Last week, in a question in question period regarding sewage spillage, the Minister of the Environment said that he believed in full transparency and actually was requesting an audit.

In that spirit, I would once again like to ask the Minister of the Environment for the release of the full documentation of the application and the monitoring documents of a human sewage lagoon located in the township of Armstrong. The people have been asking for the documentation. There have been some legitimate questions raised, starting already with the consultation process. I brought the first issue up more than a year ago.

At this point, we don’t want a technical briefing. We don’t want a letter that specifies one issue or another. We want the full documentation so people can actually see for themselves that the ministry is doing what they claim to be doing, because so far they haven’t seen it. What they’re being told isn’t the same as what they’re seeing on the ground.

Once and for all, please, in the full spirit of transparency, will the Minister of the Environment release the documentation of the sewage lagoon project in the township of Armstrong?

I want to thank my honourable colleague on the other side for that important question.

I do want to highlight the fact that our minister, the Attorney General of Ontario, obviously has been doing a tremendous, tremendous job over the last four and a half years modernizing our justice system.

I’m sure the member opposite would understand that the previous Liberal government, for 15 years, and the mess they left us with—obviously, it does take a little bit of time to clean all of that up. I would also point out the fact that we all know that the opposition spent most of those 15 years supporting the Liberals’ inaction on a lot of those items.

As I mentioned in my remarks, the province we inherited when we formed government in 2018 had the largest regulatory burden in the province. So, yes, we are working each and every day diligently, and we are working to address some of the challenges that—

It’s an important question about the consultation. Absolutely, consultations on any changes that our government proposes to introduce are a big part of our mandate. Her question is related to the consultation to do with the veterinarians. Of course, we will be holding very comprehensive consultations, and I hope that each one of our colleagues in this Legislature can play a role in them. Any input that can be provided, whether it’s from stakeholders or whether it’s from industry leaders, is always welcome. We always look forward to it because, ultimately, individuals who deal with situations on a day-to-day basis are obviously the best ones to provide us input so we can get the best bang for the buck.

Thanks to the member from Mississauga–Malton. You spun a very good tale in this House, I will say this, about that. He did talk about the importance of consultation and working with us across the lines, and I find it a little ironic, I have to say. The member is on finance with me, and I got 20 minutes on the fall economic statement—20 minutes instead of 15 hours.

The consultation piece, though, in Bill 23 I think is one of the most egregious moments for this House, when you did not welcome the Association of Municipalities of Ontario—444 municipalities. The member from Mississauga–Malton talks about how important it is to consult and how to rise above politics, and yet the former mayor of Toronto, John Sewell, at the age of 82, had to disrupt Bill 23 delegations because you shut him down. That’s not good practice, and I’m going to give the member an opportunity to correct his record.

Thank you to the good member for the question.

That’s exactly what I’m saying. I think that the way schedule 5 is written, it looks like a red herring to me. I guess the challenge before us is that we’re not going to go through a fulsome debate. That’s just a fact of where this bill is headed. I am very concerned that schedule 5 is opening up an extremely large hole in the legislation that you can’t reverse. Once the environment is gone, it’s really hard to come back. We need to think twice about moving something like this without any type of research debate or any type of background—and it can’t be because we’ve consulted with business. I’ve heard that time and time again from the government—that you’ve consulted with somebody, but then there’s no document to say, “This is what the consultation produced.”

This is complicated legislation that’s going to have multiple effects—not even just in one act or one piece of legislation, but multiple pieces of legislation, and then you’re going to be dealing with years, generations of impact.

I think it belittles the people of Ontario when we actually don’t put our heart, energy and grey matter into making good legislation.

I just want to start off by saying, whenever there’s any talk about red tape cutting, oftentimes that’s coded language for deregulation. I’m not going to be fooled—that you can get me to vote for this because you want me to cut red tape—because you’re asking me to support deregulation, which I cannot do.

Back to jury duty: For a lot of folks who are trying to get access to justice—the best trial lawyers in the country have said that every other province has moved in a direction where you don’t have to have an option for civil juries. Therefore, why is Ontario lagging so far behind? For a government that talks about modernization and embracing change and about moving forward with innovation—we’re one of the laggards. So why be the outlier and not be the leader? This is a great example of how you can eliminate the option for some civil juries to actually cut the red tape and to get us moving faster—not to mention the fact that it’s good for business.

I really think that one of the best ways for us to go about this debate is not to try to create it into a binary—because when you do that, you actually eliminate what is really at the heart of it. There are going to be some conflicting reports—some of them are actually produced and funded by the big fossil oil companies—that are going to give you one result, and then there are going to be other studies—perhaps our noted scientists and third party reviewed—that will give you others.

What I’m interested in doing here is to actually just raise the question that the premise right now that’s in this bill—you’re assuming that carbon capture is neutral, but studies have shown us that it’s not. Studies have shown us that it has failed to be neutral and it’s actually going to have longer ramifications in the future that we can’t necessarily undo.