I wish a very warm welcome to an incredible person who I expect to be the future member for Windsor–Tecumseh: Jada Malott, who is participating in A Remarkable Assembly women’s forum today.

Welcome to Queen’s Park, Jada.

I’m going to talk for the next 20 minutes about the budget because this is one of our documents and one of our efforts that is really going to propel Ontario through 2023 and into the future. All you have to do is look to the past to know exactly where the future is going to take us, and this bill addresses everything that we need to get us through this year.

I want to look back to some time ago when former Premier Wynne was on a stage with former CEO of Fiat Chrysler, Sergio Marchionne. Now, his exact words when the Premier asked him about expanding Chrysler in Ontario, he looked very quizzically at her and his exact words to her were: “This is not what I would call the cheapest jurisdiction.” He said to her, “You need to create the conditions to be competitive.” Speaker, I would attest that that is exactly what was done in the past, and that’s exactly what the Ontario Made Manufacturing Investment Tax Credit that is in this budget will do for the future.

Speaker, when you look again to the past, you can see what happens when you don’t do things like the Ontario Made Manufacturing Investment Tax Credit, investing in Futurpreneur, investing in places like Invest Ottawa and others.

The previous Liberal government, in their thankfully final report on the economy, threw in the towel on manufacturing and threw in the towel on Ontario. I’m quoting again from their final report on the economy: “The structure of the Ontario economy will continue to shift from goods-producing to service-producing sectors” and this will result in “shifting employment from goods-producing industries, in particular manufacturing, to the service-sector industries.”

Instead of fixing the problems that they created, they threw in the towel. They just gave up. They gave up on Ontario. They gave up on manufacturing. They certainly gave up on northern Ontario. We know that.

We were elected in 2018, and one of the very first instructions from Premier Ford to our entire caucus was that we’ve got to listen to what happened in the past, learn why 300,000 manufacturing jobs fled Ontario, why manufacturers fled Ontario and listen to what they’ve asked. They asked us to lower the cost of doing business. That’s exactly what we did, and that’s exactly what this budget will do through the Ontario Made Manufacturing Investment Tax Credit.

The Premier visited places like Ford, GM, Stellantis, Honda and Toyota, as well as companies in the tech sector, as well as companies in the pharma sector, and all of them said the same thing: “The cost of doing business in Ontario is too high. You’ve got to bring in some relief. You’ve got to lower the burden. You’ve got to lower the taxes in Ontario.” The very first thing that was done was the WSIB, Workplace Safety and Insurance Board. Some people would call it workers’ compensation. That was reduced by 50%. There was so much money in reserves bundled in there by the previous government, taking it from the businesses and piling it into reserves that not only were so overstuffed, they far surpassed any financial requirements, they far surpassed any moral requirements to keep that much money. So that was cut by 50%. That was $2.5 billion annually in the cost of premiums saved by businesses without touching the benefits even a fraction. That $2.5 billion—the 50% cut—was only the beginning. From there, something called an accelerated capital cost allowance—that’s a really fancy way of saying that you can take your equipment and write off the cost of that equipment in-year. That’s a really novel thing to do in North America. Businesses, instead of writing their equipment off over years, can write it off in the same year. That saves businesses a billion dollars a year.

Then the red tape reduction bills began, a series of eight or nine of them now, that saved hundreds of millions of dollars every single year. All the taxes that the previous Liberal government had planned for January 1, all of those hundreds of millions of dollars of tax increases that were to come in on January 1, 2019, we wiped all of those off—gone. Hundreds of millions of dollars did not come on the tax rolls of these businesses on January 1.

The hydro mess that the Liberals created: We also immediately reduced industrial and commercial rates by 15%. You take that combination of capital cost allowance, WSIB, red tape, hydro, taxes: All of these things together at the time lowered the cost of doing business in Ontario by $7 billion each and every single year.

Speaker, you would say, as some have said, “Well, what did the government do? They lost $7 billion each year in revenue. How do you continue governing with that much loss of revenue?”

We’ve always said from the very beginning that lower taxes create jobs and create higher revenue. And nothing proved it more than the budget that came out last week, where we saw that now the annual total of savings is $8 billion—$8 billion in savings every year. What did that do, Speaker? Exactly what it was set out to do: 600,000 new jobs were created in the province of Ontario. That exactly is the result that you would anticipate—one of the two results you would anticipate.

Some 300,000 jobs were created before the pandemic; 300,000 jobs were created since the pandemic. Our government, with these changes—$8 billion a year in savings—created the conditions for those companies to create all of those jobs. Eighty-five thousand new businesses opened in the province of Ontario last year. Again, why? You’ve got a lower cost of doing business.

Again, $8 billion—yes, lower revenue to the province. How did that get made up? Higher employment—600,000 new jobs. Revenue to the government was $154 billion the year we were elected. This budget shows the revenue to the government is now $204 billion, a $50-billion increase, because lower taxes create higher revenue. That’s what’s happened here in the province of Ontario.

More of that is coming. You’ve got the Ontario Made Manufacturing Investment Tax Credit. That brand new tax credit is going to lower the cost of investing in Ontario for local manufacturers who want to grow their business, want to expand their business, just like the WSIB, $2.5 billion in savings; just like the capital cost allowance—in fact, this one is very similar to that—that saved a billion dollars. This is going to save $780 million for businesses to be able to reinvest that money in their companies, just like they did the last four years, where they hired 600,000 workers.

