What a pleasure it is to be in the House today to address the Supply Act motion. I have to say, I actually have so much material to work with. I feel like a mosquito at a nudist resort, Madam Speaker. Literally, I don’t even know where to start.

The President of the Treasury Board, my friend, talked a lot about transparency. I think that we agree on a few things, and one is that transparency is very much connected to trust. But this government has a serious, serious trust issue. The people of this province have been promised a set of goods. They were promised a budget in 2022, which had some detailed expenditures—and I’m going to go through some of them, because that matters. When you actually follow the money and you follow where the expenditures actually occurred, then you can see sometimes what the real priorities are. But the trust piece—this government, I will admit, is very, very, very good at announcements, and sometimes really doubling down on some of those announcements with re-announcements about expenditures.

We are very fortunate, in the province of Ontario, to have the Financial Accountability Officer. This position, this independent officer of the Legislature, came to be as part of the negotiations in a minority government. Minority governments can be very effective. We wanted greater transparency with the former Liberal government. You can’t blame us, given some of the decisions that they made and some of the funding decisions that they made. I will also admit that we are still feeling the repercussions from some of those decisions, particularly on the energy file, for sure. The FAO has an expenditure monitor. Every quarter, he tracks where the money has gone, based on the government’s own numbers. So the government says, “We are going to allocate this particular amount of money to health care,” and then they make announcements and announcements and announcements. And then the FAO says, “Did that money actually go to health care?” Fortunately, we have the exposure of, really, what is happening.

We actually just got the Q3 expenditure monitor from earlier in this month, March 1, and lo and behold, combined over the first three quarters, the province was expected to spend $129.2 billion but actually spent only $122.8 billion—a $6.4-billion difference, 5% less than expected. Now, the question comes. If government has said health care, education, justice and energy—these are justifiable expenditures. You have the same formula that I think the FAO has. And then the FAO says, “Where did that money go?”—or in this case, and more importantly perhaps for this discussion, “Where did it not go?”

We’re not talking about new money today. We, as the official opposition, one of only two parties in this House, have said that you made a promise to the people of this province. You said you were going to invest in autism. You said you were going to invest in community services. You said you were going to invest in housing. And that money did not flow.

Just to break it down—because in order to be transparent on the lack of transparency, I want to be sure that the government understands why we have taken such issue with the budgeting of this government. Breaking it down around actual spending versus planned spending, the programs with the largest lower-than-expected spending include Metrolinx and municipal infrastructure projects.

This government talks a lot about capital infrastructure. They talk a lot about building hospitals. We heard this at the finance committee; my colleague and I travelled around the province. You can talk about beds all you want, but you are actually funding furniture if you don’t have a nurse, if you don’t have a PSW, if you don’t have a doctor. It’s just the facts.

The other underspending happened in the Ministry of Infrastructure capital program—$644 million less; public health, $605 million less.

What have we learned? We went through a global pandemic. It is not over. We are still feeling the effects of the various strains of COVID and long COVID. Nobody in the Ministry of Health is talking about long COVID at all. A responsible government would plan, do research, have an evidence-based policy around long COVID; not this government.

Certainly, underspending by $605 million, over half a billion dollars, in public health to prevent people from getting sick—early intervention and prevention is the smart investment in public health.

Social assistance programs—this kind of surprised me—got $453 million less; elementary and secondary education programs, $432 million less; child care programs, $396 million less than planned.

What is the problem? Where is the barrier to actually—you’ve acknowledged that there this is need in these areas, and you’ve set aside the funding, but the money doesn’t flow. But we do have lots of announcements, and we do have lots of photo ops.

Just as an aside: I came in last night on the UP Express—and let me tell you, it was not express. When I look at this lack of $462 million in the Metrolinx and municipal transit operating funding and I think about all the people who rely so heavily on public transit in this city, to not get that money out the door, to not invest that money, to not create those jobs, to not create those opportunities, is an economic non-starter. That train last night—it’s a diesel train; you know this. To get on a diesel train that chugalug-a-lugged me for 45 minutes from the airport to Union Station—it was a bit embarrassing. There were some Europeans on there, and they said to me, “Is this thing going to go fast?” And I had to say, “We’re not quite in the 20th century on public transit in Ontario yet.”

The expenditure monitor notes that the FAO provided all members of the Legislature—this office is open to everyone, and it is truly non-partisan.

On health care, the $1.25 billion that didn’t get spent, that did not get “invested”—that’s actually the better word. It was not invested in a time when we saw the Children’s Health Coalition for the province of Ontario—CHEO is a big part of that coalition—asking for $371 million to alleviate that 12,000-child wait-list. Some 12,000 children are long-haulers, so they’ve missed the opportune moment to receive surgery. The government has been silent on this request of $371 million. I really hope that my friend the President of the Treasury Board is able to talk to the Minister of Finance and say—not only does it look bad to keep children waiting, languishing on a wait-list and not opening up those operating rooms so that children can reach their potential, and so that their surgery is not more complex and more expensive—as one parent said to me, “Does the minister not understand that I as a parent, when I go to work, am not at my full productivity if I know that my child is in pain?” Surely, we can all understand this concept.

Going down the sector breakdown, the education piece, the actual versus expected is less $844 million in this last quarter as of December 31, 2022. The government has said, “We understand there’s a gap in learning.” The pandemic interrupted those learning patterns, especially for younger children and younger students. That money didn’t get out the door.

Children and social services: almost half a billion dollars, $458 million.

And I have to say—in the total, though, because there’s another program which captures $3.5 billion that didn’t get invested.

I can go through the other programs. These are important issues, but they’ve been encapsulated in the report, under a large umbrella, if you will.

The unallocated funds—let me just finish: You plan to spend $6.4 billion in very important ministries. I know that the communities were expecting that funding. That funding didn’t get out the door. I wish sometimes that we could get answers in this place, because I really want to know, why did you not get the job done? The people of this province, in the interest of transparency, which the government has said that they care about, want to know, because without that transparency, there is no trust.

There’s a tale of two Ontarios here, and when you factor in the Indigenous communities, it’s actually three, because there are very different levels. But here at the Pink Palace, as we heard this morning during question period, when we had people from across this province who were lobbying the government for better services for the most vulnerable people in Ontario, including Sarah and her daughter, Mia, who is homeless—so a mother and a child are homeless, and what do we hear from this government? “We’re going to create some jobs in another jurisdiction.” Sarah needs a roof. Sarah needs a place to call home. She needs to be safe. And you can talk about jobs—jobs and housing are connected. I don’t see why this government cannot draw that connection.

We also heard very clearly that housing is health care. We heard this from doctors in Ottawa. We heard this in Kenora. We heard this in Toronto very, very clearly. People who are precariously housed, who are couch-surfing, the 130 people living in tents in Waterloo region—these people are barely holding on. It was quite something, actually, to hear this morning from our leader about how many deaths happened every week over the winter. The fact that three people a week died in one of the richest provinces in Canada is really something that should keep us up at night.

The politicization of the housing file has reached a whole new extreme—because the not-for-profit sector is ready and willing to come to the table. In fact, they have applications. The minister, with the strike of a pen, could include in this budget direct partnerships with not-for-profits, and every single community in this province would have some form of supportive housing, some form of new accommodations. They’re ready and they are willing to come to the table—

Interjections.