Do you?

Thank you to the member for Timiskaming–Cochrane for your excellent 20-minute presentation.

My question is this: When you rush a bill through like this, who loses out?

Thank you to the member. It is now time for questions. I recognize the member for Windsor–Tecumseh.

Report continues in volume B.

Thank you, Speaker. I’ll be short so my friend member Babikian can ask his question quickly.

Anyway, I appreciate the comments from member Vanthof. Thank you very much to the NDP caucus for supporting the bill at second reading. I know that the crux of this bill is in our industrial land shortage.

I wanted to quote a 2021 report from the Trillium Network for Advanced Manufacturing on industrial land shortage, which says, “If suitable land and buildings are not available, prospective manufacturers will bypass Ontario and those already here will invest elsewhere.”

It goes on to say, “The shortage of industrial land threatens” the manufacturing “sector that is vital to Ontario’s economic and social well-being.”

The goal of the bill that we are debating today is to try and solve this very problem in the St. Thomas-Central Elgin area. I wanted to find out if the member agrees with the findings of this report as a general part of supporting this bill.

I would like to continue on that question. I appreciate the question from the member from Scarborough–Agincourt and I want to continue on it, because there’s an assumption in that question that global warming is going to be a gradual warming. What we’re seeing around the world is actually climate chaos. We saw it last year in Pakistan, for example. A third of the country was flooded and the farmland was destroyed and the crops were destroyed. There were all kinds of problems. We’ve got fires in British Columbia. We had fires in California.

What I think people are saying when we’re saying what my colleague is saying—and I’ll ask him about this—is that we need to protect every acre of farmland because global warming means that we’re facing climate chaos. Places like Ontario are places where we have to protect the farmland because there’s going to be a greater need for this farmland in the future. Have I got that right?

This is a relatively simple bill. It reduces the complexity of creating a mega-site. As a businessman, would you agree that sometimes you have to move quickly or opportunities are lost, and that this is one of those times?

Okay. I thank the deputy House leader for her indulgence. Thank you very much.

The government wants to promote business and jobs. I understand that. So do we, so do I. But when major changes have to be made—when I work with someone who has a plan and all of a sudden the plan has to change in mid-direction, you go, “Whoa, I’m not sure I want to keep working with this.” We all lose when stuff is rushed through and mistakes are made, simply because they’re rushed through too quickly, and you don’t respect others’ opinions just because you don’t agree with them philosophically.

There is a lot of potential in northern Ontario, but don’t think that you can just transfer what you produce here or south of here. We’re not going to be growing field tomatoes in Timiskaming any time soon. There’s a lot of things we’re not going to be growing. We’re not going to be growing 200-bushel-an-acre corn. We grow silage corn. We are way far away from growing profitable grain corn in northern Ontario. We are way far away from growing consistently safe soybeans. We have early frost. We grow soybeans, great soybeans—

And one other thing: The land in northern Ontario isn’t sitting there idling now. It grows trees, and you take 10 million acres out of trees—

Yes, to a point. We have to treat every acre as precious. Some acres we have to give up for other projects, but we have to treat every acre as precious.

The thing that most people are missing with global warming is that in areas like California, if it gets to the point where they can no longer grow crops profitably, efficiently or possibly, they’re not just going to sit around and say, “Well, we’ll just let Ontario go its own way and things will be great in Ontario.” When climate change really impacts, it’s going to cause huge problems. It’s not just that we can grow better crops in northern Ontario, but that there’s going to be huge global food problems.

Across, they’re going, “No, no.” Having to rescind a bill a week after and actually kind of state that it never happened—“Oh, no, that happens all the time.” Well, if that happened in business, you’d never do business with that group again.

And this isn’t a simple bill; there’s no such thing as a simple bill. But this bill is fairly straightforward, compared to some. It deals with one area, one issue. If there had been more confidence in the government, I think it would have been easier—

Yes.