It’s an honour to rise in the House to speak about Bill 69, the—well, it’s called the Reducing Inefficiencies Act, but it’s actually the reducing public consultation act.

I’m in the NDP in part because I believe in a progressive society. A progressive society is one in which we leave the next generation with better opportunities than we had ourselves. The most important thing we can do for the next generation is to leave them with a healthy planet, and yet time and time again, we see this government weakening the Environmental Assessment Act.

We have a history in this province of environmental catastrophes. I’ll give a couple of examples. In 1976, I was driving with family—my parents, at the time—to Sudbury, and 30 kilometres outside Sudbury, the trees disappeared. This was because of sulphur dioxide, because of acid rain. All of the lakes within a 30-kilometre circumference of Sudbury were dead, and the trees were dead. This was because of the way that nickel was being smelted in Sudbury that released the sulphur dioxide into the environment. It has taken decades for Sudbury to recover. It has taken millions of dollars and incredible community effort to green Sudbury again. I am happy to say that Sudbury—and I’ve been up there over the last decade or so—is a green, beautiful city once again. But this environmental catastrophe could have been prevented if we had known what we know nowadays and if we had had an Environmental Assessment Act in place.

Another example: I lived in a small town in northern Ontario that used to have a mine. The tailings from the mine were laid on the ground, and there was mercury in those tailings. The mercury was leaking into the nearby lake, so even though this town was built on a lake, they could not draw their water from that lake because of the mercury poisoning. Again, it took decades—and this was the town of Geraldton. There was a very visionary mayor of that town, Michael Power, and he sealed in the tailings and built a golf course on that site, just to seal it in, so it was possible to remedy the site.

The other example of environmental catastrophe that we had in this province: Grassy Narrows. For four decades, the First Nation community of Grassy Narrows has been dealing with Minamata disease—mercury poisoning—because of a mine that had been located in that area.

We need to protect the environment. We need to make sure that the projects that we undertake in this province protect the environment for future generations. That’s what the Environmental Assessment Act is about, and that’s why weakening the Environmental Assessment Act with Bill 69 is a step in the wrong direction and it’s a step that leaves our next generation vulnerable.

What this act does is it allows the environment minister to waive the 30-day waiting period after the comments have been received as part of a class environmental assessment. So the community gets together, and they provide feedback to the government about a project from an environmental perspective. Normally, the minister has to consider those for a 30-day period. The idea is that the government is actually going to respect the feedback that they get. But what’s happening with this legislation is, the government could receive a submission from a community member at 5 o’clock on a Thursday night, and that ends the comment period. The next morning at 9 o’clock in the morning, the minister could go ahead with the project without ever considering that community member’s consultation or their input.

And the thing about it is that we in the government do not know everything. We don’t have the local knowledge, and that’s why it’s really important—when we’re passing legislation, particularly legislation that has to do with the environment and the future generations of this province, we have to consider the local input because local community members and agencies and companies have knowledge that we do not have in the government. That’s why it’s important to have this public consultation.

I’ll give you a couple of recent examples where this government has not followed their own legal obligations for public consultation. In January 2019, demolition crews rolled into the foundry site in Toronto Centre, my colleague’s riding, and they were going to demolish the foundry, which is a heritage property right in downtown Toronto. It’s nestled in a bunch of condos, and the city was already working on ideas on how to redevelop this heritage site. We’ve seen in the city of Toronto how successful the redevelopment of heritage industrial sites can be. The Distillery District is a huge tourist magnet in downtown Toronto, as well as a wonderful place to live, and the foundry has that kind of potential as well to be an economic generator. But these demolition crews rolled into the site and were prepared to demolish it. The community and my colleague Kristyn Wong-Tam and the MPP at the time, Suze Morrison, and myself, we organized and we worked with save the foundry; we worked with the St. Lawrence Neighbourhood Association. And we were able to save that site because the government had violated its legal obligations under the heritage act for public consultation.

The other example that I want to give from my community is Ontario Place. Right now, there’s a proposal that the government is pursuing, and they’re going to be spending an estimated $650 million redeveloping Ontario Place: $200 million to bring it up to scale, and then they’re going to build an underground parking garage for 2,000 cars. The estimated cost of that kind of parking garage is about $450 million. So $650 million of taxpayer dollars is going in to redevelop Ontario Place, only to hand it over to Therme, which is an Austrian spy company—oh, sorry, spa. They’re not a spy company. They’re a spa, an Austrian spa.

There’s nothing wrong with this Austrian spa, except that it has nothing to do with Ontario. Ontario Place was designed to celebrate this province. It was supposed to be a showcase for the province. John Robarts, who was the Premier who announced the project, said that every piece of steel at Ontario Place is being mined and smelted in Ontario. It was designed—it had silos representing our farming area. It had areas representing the Canadian Shield. It was a showcase for the world to come and see what Ontario was all about. Now this government is leasing it out to two private, for-profit companies, neither of which have anything to do with the province of Ontario.

And the other thing about their project is that they’re exempting the Therme project from the required environmental assessment because they’re arguing that this is being done by a private company and therefore they’re exempt from the environmental assessment requirements, when, in fact—and this is the contradiction here—the government, Infrastructure Ontario, the government’s own agency, is the one that submitted the plans for that spa to the city of Toronto. So the government is making two different arguments here, and they’re trying to avoid the need for an environmental assessment.

The concern that we have in the community and across Ontario is, first of all, what is the environmental assessment of building what is essentially a 12-acre greenhouse on the waterfront? And the government is also not following its own obligations under the heritage act, and it’s skirting its obligations under the Environmental Assessment Act, so it’s a real concern that before us in the House today is Bill 69, which further weakens the requirements for environmental assessment.

I ask the government to reconsider, to actually respect and make sure that future generations have a healthy planet to inherit and stop weakening the Environmental Assessment Act.