Good morning. Let us pray.

Prières.

Resuming the debate adjourned on March 1, 2023, on the motion for second reading of the following bill:

Bill 69, An Act to amend various Acts with respect to infrastructure / Projet de loi 69, Loi modifiant diverses lois sur les infrastructures.

I listened yesterday to the remarks from the member for Essex. I noticed that he repeated some of the claims that were made in the government’s press release accompanying this legislation. The government stated that the purpose of the legislation is to address the 2017 Auditor General’s report on Infrastructure Ontario real estate services. So I looked at the 2017 Auditor General’s report on real estate services, and never once in that report did I see anything about consolidating these 14 properties under the auspices of Infrastructure Ontario. In fact, what the report did was criticize Infrastructure Ontario’s poor oversight of the contracts that it was managing. So can the member explain how exactly this legislation addresses the 2017 Auditor General’s report?

Thank you for the question. As we learned throughout the very lengthy speeches made yesterday by the various members of this assembly—there were various commentaries made by the Minister of Infrastructure, who laid out the details of the bill and explained how it would operate. Other members spoke, both on the government side and on the opposition side, laying out the details of the bill and explaining how it works. I, myself, took the impromptu opportunity to lay out the typical process of an environmental assessment as was my experience through being elected on a municipal government for six years. We all understood, from all of the presentations that were made from the various members of this chamber, that the standard environmental process can be very long and invite all sorts of public commentary. The public commentary, of course, is very important and desired and proper and good. That’s why an environmental process is open to public comment. That was the process that we discussed. That is, of course, the main—or, at least, one of the main—subjects of the subject bill in front of us today.

As we have observed throughout the discussion of this entire bill, there is 100% opportunity for the public to comment during the process of an environmental assessment. That is 100% preserved. It is 100% preserved throughout the entire period, the lengthy period, that we discussed and that I described yesterday in my comments. Municipalities will still have to go through these processes and will still have to have public input. They will still have to go through the environmental assessment process, but we’re only talking about one very brief little skipping moment which might occur from time to time.

With regard to the question about touching upon the Auditor General’s report, of course, we all know that one of the main functions of the Auditor General is to find efficiencies to decrease inefficiency. That is the original and primary function of an Auditor General, I would submit. That’s my opinion. And what is the name of this act? It’s the Reducing Inefficiencies Act, which coincides directly with the primary function of having an Auditor General. So in my submission, this is exactly the kind of act that would be welcomed by the Auditor General, reducing inefficiencies—or I might put it another way: increasing efficiencies. I’m thinking that when the Auditor General sees that we’re reducing inefficiencies, the Auditor General would be very happy about that, because reducing inefficiencies, which is what this act does, saves taxpayers money. And I would hope that we would all agree, all 124 of us, that saving taxpayers’ money is a good thing. But interestingly enough, when I put that question to the member from London North Centre last night, he didn’t really give me an answer to that. I asked him: Isn’t it a good thing? He didn’t answer. I think it’s a good thing. Let’s do it.

Thank you to the member from Essex for passionately talking about this bill. I was enjoying your presentation yesterday.

The EA process is not being compromised. The proposed legislative amendments are minor and won’t have any impact on the existing EA class, environmental protection.

My question to you: How is this government keeping the environment top of mind while reducing inefficiencies?

To the member from Essex: I was able to listen to the tail end of his comments yesterday. The government has—there’s a long, long list of transgressions against the environment, everything from gutting conservation authorities to a tax on the greenbelt. So when the government comes forward with a bill and they really don’t communicate anything to the opposition and there’s no real opportunity for us to learn the intent behind the legislation, why should we trust this government with anything that they have to say about the environment?

I’d like to ask a question. He talked about saving money and taxpayers’ money. Why do you continue to support P3s? I gave an example yesterday and nobody answered it. When we built the Peterborough hospital with public funds, it cost about $350 million; when you built the St. Catharines hospital, it cost $1.1 billion. One was done with public funds, almost the exact same hospital; one was done with a P3. So if you want to save money, why are you not addressing the P3s and how much more they’re costing taxpayers over and over again?

Remember, she’s Italian.

