It’s always a pleasure to see my friend from London North Centre hold forth in this place. As our economic development critic, I’m wondering if my friend could share a little bit of insight with the government. If I’m not mistaken, this is the same party that ordered the ripping-out of EV charging stations at GO Transit areas years ago—if I’m not mistaken. And if I’m not mistaken, this is a game-changing possibility for us to develop battery capacity in the EV industry.

Are you concerned that we learned about this piece of legislation this morning? People watching this at home don’t realize that this government will drop a piece of legislation on us the morning of and ask us to comment on it. Would you like a seat at the table so you could help these folks figure out how it’s important to build EV capacity, not rip it out of GO charging stations?

It’s great to be here in the Legislature this afternoon. I would like to point out to the member opposite—she mentioned electric vehicle charging stations being taken out of GO stations, and the member from Ottawa Centre, I believe, mentioned as well what the government is going to do to build the infrastructure for electric charging. I agree with you; what are we doing?

I just wanted to clarify for the member opposite that that was a failed experiment that the previous Liberal government did in putting charging stations into GO stations where commuters drive for the full day. They go downtown for the full day and their car is sitting there for 12 hours. It didn’t make sense. What our government has done is put charging stations in places where they make sense, like the ONroute stations, so driving to Montreal or Ottawa you can charge your vehicle, rather than have a commuter sit all day at a GO station.

We certainly want to build the infrastructure around that. My question to the member opposite is, do you support us in building this infrastructure for green vehicles throughout the province?

As my friend from Oakville just said, this is a discussion that we have to have and the member from London West has said it very clearly: The government made a decision in 2019, through Metrolinx, to cancel the project. I remember the early days of this government. To those of us who were here, it was like, “anything Liberal, Hulk smash.” It was just this impulse to destroy anything that the previous-to-them government had done.

I had a lot of criticisms of that government, but Metrolinx made a terrible decision. You don’t build charging stations—member, I’m asking you to react to this—in 2019 to pilot them and think about them—it was a three-year pilot—in a single year. There are people who lived close to those charging stations, not just people using the GO stations. There are communities that we want to hub around them. Having four or five chargers at ONroute stations doesn’t meet the need.

Member, don’t you think we need mandatory changes to the building code to get condominium buildings to put in EV chargers? We need EV chargers in communities. We need them to be affordable and accessible to support the cars this government wants to build. I’m just wondering if you could elaborate on that for my friend over there.