I would like to focus my time today on talking about the failure to seriously address climate change and the lack of environmental protections in this bill.

During the previous Parliament, this government made significant changes to the province’s environmental policies: for example, a 70% funding cut to the Anishinabek/Ontario Fisheries Resource Centre, a 30% cut to the Canadian Environmental Law Association and a 100% cut to the Ontario Biodiversity Council. The budget of the Ministry of the Environment, Conservation and Parks was slashed, and in 2019, without any consultation, the Ford government gutted the province’s 36 conservation authorities, removing their ability to protect crucial waterways and wetlands.

In November 2021, the Auditor General accused the government of deliberately undermining its own rules by not following the province’s Environmental Bill of Rights, by passing changes to environmental assessment procedures without consulting the public. These cuts were not about saving dollars. In 2018, the Ford government killed the Green Ontario Fund, which included 227 clean energy programs. Okay, they didn’t agree with anything designated as clean energy, but it cost the people of Ontario more than $230 million in fines and legal fees to shut down these projects, and then there was the enormous cost of taking cases to the Ontario Court of Appeal and the Supreme Court of Canada, only to be found guilty of acting illegally by cancelling programs without public consultation. Note the pattern here of refusing to have public consultations whenever the government doesn’t want scrutiny of its plans.

Now, regarding Highway 413: The people of Thunder Bay–Superior North do not support the government spending billions of dollars on an unnecessary highway that will, not incidentally, pave over 2,000 acres of farmland, cut through 85 waterways, damage 220 wetlands and disrupt the habitats of 10 species at risk. Claiming that new highways will reduce emissions because there will be fewer idling cars is a case of magical thinking. Decades of research show that new roads do not resolve traffic problems in the long run; rather, they attract even more drivers with even more cars.

The government has also not been able to answer the question of how the food production lost through this significant loss of farmland will be replaced. The last environmental review of these highway projects actually took place in 1997, and it found that they posed significant risks to groundwater, surface water and air quality and were not worth pursuing. However, this government has exempted both highways from undergoing another full review before construction begins.

My concern is thus that while there are many projects to expand the development of natural resources, environmental protections have been gutted, leaving nothing in place to protect the land, trees, air and water that are also under our care.

Growth that doesn’t have environmental stewardship at its centre risks burdening present and future generations with the long-term poisoning that we have seen in Grassy Narrows and Indigenous communities in the Sarnia area. In southwestern Ontario, we had the devastating explosion in Wheatley that has drawn attention to the thousands of abandoned oil wells in the province, an issue the province is currently ignoring.

Climate change mitigation, environmental protections and respect for Indigenous rights needs to be baked into every single government project from the outset. Between this government’s silence on climate change, their record of abandoning injured workers while repurposing the WSIB as a cash cow for employers, and their record of dismantling environmental protections, I cannot support this bill.