Good morning to the members. It’s an honour today to rise to speak to Bill 2, the Plan to Build Act.

I want to start my remarks by sharing my first impressions. I want you all to know—and I think you do know—that I’m new to Queen’s Park, having come here from city hall after serving 12 years as a city councillor. So I have a little bit of experience in working with budgets.

As someone who is elected to hold government accountable for my constituents, I want to share with you some of my observations. I need to see the numbers—I think we all need to see numbers when it comes to budgetary decisions, but it’s really hard to find out exactly what’s in there. Given the very limited documents that we have available to us as MPPs, this is certainly something that I think could use some improvement.

Just to give you an example of how things could work in another government, the city of Toronto is the fourth-largest government in North America. The various city departments draw up their respective budgets based on city council decisions, often established based on motions established the year before. Therefore, municipal priorities are established by the city council, including the mayor, and then costed by staff. The budgets are then launched at the budget committee, and the financial planning staff and senior departments each present their budget request to the budget committee, the executive committee and, ultimately, the city council, for a final decision. During this time, members of the public can review the budget’s department spending, line by line, briefing notes and analysts’ notes. Budget town halls are held by city councillors, where we and the CFO or a financial planning staff representative will then go and present this information to the public, and the public can ask questions and dive deeper into some of their priorities.

Toronto residents are also available to submit their communication and their budget deputations in person to the committee, including to the mayor, who chairs his very powerful executive committee—each member hand-chosen and selected by the mayor and appointed by him.

The entire process from the city of Toronto’s budget is launched from—and it takes about six to eight weeks, from the beginning of the year. Therefore, we adopt the 2022 operating budgets, the tax-supported budgets and the capital budgets for a city of three million people by, roughly, February, which is in line with general accounting principles. Since the spending has already begun in January, we try to make that decision on the budget final deliberations as quickly as possible. Therefore, we don’t delay; we get it done. The problem with having a budget adopted so late in the year, when the spending has already begun, is that programs and services are already rolling out.

At Queen’s Park, we’re debating a budget that few have actually read. Having spoken to a number of media reporters and asking them how they review the line-by-line spending, how they are able to do that review and account—they tell me that it’s difficult because they don’t have access to the information either. This could change, and I hope that it can, and it should.

Ontarians need to have access to the detailed budget and any relevant data and information. This will empower our stakeholders and citizens to make informed decisions to better grow their businesses, to better understand particular issues, and to hold government to account. A much more detailed copy of the Ontario budget should be made available and accessible to everyone. The Ontario budget should inspire and invite universal participation, where everyone should be encouraged that they have a place here in Ontario and that they can also participate in important decision-making processes. We are sitting here; they are not. We’re making decisions about their lives with very little input.

After all, a government budget is the apex of every single policy tool. You can have all the strategies and the plans you want, but without a line item and discretionary spending, it just won’t happen. It cannot be operationalized.

As members here in this House, we can have the opportunity to make lives significantly better, or significantly worse, just by adopting a budget. So if we were to invert that process and bring residents in closer to help us design a better budget that better reflects their priorities and needs, we think that everybody would be better off. I hope we can do that together. It will allow us to create an open and accessible budget process in Ontario that can better create business, drive innovation and help us design citizen-centred services.

It’s extremely valuable to all of us and to our constituents to understand how government money is being spent. I know that fiscal responsibility and accountability are important values to all my colleagues here in this House.

I think we can do better. I hope we can do better. I look forward to learning with you how we can improve this process here at Queen’s Park.

I understand that I can now use my laptop in this chamber because of specific and long-overdue changes to the standing orders. I think we can do the same thing with how we modernize our budget process so that financial spending information is made available to all residents. After all, our residents, the citizens, the constituents of Ontario, are our best assets. They will help us live up to the potential and the inspiration of what we consider the concept of Ontario.

I know that the government was elected by a majority in the first-past-the-post system, and I want to honour that. But I also want to remind all of us that 43% of voter turnout—having less than 18% of eligible voters vote for the PCs—doesn’t give you a bulldozing mandate when it comes to the budget. We are here to work together, and I’m going to continue to echo this theme throughout my four years here at Queen’s Park.

What are the challenges of the day? I know we’re going to spend a lot of time talking about health care because, in this budget, we need to find the solutions to our health care crisis. As my colleague the member for Waterloo has said, health care spending has increased only by 5.2% in this quarter, when inflation was 8.1%. This means, according to Statistics Canada reporting of inflation at 7.6% in July, this effectively makes that budget spending a cut. So we are not investing actively in the health care system by adopting this budget as it is today without any significant amendments; we are making a cut, especially when health care investments are needed the most.

