Sorry?

And bring back the late career initiative—there are nurses who would come back into the workforce. They really would. But they’re not going to come into this particular environment right now, and I honestly can’t blame them. I want them to feel supported, I want them to be encouraged and I want them to have the financial support to do the upgrading and the upskilling, but I don’t blame them right now for not being there.

The other example that we had at committee, another solution that this government definitely could employ, is increased funding for nurse practitioners and community health centres. The fact that this province is not utilizing the capacity of nurse practitioners who can alleviate a wait-list by 900 patients—one nurse practitioner can carry a workload of 900 patients. Nurse practitioners are keen to work in smaller communities and rural and northern communities. Our health critic, the member for Nickel Belt, has been talking about the value and the capacity of nurse practitioners for years, and it truly is astounding. As I said, I really do hope that on Thursday in the 2023 budget we see a significant investment in nurse practitioners.

The third piece is around ensuring the safety of nurses and health care professionals. This speaks to recruitment, because nurses are still fighting to get the appropriate personal protective equipment. ONA says, “Guarantee access to N95s or a higher level of protection.” They want to stay healthy. They want to stay healthy so that they keep their patients healthy, so that they can keep showing up to work.

Then, tackle head-on the growing epidemic of violence in health care settings. What we have heard in our local ridings, what nurses have experienced first-hand around physical and also emotional abuse—because people are so frustrated, that environment has been so demoralized. I think that’s what we heard. We heard Bill 124 has been humiliating for them, and yet this government stubbornly, callously holds on to this legislation, fighting for it in court, even when the very people that you call heroes tell you that it is untenable. If you want to fix the problem, there are solutions here.

The last point from ONA is to stop the privatization of Ontario’s health care system. This is a huge concern for this workforce. I would argue that you’re kind of working at odds with yourself. You’re trying to recruit nurses into a system, but you’re creating a parallel system as well. That parallel system is now competing with the public system, and you have all the research and all the evidence which demonstrate that this will undermine the goal of staffing up our hospitals.

Why does the government not fund our current surgical suites, expanding those services? They are the public infrastructure in 100 public hospitals in this great province. Why would you not reach the potential and ensure that the capacity of those surgical suites is met? You could address the 12,000 children who are waiting. You could address the 90,000-surgery backlog of long-haulers—which is kind of a terrible name, but these are people who have been waiting so long that the optimum time to receive surgery and to have a really healthy outcome has come and has gone.

I can’t imagine the finance minister knowing all of this now—and I want to thank the good staff at the Financial Accountability Office; they broke down these numbers for us. They laid it right on the line, Madam Speaker. They said the investment needs to happen, or we will get to a point in time in the province of Ontario where—and these aren’t my words—we will fundamentally lose whatever we have left of our public health care system.

I don’t know about you on that side or this side, but these people here—these 31 people now, because we just won a really good by-election in Hamilton—we think that public health care is worth fighting for. It gets us up every day to come to this place, and even to have to listen to the rhetoric that we had to this morning during the non-answer-period time—lots of questions but not a lot of answers. When that does happen, it is essentially demoralizing, but at the same time, I think that the people we serve truly know what we’re fighting for, because they see what’s actually happening in Ontario. It doesn’t matter what the press release says. It doesn’t matter that you have some awkward nurses and doctors behind you in the photo op. The fact of the matter is that people know what’s happening in our health care system and they’re very concerned about it. Even the people who have money are concerned about it, Madam Speaker.

I want to talk about this one story that I just caught wind of on Friday. It’s really good that the member from Hamilton Mountain has come into the House, because she has stood in her place for years now talking about the tsunami of complex-medical-needs children who age out of being a child into adulthood.

Cynthia Mulligan did a story last week. These parents came forward to tell their story. I believe they’re from Simcoe: Michelle and Sean Crooks. They have twins who are 23 years old. Both boys have autism. During the pandemic, when the routines got broken, the supports fell apart, and Aidan, one of the boys, became very violent. It became too much for the parents.

We all know some parents who are, really, at the breaking point. If you’re meeting with parents and they’re in this state, you have this genuine feeling of helplessness because there is nowhere for them to turn.

So I just want to say, their son Aidan, for the last eight months, has been in a psychiatric unit because there’s no place else for him. As a parent, it’s heartbreaking to watch these stories, because the solutions are there, and there actually even may be some resources, not in their genuine community—but the rules are so broken, the community supports are so fragmented, that there is no safety net. It is frayed, it is torn and it has been that way for a long time, which is why when you see that you underspent in community and social services by $603 million—that money is needed.

