I mean it, to my neighbour from up the Ottawa Valley there. Let me work with you, my friend.

Take this bill on the road through the community, and they will tell you why a mayor-driven model is not going to build you more homes. It’s not going to help feed people who are suffering, help them recover and get a decent life. It’s not going to help a small business that is going to close right now.

I think of a place like the Ottawa Bike Café on Sparks Street, which is a fantastic enterprise. If you’re ever in our city, I encourage you to patronize it. Just like every Sparks Street business right now, they have been hammered by the pandemic, because they’re in the red zone. As we figured out, from a security perspective, what to do going forward after the convoy, we forced a lot of these businesses to close, or we forced them to open up, because they needed the revenue, without a lot of traffic, because now we have federal government workers who used to work in that area of the city working from home. I think about the owners of that place, Jason and Maria, and I think about what their future is going to be. What is Bill 3 going to do for them?

If the government would allow us to take this bill on the road and not rush it through this House, I think they would hear from those voices directly, not just the carping socialist on Wednesday morning.

So where are we at, Speaker? We’re in a situation where my friends in government are telling us that the only way to build housing in the province of Ontario is to put more power in the office of the mayor. The mayor of our city, who was not consulted on this piece of legislation, is telling this government, “Put on the brakes. You never talked to me about this.” But we’re marching forward nonetheless.

But the good news is this: I’ve worked with these folks before to get a public inquiry declared into our LRT system. I’m happy to work with them again to make sure this bill actually does what it’s intended to do. Because we have elections coming up province-wide for municipal elected officials, every single one of those aspiring municipal elected officials are going to have to try to prove to our neighbours how they’re going to help people get housed, how they’re going to help small businesses be successful, how they’re going to help deal with our mental health crisis everywhere in our city. They share an ambition for urgent change.

I’ve often found, as I’ve listened to my friends in government talk about legislation over the last four years, that we share a commonality of urgency. They want to get things done, to time-allocate, to move fast. If I was in government, I would probably be sitting at the table and saying the same thing—“Enough talk. Enough studying things to death.” I like that.

What I absolutely don’t like and what I would never consider adequate for me, for people working with me, is to march ahead with proposals that have never been presented to those they will directly impact first. I can’t do that; that’s a red line.

So let’s back up a bit. Let’s think about how we can build housing, how we can make municipal decisions co-operatively. Let’s involve all stakeholders at the table, and let’s actually build the Ontario that we’ve dreamed about. We never do that. We hit each other with partisan gloves in this place all the time. We never stop for a second to think about what we agree on and how we can build the Ontario we dream about. Bill 3, in my opinion, is falling short on that right now, and we need a piece of legislation that will make that happen.