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.

I’d like to thank the member for providing a personal story, for showing their strength and providing a human face to social assistance. I also want to thank the member for their thoughtful discussion of issues that are facing the 2SLGBTQIA+ community, which are completely ignored by this government and their budget.

In their discussion, they mentioned that budgets should have universal participation, and that’s missing from this discussion and this budget. Why is so much detail in this budget left out?

I’m happy to have this opportunity today to rise and speak about the budget on behalf of my constituents in Ottawa West–Nepean.

Ontario is facing multiple crises right now. Our health care system is collapsing around us. The rapid increase in the cost of living is hurting working families, forcing them to cut down on essentials and, in some cases, to choose between food and rent. Poverty is increasing. Visits to food banks are increasing. Homelessness is increasing. We see it in our ridings and communities every day, urban and rural. We have a system right now that is letting the majority of Ontarians down.

This budget was a chance for the government to meet the moment and address these challenges, Speaker. They have failed. There is nothing to fix the health care crisis, nothing to fix the cost-of-living crisis that is hurting so many families, nothing to fix the housing crisis that is making it so hard to find a place to call home and pushing so many people out onto our streets.

Budgets are moral documents; they show our government’s priorities. One thing this government and this Premier have been consistent about is that their priority is their wealthy and well-connected buddies, not ordinary Ontarians, not vulnerable seniors, not people living in poverty, not people with disabilities, not our health care workers and not Ontarians who need to call an ambulance or go to the emergency room—what a lost opportunity to help those who need help the most.

This budget is essentially the same one that was tabled just a few months ago. However, since then, our situation in Ontario has significantly changed. Our health care system—which was already under stress, and let’s be honest, should have received significant investment already back in April—is collapsing after years of being underfunded and ignored.

Our health care heroes who got us through COVID have been so worn down by this government, so disrespected and so poorly compensated that they are now leaving the profession, switching to agency work or cutting down on shifts. It’s not because they don’t want to be nurses working in our public hospitals—they absolutely do—but the mistreatment they’ve suffered, the conditions they’ve been forced to work in every day, and the significant cut in wages that they’ve endured with a 1% wage cap when inflation is over 8%, have led many of them to leave.

This significant increase in inflation is affecting everyone, Speaker. People across the province are being squeezed when they go to the grocery store or pay their bills. Prices are exploding and working people are the ones paying the bills. As I’ve knocked on doors over the past year and talked to thousands of constituents, I’ve heard again and again the struggles that people are facing because incomes aren’t keeping up with prices. Everybody is feeling the squeeze.

So does this budget do anything to address these problems? Absolutely not. This is a stay the course, nothing is wrong, everything is fine budget that maintains the status quo. No problems to see here. But that isn’t true, that’s not what I hear from folks across Ottawa West–Nepean every day. It’s not what I see when I go to the grocery store or fill up my tank. It’s not reflective of reality.

The Premier and his government seem to be living in a different reality than my constituents. This is an Alice in Wonderland budget, Speaker, where up is down and wrong is right. They keep on saying there are record amounts of money going into our health care system, but no one on the ground can see it as they wait 12 hours for care at the Queensway Carleton Hospital.

They say they’re building record amounts of new housing, but McMansions that cost hundreds of thousands of dollars aren’t affordable for everyday Ontarians, and they’re certainly not providing any help to my constituents earning minimum wage or on social assistance.

This was an opportunity for the Premier to show that he understood the problems that we are facing and to do something about it. Now, it’s those who can least afford it who are being asked to pay the price for the Premier’s inaction.

Take the health care crisis for instance. People are waiting 12 hours to be seen at the emergency room at the Queensway Carleton Hospital. The Queensway Carleton staff, meanwhile, are trying to deal with a situation where some days there are more patients in the ER who have been admitted but are waiting for a bed in the hospital than there are beds in the ER. Patients are receiving emergency care in the hallway and in the waiting room. Only 60% of the hospital’s surgical capacity is being used even though we have this massive backlog of surgeries and procedures because there are no nurses to assist the surgeons.

And if you call 911 in Ottawa, Speaker, there’s a good chance you may be waiting several hours for an ambulance. The number of hours where there is no ambulance available at all in the entire city is increasing.

I spoke to one constituent this spring who called an ambulance because of chest pain and dizziness. She waited two hours, worrying the entire time that she would die before the ambulance got there. Her daughter finally came and collected her and took her to the ER. If we don’t do something about this soon, someone is going to die before the ambulance gets there.

