In my riding of Thunder Bay–Superior North, parents of children with autism face years of uncertainty because they can’t access a diagnosis. Then they wait many more years because they can’t access treatment dollars—and that’s if they can find a service provider remotely close to where they live.

With not even a mention of the word “autism” in the budget, Minister, what will your government do to make diagnostic and clinical services available to parents in northwestern Ontario now, so that their children are not missing out on crucial early years of support?

When providers are not available locally, therapy dollars go to travel, leaving less money for treatment.

Adrianna had to quit her job in Manitouwadge and live with her son in Thunder Bay for months so that he could access essential therapy. Once completed, and Adrianna and her son moved back home, they had to travel back and forth, four hours each way, to continue receiving therapy in Thunder Bay.

Will the government provide incentives to bring practitioners to our region and, whenever distance is a factor, provide travel grants so that all autistic children can access timely diagnoses and treatments?

This petition is entitled, “Vulnerable Persons Alert,” and I would also like to thank the MPP for Hamilton Mountain for bringing forward a very important bill about this issue.

“To the Legislative Assembly of Ontario:

“Whereas there is a gap in our current emergency alert system that needs to be addressed;

“Whereas a vulnerable persons alert would help ensure the safety of our loved ones in a situation where time is critical;

“Whereas several municipal councils, including, Brighton, Midland, Bonfield township, Cobourg and Mississauga and several others, have passed resolutions calling for a new emergency alert to protect our loved ones;

“Whereas over 90,000 people have signed an online petition calling for a ‘Draven Alert’ and over 6,000 people have signed an online petition calling for ‘Love’s Law’, for vulnerable people who go missing;

“Whereas this new alert would be an additional tool in the tool box for police forces to use to locate missing, vulnerable people locally and regionally;

“Whereas this bill is a common-sense proposal and non-partisan in nature, to help missing vulnerable persons find their way safely home;

“We, the undersigned, petition the Legislative Assembly of Ontario as follows:

“Support and pass Bill 74, Missing Persons Amendment Act, 2023.”

I wholeheartedly support this. I will affix my signature thereto and give it to page Jing.

I’ve heard from the government side an apparent interest in looking after human trafficking, about doing something about human trafficking. I was very shocked this morning to hear that the Elizabeth Fry Society of Hamilton lost its funding.

I’m going to create some context: When women are released from prison, they’re taken to a bus stop and they’re given a bus ticket, and that’s it. They’re immediately targets for human trafficking. The Elizabeth Fry Society provides programming to help women become ready to resume civilian life, and also to make sure that they get home safely and that they have safe places to live.

To see that cut is really horrifying to me. My question to the member from London West is, do you have concerns about how vulnerable women are being treated in this budget?

I’m pleased to see that there will be fines there for people who take away people’s passports and so on, but it does worry me, about enforcement. I also worry that perhaps people from the other side haven’t actually visited many of these places where foreign workers are employed. The living situations are often very crowded, unsanitary, and we know that COVID broke out in those places and that workers died, and yet OHIP is being denied to those workers. They also pay into WSIB, and they’re not eligible to collect.

What I would like to know is, what will be there in terms of health care for these workers from this government?

I see this bill as tinkering around the edges but really leaving workers extremely vulnerable in many, many respects. First of all, Bill 124—we know that it is repressing wages, that it is harming workers, that it has resulted in the crisis in our health care system. I can tell you, for example, about Steve, who works at the Thunder Bay regional hospital. His coordinator received a 6% raise on his $106,000 pay. Steve, who’s an electrician, takes home $51,000 and, of course, his wage has been capped at 1% for the last five years.

At this point, there are only two electricians left because they’ve all left for better pay and working conditions outside the public service. When he started work, 15 people in trades were working in the hospital: electrical, painters, building operators and maintenance. These days, at most, there will be five permanent employees and they are vastly outnumbered by private contractors.

There are 18 new beds added to the hospital—great, new beds, but no people to look after the people in the beds—which adds to the workload. Contractor labourers are earning $20 more an hour than Steve as a permanent skilled trades employee.

Now, it seems to be very clear that the position this government has taken on workers, governed by Bill 124, is a deliberate attempt to break the health care system, to break education, in order to privatize. I see this bill doing nothing to help those workers to remediate those situations.

There are other workers also affected by this. For example, corrections. Well, things are not good for workers in corrections. It’s interesting to me, though, because the majority of workers are in female-dominated professions and they’re not being well treated and they’re not being respected. But there are also male workers who are not being respected, including the electricians like Steve. People in corrections, well, they’ve been experiencing wage repression for five years—no right to bargain collectively.

And then there are the conservation officers. Conservation officers protect us and they protect our wilderness. It’s interesting to me because the conservation officers will be the first people to discover whether glyphosate, for example, is being sprayed illegally in our forests. But the conservation officers have actually been misclassified for many years, so not only are they suffering under Bill 124, they have a lower classification, and the skills and responsibilities that they have are not acknowledged.

Now, I worry a great deal—you know, I find it interesting; I’m excited. I was at the Fleming College display yesterday and I thought, “Wow, I’d love to go back to school. This looks really interesting. Some very interesting things are going on.” But I really worry very deeply about young people who may be in grade 10 or 11 being moved quickly into trades when young people on their first jobs are the most likely to experience a serious injury. I know this has happened in my own family. My niece’s partner and his father went to their very first job roofing. They were electrocuted; her partner died. They had a young baby. That’s changed her life forever.

