Thank you to my friend from Timiskaming–Cochrane for his speech. He’s our agriculture critic, so I want to ask him: I find it incredible that at a time when we just went through COVID and we learned all of the lessons about supply chains and food security—and we have inflation largely because of those issues—that the government would take the situation where we’re losing 319 acres a day of prime farmland and actually speed that process up by taking land out of the greenbelt and using up farmland.

What does that say for the future, whether you’re a newcomer or you’re a young person today, that we’re going to lose all that farmland? What happens if we no longer have food security?

As always, I enjoy the member opposite’s comments. We share a deep love of agricultural and business and all things southern Ontario—and northern Ontario for that matter.

A few comments and then a question: 9,200 acres coming into the greenbelt, 7,000 coming out. We’re growing the footprint. That’s a good thing. I hope you would agree.

The other thing I’d like to point out, probably, in this House, when I look around: Who here doesn’t live in their house, in their home, that wasn’t once—even in this city, below this Legislature—a farm at some point in their life? Everybody. Is it good for us so we can afford our homes, but new Canadians, older Canadians, first-time homebuyers don’t get that opportunity? When I grew up, this province wasn’t as big. It’s going to be a lot bigger. We need the land. I think we need to sometimes put a little balance in our thinking.

Back to the infrastructure: If you don’t want the reserves to be spent, what’s the use of them sitting there? Why wouldn’t we invest those reserves in this province now? We need homes now.

It’s a good start to the afternoon, with all people from Niagara asking questions on the bill.

I’m going to talk about a developer named Mr. Rice, who bought 700 acres of land in the greenbelt in September, which was really worthless, but what they did is—under this, it’s now worth probably half a billion dollars. I don’t know who talked to him to say, “Go buy this land. We’ve got a bill coming.” We do know that he was a donor, certainly a big donor, for the PC Party. He donated to some MPPs. We know very clearly—and the member who just spoke is a young guy. I don’t know how he’s going to feed his family if we get rid of 319 acres of farmland every single day. There will be no place to get food. If you live in this country or this province, if you can’t feed yourself, you’re in trouble. We found that through COVID-19.

My question to the member—oh, and by the way, we do have the best farmland in the world. Why do you think that the PC Party decided that it’s a good idea to develop on the greenbelt when their Premier, just three months ago, made a promise that he’d never touch the greenbelt?

I’d like to thank my colleague for the question. I think what it says—we’re losing 319 a day now; the government is grabbing more land that was completely protected. What that says is, this government is extremely short-sighted. That’s what it says. And it’s not for our own food security, because we can grow food to feed the world. We’re one of the few places that has the capacity to grow much more food. But just because you can grow more food doesn’t mean you should waste the land you have. There are parts of this that are going to be developed, but it is precious and we should treat it as such, and this government, based on the legislation we’re seeing, isn’t doing that.

We all ran on building more homes. You didn’t run on changing how councils work. You didn’t run on appointing municipal chairs. You didn’t run on any of those things. You didn’t run—the Premier specifically ran on not touching the greenbelt. He specifically ran on it, and that specifically changed. You didn’t run on the things you’re doing now.