Our nurses and doctors and other health care workers are so burnt out. They were here for us during the height of the COVID pandemic. They fought for us and now it’s time for us to pay them back and be there for them when they need it. I know how hard they work because I’ve needed emergency care myself over the past few years thanks to long COVID. I saw how hard these folks work day after day, the personal sacrifices they make to ensure that people like me get the care they need even when the emergency room was packed and there was only one doctor on shift and not enough nurses. But they’ve gotten no respect and no help from this government.

If the government wants to start showing that they are taking this crisis seriously, they could start by repealing Bill 124. They could start implementing the recommendations of the Ontario Nurses’ Association and the Ontario Medical Association. These are the experts. They’re the ones on the front line every day—not the Premier, not the health minister. These people, who save countless lives of Ontarians every day, they’re the ones who know the true needs of our health care system.

When we talk about numbers in the budget, we forget at our peril that budgets are about people. They’re about what happens every day to people in Ontario. And the decisions within budgets can have massive consequences for people. I hear it every day from my constituents, so I want to share some experiences that illustrate the human cost of this do-nothing budget for people across Ontario so that the government can understand how their lack of action is hurting people.

Sherry, a constituent in my riding of Ottawa West–Nepean, reached out to my office because she’s extremely worried about the state of our health care system. Recently, she had to take her 92-year-old mother-in-law to the ER at the Queensway Carleton Hospital. After waiting hours to be seen, her mother-in-law was finally taken in for a CT scan. The results of the scan were inconclusive so she was sent home with the impression that everything would be okay. After two days of not eating or drinking anything, it was obvious that there was something seriously wrong.

Sherry took her mother-in-law back to the ER, this time at the Ottawa Hospital, where they waited seven hours before she was finally seen. She then spent two days in the ER, which she described as a nightmare, with incredible crowding and disgruntled patients waiting six to eight hours to be seen by a doctor. And when patients are admitted, there are no beds available for them. Just imagine waiting days and days for a bed in a little ER cubicle, with bright lights, the impossibility of sleep and the difficulty of obtaining food.

When Sherry’s mother-in-law had her second CT scan, they discovered lymphoma in the brain. After doing an MRI late in the afternoon, she was finally admitted to a room but had to shuffle between hospitals for the next five days while undergoing radiation treatment.

As the mother of a doctor, Sherry sees unequivocally that nurses and health care workers are suffering, and many are leaving the profession because this is just such a difficult time. They do not feel supported by this government.

Another constituent of mine, Peggy Mansyk, recently moved to Ottawa West–Nepean from Niagara with her husband. She was unable to get an appointment with a nephrologist to continue her husband’s care for his condition. When she booked two appointments to see the doctor in July, they were cancelled each time and she was then told that they would be unable to rebook an appointment this summer. Why? Because the clinic is too busy. Because there aren’t enough staff to see the volume of patients required. It will now have been over six months since Peggy’s husband has seen a nephrologist for his care, and they can’t get a family doctor either. The story is shocking and unacceptable, but unfortunately I hear similar stories every day.

Another constituent in my riding suffers from Crohn’s disease. As a result of complications, she has been hospitalized five times in the last two years. In January 2021 she was referred to a colorectal surgical group at the Ottawa Hospital. Because of the great deal of pain she was experiencing, she was eager to have this done as soon as possible. But her consultation was booked for six months later. However, shortly before the consultation she started feeling severe abdominal pain and was rushed to the hospital for emergency surgery to remove two thirds of her colon. Post-surgery her colon flared up, which resulted in another two-week stay at the hospital. She was booked for another surgery in February 2022 to have the rest of the diseased colon taken out, but again it was delayed and rescheduled for April of this year.

Two months later, while visiting family in BC, she was hospitalized once again because of a post-surgical infection and internal abscess. She was treated with antibiotics and told to consult with her health care team once she returned to Ottawa. She was also told to keep an eye on her symptoms for anything similar and that she would need to go straight to the ER if anything similar happened.

Now, with recent ER closures in the Ottawa area, she’s living with the constant fear of being unable to access the health care she needs if she finds herself in an emergency once again. It is also very likely she will need another major surgery in the next few years, but is quite concerned about when that surgery might be scheduled, given the state of hospitals in Ottawa, and what impact this might have on her care.

A key point that I need to make, Speaker, is that the privatization of our health care system that the Premier wants to force on Ontario will only make matters worse. The health minister just announced this morning that the government’s response to our crisis is going to be privatization. What does this mean for Ontarians? It means, instead of getting the quality health care services you deserve through an efficient and highly professional public system, you’ll have to get worse care for more money. Health care costs will soar because middlemen investors will now be pocketing profits on top. The only people that benefit from this will be shareholders making more money at the expense of taxpayers.

