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.