I really want to congratulate the member from Thornhill, someone who I got to know as a candidate through this recent election. Her story is very important.

One of the questions I’d like to ask you is, when we look at the diversities of our many ridings all over Ontario, what would you say is a common thread that binds a community, one to another—something that we can learn from your community about?

I’m happy to be here to speak about the throne speech.

First, let me congratulate everyone who is here on their re-election, or their election if it’s the first time. It’s not easy to do. I haven’t had the opportunity to speak with a lot of you yet this year. It’s always good, in the hallway, when we do the congratulations and the quick, little handshakes and stuff. We’re on different sides of the House, but we’re all doing the best we can for our ridings. I’m very thankful for that.

I’m also thankful for everyone who volunteered, especially those who weren’t successful. I’ve worked on some campaigns where you put your heart and soul into it and you don’t win. I remember taking down signs in the rain after not winning an election, after volunteering in it. It’s hard—not just in my riding, but in all ridings. That’s how democracy works. Only one person gets to win. It’s great that all these people put the effort in.

The first time I heard a throne speech as an MPP, I wasn’t sure what to expect from it. I didn’t really understand the format of it. But it’s the idea of sort of explaining what’s happening—there’s hope on the horizon; there’s relief coming; there’s a direction to follow. I really took that to heart, and this time I was listening for that hope and opportunity.

I’ve always been a glass-half-full guy—my mom generally is, as well. One day she was in a bad mood, and I said, “Mom, you’re kind of glass-half-empty.” She said, “What’s that supposed to mean?” I said, “You know that expression: The glass is half full or the glass is half empty.” And she said, “It doesn’t matter if it’s full or empty. Sooner or later, that glass will be broken.”

I feel like the glass is about to break. There is a lot of stress and a lot of frustration in the province, and you can feel it. As we all went to the doors and we spoke to people—man, there was a sense of frustration. There was tension out there, primarily in my riding. I ventured into everyone else’s riding as well. It had to do with just—things were so unaffordable. People I talked to who are more affluent were talking about feeling the squeeze—but really worried about their neighbours and wondering how their neighbours, who made a lot less money than them, were going to make ends meet and how difficult it was.

People are very stressed out because of health care. Not just because the pandemic has really—during the election, the sun was out and we were taking our masks off and there was a bit of hope. The idea of Bill 124, it’s slowly, slowly crushing our health care workers; it’s grinding them down. There’s a lot of stress out there. I’ll go on about health care. Earlier, I was listening to my colleague talking about emergency room closures. It really got to the point where, if you heard in the news that an emergency room was closed, it didn’t feel like news anymore. I remember the first time I heard it, I was shocked. I think the number she said was 25. When you get to 25 emergency rooms closing, it’s no longer news, right? It just becomes the normal.

I remember in 2018, when I was running, hallway medicine was normal—that we were talking about hallway medicine. It’s underfunding, it’s showing up every year with the same size cheque and ignoring the cost of living, and so our hospital wasn’t provided with enough money to make ends meet. In the beginning of the election, we talked about hallway medicine; it was a major story, and people were in shower rooms. And near the end of the election, we went to talk about it and the press wouldn’t show up because they said, “That is normal now.” I feel like, right now, hospital emergency room closures have become normal for people. They’re angry about it, and they want it fixed, but it doesn’t seem odd anymore, and that’s a dangerous thing to have.

The other thing that is becoming more and more normalized is the privatization. I cannot understand—and I can’t get anyone to explain it to me—why it’s okay that we can pay a private agency more money than we can pay public sector nurses. It just boggles the mind. I had met with a long-term-care facility who needed PSWs and wanted to hire PSWs, and the way their budget was set up, was they had a max budget for employees and they had an overflow budget they could get into for a private contractor. They wanted to hire these people from the private contracting place, which they weren’t allowed to do because of the contract that excludes them from doing that, which is a whole other matter we should take apart one day. But they wanted to hire somebody because they were hiring contractors on a regular basis. Imagine every day you show up somewhere, but you don’t work for the store like the name on the front—you work for a third party. But every single day you’re there and you want to work there and you’re getting to know the residents, but you’re making more while the agency is making more than the people you work with. And the place that is hiring the contractor? They can’t hire you because their budget excludes it. That’s a broken system. That isn’t a system—when we’re talking about financial responsibility, having public organizations say, “It’s okay to spend extra money as long as some of it slides over to a private contractor” doesn’t make sense. That’s not the most fiscally responsible thing that we can do.

The other thing when it comes to health care, Speaker—and this is near and dear to my heart; I’ve talked about this a lot over the last four years—is the opioid epidemic, the pandemic within the pandemic. We are losing a generation of people on a regular basis. And I know in Sudbury, we’re getting hit extra hard. I read recently that I think Thunder Bay may be overtaking us, but that’s nothing to brag about either way. People are dying from overdoses. People are struggling with addiction with no hope out there, and this is something we really need to tackle. I know that COVID sucked all the air out of the room and we had to focus there, but we really have to do something with the opioid epidemic. It is ravaging all of our communities.