This is exactly what works. This is the formula for success for Ontario. This is going to provide a 10% refundable corporate income tax credit on the investments in buildings and machinery and equipment, all to use in advanced manufacturing and processing, all to build the things we need in Ontario, all of the reshoring that has gone on in the province of Ontario—I’ve talked about it before, a great company down in Windsor that makes Pine-Sol. Pine-Sol was never made here in Ontario. It has been reshored from the States into Canada, and who doesn’t love Pine-Sol? It’s now made here in Ontario, along with dozens and dozens and dozens of other companies that are making products in Ontario for the very first time. Why? Because we’ve lowered the cost of business. We’ve made it attractive to them. This Ontario Made Manufacturing Investment Tax Credit is the next step. That’s the next piece of the puzzle to lure even more companies here to work in Ontario and to hire our families.

If there was any doubt that there was any issue with this at all, think again. We’ll go back to where we were in 2019. Reuters news agency announced that $300 billion was going to be spent on electric vehicles, electric vehicle batteries and parts—$300 billion. Of that $300 billion, not one penny was earmarked for Canada or Ontario. Not one cent under the previous government was earmarked here. They’d given up. They threw in the towel. They gave up on manufacturing, turned manufacturers away, raised the price of hydro, raised taxes, raised all the costs of doing business and sent people fleeing. With $300 billion at stake, we got zero.

In a very short period of time after implementing the things that we talked about—things like this Ontario-made investment tax credit that’s coming, if passed—we now saw $17 billion in announcements made by all of these auto companies in 24 months, and that is before the Volkswagen announcement that was made only a few weeks ago. We’ll learn more about that in the coming weeks as they are here to make their announcements, and we’ll learn just how vast the plant that they plan is and how vast their investment will be, Speaker—without that: $17 billion. And that has prompted Bloomberg, another one of our media agencies, to rank Canada as second in their annual global battery supply chain ranking. We went from zero to second place in the world; first in North America, ahead of the US, incidentally.

We also heard from Site Selection magazine, the very company, the very groups that find sites like Ontario for all of these global companies, whether it’s in pharma, whether it’s in tech, whether it’s in auto—the site selectors gave Ontario the number one ranking. Ontario has been ranked as the most competitive province in the nation. We are the leader. We’re leading the nation in job creation; we’re leading the nation in site selection. On virtually every economic metric you can find, we are number one. Ontario is leading that pack every day of the week.

I’ve said this in this Legislature before, but I do want to repeat it: Every single day of every single week, Premier Ford gets what we like to call his one-a-day vitamin. We send him a text with the name of a company, the city they’re locating in, how many millions they’re investing, how many employees they’re hiring and whether we have any skin in the game. I bring that up again because nothing has changed. Every day—every single day—the Premier receives that note, because the economy in Ontario is robust. We have the same concerns that we see around the world, but we’ve been powering through it with announcement after announcement after announcement after announcement of companies that are investing here because they look at Ontario.

We’ve travelled to several countries in the last while attracting these businesses here, like Volkswagen, and they all have told us two things. The very first thing when we sit down with the executives, no matter which country we’ve been in or no matter what company we visited in that country—they tell us the same two things. It’s really interesting to hear this. The first thing they tell us is that they look in this very troubled world that is coming off a pandemic for the last couple of years, and they look at Russia’s illegal war in Ukraine, they look at the elephant in the room of China and all of the turmoil that the world is going through and all of these tough economic decisions that have to be made. They tell us, to a company—they look to Ontario as a sea of calm. They say, “You are stable. You’re a reliable partner. We know what we’re going to get. We’re putting our money with you.” All of them have said that to us.

The second part of what they’re saying is that Ontario is a safe place. It’s a safe place for their executives. It’s a safe place for their employees. It’s a safe place for their families to be. It’s universal that they’re doing this, and that is also why they’re coming here.

You need the fundamentals in place. You need to have a skilled workforce. They like our 65,000 STEM grads we have. Every single year, we’re producing 65,000 science and technology and engineering and math graduates.

We have a tremendous life science ecosystem here: all of the companies that are making medical technologies, making pharmaceuticals. It is a huge life sciences sector. We’ve had $3 billion in new life science investments in the last couple of years.

They love our tech sector. I think for four or five days in a row the notes that I sent to the Premier were of brand new tech companies who are investing hundreds of millions of dollars here in Ontario. Look at Nokia: only a few months ago, $340 million invested in Ottawa. Telus: $23 billion invested in Ontario, 9,500 new employees coming to Ontario with that company alone.

Now, the Ontario Made Manufacturing Investment Tax Credit is the newest piece, the newest tool that we have in our tool box. We will now add this to the long litany of things where we talk to companies about how we lowered the cost of doing business by $7 billion. Well, it’s now $8 billion. When we put this Ontario Made Manufacturing Investment Tax Credit—we talk about 600,000 new employees. That number will grow too, because these companies are going to hire people.

There are a couple of other things that are exciting as well. In Ottawa, we’ve seen a real investment in the tech sector. If you look between 2016 and 2021, in San Francisco, they added 14,000 employees in those five years in the tech sector, brought them up to about 380,000 employees in Silicon Valley. But if you look between Toronto and Waterloo, we’ve added in the same period 88,000 new tech employees, just from Toronto to Waterloo. That brings us up to about 315,000, just between Toronto and Waterloo. We grew 350% faster than Silicon Valley in the last five years.

Speaker, if you add Ottawa, there are 555 tech companies in Kanata alone. There are 80,000—