I am very pleased to be able to stand and put some thoughts on the record here about Bill 39. I wish I had more time, so I’m going to cut right to the chase. This particular bill is a lot for just three schedules—and I’m going to focus mostly on one of the schedules we haven’t heard a lot about, because being from Durham region, I think it’s very important that somebody out of the seven Durham MPPs gets up and tells this story, so I will be the one.

Interjection.

Schedules 1 and 2 of this bill are about democracy.

Interjections.

Speaker, this is fundamentally about democracy, but I’m going to break it down for you in terms of the schoolyard, because that’s what I come from and I think that breaking it down for folks makes it a bit clearer. If you have six kids in the yard and they’re deciding whether to play freeze tag or hide and seek—normally, if you have a group of three and three, one of them is going to be the deciding factor. Whether you play freeze tag or hide and seek, you need four to decide—but not anymore, not in the province of Ontario, not with this. Now you just need two—because a third is all that’s required now for councils. One of these provisions in this schedule is that a mayor, for certain motions, only needs a third of council to support them.

Here is a letter that I got from someone: “Bill 39 needs to be stopped! I did not just vote in a municipal election to now have the person that I elected not necessarily have a voice at the table. The strong-mayor powers directly threaten our democracy. Nobody should be granted the power of pushing through bylaws or other legislation with only one third of the vote. What are you doing in this province? How are we sitting back and allowing this government to enact these laws which give ultimate power to the few

“Do the right thing! Stand up to Ford and put an end to all this nonsense. Bill 39, Bill 28 and stopping public comments on his greenbelt plan are all direct attacks on democracy and our ability to use our voices as a collective. That’s how dictators lead. This is not the future I want for my children.

“Do the right thing! Stop this bill!!!!

“Christina Coghlan.”

That’s a real person. Folks are having real opinions. I would have said that the government is hearing these, that they’re getting the same emails and phone calls, but some of their offices—I don’t know if you knew this—aren’t even staffed up yet. I’m happy to share those emails with them, but this is part of why Ontarians aren’t getting answers.

Here is another one, a letter from James: “I am writing to ask you to vote against Bill 39, Better Municipal Governance Act, 2022. I believe this bill conflicts with our Canadian democratic principles. Schedule 1 allows bylaws to be passed with the support of fewer than half of city councillors in Toronto and Ottawa. I believe that if the majority of a city opposes a bylaw, then that bylaw should not pass....

“Normally I would only write to my own MPP, but this law only affects the cities of Toronto and Ottawa, so I believe that MPPs from other regions should consider the opinions of people who would be affected by this bill.”

Also, it begs the question, who’s next?

The member from Brampton North was hooting and hollering about Oshawa, so I’ll tell him about Oshawa. This is an article from insauga:

“Oshawa Council Tells Queen’s Park Hands Off the Greenbelt.

“Oshawa council has given clear direction to the Province on their recent ‘swap’ of environmentally sensitive lands for lands in the Paris-Galt moraine—keep your hands off the greenbelt.

“Oshawa councillor Rosemary McConkey brought the motion before council on day one of the new term....” She basically said, “‘When you make a promise you should keep it’—and pointed out that even though Oshawa wasn’t directly involved the deal ‘will definitely affect our headwaters’ and could lead to a further loss of pristine lands in the future.

“‘This will be hard to undo once it has started’....

“Councillor Bob Chapman agreed, saying the province ‘shouldn’t be encroaching on the greenbelt. It’s sacrosanct.’”

We’re in this House talking about Bill 39 today—but Bills 23 and 39 are all attacks on our future.

I want to take us back, though, into our history, in the limited time that I’ve got.

I got a letter from Bonnie Littley, who is the co-founder of the Rouge Duffins Greenspace Coalition. She campaigned in the early 2000s to protect the Duffins Rouge Agricultural Preserve Act—schedule 2 in this bill. She said:

“The Duffins Rouge Agricultural Preserve was public land sold back to farmers at $4,000 an acre on the condition it remained agricultural by the way of easement on title in 1999. To protect this prime (class 1 and 2) farmland for future generations in perpetuity! This speculation will be a huge rip-off of the public purse! It is the most protected land in all of Ontario! Easements on title. In the greenbelt. An MZO to protect the area from Pickering doing the planning. The former provincial government took their planning rights away when they kept trying to pave the preserve and created the Central Pickering Development Plan, where the preserve is enshrined as agricultural. Plus its own legislation Bill 16, the Duffins Rouge Agricultural Preserve Act.

“The minister spoke of lands that are appropriate for development because they are beside an urban area. That logic is 1980s sprawl logic since a ton of ag lands are beside urban areas. The Duffins Rouge Agricultural Preserve is also nestled beside the Rouge Park, which also has a lot of agricultural activity and the other side protects one side of Duffins Creek. Then it can be argued it’s appropriate to have an ag preserve where it is.

“Also, why is there no mention of the homes being built right now in Seaton? Pickering is also identified as an urban growth centre in the provincial growth plan and is required to hit certain densities in the urban core before moving into new greenfield sites. They are approving condo towers as we speak. In short. They don’t need any new lands for development. Period. This is not passing the smell test.”

I had a chance to meet Bonnie, and we had a good chat at the rally—there were 200 people, give or take—in Pickering. I was glad to spend a freezing cold Saturday with them. A lot of those folks have been fighting this fight for a long time.

A bit of history, Speaker: In 1993, the NDP government established the Duffins Rouge Agricultural Preserve. In 1998, the city of Pickering endorsed the conclusion of a rural study which called for that land to remain rural.

Just for folks at home who are thinking, “What is she talking about?”, schedule 2 of this bill says that the Duffins Rouge Agricultural Preserve Act should be repealed—and that’s like this government has to peel off that safety, that protection, in order to take that chunk of land out of the greenbelt. When everyone is talking about Bill 23 and pulling stuff out of the greenbelt for development, in our neck of the woods, this has to happen first, before they can get at it, because this is super-duper-protected land.

In 1999, the Ontario government, Durham and Pickering signed an agreement to protect these lands as farmland in perpetuity, which means forever and ever and ever. After this agreement was signed, the Ontario government began selling that land to farmers for cheap, but as a condition of the sale, the purchaser had to agree to easements or limitations protecting the land forever as farmland.

In 2005, a Globe and Mail article said that the sale of those lands was overseen by Tony—Miele? Is that how you say it? I’d have to ask the PCs; I think you guys all know him. He was the then president of the Ontario Realty Corp. He has been in a couple of different articles lately, like the Toronto Star “Friends with Benefits?” investigation on the PC-connected beneficiaries of the Highway 416 proposal. Even more amazingly, that guy who was involved in selling off the land is the chair of the PC Ontario fund, the PC Party’s campaign donation war chest. It’s just so interconnected.

Back in the day, in 2003, shortly after Miele sold the protected farmland to various farmers for next to nothing, companies owned or controlled by Silvio De Gasperis snapped up these properties from the farmers, buying all but three lots of its current land holdings, totalling more than 1,300 acres. He paid a total of $8.6 million at the time, which is next to nothing. He bought up a lot of land that was supposed to be protected forever and ever and ever.

There was a developer-funded growth-management study that contradicted that earlier recommendation. Then the Liberals came and put it into the greenbelt, thwarting De Gasperis and his plans for vast riches.

Fast-forward, and here we are. A land dispute is being resurrected nearly two decades later by this PC government, whose political donations are collected and managed by that same Tony Miele, and De Gasperis stands to make bajillions of dollars—somebody could correct me on the exact figure.

I’m out of time.