The Minister of Labour is here and he’s aware of this. Sometimes when you mention someone, it sounds like you’re going to make a jab, but it’s not. It’s something when it comes to skilled trades that we need to help people, because often in the skilled trades, you get sore from doing work, you end up on painkillers, you want to go back to work and you could end up addicted on opioids. And it’s easy to hide when you have a decent income. It’s easy to go into the washroom or your car or truck or go home, but the risk of overdose is there. We really need to supplement and bring up the number of skilled trade workers that we have, and we need to provide the resources for people to get help to get away from addictions. I don’t believe I heard anything about that in the throne speech.

Bill 124 I mentioned before. I’ve actually mentioned Bill 124 a lot, and I think on this side of the House, we mentioned it a lot. We’ve talked about Bill 124. This is not a good bill; it’s not at all. We’ve gone over how it’s unconstitutional. We have the blueprint for it. Bill 115 that the Liberals tabled was basically the same bill but just aimed at education workers only. This one was all public sector workers. At the end of the day, you know what the courts are going to do. If I was a betting person, I would say they’re going to rule it as unconstitutional. It cost the Liberal government—it cost us; the Liberal government took the fall for it, but it cost us $100 million in penalties. We could do a lot of stuff with $100 million. We could four-lane Highway 69 with that kind of money. Why do this?

The other thing too is, as politicians, the leaders of our communities, we stand up all the time—everyone in our community, really; it doesn’t have to be a leader—and talk about health care workers and that they’re our heroes, and we’re sincere, all of us, on both sides of the House, that they are heroes. They are giving their all. If you think back to the beginning of the pandemic when we weren’t quite sure how it was spreading or how it was happening, they were really going above and beyond. To tell these people, “You only deserve 1% at the max, if you can negotiate the 1%,” what a slap in the face that is. It really, really is. It’s a dangerous precedent. We talk about nurses a lot, but these education workers, snow plow drivers, these are all public sector workers. When you tell people you’re not worth that much—it’s not just the financial model; you’re literally telling them, “You’re not worth that much to us.”

I talked last week about education workers. A lot of people think of teachers, but education workers also includes the faculty that clean the building, support staff, EAs, the people in the offices. I talked last week about Charity who works full time and goes to the food bank to feed her children. We’re from different parties, but I think we can all agree that if someone works full time, they shouldn’t go to a food bank. We have to address that, and Bill 124 prevents that from happening. You need much more than 1%, especially with our cost of living going up 8.5%. We really need to do that.

We’re seeing that result because as the government makes inroads to attract more PSWs, to attract more health care workers, more nurses, what we’re seeing at the same time is that they’re exiting. What we’re doing, as much as possible, is turning on the taps to the bathtub, but we left the plug out of the drain. So they’re leaving maybe even quicker than we can fill them. We have 5,400 fewer health care and social service workers today than one year ago. We’re just burning money trying to attract people but not understanding why they’re leaving. And I don’t mean casually leaving; they’re running for the door. We have to be realistic about this. If you want to keep nurses, if you want to support things, a major thing you can do is just repeal Bill 124. We’ve been calling for it for a long time. Maybe there was a reason in the past; I would disagree that there was, but maybe there was. But it’s time to re-look at it and repeal it. If you want to come in on the weekend or the evening or any time to repeal Bill 124, we’ll come in to do it. We’ll pass it with no objection. You’ve got to get rid of this bill. It is bad for everybody. It is bad for those workers it’s affecting; it’s bad for all of Ontario.

I know that Bill 7 wasn’t part of the throne speech, but I want to talk about Bill 7. My colleague from Mushkegowuk–James Bay brought this up. He’s our francophone critic, Speaker. He was talking about what happens with Bill 7. It’s about making room in health care. The idea, basically, is that there are people who need to go into long-term care, who are better served in long-term care, but there are no beds. And so the idea is, we’ll make up room in the hospitals by putting people into long-term care that maybe they don’t want to go to. In northern ridings, that’s up to 300 kilometres away. That’s a three-hour drive. My colleague, the francophone critic, said: What happens if the only language you speak is French and you’re put into a long-term-care facility where they don’t speak French? What happens if you’ve got dementia and you don’t understand what’s going on, and when they explain it to you in a language you don’t speak, you still don’t understand what’s going on?

Let’s be honest about long-term care—and I want to say this without blame because this did not start four years ago; this started a long time ago. Nobody in Ontario is excited to go to long-term care. We need to all put the moose head on the table and just be honest about the elephant in the room. It is not a good system. There are some good providers out there, but by and large, nobody is waiting for their kids to have the conversation with them about going to long-term care and thinking, “Yes.” Right? It needs a lot of work. It’s broken.

I’d venture that if you’re sending someone to a long-term-care facility that doesn’t have a waiting list, that has open beds, it may not be the cream of the crop long-term-care facility. It might be the one that you would see on 60 Minutes. We are going to take people, our seniors, our grandparents—I know it’s not just seniors, but by and large it is—the people who built the country, who supported their children and grandchildren, and we are going to repay them by pulling them out of their community and parking them somewhere they don’t want to be. And let’s be honest, it’s probably not the best facility out there.