My constituent J wrote to me: “Health care workers are overworked. My dad is in hospital with lymphoma. While his condition is getting worse, nurses and doctors have been too busy to follow up with me when I ask about my dad.

“How much more suffering must my family and I endure before things can change for the better?”

I don’t see the answers to what J is asking for in this budget. In fact, what we’re hearing this week is that the government is considering privatized health care delivery. Privatization will not solve our health care crisis. Rumblings of privatization and the planning of privatization have my constituents worried.

My constituent Lee, a nurse who immigrated to Canada from the United States, wrote to me describing what he is seeing: “My clinic is the great equalizer—you receive the same level of care no matter your socio-economic status, language, race, religion, sex, creed, title” and so forth. Furthermore, he adds that competition between health care providers for the same pot of limited government dollars will create inefficiencies and increase the cost of health care delivery.

My constituent points to recent data that came out from the University Health Network, which the Toronto Star reported on earlier. The UHN’s spending on temporary nurses increased in the last fiscal year to $6.7 million. Compare that to the year before: It was $776,000 only, which means that our publicly funded hospitals are already in the business of privatization, because we are systematically starving them of the funds they need to do their work.

Inflation and privatization are burning through our hospital and health care budgets, and they’re doing so at both ends. This is a crisis that needs our attention.

To end this crisis in the hospitals, we need to do some things. We need to scrap Bill 124 immediately. We need to pay nurses, health care workers and PSWs more. We need to accredit tens of thousands of internationally educated health care professionals, and we need to start a hiring and training blitz immediately, right now.

The Registered Nurses’ Association of Ontario has called for this government to hire 30,000 more nurses. They are the experts, and that should be our goal as well.

I want to now focus my concerns on how this budget has no measures to enhance gender-affirming health care. As the 2SLGBTQIA+ critic, my office reached out to stakeholders in trans and gender-diverse communities for their thoughts and lived experiences.

Fae Johnstone, the executive director of Wisdom2Action, told me, “Gender-affirming health care literally saves lives, but trans and gender-diverse people in Ontario are facing huge—and growing—barriers to access. Our gender-affirming health services have been neglected by government for decades, even as increasing social acceptance results in more coming out and seeking these medically necessary services. Our communities have been hit hard by COVID, with increased isolation and access to safer spaces reduced by the pandemic, all of which has been exacerbated by rising anti-trans hate. Now is the time to invest in gender-affirming care, particularly youth. If we can” do this “now, we can save lives. If we keep on with the status quo, we will be complicit in the continued suffering of trans and gender-diverse” people.

I know this government likes to talk about innovation. This is one area of the health care sector that you can innovate.

Hannah Hodson, another advocate for trans health, told my office, “Happiness comes from living honestly and feeling comfortable in who you are. Gender-affirming care is simply allowing people to see themselves in the mirror. It is about becoming who you really are. I was born appearing as a cis straight white man. I had won the lottery. I wouldn’t have transitioned on a whim and subjected myself to abuse and harassment just for fun, or because it was a trend. These services are essential for people to live their honest and true lives.”

Speaker, gender-affirming health care is life-saving health care. But it is a complicated and nuanced kind of health care that needs medical professionals with the capacity to respond to the needs of their patients. Ontario’s ability to deliver gender-affirming, high-quality health care is at odds with the health care crisis.

Trans activist Susan Gapka described this to me, and I share this with you: “Now, wait times for referrals and access to trans-affirming care and surgeries has dramatically increased, causing distress to those requiring these essential services. People desperately need equitable access to” life-affirming health care.

Speaker, in the near future, I will be re-tabling my predecessor’s bill, the gender-affirming health care act. It calls for an advisory committee made up of people with lived experiences into the barriers that are being faced by trans Ontarians as they try to access gender-affirming health care. Some of those barriers that they face are poverty, disability and perhaps being a sex worker.

Later this year, at the Trans Day of Remembrance, I hope every single one of us will remember when we go out to participate in these events that it’s too simple to simply raise the flag and say a few nice words. That is too ceremonial. It’s too perfunctory. What we need to do is confirm to this community that we actually understand what their needs are and that we are willing to be real allies, and that’s going beyond the events and going beyond the symbolic gesture of raising a flag.

On a similar note around emerging health care trends, we need to talk about monkeypox. I know from Hansard that this is the first time the word “monkeypox” is being mentioned in this House. So let’s have that conversation right now.

