Thanks to the member.

There’s our world, the bubble that we live in here, and then there’s the real world of people and what they feel out there.

I just finished explaining that when a senior or an individual on OW gets notified that to heat their home this month is going to cost them a minimum of $800—and that will only fill up my heating tank a little bit over half. My income is less than $600. Where am I going to cut? What am I going to do? I won’t be able to pay for the entire cost of the fuel. I’m going to fall behind. I’m going to put it on the credit card, if I have a credit card. How am I going to fill my cupboards? How am I going to light up my house? People are living in poverty.

Again, it comes down to what I talked about. It’s a missed opportunity to really address some of the priorities. It’s not like this government does not have reserves or the money in order to address those shortfalls, whether it’s for seniors and people on OW or ODSP, or people in education, or investments in health care. You need to make it a priority.

When you’re talking about the petroleum tax, that the government has removed 5.7 cents and 5.4 cents on home heating and the gas—really? Do you not think for a moment that petroleum companies will take this as an opportunity and bump their prices so that they are not going to lose on the petroleum prices and the profits that are there? Really? You think that is going to help people? I don’t think it has helped anybody in northern Ontario, when we look at the dramatic prices and how fast they can go up in northern Ontario and how the heck long it takes them to come down. You see price increases in northern Ontario that happen the morning of, and it takes about three months for them to come back down. The 5.7 cents really is not a heck of a lot.

It’s an honour to rise today to speak to the fall economic statement bill. It’s clear that everywhere you look in Ontario, there seems to be a crisis—our emergency rooms, our pediatric ICUs, the level of homelessness we’re seeing along our main streets in our downtowns, the affordability challenges that so many people are facing, the loss of the farmland that feeds us. Yet, if you read the fall economic statement, you would get the sense that there’s no crisis in Ontario; none of these issues are really pressing. I would beg to differ.

I don’t understand how you can put forward a fall economic statement without substantial increases in funding to our health care system to shore up our pediatric ICUs, to address the labour shortages, to withdraw Bill 124, which has driven away so many nurses and other front-line health care providers. Nothing in the bill says, “We recognize there’s a crisis, and we’re going to invest in shoring up the system that so many people in this province depend on.”

Speaker, when you look at the fall economic statement, you wouldn’t know that we’re facing an affordability crisis that is disproportionally hitting the most vulnerable in this province.

I’ve been asking, demanding, pushing this government to double ODSP rates for well over a year now. The situation for people living on Ontario Works and the Ontario Disability Support Program only gets worse and worse, especially with the inflation and cost-of-living crisis that we’re facing. How can anyone survive on $1,200 a month in this province, or $731 a month? It’s impossible, especially when the average rents in many places, like my home city of Guelph—$1,800 a month; more than that in places like Toronto. It’s wrong that we’re forcing people to live in legislated poverty, especially when we know poverty costs the province $33 billion and investments would help us actually save money in the long term.

There’s nothing in this bill about addressing food inflation and the excess profits we’re seeing in the concentrated retail markets.

There’s nothing in the bill talking about how we make the province climate-ready. There’s a lot in the bill about how we’ll pave over the farmland that feeds us, the wetlands that protect us, the green space that’s so vital to our quality of life, but there’s nothing in the bill that says, “How do we get this province climate-ready? How do we get this province ready to succeed in the new climate economy?”

Speaker, I believe this bill fails to meet the moment.

I know budgets are about priorities. Right now, I believe the priority is shoring up our health care system.

With all due respect, to the comments around ODSP—I agree with the member that raising the earnings threshold from $200 to $1,000 is a good thing, something I’ve been calling for for a long time now. So we’ll agree on that. But to only raise ODSP rates from $1,100 to $1,200 a month and forcing people to live in legislated poverty, forcing them to live at about 40% of the poverty line—

I’m going to focus on food, because the biggest source of inflation right now is rising food prices. There are some things that I believe the government could do to address that, and I want to give two of them.

I’m a farm kid. I spent my whole life working in the food and farming sector.

Eighty-five per cent of food retail is controlled by three corporations in this province. All three of them are earning excess profits. All three of them have demonstrated, in the past, issues around collusion. We need more competition in our food retail sector.

At the very least, the province could be looking at an excess-profits tax and a grocery code of conduct that would not only protect consumers but would also protect local farmers and food processors.

The bottom line is, one of the biggest drivers of inflation around food is international global events, which, to me, highlights why we need to protect our local food supply. That is exactly why we have to put a stop to losing 319 acres of farmland each and every day in this province. This bill will make that worse.