. The Liberals got in and they doubled tuition fees again. By the time they left—their last election was in 2018—our undergrad tuition fees were about $8,000 or $9,000 a year. Law school and medical school at the University of Toronto were $28,000 a year. An MBA at the University of Toronto, when the NDP was in power, was $2,500 per person per year. Under the Conservative-Liberal regime, working hand in hand—the Liberals and the Conservatives always supporting each other—it’s now $54,000 per year. It’s a two-year program, so it’s $108,000 to get an MBA in Ontario.

That’s part of the privatization. What it means is that in our public colleges and universities, 85% of the funding used to come from our taxes. The tuition that people were paying until 1995 was about 15% of the operating costs of the colleges and universities. Now the students are paying, through their tuition fees, more than 50% of the operating costs of those colleges and universities.

One of the things that has been created with this privatization of our public colleges and universities is that we’ve got a student debt industry. It’s difficult to get a clear estimate, but there is at least $25 billion in student debt in Canada. That is mostly held by private banks and the banks are now charging prime plus 2%, so somewhere around 6.5%, in interest on that $25 billion. This is a major revenue generator for those banks.

If you look at the big picture of it, what this privatization and the increase in tuition fees mean is that the Conservative government—this Conservative government and the last Conservative government—and the Liberal government have actually created a system that transfers wealth from the lowest-income students in the province to the investors in the banks, some of the wealthiest people in the province. It’s robbing from the poor and giving to the rich.

What this government is doing now with this bill is, they’re taking away the distinction between public colleges and private colleges. What used to be called private career colleges are just going to be called career colleges, so that people won’t even know the distinction between the one and the other.

Part of the reason for this is, it’s part of a bigger trend. The public colleges have been so grossly underfunded by this government and the last government—in the post-secondary sector, the funding from the government has been frozen for at least a decade, which means at least a $1-billion inflationary cut. The colleges and universities have to make up for that somehow. One way that this government has conveniently created is this government has created a policy to create partnerships between our public colleges and private colleges, so private colleges can use the curriculum that’s developed by the public colleges and they can give degrees and diplomas in the name of the public college. So they’re blurring the distinction. This step in this bill of removing the term “private” from career colleges is a further blurring of that distinction between our public colleges and private colleges.

The reason this matters is that the privatization of our public services ultimately means that we pay far more and we get far less, that students will be paying far more in these privatized colleges and universities—they already are. They have to take on more debt in order to get their degree or diploma, and they’re also facing, because of the funding cuts, larger class sizes and less support than they would have had 10, 20, 30 years ago.

And this is just one schedule of 37 in this bill, but this schedule is a really important indication of the ideological bent of this government. This government does not believe in public services. They are trying to privatize public services as fast as they possibly can. It’s like the last Conservative government. They privatized long-term care, they privatized home care—

Interjection: The 407.

Questions?

For the House, I don’t mind a little bit of activity, but we need to be able to hear each other, please.

Continue. Start the clock.

The 407. Oh, my God, the 407. The Conservatives keep boasting about how they won 84 seats, and, I’ve got to say, I don’t know how you won it, because you won most of the seats in the 905, and the 407 goes right across the 905.

When the NDP started building the 407, it was going to be a toll highway, but it was publicly controlled, and after 20 years, the tolls would come off because it would have been paid for. The Conservatives sold it to a private Spanish conglomerate for $3 billion and gave them a 100-year lease. So people in the whole 905, who for some reason are electing Conservative MPPs, are paying these outrageous fees. If the NDP had stayed in power, there would be no tolls anymore on the 407 because the drivers already paid for it. The drivers already paid for it. But, because of the Conservatives, they’re going to be paying for it for another 70 years.

The Conservative government of the day sold the 407 for $3 billion, and the Premier at the time, Premier Harris, said, “Oh, well, we can regulate how much they’re going to charge.” Then it went to court and it turns out we can’t regulate how much they’re going to charge. And so, the 407, which was initially supposed to be a public highway and eventually, after 20 years, was going to be free, became this privatized highway that people are going to be paying for for 100 years.