Those agencies and the support services, they’re ready to scale up. They want to be able to pay their people very well. They do. I don’t know why people would be shaking their head. That money needs to get into the community. The government budgeted. They said, “We acknowledge that the need is there,” but the money has not gone into the community.

So then you have parents—there’s a cost to actually not investing. That’s the other part. So because the money didn’t get out the door, because it’s not in the community, because Aidan doesn’t have any options, he’s in an eight-by-eight cell, a padded cell, in a psych unit. That is not the appropriate place for a 23-year-old who has complex medical needs and autism. It is cruel, is what it is. His parents have said, “I think we broke, and now we’re trying to put ourselves back together” again.

But the fact that there is an opportunity to change the course of Aidan’s life to help these parents, the fact that you could do something on housing—you really could. The developers are not going to build affordable, attainable housing. Developers and home builders are in the business of business. The government of the day has a moral responsibility to do the right thing for the vulnerable people of this province. And in doing so—and I think that this is the frustrating part about it—you save money down the line, because the fact that Aidan has been in a psych unit for eight months costs a lot of money. It costs a lot of money for people to get so sick that they move past the emergency room and then they’re in long-term care. It costs a lot of money to not get an assessment for a child in the education system and to see that child become so frustrated that they’re excluded from school and end up in the justice system—the justice system that you also underspent and underinvested in to the tune of $88 million just last quarter.

I have a young woman in my riding who was assaulted three years ago, at the age of 15. She has not had her day in court. But the person who assaulted her has already confessed to the assault. So that person is still out there in the community, and you wonder why women don’t come forward and tell people about their experiences.

If the system does not respond in an ethical and trusting way, if the system is not transparent, then you don’t have trust. So as the government stands in their place and talks about how great they are, it is my job, it is our job as the official opposition, to speak truth to power, and that is what we do every single day in question period. Now, we don’t get the answers, because you have your talking points. But what we have is the people in our communities who know why we are fighting, and we are fighting for a strong public education system. We are fighting for a strong health care system. We are fighting you on the further profitization of the health care system. We’re fighting on transparency and trust around the greenbelt.

This really has mobilized people. Perhaps the government is surprised by this. I personally am not surprised, because there have been a series of decisions that this government has made which have whittled away on goodwill. Goodwill and trust are also very much connected, and when you do follow the money, you see that the priorities are auto subsidies versus housing. You make some municipalities whole—you gave the city of Toronto some money—but then we heard today about a $1.2-billion shortfall on housing. I don’t know if you’ve seen Toronto housing lately, but who makes an investment in Toronto housing stock and then not maintains it, not keeps it up? It’s like throwing good money after bad. You invest, but then you don’t take care of the investment, when we cannot afford to lose any more affordable housing in Ontario.

That truly is the most frustrating piece, Madam Speaker: The opportunity here to create good local jobs—because you can’t send those jobs on housing offshore; those are good local community jobs. The educational system is clamouring for new folks. We heard Bill 124 has had a cooling effect on labour, full stop. And so people are looking for jobs that are less complex and that make more money, because those people who work in the public system—those people who go to work every single day to uphold our public services, to serve children, to serve seniors—those opportunities are not seen as true opportunities anymore. They were at one point, I would say. They genuinely were.

In fact, I have this crest in my office. It’s actually my father-in-law’s. He served in national defence for 40 years. Do you know who signed that certificate? Brian Mulroney. He thanked him for his service. This government is failing the people who serve in the public service. You are pushing them out.

In fact, the out-migration for the province of Ontario has never been higher. You are losing between 50,000 to 130,000 who are going to school here, but they’re taking their skills and their talents to other jurisdictions, where they can afford a house, where their family can find child care, where their family can actually reach their potential. You can’t blame people for doing that, but I can tell you, while you have Bill 124 on the books—which is, as we’ve heard, humiliating for workers; which caps them at 1%—people are going to leave the system, and you will never be able to recruit those people back into the system, because once they’re gone, they’re gone. They’re not coming back to an unaffordable Ontario.

And so, while you have Bill 124—stubbornly, callously fighting for an unconstitutional piece of legislation in our courts, wasting taxpayer money—and while you have Bill 23 on the books, when 444 municipalities have said, “This is not helpful. This is disrespectful to the people who elected us, and this will not help with the affordable housing crisis in Ontario,” and while this government stubbornly refuses to admit that homelessness is a crisis in Ontario—when all those conditions are at play, you have a chance on Thursday. You have a real chance with budget 2023, and that’s what we’re going to want to see.