While monkeypox has been recently reported for its transmission through sex, it is not exclusively transmitted through sex. It can be spread through droplets, skin-to-skin contact and contaminated objects. I am worried about this monkeypox virus for my constituents. We live in a dense city. Many of us come from urban centres, and so many of my constituents have roommates. Sharing towels, sheets, utensils and clothes can also spread monkeypox.

We have to be honest that many men who have sex with men also have sex with women.

We know that the isolation with monkeypox can be several weeks long. As this budget confirms, this government will only be extending its three-paid-sick-days program until March 2023. Those three days were never enough to cover the spread of COVID-19, and they certainly aren’t enough to cover the spread of monkeypox.

Discussing the monkeypox quarantine period, Dr. Darrell Tan from a local hospital in my riding said this to the CBC: “Many folks during that long period, if they’re forced to isolate, are not going to be able to go to work, are not going to be able to pay their bills, pay the rent, put food on the table.”

We all have a duty of care to protect the health of Ontarians. Three days doesn’t come close to empowering our communities to fend off this emerging infectious disease.

My constituent Peter Kelly, who recently contracted monkeypox, told the CBC that the pain of having monkeypox was so bad: “You can’t control it. It feels like razor blades in a way, shocking you constantly.”

The Decent Work and Health Network has commented to the media that their doctors anticipate up to 10% of monkeypox patients will need emergency room care, because that is how powerful this infection is. Does anyone think our hospitals are ready and staffed to manage a new wave of an infectious disease?

For now, monkeypox is mostly infecting gay and bisexual men.

The clock is ticking, and the rates of infection are growing. We have the time to take hold and reverse that trend, but we can’t do it with an inadequate sick pay program that is only three days.

I wonder if the government’s response would be different if most people getting monkeypox were not men having sex with men.

This budget doesn’t reverse the cuts to public health care. And this government has made it clear from the beginning of their first term—this is now your fifth year in government—that funding for health care is the price of modern living. We all agree to that. We cannot defer health care spending, because it is going to be much more expensive down the road when we are in a deeper crisis than we are in today.

I want to turn my comments now to social assistance and what Ontarians need from this budget.

As I discussed in my inaugural remarks in this chamber only yesterday, social assistance was there for me when I needed it, when I came out of the closet, and when I was trying to finish high school. Getting student welfare enabled me to recover from what was a traumatic life experience. That safety net no longer exists, and I think we need to think long and hard on how we’re going to address that. When it’s so fractured and beyond a state of repair, it is so difficult to build those institutions up. But worse than that, the potential of Ontarians and Canadians who want to give back to their country and help build this great province and give back to our communities—they won’t be able to do so because they won’t be able to get up when they’ve been knocked down.

My office was reached out to by Ivan Brochu, a tenant activist in Toronto who lives on ODSP, who says this about the Premier’s 5% increase and what his actual needs are: “A 5% increase completely ignores the reality that is ODSP hasn’t seen a raise since 2018 and most recipients live halfway below the livable income cut-off. Nothing less than doubling ODSP recognizes the dire situation” that people are currently living with.

Yesterday, Cally, another constituent, reached out to me to share her story. I’m going to share this with you today: “I am a newly diagnosed diabetic who now has a blood glucose meter. I only get enough lancets and test strips for 100 tests and I have to pay extra for the needles for my injector pen I need once a week. I have to cover the rest of the strips and lancets! This eats into what I have left for food. My extra $58 per month will now have to go mainly towards test stuff and needles. This should be covered by ODSP. I am so angry. Today I spent $64 I don’t have at the pharmacy!”

Speaker, this Legislature has the opportunity to end legislated poverty, and to do that we need to double the ODSP.

Speaking of legislated poverty, we need to be able to see more measures in the budget to also end evictions.

My riding is home to an organization called the Toronto Rent Bank. With my support as a councillor, during the pandemic they began providing tenant grants to avoid evictions. This is good. It actually keeps people housed. It also diverts people away from social assistance. The Toronto Rent Bank has helped over 1,700 tenants in Toronto avoid eviction.

I hear this feedback, and this is what I’m going to share with you today: “Thanks to Toronto Rent Bank I was able to make it through the worst of the lockdowns and stay in my apartment. Their service is an invaluable part of keeping communities intact.”

With skyrocketing inflation, tenants need support from more than the city; they need real help from the government and from the province—tangible support to keep people in homes and out of encampments. Instead of helping, this government is burning and hurting Ontarians, especially renters, by allowing rents to be raised by a historic 2.5% this year, and this is despite all the different challenges that we’ve now seen in the tenant and landlord tribunal. We need to be able to do more and act faster.