The value to the investors—and this is what it’s really about—is that highway is now worth $45 billion. The Conservatives sold it for $3 billion, it’s now worth $45 billion, and somehow, you get elected in the 905 by all those poor people who have to pay those outrageous fees on the 407. I don’t know how you do it.

Earlier in his remarks, I heard the member opposite talk about expanding broadband services. For 15 years, I never heard anything from the NDP talking about expanding broadband services. Our government is stepping up. We’re removing red tape around streamlining processes related to infrastructure to help expedite the delivery of broadband projects across Ontario. We’re reducing delays, paving the way for faster access to high-speed Internet for homes and businesses, helping them grow.

Connected communities attract significant and lasting investments, boosting the local and provincial economies. Can the member opposite tell me what he has done to expand broadband and high-speed Internet to all Ontarians?

Thank you to my friend from Spadina–Fort York for his comments. He talked about privatized universities. I’ve met with Brock University and Niagara College in my area. They’re very concerned about the opening of a private university in Niagara Falls on our side of the border. What are some of the ways that a private university in close proximity to a public one can undermine the public university?

Madam Speaker, I am just so intrigued by this member’s analysis of our energy sector I have to dig a little bit deeper.

I was here in 2011, and a few members were here in 2011. The NDP were in lockstep with the Liberal government of the day when it came to the Green Energy Act: FIT contracts, feed-in tariff contracts, that were paying 80 cents a kilowatt hour for solar, and much more for wind as well. These projects were being spread out all across the province. The Financial Accountability Officer indicated that $38 billion is the cost of overmarket contracts that were signed as a result of the Green Energy Act, therefore the subsidy that the member opposite talked about.

So I just want to know: Do the member opposite and his party still support the Green Energy Act, and do they support the fact that it has resulted in $38 billion? That doesn’t even cost the electricity that people are using; this is just the overmarket cost of those 20-year contracts, many of them 80 cents a kilowatt hour, when you’re getting nuclear for seven or eight cents a kilowatt hour.

I want to thank the Minister of Red Tape Reduction, Minister Gill, for his hard work on this file, and I want to thank MPP Oosterhoff as well for his hard work on making sure that we’re continuing to reduce red tape. I want to thank him for his dedication to this cause.

Speaker, I’m really excited to speak on behalf of this bill, another red tape reduction bill that our government has put forward. I’ve been trying very hard over the last 12 years that I’ve been here to reduce red tape in this province. I arrived, along with a number of individuals on my side and the other side, in the election of 2011, and when I was elected in 2011, our leader at the time made me the small business critic and the critic for red tape. I was a busy, busy guy, because there was a lot of red tape in this province at that time—overregulation that was holding businesses back from expanding. My goal as a critic was to hold the previous government, the Liberal government, to account for all the red tape that they were foisting and imposing on Ontarians.

I’ve got to tell you, my parents in New Brunswick are actually moving out of my childhood home. They were going through a lot of their stuff that you accumulate over 75 years. Some of the things that they were going through were old pictures. When they sent me a picture the other day, I had a full head of hair, and that’s not the case anymore. Now, that’s not because I’ve been pulling it out trying to have red tape reduced in the province, because we’ve been making great progress on that since I came here. But I saw first-hand just how unnecessary a lot of the regulation or overregulation was in the province, and how it was affecting businesses in my riding of Bay of Quinte and right across Ontario, and I made sure to let the Liberal government know my thoughts on that matter.

When we formed government in 2018, I was the Minister of Economic Development, Job Creation and Trade, which was also the minister responsible for red tape reduction at that time. Now we have a full-fledged ministry for red tape reduction, which I think speaks to just how important this is for our government, to make sure that the province truly is open for business, open for jobs and open to see our economy moving.