We put in a dissenting opinion to the finance minister. We gave him some solutions and some suggestions, and we’re going to be looking for those suggestions, because we want Ontario to be stronger. We want the people in public service to be respected. We want our health care system to be there. We want Aidan not to be in a psychiatric unit; we want him to be in a residential home, where he is loved and he is supported. Ontario can be that place, but it will take strategic investment.

While you sit on $2.9 billion in unallocated contingency funds, while you basically say, “Yes, we have this slush fund, but we’re just going to hold on to it for a rainy day,” what you need to know is that it is raining in this province for so many people. The storm is here. You helped create it. You helped create it when you froze the minimum wage in 2018-19 all the way through a pandemic, which, costed out, was $7,000 a year for vulnerable workers.

You have the opportunity on Thursday to do the right thing, and we are hoping and praying on this side of the House that you do it.

Quality of care.

Further debate?

This Conservative government talks frequently about how it’s working for the people of Ontario, yet in the last three quarters, the expenditure monitor report from the FAO indicates that the government is underspending on the people of Ontario: on their health by $1.25 billion, on their education by $844 million, on children’s and social services by $458 million and on post-secondary education by $175 million.

Speaker, the government is asking us to vote for its supply bill even after they have failed to spend what they said they would. And with a record-level contingency fund that they’ve made a cabinet secret, as I sit here today in opposition, it’s hard to think about voting for any of the good things that may be in this act. The government is refusing to adequately fund critical services that the people of Ontario rely on by refusing to pay nurses and other health care workers what they are worth. Refusing to spend to keep the people of Ontario healthy isn’t financial prudence; in fact, it’s the exact opposite.

While the government talks of record investments, they also have record contingency funds. And we may have record levels of taxpayer money being spent by this government to defend their losing battles around their unconstitutional laws in court. As the President of the Treasury Board accurately pointed out just this afternoon, every dollar they spend comes from the taxpayers of Ontario. But we don’t know if this spending is at record levels because this government has not been transparent about how much taxpayer money they have been spending to fight in court. We do know that they budgeted $30 million to fight the federal government on their carbon tax, only for the Supreme Court to uphold the federal climate policy. They made private businesses put up their political notices, and the court found that unconstitutional. Now they refuse to disclose how much they’re spending on two further appeals: hiding their ministry mandate letters, and on the continued, ill-conceived and damaging Bill 124.

Fighting to hide their mandate letters has been going on since 2018—five years of wasting Ontarians’ hard-earned tax dollars. I’ve spoken about Bill 124 many times and its damaging effects on our health care and education systems. But to add insult to injury, the government continues to waste taxpayer money—money they could be paying those health care workers—to keep fighting what the courts have called unconstitutional; to keep fighting market-interfering, wage-capping legislation that’s driven away health care workers, nurses and other public sector workers.

And while the government decides to limit health care workers and nurses’ wages to a 1% increase and decides to spend taxpayer money to fight that illegal law in court, it speaks to the priorities of the government that they decide to create a record number of parliamentary assistants, effectively giving many of their MPPs a 14% raise.

Let’s talk about transit, Speaker. This government talks about getting it done. Well, the Eglinton LRT, which goes through my riding of Don Valley West and was started under the previous Liberal government, under this government is over budget by millions of dollars. The tab is still being run up, and the government will not tell the people of Ontario when it will be completed or how much their errors have cost.

The previous Liberal government started to get the work done on the Hamilton LRT. This government spent money to cancel it, only to decide the previous Liberal government was on the right track and then decided to bring it back. Had they not cancelled the project, it would have been completed earlier and for less money.

Similarly, the Liberal government started the work on GO expansion, which would include electrifying trains, making them more energy efficient and faster. Unfortunately, this government delayed that project when they came into power, and now they boast about bringing it back. While building these transit projects is critically important, the government will not accomplish what these projects are intended to when the government does not spend the money needed to help cities operate their transit systems.

Because the member for Mississauga–Lakeshore raised it, let’s talk a little more about Highway 413, the Conservative government’s unnecessary project that they claim will save commuters 30 minutes. Data from the Ministry of Transportation, their own ministry, as reported by the Toronto Star, refutes this, and says that by using the existing 400, 401 and 407 highways, commuters could cross the GTA 16 minutes faster than they could using the proposed Highway 413 alone. Perhaps the government should tell the taxpayers of Ontario if it might be more prudent to buy back the 407 that a previous Conservative government sold off, rather than to build a new highway that does what the 407 is supposed to do.

We need a government that’s willing to provide the services that people need, that’s willing to invest in children’s education and to build an economy that works for all. The government announces long-term investments while at the same crippling our health care system in the here and now by not funding it, and this is hurting the people of Ontario and our economy.