The other part as well, while we’re talking about it being broken, is that we all know, in this room, that long-term care is broken to the point where the family supplements and fills in those gaps. I remember running as a candidate. I was in North Bay listening to a consultation about long-term care, and there was a lady there talking about having to go every day to get her mom ready in the morning and to give her breakfast, that she’d brush her mom’s hair and she’d feed her mom—all these things. And she was proud of that, because her mom took care of her for a long time. But the part that she found frustrating was that she has to go, that if she’s sick or on Christmas morning, if she doesn’t go, they don’t have the resources. The PSWs are stretched so thin that her mom might not eat. Her mom might not get dressed. Her hair might not get brushed.

So that system that, let’s be honest, governments over the years—different parties—have been looking the other way about, we all know it exists, but we haven’t really acknowledged it out loud. We haven’t said that we need to fix this. As a group, we haven’t taken that step forward. We are going to pull that away from these people. And we know, from COVID-19, when family was prevented from visiting, that the seniors that were in long-term care did a lot worse. In some cases, they died. And I don’t mean from COVID-19; they just deteriorated really quickly because they didn’t have family around. If you have to travel three hours, you’re not going on a weekday. You’re just not. And you’re not going in the winter because, in the north, the roads kind of suck in the winter.

So we really need to think more beyond “we need to free up some beds.” We need to understand how this is going forward. And frankly, this bill, there’s no consultation on this. There’s no committee on this. It’s being rammed through, and that’s probably a hint that it’s not the best thing to do, that it’s not a popular thing to do. Sometimes when you’re in a leadership role you have to do stuff that’s not popular, because it’s the right thing to do, but I would argue that this is not one of those times. This isn’t one of those times where you’re doing something unpopular for the right reasons. This is something that’s going to come back and not turn out very well.

The other thing was, talking about the budget and cost—time flies when you’re speaking—the number one thing that I heard talking to people is that they were saying that the cost of living is just too high. At the time it was gas. Gas was two-something. And people were telling me how they were skipping meals; they weren’t having lunch because they were home-care workers, and “I can’t get out to all the different homes if I have lunch, because I can’t put gas in my car.” But the cost of food has gone through the roof. The cost of everything has climbed so much, and wages haven’t kept up with it at all, not even close.

I think that there’s discussion about the budget, and the budget is important, but really, Speaker, the budget is a bit of a brag. What’s important is what you actually spend, because a lot of times in the budget, there are all these really high numbers, and then at the end of the year they review and those numbers weren’t spent. And we’ve got to start looking at what we’re actually putting into the expenses.

You know, I talked earlier about mental health and addictions. Very minimal investments have come to mental health and addictions, and we need to invest that money. When inflation is over 8% and people are worried about buying food, there is something very, very wrong. When full-time workers—this is a startling fact, and some of the newer members are going to realize this when they meet with food banks in Canada: In the last 10 years we’ve gone from generally the largest users of food banks being single men, and we have gone now to the largest users being workers who work 40 hours or more a week, and then it’s families. That is a broken system that we—I and all of us—need to come together to solve. We cannot have people working full-time and not making enough money to buy food. I think we can all agree on that. People need to be able to put food in their mouths.

The price of gas, I talked about. I was reading on Hansard—I want to thank our interim leader for bringing this forward. He was saying, “ExxonMobil earned US$18 billion in the second quarter of this year.” Chevron made $15 billion. Shell made $22 billion. BP oil just saw its “biggest profits in 14 years.” All of those companies “more than tripled their profit from a year ago.”

Good for them, but do you have a sense we’re being gouged? Let’s be honest, right? Sudbury always has been. In Sudbury, you drive less than an hour away, it’s always 10 cents less. I don’t know how expensive this is in transportation. I don’t know how expensive it is to drive less than an hour. But it’s always 10 cents less. But we’re really feeling like these prices are spiking us.

I think it’s great that people are going to electric vehicles, but that isn’t an option for everybody in the north. And also, the government ripped out a bunch of charging stations, so there are not a lot of places to charge your car. I know they have changed that stance and they’re building some more, but there’s a time before we get to electric vehicles and until we get there, we have to make sure that the consumer isn’t getting gouged. I didn’t hear anything about this.

I didn’t hear anything about helping consumers make ends meet, or putting more money in their pockets, or ensuring they’re being effective or ensuring that grocery stores aren’t raising prices simply because they can. Because in the shareholder meetings, they’re saying, “We raised a lot of money because we could.” And we as government—all of us together, opposition and party—we’ve got to hold them to account on this.

I’ve got about a minute. I want to talk about ODSP. They raised ODSP—they’re going to raise ODSP by $50. So for a month, someone on ODSP is going to have $1,227. That’s poverty. All of these things that we’re talking about, all of these struggles to make ends meet, if you are in legislated poverty when the government is saying, “You don’t deserve enough money to pay your bills”—that has to change. That has to change immediately.

We can’t have people in legislated poverty. We can’t because of the mental health, the stress it causes, the reality that you just cannot get back on your feet and you feel the world closing in on you. Poverty is crushing for people.

I wish I could go on. I only have about eight seconds, so I’ll stop there, Speaker.

Congratulations to the member from Thornhill on her wonderful, fine inaugural speech and her resounding election victory.

I was actually listening very intently when you were speaking about your passion for the Yonge North subway extension. Of course, certainly, being able to build those extra eight kilometres and five stations is so critical.

I’m very curious with respect to trip generation and where people will start their journeys to the subway station. Some people may have the opportunity to take a bus or perhaps a carpool.