While I was in that portfolio of economic development, job creation, trade and red tape reduction, we brought forward a couple of bills, as we do, every year. One of them was Bill 66; it was called the Restoring Ontario’s Competitiveness Act. After seeing all of the red tape that was created by the previous Liberal government and the damage it was doing to job creators and consumers alike in our province, I wanted to make sure that Ontario was competitive again.

The first bill that was brought forward to reduce red tape was Bill 47, and that was the Making Ontario Open for Business Act, a reducing-burdens-while-protecting-workers act. I’ve got to say thanks, and probably our public servants don’t hear thanks enough: The deputy minister who I had on that file was a gentleman—and I mean gentleman—by the name of Giles Gherson. Giles was so passionate. He was responsible for reducing red tape, and do you know why he was so good at reducing the red tape? It was because he was a public servant when the Liberals were in power, so he knew exactly where all the red tape was adding up and he knew exactly where to go back and peel it off. So I just want to say thanks to Giles Gherson. He has since retired from the public service, but he made a real impression on me in my time in that ministry.

Bill 47 and Bill 66 removed dozens of pieces of overregulation in most of the ministries that we had at that time, and it really did make a difference. As I say, we’re not stopping there; we now have a full-fledged minister on this file.

I recall the Canadian Federation of Independent Business, as they do every year, hand out an award to the various provincial governments across the province when it comes to their efforts in reducing red tape. I remember in 2019, the CFIB came into my office—I was the House leader, too, at the time. It might still be hanging on the wall in the House leader’s office; I’m not sure. But we got an A-, which was the highest mark in the country for reducing red tape from the CFIB.

Interjections.

I’ll tell you one of the reasons you’ve been able to attract that kind of activity: because in spite of privatizing Ontario Hydro and now having some of the highest hydro rates or electricity rates in North America, you are subsidizing—it’s $6.9 billion in taxpayer subsidy to what used to be Ontario Hydro. It’s now a private, for-profit corporation. So you are handing over $6.9 billion of our tax dollars to attract industry, whereas if you just kept Ontario Hydro public, then it would be a competitive advantage and we wouldn’t have to provide that $6.9 billion in subsidy.

And it’s not just me who says this; there was a report on the public-private partnerships of the colleges in this province. It was from the former Liberal government in 2018. The independent report said there’s a real risk to the reputation of our post-secondary sector in Ontario if the government continues to privatize it.

I know this about the subsidies because I used to teach about the Ring of Fire at York University. I started teaching there in 2009 about the Ring of Fire. I was waiting for the Ring of Fire to get developed, and I was wondering why it wasn’t. One of the agreements that was made between the Ontario government—the Liberal government at the time—and one of the mining conglomerates that was going to be operating was to smelt the ores in Sudbury. In order to get that agreement, the government was going to be subsidizing our hydro rates by $350 million a year. So if we kept Ontario Hydro as a public utility, as Adam Beck—and the member accused me of being socialist. Was Adam Beck socialist in fighting for public hydro? Was Bill Davis socialist in fighting for our public colleges and universities? I would say those are the things we’re fighting for on this side of the House—

The other thing this government has done—I was talking to an international student at a public university here in Ontario who came last year and their tuition fees were $40,000 a year. This year they were $50,000 a year. Next year, they’re going to $60,000 a year. That’s how this government treats international students in this province, and the fear is that you’re going to undermine the reputation of Ontario as fair brokers for international students.

We’ve also been pushing for—if you read Hansard, every time a member on this side of the House stood up and talked about broadband, we’ve said we are strongly in favour of rolling out broadband, getting it to everybody in this province. The challenge here is that the government is doing—what they’re rolling out is not up to snuff. The concern that I have on this side of the House is that the rollout means that the rural communities that are finally getting broadband aren’t getting the latest up-to-speed broadband—

Speaker, through you, I would like to address a question to my colleague from Spadina–Fort York about schedule 29. We have all seen hardships of private colleges that sell students on the promise of a job, but then the actual degree lacks that accreditation and leaves students with mountains and mountains of debt. Why is it critical to not only address the accountability but also tackle the cost of tuition for students in Ontario who are struggling to pay their bills and go to school at the same time?

