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.