SoVote

Decentralized Democracy

Ontario Assembly

43rd Parl. 1st Sess.
March 7, 2023 09:00AM
  • Mar/7/23 11:10:00 a.m.

Thank you to the member opposite for the question. Our government takes matters of consumer protection in the condo sector very seriously, and I will never stop taking necessary action to protect Ontarians across the province.

My ministry actually did welcome the Auditor General’s feedback on Ontario’s condo sector, and has already begun consulting on ways to actively improve and expand the condo authority tribunal and its powers. I had a very fruitful conversation with the member opposite in regard to the tribunal.

We are never stopping our efforts to improve protections for all Ontarians and ensure they have a safe and secure place they all call home.

It is this government, actually, that is making condo boards fairer and more transparent and improving the lives of hundreds of thousands of Ontarians who call a condo a home. We will continue to work with the condo sector, implement the changes suggested by the Auditor General and ensure that condo owners across the province are provided with the treatment they expect and deserve, and we will continue to work with our stakeholders and work with the recommendations that were provided to us by the Auditor General to make sure that Ontarians deserve and feel good when they are making the biggest purchase of their lives.

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  • Mar/7/23 4:20:00 p.m.
  • Re: Bill 71 

That is a really good question.

Mines are so large, and for a lot of places—I can argue, most places—it’s the centre of commerce.

Sudbury has diversified, but mining is really a cornerstone of it even today, as much as they’ve diversified, and so they’re tied to that community.

When I talked about the most valuable thing coming out of the mine being the worker—it’s the workers who are related, too. It’s between seven or eight spinoff jobs for every mining job that happens there—so it’s all the local economy that happens around it. So it isn’t just the shareholders; it’s the stakeholders, it’s the people who live there, it’s the people who were there before the mine was founded and who will be there after the mine was founded. That’s why you want to talk to them—because they all have a goal of this shared prosperity.

Also, at the end of the day, mining companies are just names; they’re not people. When they go away, the people are there afterwards—and so they have a lot of value in what happens to the areas where they live.

Mining is incredibly important to me. It’s important to my riding. It’s important to the union I belonged to and the workers who are there. It’s important to the people who manage it, the non-unionized workers who are there. It’s important to our community. I am invested in this bill being successful, because I know how important it will be to other mining communities in the north—primarily in the north, but all over, where they find deposits. So I’ll be voting in favour of this, because I think the core of it is really important. But because I think mining is so important, because it’s so important to me and my family and my community, I want to make sure we get this right. I want to fix the flaws that it has to make a really great bill we can all be proud of.

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  • Mar/7/23 5:30:00 p.m.
  • Re: Bill 71 

I appreciate interacting with my colleague from the independent Liberals. It did put a smile on my face when he said that we seem to be moving very quickly on this legislation with mines, because we’ve been only working on it for four years. Of course, the Ring of Fire was announced in 2007, and the previous Liberal government sat on it for 11 years. I can understand that he thinks we’re moving a little bit too fast for this.

I did hear that he’s ready for it to move forward into second reading, but I was wondering if he is supportive and specifically on—what I found so intriguing is that, having met with stakeholders, the waste of previous mining operations was almost impossible to mine out for critical minerals that are in there.

Is he very supportive personally of being able to mine out what was waste in a mine from before and to clean up that area?

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