Further questions?

Further questions?

It was really Giles’s fault, not mine.

Anyway, I’m really pleased to be able to stand here and talk about Bill 91, the Less Red Tape, Stronger Economy Act. This bill is just another step in the right direction and is going to continue to build on our government’s strong track record of reducing red tape across Ontario.

As stated by my colleagues here this afternoon and earlier this morning by the minister himself, Bill 91 is going to pave the way for better services and help Ontario businesses grow and save people time and money.

Before we came into power—and I think this speaks to the grade we did get from the CFIB in 2019—Ontario was the most highly overregulated province in Canada. Many of these regulations were unnecessary, they were outdated—they were red tape. That’s one of the reasons why Ontario’s economy was plummeting at the time.

Madam Speaker, this will hit it home to you: I was the Minister of Economic Development, Job Creation and Trade when we got that call in early November of 2018 that after over a hundred years of building cars in Oshawa, General Motors was closing its plant. The folks at General Motors said to me, “Minister, it’s not anything that you and the Premier have done; it’s just become so oppressive and costly to do business here in Ontario that we’re having to close that plant”—after a hundred years in Oshawa.

I remember having an emergency meeting in Oshawa that night with Mayor Dan Carter and my colleagues from the Legislature, going out there, saying we were going to support Oshawa, we were going to support the Durham region and we were going to make sure that we became a competitive jurisdiction again—one that reduced red tape, one that got electricity prices under control and back to being competitive—and that General Motors plant was going to be back. I’m proud to say that four years later, there are multi-billion dollar EV mandates going in not just at GM Oshawa but at OEMs right across this province, and a supply chain that’s going to support it. It’s an incredible accomplishment, and it’s been a whole-team-of-government effort to ensure that we’re back and competitive in this market.

I go into small businesses regularly in my home riding of Bay of Quinte. These local establishments are staples in their communities, and they have been for decades and really hold our riding’s economy together. I know they do so in other ridings right across Ontario. We’ve seen first-hand during COVID-19 just how we needed to support these small businesses, and we did that, Madam Speaker. We can’t stop supporting our small business. That’s why we’re coming forward with bills like Bill 91.

People think that red tape only affects businesses. It doesn’t. It affects all of us in our daily lives. This is why we set out on a mission to reduce red tape by the amount that we have. I’m honoured to be a part of a government that’s reduced Ontario’s total regulatory burden by 6.5%. That 6.5% is equivalent to $700 million in annual compliance costs for not-for-profit organizations, municipalities, school boards, colleges and universities and hospitals. Our government has eliminated that.

I recall, when I became the minister, our goal was to reduce red tape by 25% across the province and save businesses $400 million. Well, we just hit the $700-million mark, which is amazing and a credit to all of us for the work that we’re doing.

Let me touch on a couple of the pieces in the bill that affect my current portfolio. By reducing red tape within the energy sector, it’s honouring our commitment to ensure that there’s a reliable, affordable and clean electricity system to power the province, to continue to drive electrification and support our strong economic growth that we’re now seeing in Ontario. Within the energy sector, there still is some red tape that’s holding us back, and we’re looking to eliminate that here in Bill 91. If passed, it would mean that our government is reducing burdens on stakeholders and making life easier.

There are two measures that I’m really excited about as the Minister of Energy. First, we’re expanding the OEB’s, the Ontario Energy Board’s, authority to enable innovation. Innovation isn’t just a buzzword; it is happening in the energy sector at a rapid pace, Madam Speaker. This will exempt proponents of innovative projects which have future potential from certain licensing requirements.

