I will do that, Speaker. I do feel that—I listened to half an hour of remarks by the Minister of Economic Development and Trade who positioned this bill very much as an economic development tool, and so I am just reminding the government that there are important issues that have to be addressed if we are to be serious about economic development in this province and ensuring that people are able to take advantage of all of the potential new jobs that are going to be generated by this bill. Sustaining a child care workforce is fundamental to that work.

Another issue that is very much tied to economic development is ensuring that people can find affordable places to live if they are to take advantage of all of these new jobs that are potentially going to be generated by this mega-site that will be formed by this bill. In London, and similarly in St. Thomas—although I don’t have the data right at my fingertips. London is experiencing an intense housing affordability crisis, much worse than anywhere else in Ontario and most of Canada. Rents in London have doubled and have become beyond unaffordable for at least 60% of the residents who live in the city of London.

Affordability, of course, is measured by how much of a person’s income rent represents. So if you’re paying more than 30% of your income on rent, then that rent is not considered affordable for you given all of the other costs that you have to make in a year.

A London household needs to make $59,000 a year or more to keep shelter costs below 30% of their income, but only 40% of London households make at least that much. So we have 60% of households in the city of London that are paying more than they should on rent if they were to meet that affordability threshold.

The CMHC, the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corp., that recently released the report on housing affordability in London noted that it is particularly acute in London compared to the rest of the country. We have a 1.7% vacancy rate, which is the second-lowest level since 2001. Homes are hard to find; in particular, affordable homes, and that is what the NDP has consistently pointed out to this government. The huge missing piece of the government’s housing plan is that there is nothing there to support affordable housing, deeply affordable housing, supportive housing—all of those housing options that are so desperately needed in our communities.

We also, in London, have been having a homelessness crisis, and once again, homelessness—the desperation of people who are experiencing homelessness—is not good for economic development in the city. As merchants in downtown London will tell you, that has been very challenging for them, and particularly since the pandemic. In London, we have lost more than 200 residents of our community who were experiencing homelessness and who have died over the last couple of years. Currently, there are an estimated 2,200 people experiencing homelessness in our city. That actually brought the city together in a series of summits. More than 60 social service agencies, business owners, municipal officials, a wide diversity of individuals and organizations came together over the course of three summits to develop a made-in-London housing and homelessness plan.

One of the things that the city of London has called for in its pre-budget submission to the government is support to enable the city to move forward with that health and homeless system transformation. Fortunately, our community has a philanthropist who came to the table with $25 million—

Thank you, Speaker. I do believe that housing affordability is a key piece of economic development. I am just basing my comments on what we have heard from members on the other side: that this is an economic development bill; that the purpose of this bill is to facilitate investment-ready land for a potential electric-vehicle-battery manufacturing plant. I am just pointing out to the province that in order to be successful with this project, they’re going to have to do more, as I said, to make sure there’s access to affordable, quality child care and to ensure that workers have access to housing that they can afford.

The other concern I wanted to raise—and this is an email that was shared with my office—is the government will also need to make certain that there is that skilled workforce available to take advantage of those new jobs. This is an email I received from Brett Gundlock. He says that three years ago, he began a career transition into the carpentry field to gain his Red Seal certificate. It took him a while to find an employer to sponsor him for the program, and now he estimates that it is going to take as much as two years in order to get into a classroom to complete the classroom requirements of that apprenticeship program.

He says that he was told by the Ministry of Labour that it looks like it will be next fall before he can begin the classroom aspect. Three other carpenters in his company are also waiting to hear about schooling. They were last in the class 12 months ago and haven’t heard anything.

He says it looks like it will take him up to seven years to finish his Red Seal since he began working as a carpenter.

Making the investments in those kinds of opportunities for skilled workers, the kinds of skilled workers who will be needed by economic development projects, such as the one that will be facilitated by this legislation, will be very important if that project is to be successful.

Speaker, I did want to make a couple of other comments before I close, and one is to echo some of the questions that have been asked already about this bill. It is rather ironic that we have a government whose first order of business when they were elected back in 2018 was to rip out electric vehicle charging stations. And now, the government claims to be a champion of electric vehicles. That is the other work that will have to be done by this government if this site is actually successful in recruiting this investor. The rumour is that it’s Volkswagen who is going to access the site to manufacture those batteries, but if that is to happen, the government has a long way to go on its electric vehicle strategy and a long way to go on its climate action plans to deal with the carbon footprint that we have in this province and try to prevent some of those once-in-a-lifetime severe weather events that we are seeing with horrifying frequency across Ontario and around the world.

It’s good to see the government trying to move forward to facilitate this investment in electric vehicle battery manufacturing, and I encourage them to take a holistic look at what is needed to ensure the success of an electric vehicle sector in the province of Ontario.

What I did say is that we received the bill yesterday. We have not yet had a briefing from the minister’s office. We are going to be doing some talking to stakeholders, which is what every MPP in this place should do when legislation arrives. But at this point, we do not see any major red flags in this bill and have not raised any objections to this legislation.

We were able to do a little bit of investigation to understand what this is really about, but there are all kinds of questions that we would appreciate answers to. Why this particular site? We don’t have a map showing exactly which lands are proposed for annexation. We don’t have any detail about what environmental attributes those lands may have. We don’t know how invested the proposed investor is in this site. There is lots of information that—