Will those subway stations connect to those very fine bagel establishments? You’re guarding that secret, but I’m just curious to know: Can we get off at one of those five subway stations and get access to those bagels?

Member from St. Catharines.

Further debate?

I loved your story.

I’ve gotten to know the member here a little bit over the last little, while being seatmates.

As everyone has said, it’s great to hear everybody’s story and the journey you made to get here.

Farmers’ markets: We have a great farmers’ market in London, a fantastic farmers’ market in St. Thomas—and throughout my own riding.

Your particular farmers’ market, the York Farmers Market—as you said, from 1953—is a very famous market. As the city grew around it, it still kept its iconic brand.

I know it’s a very important part of our community and many communities throughout this province. It’s part of our culture.

Can you tell us a little bit more about the York Farmers Market?

Yes, I will. The one thing that I love about the farmers’ market is the way it has evolved. The fact of the matter is, it has become something completely different, very much like our community. It began as a local farmers’ market, and it still remains a farmers’ market, but all of the flavours and the tastes of our neighbourhood are also there. You can go there and pick up sushi. You can go there and pick up pasta. You can go there and literally absorb a multitude of different ethnicities, and I really enjoy that.

I think that bringing our kids to these places allows them to really understand where food comes from. That’s why I appreciate everything that you’ve done over the course of 20-odd—how many years have you been involved in this? Countless years—

Thank you for the question.

The one thing I told my campaign manager when he arrived in Thornhill, who advised that he lived on Twizzlers and beef jerky, was that he was going to eat very well when he came to Thornhill.

So it has to do with food—it’s actually all about food. If you sit at a dinner table in Thornhill, there might be some discussions on the day about politics, but it will very quickly move to food, and that’s an assumed fact.

I would say the best bagel in Thornhill is a huge argument, and that is iconic—and I will not get into that argument because that would be very troublesome.

Interjection.

I personally prefer Montreal chewy bagels; my husband prefers a more doughy kind. We’ll leave it at that. He’s in the chamber.

I think the commonality is something that I touched upon. It’s building something from nothing, and we do a lot of that in Thornhill.

Aside from that issue, I think I’d have to talk about the welcoming nature of our people. I know everyone has wonderful ridings and everything is fantastic in everyone’s riding—and I feel no different. The truth of the matter is, when I first started my role in politics I was welcomed by so many people. One example of that is FCAV, the Vaughan Filipino association. Erlinda, who runs that association, opened her heart to me very warmly. I walked into her gym to give a speech, and they still had a Zumba class going. I immediately pulled off my shoes, my high heels, and I went into the Zumba class, because that’s what you do—because it’s a welcoming, inviting environment. Just the friendliness of it is kind of plastered across Thornhill, not just in that one location. So that’s probably the best example of what I could set out.

Thank you for the question.

Everything is within walking distance of a bagel place. I think it’s very safe to say that whether it’s Royal Orchard or Steeles, you will always have an opportunity to find a pretty decent bagel place; if not, it will be there. They will build it, and they will come.

Sometimes what happens in a budget is the government will cherry-pick certain lines about it and say, “Hey, you don’t support the whole budget. How come you don’t support this one part?” And that is fruitless.

The reality, though, is that when you’re living in poverty, when you’re living on OW or ODSP, and you tell somebody, “You are going to get a tax credit,” you’re ignoring the fact that most people who live in poverty don’t file their taxes. They don’t. And so, most people, they use their taxes as a bank account, as a savings account—sorry, through the Speaker. So what they do is they don’t file because they wait for their fridge to break down, because every penny you have, you spend. So telling somebody that, “You’re going to live in poverty for 12 months out of the year, but three months after that, you’re going to get tax relief,” is not hope for them.

What they need is food on the table today, money in their pockets today. They need to make ends meet today. So it’s not that it’s a bad idea, but it’s a “yes and” conversation. Let’s give them the tax relief and let’s put money in their pockets today.

Questions?

I thank the member for his statement. I know, certainly, it was mentioned about the rising costs and feeling the pinch. Rising costs have certainly hit lower-income families and workers in my riding the hardest. Could the member explain why there’s opposition to the proposal to enhance and expand the low-income individuals and families tax credit, which provides $300 in additional tax relief, on average, to 1.1 million workers?

My thanks to the member for Sudbury for his contributions this afternoon to debate. I do appreciate the member’s unique perspective, coming from northern Ontario.

Of course, we recognize that one of the things we hear about a lot from our colleagues in the north is the importance of investing in our infrastructure, including road infrastructure. We hear about the importance of broadening highways and ensuring there’s adequate shoulders. We hear about the importance of investing in good road surfaces in the north. I completely agree with all these investments. I understand the importance of building new highways and building good roads in northern Ontario. And yet, the member opposite and so many of his colleagues seem completely opposed to building any new roads in the south.

I’m wondering why the member opposite and all of his colleagues from the north, on the one hand, rightly advocate for more and better roads in the north and yet refuse to support investments in building up more roads here in southern Ontario?