With Ontario’s population and economy growing, expanding the OEB’s authority to grant temporary licensing exemptions to specific legislative requirements would better empower the OEB to facilitate innovation in the energy sector. By allowing the OEB to expand its innovation sandbox—and I’ve been out with the OEB at a number of these sandbox announcements over the years; the IESO also has a Grid Innovation Fund doing similar things, allowing for innovators in the province to showcase what they’ve been working on through pilot projects—participants are going to be able to continue to undertake innovative pilot projects such as exploring peer-to-peer energy trading, and that could result in benefits for the energy sector and economic development here in Ontario.

Our government has been working with the OEB since we took office, and we know that Ontario’s energy advantage is made possible by our many partners that we have in the sector.

The OEB is an independent regulatory body. Its core mandate is to protect the interests of families and businesses accessing energy with respect to the price, reliability and the quality of the electricity services that they are receiving.

Again, we’ve been working hard with the OEB to modernize their governance structure and make room for innovation.

So we took this action as we know that increased transparency, reduced regulatory burdens and greater efficiencies in the OEB are going to build trust and are going to benefit all electricity customers in Ontario. It also helps to ensure that our electricity system continues to be one of the cleanest and most reliable in the world, and that is what’s allowing us to see the type of multi-billion dollar investments that we have been seeing over the last number of months.

The next measure that is going to positively help the energy sector is the “keeping administrative monetary penalties off rates” measure. The proposal is part of our plan to keep energy affordable for all Ontarians. The government is proposing to amend the Ontario Energy Board Act to ensure that ratepayers aren’t subjected to additional costs as a result of administrative monetary penalties—those AMPs that, when they’re charged to energy utilities, won’t be passed on to electricity ratepayers and recovered through energy rates. It’s one more way that we’re helping to keep our rates predictable and low and not spiking at the double-digit percentage rates that we were seeing back in 2015, 2016 and 2017. We’ve brought those types of massive, massive spikes in our electricity bills under control.

Another part of our plan is to work with Ontario’s Independent Electricity System Operator to procure about 4,000 new megawatts of generation through competitive processes—not sole-sourced deals, not feed-in tariff programs that are driving up the cost of electricity massively. We’re doing this in a competitive, business-type approach that has already resulted in massive savings to electricity customers through the processes that we’ve undertaken so far through the IESO procurements, with competitive procurements through the RFPs that we have had out in the field and that we continue to have out in the field right now.

So more can still be done for ratepayers—and reducing the red tape in the sector is obviously going to do that.

On a more local note, as the MPP for Bay of Quinte, there are a number of measures in this bill, as well, that I fully endorse and am excited about. The first measure is going to be helping many constituents in my riding get broadband Internet service. The first measure that will help is the proposed amendment to the Building Broadband Faster Act, 2021. We’re proposing legislative amendments under that act that will ensure Internet service providers can plan, design and build high-speed Internet projects as quickly as possible. I’ve been working with my seatmate here, the Minister of Infrastructure, on this file for the last year and a half, just ensuring that when we are building broadband, we’re doing everything that we can to remove red tape, to make it quick and easy for Internet service providers, those ISPs, working with LDCs, the local distribution companies, to get cable in the ground, to get access to the poles that we need and to reduce the cost of getting access to those poles, so that the folks who are working on this can get broadband out there as fast as possible.

We remain committed to bringing high-speed Internet access to every community in Ontario, including Bay of Quinte, by the end of 2025. It was a major, major frustration for people in my riding since I was elected in 2011 that there were huge pockets in our area that, first of all, didn’t have cell service and didn’t have broadband Internet access. It was very frustrating. I would say over and over again, “We continue to push the government of the day, we continue to push the government of the day.” I’m happy to say the government of the day, the Doug Ford government, is actually the first to put $4 billion on the table to ensure that we’re getting high-speed broadband Internet to every corner of the province.

