I’m being heckled, Speaker, by Uncle Ernie and his companion, and I’m okay with that.

But before I start talking about the bill, I’m going to start talking about red tape: what red tape is, what it isn’t and how we react to it. No one in Ontario wants what we all think of as red tape. It’s unnecessary regulation. No one wants that, regardless of your political stripe. But we do need safe, workable legislation that keeps people safe. That’s what our society is built on. And there’s a balance to that.

The first time I really had to think about that as an MPP—I can’t even remember what year it was, but I do remember it was really cold. It was like a northern Ontario morning, 30 or 35 below, when the tires freeze and the first 10 kilometres you’re going bounce, bounce, bounce, bounce, bounce—one of those mornings. I was scheduled to speak at Professional Engineers Ontario, I believe their regional meeting in North Bay, myself and the member from Nipissing. He was at that time the finance minister. We both spoke there. He spoke first—he’s very eloquent, Speaker—and I spoke second. How do I describe this? When you follow someone, especially like the Minister of Finance, you have to do something to catch people’s attention. That’s part of our job. As people who represent the public, we have to find ways to get the public’s attention so they’ll hear us.

I can remember parts of my speech and I’m going to repeat part of it because it has something to do with this bill. Mr. Fedeli finished and it was my turn. Remember, it was 30 or 35 below that morning. I got up and I said, “I’m a farmer by trade. There are three types of people that farmers naturally dislike: (1) politicians; (2) lawyers”—

I said the reason that farmers don’t like politicians is because when they watch them on TV all they hear them do is criticize each other. But now that I am a politician, I realize that, although we have different political stripes, we often work together and we get along together. We have to. But it’s not just that we have to; we want to. I pointed to the member from Nipissing and I said it’s “because we work together on issues that benefit our people.”

The politicians were covered. Lawyers: Nobody likes lawyers—I have to back up because my daughter is a lawyer now—but everybody laughed at that.

I said, “Why farmers don’t like engineers is, on a morning like this, when it’s 35 below and I push a button on something that’s supposed to work—that day it was a silo loader, and because it sat cold the metal brakes got stressed and that silo loader, which was designed to operate for 10 years but I’ve been using it for 15, snaps and I’m stuck fixing it at 30 below. I blame the engineer.” They laughed. I said, “But you play a crucial role.” Because engineers design equipment—they design all kinds of things but they specifically design equipment—to be strong enough and usable enough but light enough and affordable enough to actually work for the period that it’s designed for. It’s critical.

Then I continued and I said, “We’ve just heard the Minister of Finance say that the goal of the government is to eliminate one quarter of all the regulations in Ontario.” That’s what he said.

There is red tape in Ontario and we agree that it needs to be limited, where possible. But if some of those regulations that are being eliminated by the government are starting to impact people’s safety, it will be the job of engineers and all professionals to not only warn the government but to let the opposition know that some of these changes aren’t right. I think that still holds true. Are there things that can be modernized, made better? Of course. The government is looking for ways and we look for ways, and where we can we work with the government to make that happen. Where we get a bit nervous is when we get big bills with no time ahead, because then you always have to look to see if somewhere hidden in here is something very egregious—that at some point, the government is going to say, “And you voted for this.” So I’m hoping that’s not in here. Quite frankly, we haven’t been able to go through it all the way yet. We’ve had a whole day and a half. There’s quite a bit of agriculture stuff in this bill, and when I contacted some of the agricultural organizations—some of the consultations for this were held four years ago—they didn’t really know this was coming right now either, so they’re in the same position.

On the matter of regulations, how we end up with red tape—because despite what some people think—and I’m not from Toronto. I’m not from the city. I’ve lived my whole life on a little country road. I have yet to find the office building full of bureaucrats whose whole life is dedicated to making red tape. That’s not how it works. How it works is, a regulation usually comes into being to fix a problem, and because it comes into being to fix that problem, sometimes that problem goes away, or sometimes that regulation impacts something else that it wasn’t intended to do, and sometimes another patch is put on top of that patch, and sometimes you get three or four patches and it doesn’t work anymore. That is how red tape develops. To have an initiative to remove that red tape—we’re not opposed to that.

An example of how a regulation could be developed that eventually would cause red tape: When an issue develops that the government of the day has never had to deal with before and they are trying to deal with it—I’ll give you an example. In my riding, right now, we have got unorganized territory. For the people who don’t have unorganized territory in their ridings or have never heard of unorganized territory, it’s places where there is no municipal government; the province is actually the municipal government. Sometimes they have a type of council to maintain roads, but there’s actually no municipal government; the government is the province. And there are huge swaths of that that are uninhabited. But in Timiskaming–Cochrane, specifically in Timiskaming, there is a lot of unorganized territory around towns and—we don’t really have cities; we have one town that’s called a city, but it’s a town. People like to move to unorganized territories because the taxes are cheaper. If you’re close enough to a municipality, the services are still close enough to access. There are many people who have lived in unorganized territory for a long time.

In unorganized territories, you need a permit from the public health unit for a septic system, and you should have a building permit to build, but there’s no building inspector. So it is the tendency of people, when you don’t have an inspector, often—not everyone. But often, things are done on unorganized territory that maybe shouldn’t be done—because there’s a reason you have building inspectors: to keep things safe.

So now there are unofficial subdivisions popping up in unorganized territory. One company specifically—it’s called Boreal Forest Medieval Villages—is unofficially subdividing in unorganized territory. The people buying these lots are leasing or they’re investing, but the fact is, they could be moving into these half-acre lots with no real municipal oversight.

To the Minister of Municipal Affairs’ credit—I give credit where credit is due—he and his ministry have been looking at how to deal with this, how to keep people safe, how to keep development sustainable, but it’s a tough issue to deal with. I can’t speak for what he’s doing—that’s his job—but he’s been doing what he can to come up with a way to deal with this. It might end up with regulation. It might—I can’t say; I don’t know, but it very well could end up with a regulation. And that regulation might impact someone else unknowingly. The government wouldn’t be doing this on purpose; I know that. I disagree with this government vehemently on many issues, but I don’t think they would do that—