With skyrocketing inflation, vacancy control is the least expensive way that this government can curb the cost of living.

I want to be able to bring our attention to the fact that there are many people who are being hurt, and this budget is not necessarily helping.

Ontario’s tribunal backlogs need investments so that they can function at the level that Ontarians rightfully expect from their government and courts. The wait times for cases before the Landlord and Tenant Board, the Human Rights Tribunal of Ontario, the Social Benefits Tribunal and the family courts are creating avoidable costs for our constituents and businesses. I hear about how legal firms are increasingly worried that they cannot take on more cases, which means people will not have access to justice, something that I believe this government should care about. I want to be able to see those investments in legal aid and so much more.

Mr. Speaker, thank you very much for the time and opportunity to address this House today. I look forward to any questions.

Thank you very much to the member for that question.

Not only should we be investing in home care, but we should be expanding it and making sure that we are meeting the needs of Ontarians where they are. The ability to draw up a budget and to meet the needs of Ontarians is all our responsibility, and we do that by listening; we do that by asking questions; we do that by really leaning in with the experts to determine what the solutions are. I believe that the solutions when it comes to health care are really quite evident, whether it’s home care or personal support workers, or an extension of them both. This is an equal system of health care that has to be designed to meet Ontarians where they are, and if that means meeting them at home, then that’s where it should go. But it has to be said that residents are crying out because it is too limited.

So, yes, absolutely, we need to do more, but we need to do it faster. “Scaling up,” “building up,” which I know are very sexy terms that we sometimes like to use—I really want us to put that into practice. If we were to really take a look at what the harm was in Ontario and how we can actually build up that system, this is what I would suggest. Listen to the experts, bring the residents in, and let’s get to work.

I think that the stakes are too high. So I want to see the details of the budget; I think we all deserve to. But, more importantly, Ontarians need to know how you are spending their hard-earned tax dollars and how you are going to be accountable to them when the ERs continue to close and the wait-list continues to grow.

I am actually a big proponent of active transportation. I believe that we need to build infrastructure that meets communities where they are, but I don’t believe that we should do it over the objection of local communities or over the compromising of preservation lands, wetlands, endangered species and any other type of environmentally sensitive areas.

For us to be able to build up Ontario and to build the network of roads and highways that we need, we need to be able to make sure that those growth areas are going to connect to other places. So it can’t be so random that the highway shoots up along a particular route and enriches certain developers who have massive landholdings. That is not necessarily smart development of highways and road networks.

What we do need to do is invest in transit, high-order transit, low-order transit, and make sure that that system of transit, especially for all those areas that are underserved, including rural areas—are going to be better served. Not everyone is going to have the ability to own a car. We need to recognize that, especially in a growing climate crisis.

I think for those who have grown up in poverty, whether it’s inflicted by war, perhaps political dissent, or challenges of not being able to just make ends meet, you will recognize that everything in your whole self is compromised. Not only are your relationships compromised because you can’t necessarily go out with your friends or perhaps are not able to engage in social activities that take money; you can’t send your children to programs they desperately need. Your body starts to break down. You have a lot of mental health—you have a lot of anxiety and stress. Your blood sugars are weakened. You are malnourished. Your teeth and gums start to erode, and everything starts to fall apart. You cannot possibly think well if you are not eating well. If you’re worried about not having a roof over your head, you’re constantly in a state of precarity when it comes to housing. At any given point in time, you could be on the street.

Each and every one of us is fortunate enough to have enough money to actually live in Ontario, but we know that it is expensive, especially for those on social assistance. This is why we can do better in this government, in this hall, to support people on ODSP.

Thank you for the question.

There are so many things that are missing from this budget. There are probably too many to list, as I’ve got a minute left. But I do want to highlight one thing which I think is critically important.

Earlier this month, Statistics Canada released some new data and it specifically talked about the rise of gender-based violence and how Canada is seeing no end in sight. We’ve seen the highest level of gender-based violence that we have seen in past years, and this has grown an astounding 18%. There’s absolutely nothing in this budget that addresses gender-based violence. I couldn’t even find the words “gender-based violence.” I couldn’t find the words “sexual assault.” And yet we know it’s an epidemic in Ontario.

That is one example of the things that are missing, but we also know that when it comes to missing one critical policy piece, the others fall apart—with respect to court services and support, with respect to housing for women who are fleeing violent situations, with respect to children who are losing the capacity to stay in school because their housing situation is so unstable.