I’m excited about broadband Internet making its way into Bay of Quinte because a lot of people have moved out of the GTA over the last couple of years thanks to the pandemic. They’re living on Sheba’s Island or they’re living on West Lake or they’re living up in Hastings county on a lake up there, and they want to work from there. We’re ensuring that they’re going to have the Internet that they need.

I know my good friend who sits behind me here, Minister Thompson, the Minister of Agriculture, is excited about a couple of things impacting the agriculture, agri-food and farming communities. We have a big farming community in Bay of Quinte. So the amendments to the Milk Act are going to be warmly received, not that we drink our milk warm in Quinte; we like our milk cold. But these are welcome changes to the Milk Act. Then there’s also streamlining the farm financial protection programs, which are great. We have a very, very active agricultural community. This is going to impact all sectors in the ag community, from dairy, obviously, to the grain farmers. We’ve got some great grain farmers in my region as well and the beef farmers, which I love. We get out to some great twilights in the summer.

For those city folk, they probably don’t know what a twilight is, but it’s where you go out to one of the local farms. The entire community is invited out there, and it’s just a whole lot of fun. You get a chance to see the animals and see the great work that they’re doing on the farm. I’m looking forward to twilight season coming up a little bit later on this summer.

In conclusion, here this afternoon, I’d like to thank the Legislature for providing me with the time to speak to the Less Red Tape, Stronger Economy Act, 2023, which, if passed, would allow ratepayers across the country, the people of Ontario, to save money on bills, which follows our government’s commitment to ensuring a reliable and affordable and clean electricity system to power Ontario. Personally, I am really excited about the Building Broadband Faster Act amendments. I know full well just how badly that type of work is needed.

This is going to positively impact the people of Bay of Quinte. It’s going to positively impact the people of Ontario.

I just want to close by saying this: There’s a lot of work that goes into these red tape bills. I’ll go back to where I started with commending Minister Gill and also PA Oosterhoff and their team at this new ministry, the Ministry of Red Tape Reduction, for the work that they’re doing, because it’s a bit like herding cats. All of these great ideas come into your office on how you can reduce red tape. And it sounds really easy, but it’s not, because when those ideas come in, you then have to go to every single line minister and make sure the due diligence is done to ensure that the red tape that you are cutting is in fact red tape, that it’s overregulation, that it is having an impact on businesses or impacting the people or not-for-profits in our province. It is a heck of a lot of work.

The commitment that we have as a government not just to do this every now and then but to do it twice a year is a major undertaking. It’s a thick document. It’s going to make a huge difference in our open-for-business policies here in Ontario.

I look forward to seeing more multi-billion dollar investments in Ontario because of Minister Gill’s Bill 91.

Question?

I’m glad to be able to ask a question of the Minister of Energy. I’m glad to hear his enthusiasm for broadband. I wish that we saw that the government was actually investing in that enthusiasm at more than the rate of 2% of what they’ve budgeted.

Specifically, I wanted to raise something that’s sticking in my craw from the other day. The member from Nickel Belt thoughtfully raised a concern from her neck of the woods about the lack of broadband investment and hope—the lack of hope, I think, because in northern and rural communities like the riding of Nickel Belt, businesses are not going to put in broadband; there’s no money in it for them. She asked if the government would take responsibility, a public solution, and she was mercilessly mocked for suggesting such a thing.

I would ask the Minister of Energy, who’s excited about broadband going across the province, how is this government going to ensure that when companies will not put it in because there’s no money for them—how are they going to get that broadband? Or are they just up a creek?

Speaker, through you to the member for Bay of Quinte: At a time when life is unaffordable, we have a series of technical measures for remote meetings. These priorities are way out of touch.

My question: Yesterday the housing minister said that meeting Ontario’s housing targets was out of his control. What is in the government’s control is prioritizing purpose-built housing and grants to make houses more affordable. Why, instead, are we prioritizing technical legislation?