I’m pleased to ask the member who serves very, very well as the critic for labour—and I want to ask the member from Sudbury about the staffing shortage in the hospitals and what we’ve been talking about a lot in this room, but certainly talking about it in our communities, about nurses leaving good union jobs that used to be well-paying, that have benefits and protections, full-time hours. They are leaving those jobs in droves to go to private, sometimes fly-by-night agencies. I guess I don’t understand that, because obviously the protections in good union jobs—that’s something people aspire to. Can you talk to me maybe about the working conditions, or what the conditions are that would make them consider that or maybe even make them feel forced to do that?

I hail from the riding of Kitchener South–Hespeler, which is, as they will all agree, a somewhat uneasy political union of the south part of Kitchener and Hespeler. Kitchener South contains a variety of residential neighbourhoods as well as a wonderful museum and gallery and the village of Doon. Hespeler, if you ask Hespeler, contains the entire world, and it more or less ends there. I know anybody watching from home from Hespeler will agree with me that they are certainly not part of Kitchener South, nor are they part of Cambridge, and frankly, I love them for that attitude.

The people of Kitchener South–Hespeler are the first ones I have to thank because they are the ones who put me here. Without all of you voting for me—I know I do have some of you watching from home, thank you, including my arborist, who just messaged me to say he’s in a tree; I hope he is. We won’t tell the Minister of Labour. The people of Kitchener South–Hespeler are the ones who voted for me. They are the ones who put me here. Without all of them, I would not have the ability to be saying anything that I’m saying; I wouldn’t have the ability to do anything for these people. I will never take lightly the trust that they put in me. I am eternally grateful to the people of Kitchener South–Hespeler.

I also have to say thank you to Amy Fee. Amy Fee was the MPP for Kitchener South–Hespeler before me, and she is a thoroughly lovely person. Amy has four kids and three service dogs, and two of her children are on the autism spectrum. She has been and always will be an absolute champion for the autism cause. While I was campaigning, she was never more than a phone call away. I could always be assured of a response from her—“Jess, you’ve got this.”

A parliamentarian’s inaugural speech—of course, I did look it up; I looked in the legislative library—is an opportunity to say thank you, to introduce yourself etc. I thought a lot about how best to structure this speech. I thought about what I wanted to say and who I wanted to thank. I thought about which section should go where. Ultimately, I thought so much about my speech that I never really quite got around to writing it and it’s mostly just notes. So if I ramble, my apologies in advance.

Standing here at the moment, I’ve decided to start with what I think is the most important part and introduce two of the best people in the world—two people who are, quite literally, the only reason I’m here; two people who have supported me through everything; and, coincidentally, two people who, just yesterday, marked their 40th anniversary together: my parents, Ruth Dixon and Eric Dyke.

There’s a Jann Arden song—it’s actually not one of my favourites, but it’s one that Mom always talks about. It’s called Good Mother, and it has the lines in it, “I like the colour of my hair / I’ve got a friend who loves me / Got a house, I’ve got a car”—but it says “I’ve got a good mother” and “I’ve got a good father.” That is absolutely what I have. I’m an only child, so I was blessed to never have to share them with absolutely anybody else, which I love.

My mom, Ruth, was born in Deep River. She was one of six kids. Her mom, my granny, was a nurse in labour and delivery, and an Irish immigrant. She certainly carried on the nursing tradition because, out of all of her kids, we have four nurses. My mom was an orthopedic and operating room nurse. My auntie Deb is a cardiac nurse. My auntie Moe is an RNFA, a registered nurse first assistant. My auntie Sheila, who we’ve lost, was a geriatric nurse. My auntie Fif did not become a nurse, but she became a registered massage therapist and a practitioner of eastern medicine. My uncle Dave was the black sheep and went off and became an engineer or something like that.

Dad was born in Vancouver, one of three brothers. Both of his brothers became skilled mechanics. My dad also was the black sheep and went off and became an engineer or something like that.

My parents met when my dad was a summer student at Chalk River. Admittedly, I get a little bit confused about the chronology after that, because they met at Chalk River, and then there was a period when mom was on a kibbutz and she was an au pair in Paris. My dad ended up on a sheep farm, either in New Zealand or Australia, and has the kangaroo whip to prove it. But somehow or other, they did get back together—luckily for me, or I wouldn’t be here.

I’m known for having a stubborn streak a mile wide and being very into DIY, and I came by that honestly. Barely a month before I was born, my parents bought a lovely arts and crafts bungalow in Victoria, BC—which came very cheap because it was scheduled for imminent demolition—which they cut in half and put on two giant flatbed moving trucks and took through downtown Victoria, just in time to welcome me home to a massive construction site, in a laundry basket with a sheepskin in it. We more or less put the final stitch in that house before picking up everything and moving to Ontario, due to the death of the manufacturing sector in Victoria.

My dad got a job at Babcock, now known as BWXT, and Mom started to work at McMaster hospital. My dad went on to Aecon, becoming the project manager for their N-Stamp project, which is attaining safety certification to produce nuclear components—which I never thought would be relevant, because I never thought I’d be a politician, and I never thought I would be the parliamentary assistant for energy, but here we are.

Mom went back to school and became a manager at Cambridge Memorial Hospital—same-day surgery, the OR, the ER, the fracture clinic etc. She retired and then came out of retirement to be a coordinator for CCAC. She retired again, and then she came out of retirement again when COVID hit, and she brought her nursing skills back to Ontario.