I thank the member for that question. I’d like to take this very brief opportunity to wish him a happy 27th wedding anniversary, as he mentioned it the other day. And now, answering his question--

Getting back to the question on building hospitals: There are several ways of building hospitals, and one is to put 100% of the cost on the shoulders of the taxpayer. That’s one way to do it. Another way to do it is to seek partners and perhaps shift some of that cost burden onto a non-government agency—and “non-government,” of course, means a “non-taxpayer” agency. So there are several ways to do these things, and several of these experiments and some of these have been tried over the years. There are a lot of government projects and non-government projects and hybrid government/non-government projects that have been tried over the various decades.

To his question: Centralizing the decision-making authority for real estate is actually a very good idea. As I stated in my impromptu remarks yesterday night, there are currently, to my surprise, at least 14 various agencies that are juggling real estate files for the government right now. I suspect that there are actually more than 14, but perhaps the Auditor General might have something to say about that. To have 14 different agencies juggling real estate files all at the same time is inefficient, so we are going to reduce that inefficiency by putting them all under one authority, which will now have the ability to fill empty spaces and move oversubscribed spaces over to empty spaces. That will be a good thing, because it will, as the title of the act says, reduce inefficiency and, consequently, save the taxpayer money. Of course, I have absolutely no hesitation whatsoever in saying that all 124 of us should be looking for ways to save taxpayer money.

My question to the member from Essex: How will the centralization of real estate under these agencies help the government achieve its priorities?

Next question?

It’s always an honour to rise in this House to represent the people of my good riding.

We here are members of His Majesty’s loyal opposition, and I am the official opposition critic for the environment, and we all take that responsibility and that role very, very seriously.

I have to say, as the critic for the environment, it has been a really demoralizing few years under this government—and not just for me, but for the people of Ontario. We have seen, in the last few years, under this government and under this minister—we have seen a minister preside over what we can only describe as the greatest assault on our public natural spaces, our green spaces, our natural heritage, our wetlands, our wildlife. It is something that has been unprecedented in the history of Ontario, and it begs the question as to why he’s even called the Minister of the Environment.

People in my riding and across Ontario are feeling nothing but despair. Young people who expected a government to protect their natural heritage, to protect what should have been a legacy handed to them from those of us who are entrusted to protect that, see nothing but a bleak future when it comes to our natural world.

There’s a real running tally, a real rogues’ gallery, if you will, of the things that have happened in this province under the nose of the Minister of the Environment. We have seen the loss of protection for our conservation lands, with this government kneecapping agencies that were once charged with protecting our wetlands. In fact, it’s unbelievable to think that this government, rather than protecting provincially significant wetlands, has chosen to charge conservation authorities—not only have they taken away their ability to protect these wetlands, but they’ve actually charged them with the task of finding land that is under their protection for development. This is unbelievable. The conservation authorities now are playing a role in delivering up more of our protected, provincially significant wetlands for development.

Not only have they changed the role of the oversight body, the conservation authority, we’ve also seen loss of protection for our wetlands because this government is in the process of declassifying provincially significant wetlands. For those of you who don’t—I’m sure many of you do understand, but it cannot be said often enough that wetlands are significant in protecting not just our natural heritage, but they’re significant in protecting our communities, our towns, our infrastructure from flooding. So wetlands are not just something that’s a bother that this government seems to see as in the way of development, but they’re something that’s a significant, important part of our natural landscape.

We have seen this government’s complete disregard, or complete disrespect, of the role of wetlands in conservation authorities, and clearly in the member from Oshawa’s neck of the woods. This government gave permission to pave over a wetland, in the case of Duffins Creek. Clearly, they don’t understand or they don’t care about the role of wetlands when it comes to protecting not only our environment but protecting communities from flooding.

We’ve seen the loss of protection for our wildlife species and their habitat with the watering down of the species-at-risk act. We’re talking about animals and habitat that we all love. We’re talking about the monarch butterfly. We’re talking about bald eagles. We’re talking about things that make us proud to be in Ontario, to call Ontario such a beautiful place for us to live and grow. Our habitat, our natural species are part of that. And we have a government that, instead of protecting these wildlife species, is watering down their protection. This government introduced essentially a pay-to-slay provision that would allow destruction of the species’ habitats, or species, and that’s okay as long as the person or the entity that is doing this destruction pays a fine. That fine goes into a fund that really has no connection to restoring the actual area that was destroyed. Who knows how that money will be spent? That is cold comfort, to know that the habitat of one of these species has been destroyed or damaged, with no provision to restore it in any way.