I appreciate the question from the member opposite. It’s very important, first of all, and our job here in the province is to ensure that we get the infrastructure to the doorstep of the individuals across the province so that they can access high-speed Internet service for their businesses, so their kids can do their homework, all of those important things so they can do their business from home. We put $4 billion out there, and the Minister of Infrastructure has been working extremely hard to ensure that happens by 2025. The reverse-auction that she has run has been successful in ensuring that we have the ISPs, those Internet service providers, that are going to do the work to get it to the door.

I’m not exactly sure what the question is that the member is asking, because it’s still going to be up to individuals to sign up with that ISP to get the Internet service so that they can run their business, and it will be up to them to make that decision, but the Internet service will be available to each and every home and business across Ontario.

For an example, there are companies and manufacturers in our province that are operating battery storage facilities. They would be able to share, peer to peer, the energy that they’re producing and storing in their facilities, and potentially making that electricity available to their local distribution companies. So if it’s in Ajax, they would be sharing the electricity they’re producing, with a fee, to Elexicon, which is the local distribution company, which will then make our grid even that much more stable.

These are some of the ideas that we’re looking at, and there’s lots of innovation opportunities in the sector.

Every time we bring forward a piece of legislation, you know what you’re going to get out of the New Democratic Party: You’re always going to get a no. But I think it’s pretty rich to allege that this government hasn’t done anything on housing. We’ve done more on housing than any government in our province’s history.

Interjections.

Red tape is suffocating businesses in this province, but not as bad as it was five years ago because of all of the legislation we’ve brought forward to reduce red tape. The red tape bills that we have brought forward have had an impact on just about every sector.

One of the blessings, I guess, of being a new member back in 2011 and given this portfolio was going out and seeing just where red tape was impacting people across the province, and it wasn’t just small businesses. Certainly it was impacting small businesses, but it was impacting our delivery of health care. It was impacting our delivery of education. It was impacting our delivery of social services. It was impacting all of the ministries that deliver very, very important services to the province.

So we set out on a mission to reduce that red tape and we have surpassed our goals, but we’re not stopping there. Minister Gill is still charging forward like a bull at a red flag in front of him to remove red tape.

It’s such a pleasure to join this debate on G91 this afternoon. I did catch the one-hour lead by our critic on this bill, and I think the way he started the conversation on the nature of red tape and the importance of having regulations for health and safety really resonated with me.

I’ve heard some members saying that the number one issue they hear in their riding is reducing red tape. The number one issue that I hear in Waterloo, and I’m sure our other members in the official opposition too, is housing. It’s cost of living; it’s affordability; it’s climate change; it’s health care—accessing health care, accessing mental health services. So I just want to preface that, because I’m going to present some examples of streamlining and reducing regulatory burdens, which would be beneficial for the people of this province. Also, I’m really hopeful that the door is still open, and I’m glad that the minister did his opening speech this morning on Bill 91. We have some specific examples where regulatory burdens couldn’t be reduced which actually benefit the people that we are elected to serve, and that’s sort of the focus that we are coming to in this debate on this piece of legislation.

It is worth noting, as our critic mentioned, that we only got a hard copy of the bill this morning. It’s a fast-moving bill, and so we’re still peeling back the layers on it, and of course, doing some stakeholder consultation, which I think is our duty to do and also an important part of holding the government to account.

Now, it will surprise some of the members over there, but we have already heard from some folks that are very concerned with where you are choosing to place regulatory burdens and then where you’re sort of ignoring or setting aside red tape and regulations. My friend and colleague from Oshawa, she just happened to share an economic and development services department planning services report that’s going to Oshawa city council, and as you can expect, municipalities are reeling from Bill 23. The government is actively changing the rules of engagement, and honestly, the relationship that the provincial government has with municipalities in Ontario, and you’ve done it in such a way that it is only breeding discontent and genuine concerns. And I just want to say, 444 municipalities are not wrong on Bill 23.