Why did I get involved in politics? I never wanted to be a politician. It never occurred to me that I’d be here. If you had told me two or three years ago that I would be here, I’d be very startled. It begins with a house and a job, as well as a day at work that was both good and bad, and, surprisingly, a bag of milk.

I’ll just begin: I’m a crown attorney. I’ve been a crown attorney both federally and provincially. My mom has a report card from preschool where my preschool teacher wrote, “Jess has a very clearly defined sense of right and wrong”—and that seems to have stuck with me. I articled with the crown attorney in Ottawa, and I loved my job as a crown ever since I first walked into the halls.

In 2015, in Cambridge, I bought a foreclosure that I’m still working on at a rate that appalls my project manager father, because the projects that get done are the only ones that seem interesting at the time. At any rate, in the course of working on that house, I met my neighbour.

My house is in an area that has a large swath of geared-to-income single-family housing in it. As I would be working on my house, I would notice my neighbour Laura walking by. She was a single mom with, at the time, a 13-year-old and a one-year-old. We eventually got to chatting. Basically, she’s somebody who doesn’t have a lot, and she was just loving living vicariously through me making this very, very ugly house, day by day, a little bit more attractive. We started to talk more, and her older daughter, Lauryn, would come over. One day Lauryn was helping me in the garden, and we started talking about school, and I realized that Lauryn, even though she had just graduated grade eight in Ontario—she was born in Ontario—had no conception that college or university was something that applied to her. I went to a private school; I didn’t know about the applied versus academic streaming. Lauryn had been put into applied, and I was absolutely appalled that somebody would make that decision for her and limit her in that fashion. I ended up marching into her school, tailing Laura behind me, and having her moved into academic and into a different school entirely. I’m proud to say that she has just finished her first year of occupational therapy at Georgian College.

As the little one, Caprea, Laura’s other daughter, got older, she—again, Laura is not somebody who has a lot. She is somebody who should have been on ODSP but wasn’t. I ended up helping her with that application and going through the Byzantine process—particularly for somebody who deals with brain injury, when you have an invisible disability. As Caprea, the little one, got older, I started realizing her language development skills were falling behind a little bit, but I always knew that she was a really smart little girl. At school, they seem to have just written her off. The idea seemed to be that if she acted up in class, they would just take her to a different room. Frankly, she’s smart as a whip. She figured out very quickly that if she acted up, she didn’t have to do the work, and she immediately left the room. So I ended up putting Caprea into Kumon, into math and English tutoring, and, ultimately, into swimming and into karate. She is a very smart little girl. She’s doing wonderfully in Kumon; she has been in it for probably three years now. This is a little girl who is never going to fall through the cracks. She has been given a start that she wouldn’t have had otherwise.

When I was a crown, I would talk to a lot of accused people. When you’re a crown, you’re supposed to want to be up in the glamorous courts, the Superior Court. I always loved being in the workhorse courts where you’re dealing one on one with accused people. As time went on, I started pursuing more and more of my own alternative justice measures. I would have some pretty good successes. I have a lot of different stories. One of the ones that always comes to mind was when I was in St. Thomas, and I ended up talking to a man, a boy—I’ll change his name; I think he's 20—named Matthew. At the time, he was living in his car. He had been charged with two counts of driving without insurance because he was sleeping in his uninsured car. His family had kicked him out because he had a cocaine addiction. He had managed to finish high school, but that was about it. So he was facing a drug charge; he was facing a property crime charge; he was facing two counts of driving without insurance, which is a $10,000 minimum fine. This is somebody who was on the precipice of a downward spiral.

I talked to him and I said, “Look, I’m the prosecutor, you don’t have to talk to me, but I’m interested in hearing how you got here.” He talked to me and he told me about some of his struggles from home. This is all happening over the phone; it’s still COVID. And so I said, “Okay, you’ve got yourself in a lot of trouble here, but I am most interested in seeing about how we can make it that you never come back here again.”

I told him to go off and to start seeing—I was like, “Okay, the first thing is, let’s see if you can get back in with your parents.” So I set him up with some counselling options, which I had to look around to find. Over the months that I adjourned his case, he moved back in with his parents. He met a girl. Because he’d finished high school, I’d started talking to him—technically I knew I was probably going to run, but I still wasn’t thinking about it that much—and I told him a lot about the trades. By the end of my time with him—a lot of the time, being a crown is sort of being somebody’s cheerleader and their mom at the same time. And by the end, he had moved into his own apartment with his girlfriend, and he was officially signed up as an apprentice at Fanshawe.

I told him at the end, “I’m withdrawing your charges, because you’ve done what I wanted you to do to never be back here,” and he sobbed on the phone to me and said that I was the only person that had ever really believed in him or taken the time to speak to him—

Interjections.

Thank you to the member for Toronto Centre.

Over the last four years, one of the things I was surprised by, as an MPP, was how little consultation we have with the public, that many things we discuss—and, I would argue, maybe everything we discuss—become time-allocated; that when we have public consultation, it is always five hours, the minimum allowed.