Can we talk about climate change? Because we’ve absolutely seen no progress to address climate change. In fact, under this minister, the carbon pollution in our province continues to get much worse. They do not have a credible climate plan. Their made-in-Ontario plan, really, is just a pamphlet. So we have a government that either doesn’t believe in climate change or doesn’t care about the impacts it will have on future generations.

We continue to see in this province water bottlers, big multinational corporations like Nestlé and like BlueTriton, continue to be given a licence to drain our aquifers for pennies. It’s pennies on the litre. In fact, these companies that are profiting from our water and our waterways pay less in fees than it costs this government to oversee and manage this. Why do we have a government that doesn’t understand that we think that large corporations shouldn’t be profiting off of our natural resources, which is water, and for it to be sold for a profit when the people of the province of Ontario have to pay those costs? Municipalities that do not have access to good groundwater—it impinges on their ability to grow. But companies are profiting, with no obligation to make whole these municipalities and those communities that are suffering from that.

And then I guess we have—I would like to say this is the mother of all, but we’ll get to the greenbelt. But we have Highway 413. As we know, this government is really ramming through this super-sprawl highway that we all know will pave over farmlands and wetlands. It will continue the carve-up of the greenbelt and, again, destroy the habitat of many, many more species at risk.

I just have to wonder—this government has decided that they’re going to look at a new biodiversity strategy. If you’re not aware of this, the government is looking for comment at their committee on the status of species at risk. My suspicion is that this is not to add species at risk to the list. My suspicion is that it will, again, be a diminishing of the protection for species at risk, and I can only suspect—only suspect, with the lack of transparency of this government—that this may be in anticipation of building a highway in habitats for species at risk, and if we take these species off the list, the government is under no obligation to protect them. That is something that remains to be seen, but given the current track record of this government, it’d be hard to think otherwise.

Thank you, Madam Speaker.

So yes, to be clear: We are talking about Bill 69, which has a significant schedule that will diminish the environmental assessment process in the province, which has a direct negative impact on the environment, as I’m discussing.

Highway 413: We know that it will go through some of Ontario’s last remaining areas of countryside. It will require cutting down a forest. It will continue to threaten our precious agricultural land. We have class 1 farmland that we’re losing at a rate of—I think it’s 379 acres a day. When I say that, I can hardly believe that that’s the figure—I think it is—because it’s so astronomical. But this Highway 413 further threatens the land on which we grow food.

So it’s quite clear that this highway is a potential looming environmental disaster, but I think we need to make no mistake that it is also a potential financial disaster as well. Estimates say that this highway could cost anywhere between $10 billion and $12 billion in taxpayers’ money. That’s a lot of money with not a lot of information from this government, and I just think, to put that in context—we’re having our budget coming up March 31, I believe. The government is going to present its fiscal plan for 2023. But if we look at where we are now, this is a government that’s sitting on $400 billion in debt. That’s the debt of the province of Ontario currently.

Interjection: How much?

We also, as a measure of fiscal responsibility, look at the debt to GDP. I remember Minister Fedeli being outraged when, under the Liberals, the debt-to-GDP ratio went to 40%. We now have a government that has a debt-to-GDP ratio of about 43% and climbing. So by any measure, Highway 413 is not fiscally prudent, nor, I would suggest, is this government as fiscally prudent as they like to claim.

Then we come to the greenbelt and what has been described as the carving up, the selling off of the greenbelt. The outrage over this is about the environment. It’s about what’s at risk and what we stand to lose when it comes to our natural heritage, when it comes to farmland. All of this is something that we understand. When we hear just the name “greenbelt,” we know that this is something that we should be protecting and preserving.

But I think the absolute outrage for people comes from the fact that the Premier promised many times to protect the greenbelt, that he would not open the greenbelt up for development. And what we see is a string of broken promises. The people of the province feel betrayed. They feel betrayed that what they expected would be protected by this government has essentially been divvied up. And it would appear it has been divvied up not to benefit the people of the province of Ontario but to profit select powerful developers in the province of Ontario. I’m not just making that up; it’s a matter of public record that the big developers that own land in this greenbelt are also clearly connected, either through employment, through appointments or through donations, to the PC Party.

