I would like to thank the member from Ottawa West–Nepean for her excellent presentation showing how Bill 69 is actually creating a loophole that undermines or even negates the Environmental Bill of Rights.

It seems that this government is a government of backroom deals and escape hatches when you look at Bill 28—the bill that never was but never was—the “notwithstanding” clause, MZOs, Bill 124, and now Bill 69.

You talked about the Auditor General’s 2017 report, and you pointed out how Infrastructure Ontario management was ineffective, with no standards of performance, and that there were no timelines. It has even been pointed out that invoices were non-specific and did not have proper addresses on them—so it wasn’t necessarily as though these invoices were even related to the properties that were being managed.

My question: Is it fiscally prudent or socially responsible to give further contracts to Infrastructure Ontario?

There were a lot of buzzwords in that question. But I certainly agree with the member opposite that this government has a track record, and that track record is what I just spent 20 minutes outlining. It is a track record of undermining environmental assessments, undermining our green spaces and our waterways, undermining the future of our children.

Let me tell you, the government has done a great job of creating jobs cleaning up from natural disasters. But we could create a lot of jobs by investing in retrofits, building more sustainable infrastructure for our communities and things that would actually prevent and reverse climate change and help us to build more sustainable communities, which would allow my children and everyone’s children to have a healthy future in our province.

No, it’s not at all fiscally prudent to keep giving an organization that has such an incredibly poor track record contracts. And it hasn’t been great management on the part of that organization to keep outsourcing contracts to companies with incredibly poor performance. In fact, one starts to wonder after a while if the point of the contracts is not the actual work being done, but who is on the other end receiving the money for the contracts—which is another pattern recurring with this government that we have seen.

I will try to clear up your confusion efficiently for you.

I think one of the most inefficient ways of spending taxpayer money is to spend it on an organization that is not delivering good oversight, is not delivering good value for the citizens of Ontario—and what we saw in the Auditor General’s report is that Infrastructure Ontario has clearly not been doing that. We’ve repeatedly seen occasions where outsourcing by the government has led to incredibly inefficient management of services. It results in money going into people’s pockets; it has not resulted in better services for Ontarians.

This government’s love of P3s also frequently results in inefficient services for the people of Ontario—once again, money going into private pockets and incredibly inefficient oversight. If the member has any doubts about that, I would love for him to come to Ottawa and ride on our train that was built as a P3 and does not have round wheels and has doors that do not open in the heat or the cold.

I would also add to that that our city of Ottawa is still waiting for our expenses from that storm to be reimbursed by the province. I can tell you, it’s incredibly inefficient for the city to have to clean up after such a major storm. It was incredibly expensive for the residents of Ottawa West–Nepean to have to rebuild their roofs, to purchase new vehicles. For many of them, it cost the entire contents of their freezers and fridge; for many others, there was an incredible cost in trauma and psychological suffering, because they were trapped in their own homes.

We’ve seen this government, just recently, refuse to require generators that would allow people to get in and out of their own homes in the case of these storms.

We’ve also seen, with the floods in Ottawa, that allowing people to have homes built on hundred-year flood plains results in having homes that are eventually flooded.

That is why it is valuable to have an environmental assessment done—so that you are not building your homes and your buildings and your roads in places that are going to be destroyed by climate events.

Thank you to the member for the question.

He’s absolutely right; this government has a track record. It’s a track record of undermining environmental assessments, of undermining our green spaces and our waterways and our clean air at every turn.

There is absolutely no future for the province of Ontario if we don’t have green space, if we don’t have farmland, if we don’t have clean water, and if we don’t take action to stop irreversible and catastrophic climate change.