My background is in health and safety—there’s a bunch of different stuff, but health and safety is really my passion. I’ve learned over the last 17 years of doing that job that you don’t have to have all the answers. What you need to do is, you need to sit down with the people who are being affected, and they’ll give you the answers—and some of the answers we know already. Do you know how you solve housing? You build houses, affordable ones—not giant ones—public housing. That’s how you solve that.

Do you know how you get food to people? You give them affordable food. You give them enough money so they can make ends meet.

Those are the solutions.

But really, what we need to do is what we’re elected to do: to listen to our constituents, to tour, to talk to them and make good decisions, even if they don’t agree with what we thought we believed before we came there—to make decisions based on what people are telling us is the best thing to do.

It’s a weird thing, because it’s a yes/and conversation—it isn’t Highway 69 or Highway 413. I’ve looked at the data for Highway 413 because I was the northern infrastructure critic, and it doesn’t bear fruit; you can say that it does, and the Liberals tried saying it did before, but it doesn’t. It doesn’t reduce commute times. Really, if you want to go forward with that, if that’s what the constituents want in southern Ontario, more power to you. I would disagree about the strength of it. What I am saying is, don’t do it instead of Highway 69. On Highway 69, people are dying. People are being killed. Someone was killed in the last 15 days. I’ve been here before several times talking about people who were killed on Highway 69. So if we’re going to do either/or, let’s stop where people are being killed and let’s then do the next one—and if it’s going to be a yes/and, then let’s do both. But at the end of the day, let’s get Highway 69 done. If you really, really, really want 413, you have the power to drive that through. We can disagree about it—but what I’m talking about is that we have an area where people are being killed on the highway, and we need to support them and ensure that stops happening.

I talked a lot about Bill 124 in the debate, and my colleagues have talked about Bill 124. It’s a bad bill, and it’s punishing. The result of it, really, at the end of the day, is, even though the Conservative government stands up and says that these are heroes and role models and stuff, they’re not being treated like heroes; they’re not being treated like the best. There’s a quality of life that you want. You want to feel fulfilled about your job.

Let’s be honest. If somebody were to tell you to explain what it’s like to be an MPP—there are long hours, and we work hard; there are a lot of people who think that we don’t, but we do, and I know my colleagues opposite do as well. Why do we do it? Because we’re inspired and we enjoy it and it fulfills us.

As health care workers, when you’re being treated by the government as if you’re not valuable and not important, you exit those jobs.

In Sudbury, we have a supervised consumption site that we are waiting for an announcement of the provincial funding for—which, fingers crossed, is happening this week; I’ve heard a rumor, but to be honest, at the same time, I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s just a visit to evaluate it.

For four years, I’ve been talking about the opioid crisis in Sudbury—across northern Ontario, but in Sudbury in particular, because it’s my riding and where I see it the most. There’s a major intersection in Sudbury with a sea of white crosses, and it is sad that I have to count them to see how many there are on a regular basis. The number continues to grow. That only signifies the people who agree to put crosses up.

We need to inject money into people to be successful. The idea of quitting on your own and just magically overcoming this doesn’t make sense. The government can really, really help by an investment into mental health and addictions to help with aftercare, to help with beds, to help with addiction recovery.

The member spoke quite passionately about another crisis that is going on in this province, and that’s the opioid crisis. I’ve seen, and I know the member has seen, so many crosses—the white crosses that we see in many of our communities across northern Ontario. Actually, in a couple of weeks I’ll be participating in a community walk—where we have another beautiful young person who succumbed to the opioid crisis. Week after week, those numbers keep getting elevated.

We have these buildings where individuals go and get the treatment they need, but it’s the aftercare that is not being provided to them. They’re being subjected to going back to the environment that they were in, and they slip back into that routine. That aftercare, that continuum of care is so needed, and we need to make those investments if we’re going to get on top of the opioid crisis.

I’d like to hear from the member: What do you see, as far as the Sudbury area, northern Ontario, that is absolutely needed to battle the opioid crisis?

Next question.

Questions?

I want to tell the member, your inaugural speech was amazing. You say you ramble—you can ramble all you want in this House. It’s going to be welcome.

You would have shamed the previous member from Bruce–Grey–Owen Sound. He used to go, go, go, but you would just put him in his place today. For those that have listened to Bill Walker when he was in this House—he would always have a good time with us in this House.

Listen, you’ve demonstrated that your experience through getting here, you have heart and compassion. That’s something that many of us have in this Legislature—all of us have in this Legislature. We’ve all have those stories. I remember meeting up with Januzhe Pochwalowski. He was an immigrant who came to Canada. He was having so many problems raising his two boys—nobody would listen to him. He kept saying, “Listen, there’s something wrong with my pension. There’s something wrong with my pension.” I listened to him. I heard him. We looked at his pension and managed to deal with WSIB. We found out that he had not been indexed. I called him into the office and said, “I have some bad news for you. You know those years of pension you were entitled to that didn’t come? They’re coming. You’re going to be getting $186,000.” And it was just something that we do.

As an opposition, we are critical of this government. We will criticize the government. We will oppose. That’s our job. My question to you will be, will you be hearing to respond to the opposition or will you be listening to understand the points that we’re bringing across?

Thank you. And the thing is that he was just one of many. I have had that experience over and over and over again, of being a person that took the unconventional approach, the person that listened.