So that’s the kind of cynicism that is not good for Ontario. I would suggest that people expect so much better from their government, not only to protect their environment but to be straight up when it comes to how you’re selling off our heritage. I think people feel that the government needs to hear this: This is not your land. This does not belong to the Ministry of the Environment. It doesn’t belong to this government to sell to its friends. This land is public, and it should be protected as such. It’s a jewel, and we should be protecting it and not selling it off—for pennies, really. The cynicism runs so deep.

I have a question. I’m hoping that the Minister of the Environment will speak to this bill. We have not heard the Minister of the Environment stand up to speak to this bill that has such a significant impact on the environment. When and if the minister speaks to this, my question to him would be around the greenbelt: When did this minister himself know that the greenbelt was going to be open for development? It would be interesting to know the timing of that as well.

With this list, I have to say, with all due respect, the government has not shown that they are forthcoming or trustworthy when it comes to the environment or our natural heritage. In fact, they’ve just given us many reasons not to trust them. So I think the government should understand why no one in the province believes anything that you say or what you’re doing when it comes to the environment.

Specifically to the bill, Madam Speaker, in this bill, we have a schedule that will again address and make diminishing changes to the Environmental Bill of Rights. People need to understand in the province that we have a bill of rights. It’s a right that we all have as Ontarians. It’s the Environmental Bill of Rights. This is a legal right that’s enshrined in provincial laws, similar to us having access to government information, similar to the right for us to have safe and healthy workplaces and to the right of Indigenous communities to be consulted—free and fair, prior consent. The Environmental Bill of Rights is one of those sets of laws. In the Environmental Bill of Rights, this recognizes that we have a shared and common value in Ontario to protect, conserve and restore the environment “for the benefit of present and future generations.” That just sounds so lovely, and I think that’s what we should all be doing. In fact, what we have seen is the Environmental Bill of Rights continue to be watered down, chipped away—and I guess we’d call it death by a thousand cuts—with this government.

In fact, I’ll go on to show that this government has been proven to have broken the law, violated the rights of the people of the province of Ontario, under the Environmental Bill of Rights. I think it’s important to note at this point that the actual mechanisms by which you access your rights under this bill are that the government needs to notify and consult the public through a website called the Environmental Registry. For those of you who don’t know this, it’s called the ERO, the Environmental Registry of Ontario. That’s where the government posts—or should be posting—things that will have a significant impact on the environment. That is an important right we need to protect and that we need to continue to utilize.

The whole idea of the environmental assessment is so that we look before we leap, when things are being proposed that will impact the environment that we have a transparent public consultation process, that we allow experts in their community to weigh in on things that will impact them. But apparently, this government finds that this law is just too burdensome for them. They call it burdensome. They say it’s red tape, but it’s your right that they are considering to be a burden.

In fact, with the Bradford Bypass, another highway that has the potential to impose significant damage to our environment, the government has chosen to exempt themselves from any environmental assessment.

So it’s quite clear that this is a government that does not want scrutiny, that doesn’t want the public to weigh in on the environment, and that they think they know best when it comes to our environment.

Again, we have the Auditor General to thank for the independent research that she does, the oversight that she provides to all of us in this House to do our job better, to understand the role of the government and how the government is performing on our behalf. We use this, as the official opposition, to inform the government, which is our role—to give them information that we believe will help make their bills better. We rely heavily on the Auditor General, as we believe the government should.

Unfortunately, the government has racked up a litany of failures when it comes to the Environmental Bill of Rights and when it comes to environmental assessment.

In her latest report of 2022, the Auditor General said that even though required under the Environmental Bill of Rights Act, the environment ministry did not provide educational programs to Ontarians about their rights. They don’t want you to know about your rights. They didn’t notify Ontarians promptly in over half of the leave-to-appeal applications. The environment minister could not provide documentation of internal controls—and many of the ministers did not follow internal procedures. The environment minister was not proactive in ensuring that environmentally significant decisions were made subject to the EBR act, the Environmental Bill of Rights.

It has been shown over and over again that this government has violated—a court has found, the Auditor General has found that this government does not seem to think that the Environmental Bill of Rights is something that they should be adhering to.

So what we see before us is a bill—we’ve seen that they have ignored the right under environmental assessment because it’s burdensome. Because they’ve broken the law and they don’t want to follow it, what we now have is a bill that changes the law, so there are no longer any requirements to follow some of the provisions. This is a continuing decline, I would say, of what we’ve seen in this province.

