I want to start by telling you about an experiment. It’s called the Milgram experiment. Some of you may be familiar with it. It was 1962 and Stanley Milgram was a social scientist. In the experiment—he was the experimenter, so he was wearing a lab coat and he had one volunteer and one person, and the other person thought—a teacher and a learner; I’ll describe it that way. The idea was to study—what he told the two study participants was that he was going to be studying the impact of punishment on memory and on learning. And so what he did is he took these two people, and he designated one as the teacher and the other one as the learner.

Now, the learner was actually in on the experiment. So the teacher and learner go in and they look at the equipment. There’s a dial in the one room, and it’s a voltage dial, and in the other room there’s something that looks like an electric chair. They strap the learner into the electric chair, and then the experimenter and the teacher go back in the other room with the dial. They say that the way the experiment is going to go is that the experimenter is going to read out pairs of words and then the learner is supposed to recite them back. If he gets them right, that’s fine. But if he makes a mistake, they’re going to give him a shock with the voltage meter. The shocks go from 15 volts to 450 volts, and if you know anything about electricity, 450 volts is a lot; it’s deadly.

So he does this experiment, and at first the teacher gives a shock and the learner goes, “Uh!” And then eventually the learner is complaining more and more about the shocks that they’re getting. They’re in the other room. If the teacher was saying, “You know what? I don’t think we should continue. We might be hurting him.” The experimenter would say, “Please continue,” and then he would give another prod; he’d say, “The experiment requires that you continue. It is absolutely essential that you continue. You have no choice. You must go on,” is what the experimenter would say. And the shocking part was that 65% of the people who were the teachers, who didn’t know what this experiment was really about and didn’t realize they weren’t actually giving a shock, went all the way to 450 volts, even after the learner had gone silent in the other room. And 450 volts is a deadly voltage. So these people actually believed that they were torturing this person, and yet they continued. It’s an experiment about obedience to authority.

One of the other things that came out of this experiment was that people who were polite and nice tended to go all the way to the 450 volts. People who were cantankerous tended not to go. They’d say, “I’m not doing this.” I always think about this, and I think of myself as a polite person, and it’s a warning to me. It’s a warning to me that you can’t always be polite. There are times when somebody is going to ask you to do something that is wrong, and you’ve got to stand up and you’ve just got to push back.

The reason I’m telling this story about the Milgram experiment is that I’m asking the Conservative members of the House: What bill would your government bring forward that you would not vote for? What is your line in the sand? Where would you say, “This is beyond what I voted to be in here for?” I’m looking at Bill 39. We’re talking about Bill 39 today, and this bill, I will say, is an egregious attack on our democracy. It was introduced six days ago and it gives the mayor of Toronto the power to make bylaws with only one third of the councillors. We just had, just three weeks ago, our municipal elections and we elected—the people of Toronto voted for our city councillors. We voted for 25 city councillors, and we assumed that the election that we took part in would be respected. But instead, immediately after the election, two weeks after the election, this government introduces legislation that says, “Well, yes, you may have elected 25 city councillors, but only eight of them and the mayor are going to be able to make decisions.” So 17 of those councillors that we elected are going to be taken out of the decision-making process, even though we elected them. This is a violation of the fundamental principle of democracy. Democracy: Webster’s dictionary defines it as “government by the people especially: rule of the majority.”

The other thing that came out—and I’m really shocked—is that Mayor Tory asked for these powers to govern the council with only one third of council votes. Mayor Tory is a person who—we may not always politically agree on issues, but I’ve always respected him. I’ve been at a few events with him over the last few weeks, and he’s been talking about coming out of the pandemic how we need to work together, how we need to heal the divisions that came up in our society through the pandemic. And then, for him to have asked the government, during the election in which he was running, to override, to give him the power to override the results of the election, to override the results of the votes of the people of this city, is absolutely shocking. I’m so deeply disappointed.

The government always has a rationale. Every time they bring in a bill that attacks our democratic rights, they always have a rationale. This is housing, and the government refuses to talk about democracy. In this debate this afternoon, I haven’t heard the word “democracy” once from any of the government members, but what we have heard about is housing.

The new city councillor in my riding, Ausma Malik, wrote, “Bill 39 isn’t about housing. It’s a clear attack on our local democracy.

“I am disheartened by Mayor Tory’s overreaching request for this power.”

And it’s not just Toronto that Bill 39 affects. It’s also the regions of York, Peel and Niagara. The voters in those municipalities just voted for their councillors, and some of those councillors sit on regional governments, and those councillors on the regional governments were to elect the head of the council. Instead, what’s happening with Bill 39 is, the Premier is going to be appointing the head of council and that head of council that he appoints will be able to make decisions for the regional council with only one third of the councillors. It’s a complete violation of the democratic expectations and principles of the people who voted in those municipalities of Niagara, York and Peel.

To the people, if you’re listening to this and you don’t live in Toronto, you don’t live in York, Peel or Niagara, pay attention to this because when this government attacks the democratic rights of the people in the GTA area, they’re attacking the democratic rights of everyone, because any of us could be next.

I started out by asking the government members, “What’s your line in the sand? What bill would you not vote for?” The other bill that just came up is Bill 28 that this government introduced two weeks ago, and it used the “notwithstanding” clause to strip education workers of their fundamental freedoms and their legal rights under the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, and it also stripped education workers of their protection under the Human Rights Code. The Human Rights Code makes it illegal to discriminate against people based on their gender, their race, their religion, their disability—there’s 15 categories there. What that bill did was, it made it legal for the government to discriminate against those education workers, who are predominantly women and people of colour, and that’s a piece of legislation that the Conservative members in this House voted for. I am really shocked that anybody would stand up for that. This is why I started talking about the Milgram experiment: What is your line in the sand? When will you say, “I don’t care what’s coming from the leadership in the Conservative Party, I cannot vote for that because it violates the fundamental principles and rights of the people of this province”?

I will say, just to conclude about Bill 28, there was an incredible mobilization of workers and unions across this province that forced this government to withdraw it. So I’m really, really hoping that there will be a mobilization of citizens across this province that will force you to repeal Bill 39.

I’ve just got a few seconds left. The Conservative members, when you walk out of your caucus room in this Legislature, there’s a large portrait of William Lyon Mackenzie. He was the leader of the Rebellions of 1837. He was fighting for what they called responsible government, democratic government, and that rebellion actually got it for us. In 1848, the residents of Upper Canada got the first elected government in this area, after the First Nations people—so in the colony. This government, your government, is actually taking us back to that pre-democratic history. I ask you, please, do not support Bill 39.