Let’s deal with the argument being parroted by the government that outsourcing and privatization will lead to shorter wait times. They absolutely do not. In fact, what is already happening—and if this government’s plan is pushed through, it will get even worse—is that the crisis of short staffing will continue. The public system will bleed doctors, nurses and other health care workers away to the private system. We will continue to have a chronically understaffed public system that lacks the resources it needs to serve the public.

Will the private system that is being foisted on Ontarians serve the public with higher-quality service? Absolutely not. Wait times won’t go down, but private shareholders will make more money. This isn’t scaremongering, because we have a clear example of what a private, everyone-for-themselves health care system looks like. It’s the system used by our neighbour to the south, which is consistently ranked as having some of the worst health outcomes of any Western country. In fact, it is often used as an example of what a health care system shouldn’t look like because it leads to high costs for patients, poor health care services and a huge amount of money for private companies, who make extraordinary profits at the expense of working and middle-class families.

The evidence is clear: Privatized health care leads to poor services. Just look at our long-term-care system and what happened there during the pandemic and what continues to happen to our seniors, persons with disabilities and loved ones living in long-term care. Companies like Chartwell homes put profit and their shareholders before people. Shame on them, and shame on a government that wants to do the same thing to our health care system that they did to our long-term-care system.

Let’s also talk about the cost-of-living and affordability crisis that is hurting families in my riding of Ottawa West–Nepean. Again, this budget does nothing for them. It has nothing in it to protect working people from the rapidly rising price of groceries and rent, with inflation devastating families’ purchasing power. This is a do-nothing budget.

One of the biggest problems we are facing is that large corporations are now using inflation as an excuse to gouge working people. The oil and grocery companies are making record amounts, yet you don’t see gas or groceries coming down. Where in this budget are measures to make these companies accountable to Ontarians? They are nowhere.

For working people and families, this means that every month their paycheques lose more and more of their buying power. This is forcing families to choose between basic necessities, pushing back getting their car repaired, not being able to sign up their kids for a summer camp, not sure if they’re going to be able to get their kids’ school supplies this year.

Everyone, not just those on low incomes, is having to cut back on their grocery shopping. For those on Ontario Works and ODSP, it’s even worse. They have now officially been legislated into poverty. A 5% rise only for those on ODSP is an insult to those who have already been pushed to the brink. They face a situation that’s gone from bad to worse. This will mean that seniors and children are going hungry and homeless. That will be this budget’s legacy and record: profit for those at the top and cuts in real terms for everybody else.

On housing, this government’s answer is simple: give developers more money and let them build more unaffordable McMansions. That doesn’t do anything for my constituents who are struggling to get by. They are being exploited by predatory landlords, with their rights and protections increasingly eroded and disregarded by a Premier who cares more about developers making money than actually fixing the housing crisis and building genuinely affordable homes. I’m hearing stories every day from vulnerable constituents who are paying the price for this government’s inaction.

To give you just one example, a constituent in my riding has been in contact with my office with concerns about safety in her community and a request to transfer housing. She is pleading for help. This constituent has been targeted because of her advocacy for LGBTQ2+ rights in her community, and she is a survivor of multiple assaults. After a recent midday shooting in her small community, she has requested a transfer with Ottawa Community Housing and has been listed on the urgent safety priority list.

Speaker, the current wait-list for urgent safety transfers with OCH is averaging two and a half years. Non-urgent transfers are up to eight years.

This constituent has stated that she is overwhelmed with stress because of the fear for her safety, and incredibly concerned for her mother’s health, who was recently diagnosed with stage 3 lung cancer. She is on Ontario Works and cannot afford to leave community housing because rent in Ottawa is simply unaffordable. She needs the transfer, but fears the harm that the stress will cause both herself and her mother if she has to wait another two and a half years before she gets one.

I hear stories from constituents every day about the unending wait-lists. In Ottawa alone, 500 families are living in motels, including children, because there just isn’t enough affordable and safe housing for them to access. That means parents washing their children’s clothes in the bathtub. It means the only option to prepare food is a microwave. Just imagine 500 families living in these conditions. This is a disgrace. This government should be doubling both Ontario Works and ODSP rates so that people can actually afford to live in this province.

I urge the government to go back to the drawing board and to come up with a plan that will actually address the challenges facing Ontario. It’s not too late to save our public health care system. It’s not too late to help people living in poverty or experiencing homelessness. It’s not too late to support people with disabilities. It’s not too late to invest in genuinely affordable housing. It’s not too late for the government to side with ordinary Ontarians and the issues that matter most to them. Thank you.