I’m disappointed to see that rather than protecting the environment, we have a minister, we have a government that have shown a limitless weakness to bend to the will of big development at every turn. Rather than sustainable growth, we have a government that is handing over our natural heritage.

I pledge to continue to stand with the people who stand for the environment. We will not stop. We will stand to make sure that our natural heritage is protected, because clearly, this is what the people of Ontario expect for us and—

Point of order, Madam Speaker. I just want to remind the speaker and the member to stick to the content. I believe we are discussing Bill 69.

The member for Oakville?

Questions and answers?

I wasn’t going to go there, but seeing as this member continues to mislead this House, you will remember, Speaker, extremely well—

Interjections.

You will remember this, Speaker, because I know I was there with you, quite frankly, in Hamilton. When you want to talk about closing schools and closing hospitals—Mike Harris closed more schools and more hospitals than anybody in the province of Ontario. And you’ll remember this because you were the reporter: There were 100,000 teachers and other unions marching in Hamilton to try to protect their jobs and stop the closures of schools and hospitals in the province of Ontario.

So when you stand up and talk about coalitions—I’ve got to have a question for her. My question is, why do you think they want to build 1.5 million homes and attack the greenbelt, when we know we can build two million homes without touching the greenbelt today—and that was a report that came out two days ago.

We do not want to see what this government is trying to do, which is drag us back to the 1970s when it comes to environmental protections, when basically it was the Wild West, where anything was allowed and the people of the province had absolutely no input on things that would impact their communities.

I think the people of the province of Ontario need to know that what we’re talking about is those little woodlots that are near your neighbourhood, the place where you walk your dog, those streams that you like and you don’t realize—were environmentally significant, protected—are no longer protected.

We absolutely will not vote for a bill that takes away people’s rights and does not take into consideration the things we need to do for sustainable ecological growth.

That’s what we’re talking about. We’re talking about these natural spaces that people love and frequent and that are so good for our mental health and our mental well-being, but also just for the health of our province.

It’s really disappointing to see that the government has gutted conservation authorities to speed up development. I think people will be shocked to find what they’re going to lose—I think even the way that the Niagara Escarpment Commission has been taken out of the ability to preserve land, right into the fact that the conservation authorities no longer can consider pollution or conservation of land as part of their job to protect our environment. So, yes, I think people would be shocked to see what this province looks like once these kinds of laws go through.

I believe that the member will understand the severity of impacting wetlands. It seems to me that in your very own community, you have had not one but maybe two once-in-a-century storms that have resulted in loss of property, property damage, people’s homes being damaged, major flooding. And it’s my understanding that people can’t even get insurance for some of their homes. So why would you consider protecting people’s homes and protecting flood lands red tape? It’s your job to protect people and protect their homes and protect their financial health, not to eliminate those protections.

I want to thank the member for Hamilton West–Ancaster–Dundas for the remarks.

On Tuesday night, the Ontario Society of Professional Engineers had a reception here. Two members, Dan Cozzi of the Municipal Engineers Association and Chris Traini, county engineer for Middlesex county, made a beeline for me and expressed their frustration with the province’s environmental assessment process. It’s in dire need of modernization and simplification, I know all too well—because I’ve led many of these in my own professional career.

My question to the member is—why the red tape that is anticipated to be removed with this bill is worse off for Ontario versus what the municipalities would like to see.

Thank you to the member from Hamilton West–Ancaster–Dundas for her presentation.

During the pandemic, the conservation areas in my region, in Thunder Bay–Superior North, were the mental and physical lifelines that helped people get through the pandemic. They are beloved spaces, and I can’t see anybody wanting to give them up.

Is it your sense that the incredibly beautiful conservation areas in your region—I’m thinking of Webster Falls, for example, a stunning place. Do you believe that people in your region would be happy to see these conservation areas turned into housing developments without any consultation from local organizations?

Speaker, since 2018, the Progressive Conservative government of Premier Doug Ford has been focused on building Ontario. We built schools. The previous Liberal-NDP coalition closed schools down. We are building hospitals, in contrast to the Liberal-NDP coalition that brought our health care system to its knees. We are building transit, with four new transit lines in the GTA, and the NDP said no to that.

Bill 69 will help predictable infrastructure projects—and let us build infrastructure faster without compromising the EA process.

Speaker, the opposition supported Bill 63. Why will the opposition not support Bill 69 and build infrastructure for the people of Ontario that they need and deserve?