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—