A recent article from CBC said 50,000 young people are leaving Ontario because they see better opportunity elsewhere. Building new subdivisions in the greenbelt is not going to address the housing crisis. Paving over agricultural land will not help food affordability. Underpaying our educators and health care workers until they quit is not going to give those same 50,000 young people the education system they need so their children can have a brighter future.

Health care, education, transit, protecting the environment and helping build opportunity for a brighter future are indeed the business of government. Ontario needs a fiscally responsible government that is fully transparent about what it asks its ministries, that treats its health care workers with respect so they can do the work needed for the people of Ontario, a government that manages all parts of our economy, including implementing an affordable daycare system that works for families in Ontario. Ontario needs a government that is fully transparent about our finances instead of artificially inflating projected expenses by squirrelling away billions in contingency funds. That is why, sadly, I will be voting against this supply measure.

I’m up to debate the government’s Supply Act to authorize expenditures for the government’s fiscal plan. What I really want to talk about today is what this act will not supply for the people of Ontario.

Let’s start with housing that people can afford. The experts have told us that over the next decade we need to build 160,000 deeply affordable homes in this province. Of those, 60,000 need to be permanent supportive homes with wraparound mental health, addictions and other supports. You won’t see money for that in the Supply Act.

You won’t see money for that allocated to ensure that we build affordable communities—communities where people can actually live in homes they can afford, close to where they want to work. Instead, what you have is a government focused on building million-dollar homes in the greenbelt, paving over the farmland that feeds us and contributes $50 billion to the province’s economy, the land that protects us from flooding, the wetlands that clean our drinking water. So let’s supply the ability of the government to spend money on affordable homes instead of paving over the places we love.

Second, you won’t see anything in the government’s fiscal plan that will supply the ability to build affordable climate-ready communities with resilient infrastructure that’s going to withstand the impacts of the climate crisis that we’re already facing. According to the Financial Accountability Officer, in this decade alone—we’re just talking about the next seven years—the government is going to need to invest $26.2 billion just to make our public infrastructure have the ability to withstand the impacts of the climate crisis, $14 billion for transportation alone—our roads, our highways, our bridges, our transit systems. You can see it—when I was coming to Queen’s Park today, the number of potholes I hit alone coming in, let alone the climate impacts we’re going to face—we’re going to need $6.2 billion over the next seven years just for water and stormwater systems and $6 billion for buildings.

So, Speaker, think of the people and the communities, the municipalities who are going to be on the hook for this damage. We need to do far more to prevent it from happening in the first place—which you don’t see in the Supply Act—we’re going to need to protect the nature that protects us in order to reduce the financial costs of these risks. But at the very least, if the government is going to ignore doing that, they should at least allocate the funding to build the resilient infrastructure to be able to withstand those impacts.

Third, there’s nothing here that’s supplying people with the solutions to address the health care crisis that we’re facing and, in particular, solutions to pay the nurses and the front-line health care workers who care for our loved ones each and every day. We should be embarrassed in Ontario that we have the lowest-paid nurses in the country. The Financial Accountability Officer, an independent officer of the Legislature, in his latest report says that Ontario spends the lowest per capita on health care of any province in the country, and we have the lowest-paid nurses the country. So if we’re going to solve the health care crisis, we actually need to invest in the people who care for our loved ones. That means getting rid of Bill 124. Stop wasting more money on lawyers to appeal it and actually start bargaining fair wages, better working conditions and better benefits for nurses and other front-line care workers in this province.

The final thing that you won’t see supplied in this expenditure plan is the base budget funding that our mental health services need to just be able to maintain existing levels of service, which anyone in the sector will tell you are already inadequate. Some 28,000 young people are on wait-lists that can go up to two and a half years to access basic mental health services.

I tell a story oftentimes of a young man I ran into in downtown Guelph. I never forget the day I asked him, “How are you doing?” He said, “I’m okay today, but it would have helped six months ago, when I was on suicide watch, if I could have accessed mental health services. But I finally got a call from somebody yesterday.”

When we underfund basic public services like mental health services, those have real-world impacts on people’s day-to-day lives, their quality of life, the quality of life in our communities. If you talk to small businesses in downtowns and along main streets all across the province, they’ll tell you it has direct impacts on the economy of this province, the ability of the small businesses to generate the prosperity to fund high-quality education, public health care and the other social services we need.

Speaker, let’s actually have a fiscal plan that supplies what the people of Ontario need to thrive.

Further debate?

No further business.