The thing with him or the thing with my neighbour and my neighbour’s daughters is that they’re not going to fall through the cracks. They are protected. But what increasingly bothered me more and more was that the only common element in that—this is not to pat myself on the back; this is why I became involved—was me. If they hadn’t come across me as the crown or me as their busybody, interfering neighbour, that wouldn’t have happened. And I felt that in a province like Ontario, that simply wasn’t good enough.

I firmly believe that a rising tide lifts all boats. I believe that that is what this party stands for. It stands for investing in people early on, in giving people the tools that they need to build themselves up. But I wanted to be able to be here and tell stories like the story that I just told so that you understand what it’s like for people that live in this different world, in this far more disorganized world, and know that they’re not past hope. They’re not past help. And we can absolutely do a great deal for them. And that is, in large part, why I ran: in order to be here.

To finish this off, in my last few days—I’ll get to the bag of milk, actually. I had had both a good day and a bad day at work. It was a good day because I’d had yet another full-grown man sobbing, in happiness, on the phone to me, and I had made a really, really big difference in his life. I was happy about it, but I was also frustrated because I thought, I know that there’s not very many people that are doing what I’m doing, so I’m having an incredibly small impact right now, even though I’ve had major impact on this one man.

My mother was over, and I was saying, “I don’t know. What do you do if you want to make things better? If I have influence, but it’s very small, do you go into politics?” And she said, “Well, you know, it could be something to consider.” And then she left, and she went to the grocery store to get a bag of milk. And while she was at the grocery store, she saw a gentleman, John Wright, who is sort of a local businessman, and she distantly recalled seeing him on Facebook, in perhaps a Conservative Party function locally. So she went up to John and asked him if he had any party involvement and said, “Jess just wants to talk to somebody about it.”

John is the type of person that does everything at just 100 miles an hour. So before the next day was even finished, he had two people that were involved locally, Mike Dearden and Peter Tudisco, and had arm-wrestled them into calling his random friend’s daughter who had a slight interest in politics.

They were really the originators. Peter Tudisco and Mike Dearden were the ones that took this away. If it weren’t for them, I absolutely would not be here. They made this happen. I was working full-time as a crown attorney, caring for a very, very ill dog at that point, and they were the ones that absolutely did this, while also having a wonderful sense of humour about it.

Mike will be watching this, and I feel entitled—because I have 20 minutes to talk—I have a phone full of text messages from Mike with no response from me, of us being at events with him sending me a message that says, “Wrap it up, Jess. Wrap it up. Okay, you’ve talked too much.”

I also want to thank Jim Schmidt. Jim was the candidate for Kitchener Centre. He unfortunately did not win but is just an absolutely stand-up guy. He was one of my main touchstones during the entire campaign process. We’d meet for lunch regularly. He was always the one who actually knew what date things were due, how to get the phone and who’s email I was supposed to have, and then he would also comment that he would really appreciate it if he could see me eat a vegetable once in a while—he still hasn’t.

I also want to thank Brandon Lukach, who’s another one of my neighbours. Actually he’s another part of that neighbourhood. Brandon is somebody that dropped out of school when he was in grade 10 due to a combination of circumstances, and I’m proud to say that we got him to successfully write his GED back in March and now he will be on to bigger and brighter things. I’m very proud of him for that.

I also want to talk about Joe and Corey Kimpson. When I started doing social media for my campaign, I came across this business, a paintball field called Flag Raiders that I remembered was closed down. I reached out to them to say, “Look, I’ve got about as much power as a goldfish in an empty bowl, but I’m happy to come talk to you and see what’s happening.”

I went out to the field and I just had this immediate—I don’t know—connection with the two of them, but particularly with Corey Kimpson. We talked about paintball, we talked about local businesses. I think maybe one week later, she sent me a package about Flag Raiders and then not even a week after that, our next connection was me sending her a panicked message, asking if she knew anybody at the Rotary because I had just been asked to go to a Rotary gala that started in two hours. She wrote back, “I think I know some people.” Then I wrote back, “Will you go with me?” So she was my date at a Rotary gala with two hours’ notice, having only ever spoken to me once before. Her and Joe put up signs. They managed my social media. They were just incredible.

I also want to talk about—I call them my Holy Trinity. I know that some of them are watching. Angie, Monica and Marie are three wonderful ladies. I met Angie through Facebook. Monica was one of the only people that responded to one of our riding-wide emails, and Marie was a person who came out to one of our events. I remember being so incredibly touched, the first time we had a super canvass when Marie came out and gave her time to me because I was never expecting somebody I didn’t know that didn’t owe me anything would turn up. But those three did and they turned up over and over and over again, and I absolutely owe them.

My aunts, my nurse aunts, Auntie Deb and Auntie Moe, would come out as well. Carl—reliable Carl and Tyler, who, when they came, I knew with a breath of relief that we would at least probably finish this canvass. And Rob Elliott—Rob was a regional organizer, and he came in in the last 10 days of the campaign to get us over the finish line—just an absolute ray of sunshine. He came on after, again, to help me set up the office, and if it weren’t for him, all of my phones would still be tin cans on strings.

Anyway I owe so many people: Megan, TJ, Alide, Bill, David, Lauryn, Jenn, Max and Chris, but I want to end this again by saying thank you to my parents.

Question?