Specifically, around regulations, this is in 5.3 of the staff report: “The province is proposing that municipalities report planning-approval information quarterly. Staff do not support reporting on a quarterly basis as it is onerous, time-consuming and may overlap with the subsequent quarter’s data collection. This may also prove onerous for the province to disseminate the data on a quarterly basis.... As a result, there is typically a delay recurring on an annual basis when activity that would otherwise would have occurred during the third quarter can only be dealt with in the fourth quarter.”

These are the people who are actually doing the real work in the community to facilitate housing, right? So what is this government doing? They’re providing more hoops for them to jump through, Madam Speaker. The “implementation of the regulation” that is contained in Bill 23 “will take already constrained staff resources away from actually processing planning applications.” If you want to fast-track housing, why would you put another roadblock for staff to facilitate and streamline that process? They say, “This will cause delays in planning approvals and may require the hiring of additional staff to help offset the need for staff to spend more time recording data.” Is that what you want? You want municipal staff to spend more time recording data than approving housing development?

And this also, they point out, would result “in further costs to the city in an already cost-constrained environment.” We are already seeing tax hikes across the province due to Bill 23. Bill 23 is having a cooling effect on housing. It is already happening in Waterloo with the delay of 800 homes because they don’t have the money to plan the community infrastructure that subdivision requires. This report from Oshawa goes on to say, “It is requested that the province provide information on the consequences of not having the data available to provide to the province in the manner proposed.”

And then, finally, “The pace of planning applications is often in the hands of developers”—I just want you to sit with that for a little bit. “The pace of planning applications is often in the hands of developers and their consultants. If a developer decides to not advance their application or decides to alter it substantially it will cause delay.”

This is actually happening in Waterloo region, and I know that my colleague from Kitchener–Conestoga knows this. Applications have been approved. All the i’s are dotted, the t’s are crossed, but the developer is not moving ahead. They’re waiting for the cost of the homes to increase, they’re waiting for the profit margins to increase, and this, then, is outside of the purview of those municipalities.

“The province should develop a reciprocal regulation for the development industry”—this is coming from the planners in Oshawa, which is a very fast-growing community which actually needs housing. This is the feedback on the regulatory burden that the government is placing on municipalities, all the while going through the motions of reducing red tape.

I just want to say, the regulations that are contained within Bill 23, it goes on to say, “do not appear to require information concerning approvals of housing units related to community planning permit systems. Without such information, it is not clear how the province can reliably compare planning approval processes across all municipalities.”

When the minister talked this morning, he was saying that there was a lot of collaboration and communication between ministries. I would urge the minister responsible for red tape to sit down with the Minister of Municipal Affairs and say, “Listen, housing is in a crisis. Bill 23 will slow down that planning process.” We do not need more red tape around housing, Madam Speaker. What we do need is direct investment.

This sort of leads me to this conversation around what is driving the red tape priorities. I was watching the news earlier today, and I’m sure people have heard about a senior couple who were scammed by cryptocurrency. Cryptocurrency and Bitcoin are a huge issue in the province of Ontario. I did write to the Minister of Finance back on September 8 of last year—it does feel like a very long time ago, I just want to say for the record; we haven’t even finished one year of this term. But the fact that this couple was able to be scammed out of $400,000—and just so the House knows, fraud reports in the province of Ontario have skyrocketed over the last decade. Crypto is problematic in that there are not enough regulatory protections around this new sector. In fact, the Ontario Securities Commission is chasing the sector, I would say.

I did meet with a group called the Canadian Web3 Council. I sat down with them. They are a group of folks who are asking the government to establish responsible public policy around crypto, and they’re actually asking for a trust framework to unlock the development—because there’s lots of potential. I’m not going to pretend that I understand everything about it; I don’t think anybody in this House understands everything about Bitcoin, but it is here. It is here in Ontario.

Interjection.