It is a pleasure to rise today on behalf of the people I represent in London West to participate in the debate on Bill 79, An Act to amend various statutes with respect to employment and labour and other matters. We’ve heard from the government that this is their third iteration of their efforts to work for workers, and I can tell you that workers in this province view the government’s working for workers efforts as falling far short of what workers actually need. It has been interesting throughout this debate to observe this disconnect between what is actually in this bill, Bill 79, and what the government is talking about when they refer to this bill.

This bill has seven schedules. It amends a number of different pieces of legislation that already are in place. Schedule 1 deals with the Employment Protection for Foreign Nationals Act. This schedule increases the fines for employers who employ foreign nationals and take away their passports or work permit. Speaker, that is something that is desperately needed. We know that migrant workers, foreign national workers, are very vulnerable to exploitation and abuse by employers. They’re very vulnerable. We saw during the pandemic how vulnerable they were to COVID because of the working conditions they were facing.

Now what is not in this bill—while it talks about the increased fines, there are no details as to how enforcement is going to take place. How are we going to hold these employers accountable?

There’s no details about whether there are going to be proactive inspections of workplaces that employ foreign nationals. There’s no details about whether the ministry simply intends to create a new helpline for foreign nationals to call if they have been exploited by their employers. There’s no details about how migrant workers will find out their new protections with these increased fines. There’s no details about whether information will be available in multiple languages for migrant workers, and we know they come from many different countries around the world. There’s no details about the protections that would be available for foreign nationals, for migrant workers from reprisal if they report an employer. So those are the kinds of details that are missing from schedule 1.

But the most glaring omissions from this act—the details that we see nowhere in the legislation before us—are the things that the government is highlighting from this bill.

Schedule 5 of this bill talks about the Occupational Health and Safety Act. Again, it increases maximum fines for corporations that are convicted under the act, and yes, as in schedule 1, we need an increase in maximum fines to create effective deterrents to employers for contravening their legislative obligations to keep workers safe on the job. But what we don’t see in schedule 5 is any mention whatsoever of the addition of pancreatic and thyroid cancers as presumptive occupational illnesses for firefighters. Despite the government’s continued references to that being part of this bill, it actually does not appear in the legislation before us.

The other thing that is nowhere in this legislation is any mention of clean, gender-based bathrooms on construction work sites, which is what we have heard many times repeated by this government, that this legislation is going to make sure that women on job sites will have access to washrooms that are clean and decent. That is definitely something that is needed on job sites throughout this province. It is something that I think will help get more women into occupations that are male-dominated. It would be great to see this in this legislation, but it’s not here—it’s not here.

If this government is planning to pursue these measures through regulation, that would be important for people in this province, but the problem with regulation, of course, Speaker, is that it doesn’t have the same kind of accountability and due diligence that legislation has. There’s nothing that would have prevented this government from introducing the measures in the bill rather than through regulation. But even then we will wait to see if these regulations materialize, and we will wait to see if they actually do what this government has been talking about doing.

Schedule 2 of bill deals with the Employment Standards Act. Now this schedule does not increase fines for contravention of the Employment Standards Act, which would have been something that is desperately needed. We know that, for decades in the province, wage theft has been an ongoing and unresolved problem that workers experience in Ontario—that is employers who withhold money from workers, who don’t pay them what they are entitled to under the Employment Standards Act, who don’t pay vacation pay, who don’t even pay minimum wage sometimes. They pay them under the table to avoid the accountability that is in the legislation. Currently, what employees must do if they experience wage theft from their employer is make a complaint to the Ministry of Labour and wait for the results of an investigation. All too often, they wait months for the investigation to start. Many times, the investigation results in an order against the employer to repay those stolen wages to the employee, and that order is not enforced. In fact, we know that only one third of employers will repay the wages that are stolen from their employees in this province once they are notified that a complaint has been made. So two thirds of employees whose wages and benefits are stolen by their employer do not see the money that they are owed. This has been an ongoing problem in this province.

I want to share a couple of experiences of workers who have faced wage theft.

Helena Borody worked for three months without wages and then was fired without notice. She went to the Ministry of Labour. The Ministry of Labour slapped her former boss with a $4,800 order to pay. A year and a half later, no payment was received. Helena Borody said that going to the Ministry of Labour was a useless exercise because the Ministry of Labour did nothing to help enforce her rights and to help get that money that she was owed back from the employer.

In this Legislature, a couple of years ago, I shared some other experiences.

Isabelle Faure had an employer who was ordered to pay her $5,000 in back wages. The Ministry of Labour made that order to the employer, but nothing happened. Isabelle was unable to get those back wages paid. She said that she had no way of knowing that the Ministry of Labour would do essentially nothing to enforce its own regulations, and she has yet to receive her money.

Another employee in this province, Juan Jose Lira Cervantes, was owed more than $25,000 in lost wages and benefits. He went to the Ministry of Labour. The Ministry of Labour made an order against his employer, Domino’s Pizza, and the bill has never been paid. He has not been able to collect on those lost wages and benefits that were withheld by his employer. That is because of gaping loopholes in the Employment Standards Act that allow employers to get away with wage theft on a regular basis in Ontario. It’s because of inadequate fines in the Employment Standards Act to make sure that there is an effective deterrent for employers to steal the wages of their employees—

My question is to the Premier. Speaker, we now know that this government’s flawed paid sick days program will end on March 31 with nothing to replace it. Instead of fixing the flaws in the program, instead of increasing the days from three to 10, instead of making them annual and permanent and employer-paid, instead of making them available for all illnesses, not just COVID, this government is abandoning sick workers.

Why does this government believe that workers without paid sick days should be forced to give up their pay if they have to stay home when they are sick?

Speaker, BC understands this; 15 US states with paid sick days understand this. Why doesn’t this government?