When people are young, they think that they’re invincible. They haven’t got a concept of their own mortality, so that worries me. I truly hope that health and safety will be front of mind for everyone training those young workers, but what I also know is that WSIB has changed enormously from when it was first created 100 ago—by the way, it was a Conservative member who created that, William Meredith—and it does not do what it was intended to do.

Let me give you some stories—also young people. Eugene was a young worker: fit, on top of the world. He had a serious accident in forestry. He’s been in pain ever since, so that’s another 30 or 40 years that he’s been suffering in pain, and he’s been fighting the WSIB ever since.

Then there’s Janet who had something fall on her at work and then was later assaulted at work. Well, her back is so sore she hasn’t been able to engage in anything with her own family for many, many years. WSIB, where are they? She’s still fighting for compensation.

Did you know that WSIB shortchanged all workers who are receiving some level of compensation by cutting their cost-of-living allowance in half? Now they have to go to court to fight the WSIB to get what they are legally entitled to. It’s not fair. They’re not doing what they need to be doing.

Then there’s Jim who worked at the Weyerhaeuser mill in Dryden. This was years ago. Many of those workers were poisoned because the owners of the mill made a decision to not install a particular smokestack cleaner thing—I couldn’t tell you exactly what it is. But what I do know is many, many of those workers were poisoned, and the outcome has been neurological problems as well as breathing problems.

Now, that was in 2002—between 2002 and 2004. We are now in 2023. The WSIB still refuses to recognize these workplace injuries that have changed their lives utterly. The strategy that I see is that they wait and wait and wait until most of the workers have died off, and then they don’t have to pay out so much. That’s exactly what happened with the people who used McIntyre Powder. We had a very important memorial acknowledgement and apology to those workers and their families, and it was the same story there: Many, many of those people had already died by the time that apology came.

I fear that it’s going to be the same story, because I know there are clusters of industrial disease all over the province that are being denied right now. And while they are denied, workers have no income. What do they do? They apply for ODSP. Well, we know how much ODSP is: 1,200 bucks, what is it, a month? It’s around that, yes. We know it’s not enough to live on.

Imagine that you’ve been a full-time skilled worker, you’ve got good pay, you have a mortgage, you felt secure enough to have a family, and then you’re poisoned by your work. You can’t work anymore. Okay, there’s no money for you. WSIB is going to fight you year after year after year, and you’re going to have to apply for ODSP. Okay, now you’ve got $1,200 a month or so.

Oh, yes, you have to start on Ontario Works.

And I can also tell you that if you talk to people who are homeless, find out how many of those homeless people had workplace injuries and were not able to get any support to go on. They’re homeless, and that’s what we do to people.

So I’m extremely worried about what is going to happen to those young workers who are going to enter the skilled trades with so much enthusiasm and life force and energy, and we know that some of those workers will experience serious injuries—statistically, we know that—and we know that they are going to be thrown under the bus, because that’s what happens to all other workers in this province.

There is also another piece that we don’t talk about here very much, and that is the fact that there are these incentives for employers to hide the fact that an accident has taken place. They bribe the other employees with fancy leather jackets, or whatever it is, so that they don’t report the accident. That means that the injured worker, again, is left on their own, his or her own, with no support and no ability to verify what has actually happened to them. It’s become a very dirty business. This government sent employers—what was it?—over $2 billion returned to employers while denying workers the money that they have paid, that they are legally entitled to. They are entitled to that support, but it was given back to employers, and I can tell you workers are so angry about that, so hurt, and the hurt is real because it affects their—

I would like to point out again that the Meredith Principles from over a hundred years ago “rest on the historic compromise in which employers fund the compensation system and share the liability”—

Interjection.

Interjection.

Interjection.

“Employers would be protected from lawsuits by injured workers and be able to calculate payments as a cost of doing business.

“Injured workers would receive prompt benefits for as long as the disability lasted in a non-adversarial system.”

Isn’t that amazing? It’s so far from what is happening now. I implore the government to look seriously at turning WSIB back to what it was intended to do.

Deeming is an incredible thing because you can deem that somebody is able to do a job and you can deem that the job exists, but it doesn’t have to, nor does a worker have to be capable of doing it. I’ve used this example before: You deem that such and such a worker can work as a parking lot attendant in Thunder Bay. Okay? We don’t have parking lot attendants, but if the WSIB deems that you can be a parking lot attendant in Thunder Bay, they will deduct that amount—whatever amount they decided is the amount you would get paid—from your meagre whatever support you are getting.

It’s a fantasy. These are phantom jobs. There are many, many examples of this. It’s part of the dishonesty that has been built into the system.

Was there anything else in that question that I missed?

If they can’t take a day off, if they can’t take a few days off if they’re sick, then they’re going to work and they’re making other people sick. They’re working under duress—

It’s getting late. Thank you, Speaker.

My question is, what is there in the bill or in the government’s plans to protect young workers? We know the WSIB is not there for workers, and so I’m very worried about the lives of young workers. I’m hoping you can tell me how the government will be protecting them.