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.

Further questions?

I am proud to be part of a government under a Premier that is fighting for my generation and the generations to come, and home ownership. The members opposite had an opportunity to address the housing crisis in Bill 23 and they voted against it. They voted against cutting fees on non-profit housing, on affordable housing and making it more affordable. In the GTA, in Mississauga, development charges add $160,000 on the average house.

On this side of the House and in the middle over there, we will continue to fight for home ownership, for renters and for affordability in this province. Yes, people have left, but we’re going to fight to bring them back because I know this government will continue to fight, again, for my generation and the future generations in this province.

Speaker, through you to the member opposite, I thank her for her advocacy on this and the health care file, and I know we’ll continue to work to support our volunteer firefighters and professional firefighters across Ontario.

Economist Mike Moffat put out a report just recently showing that typically in Ontario, about 80,000 people move and about 80,000 people move in from other provinces. This past year, under this government, we have seen 50,000 more people leave Ontario than are coming to this province, and many of the people who are leaving are the skilled trades workers that we will need to build the houses that we need here in Ontario. Many of them are the health care workers that we need to shore up our health care workforce. And the reason that they are giving for leaving is because of this government’s failure to deal with the affordability crisis.

I would like to hear from this member what the government is doing to try to retain those mainly young adults who are leaving the province in droves, going to Alberta, going to the east coast because this province has simply become too unaffordable.

Thank you to the member from Perth–Wellington for his speech. In my riding of Newmarket–Aurora, I had several conversations with the Central York firefighters; in the House here, I had a meeting with our Ontario firefighters association, and they were asking for us to consider expanding the list of presumptive cancers. I would like the member to speak to that, because to me, our government was listening. Can you please speak to what we are doing as far as presumptive cancers are concerned for our firefighters?

I was hoping that I’d hear something from the member about the bill, but I only heard this dissertation and this indictment of the WSIB and the worker’s compensation plans.

But then I heard from the member from Sudbury talking about recruitment into the police forces. I can tell you, when I talk to people who are considering a career in policing, it isn’t the compensation, because they’re well compensated. Police are well compensated. But I’ll tell you what they’re concerned about. They’re concerned about getting into a career when people like the NDP continue to go around and call for the defunding of the police and look for every opportunity to attack the brave members of our police forces across this province and across this country.

If you want to attract people to the police forces, stop attacking them every chance you get and end with your ridiculous campaign of defunding the police. That’s what you need to do.

I’d like to thank the member from Thunder Bay–Superior North for her comments that are truly in support of workers. It’s disturbing that the WSIB has taken so long to recognize workplace exposures and is still rather reluctant to recognize multiple exposures, especially where there are clusters of industrial disease.

As an omnibus bill, Working for Workers could have addressed so many other pressing issues which impacted workers. I wonder if the member could talk about the disturbing problem of deeming, or phantom jobs.

Thank you to member from Thunder Bay–Superior North for her comments. There are a lot of good things in this bill. Some of the things that I thought the member opposite would be supporting include the fact that we’re having a provision in here to make sure we have sanitary washrooms on construction sites to promote worker dignity, as well as make sure we have women-only washrooms and increase the standards for bathroom hygiene on construction sites for all workers, and also that we have personal protective equipment which is designed for women and fits them properly. I would just ask the member opposite if you would support those parts of what we’re offering here, because it’s going to help get more women into the trades.

Questions?

The member from Thunder Bay–Superior North.

You have to start on Ontario Works.

That’s what we do to workers.

She talked about Steve the electrician. The Minister of Labour likes to talk about the good trades jobs, how important they are, but he doesn’t want to talk about Steve. He doesn’t want to talk about public sector electricians, where contractors make $20 more than they do.

I wonder if the member could explain to us how Bill 124 capping workers’ wages, like Steve’s, at 1%, is not the Conservative government working for workers, especially when you look at how much Steve’s boss makes and that he was able to get a 6% increase, while Bill 124 capped Steve’s wages, which were much lower, at 1%.

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—

I would like to review a quote from Jeffery Lang, president and CEO of the WSIB, regarding the announcement of expanding cancer coverage for firefighters: “When anybody is facing a work-related illness, we are here to help. Our team gets to work as quickly as possible to help people and this change will help us get started faster for firefighters and fire investigators with thyroid and pancreatic cancers.”

My question to the member is, will you vote with us on this bill and vote to support our firefighters?

I very much appreciated the comments from my colleague the member for Thunder Bay–Superior North. I wanted to ask her thoughts as to what it says about a government that basically, at the very same time they bring in this legislation, eliminates paid sick days for workers in this province. After eliminating two paid sick days that workers had back in 2018 when they were first elected and now eliminating the temporary program, does that suggest that this really is a government that is working for workers, that would do something like that, that would take away the ability of workers to access paid sick days so they can stay home if they are sick?

Further questions?

Further debate? I recognize the member for Essex.

Further debate?

Madam Speaker, thank you very much. Good evening. I’m so happy to have been called upon to offer—

The member for Essex does such an outstanding job speaking to all the government legislation that he’s so proud of and fond of because it says such wondrous things for the community of Essex and the rest of the people of Ontario.

I’m happy to be able to stand up and speak to the Working for Workers Act. It is a great piece of legislation, and it’s great for a number of reasons. When you look at the facts, when you look at how much effort our government, under the leadership of our Premier Doug Ford and Minister of Labour Monte McNaughton—the outstanding work that’s been done by our government to put workers first. When we talk about working for workers, it means something. It means a lot. It means that our job here is to ensure that—

Interjection.

Every element of work that’s being done in this particular area has been so important in making sure that we’re not leaving anyone behind. Whether we’re talking about workers, our soldiers who are deployed in Afghanistan, brave men and women who put their lives on hold to protect our freedoms, these types of changes are going to help address reservists and troop shortages in the Canadian Armed Forces and ease the burden felt by current reservists and members of the Armed Forces. If these are passed, these changes are going to make Ontario the first province in this entire country to allow reservists to take time to recover from an illness or an injury as a result of participating in these activities.

These are just some of the areas of work that we are doing to support our men and women in the Armed Forces, and we’re working on introducing new legislation that would guarantee that military reservists can return to civilian jobs after deployment even if they are going to need extra time to be able to recover from any type of physical or mental challenges they would have had as a result of their time in the reserves. It’s important to note that they are not being paid when they’re on reservist leave; however, the employment is deemed to be continuous. Seniority and length of service credits will continue to accumulate during their leave. They’re entitled to be reinstated to the same position, assuming that position still exists at the time they are able to return or to a comparable position if it is not. The employer is not required to continue any benefit plans during an employee’s leave.

These are just a few points touching on some of the work that our government is doing, again under the leadership of our Premier, to ensure that reservists are being treated with dignity and with the respect they deserve after putting their lives, in many respects, on hold to support our freedoms.

Interjections.

I think the work we are doing as a government to make changes to mass termination entitlement and job description benefits for workers in Ontario is outstanding as well. During the COVID-19 pandemic, we saw such a tremendous shift to remote work—the largest shift to remote work that we’ve seen in history. In the fourth quarter of 2022, about 2.2 million people in Ontario were working from home with about 1.4 million doing so on an exclusive basis and about 800,000 doing so on a hybrid basis.

Now, just take that into perspective: I think what we learned through COVID was there were some tremendous positives. We did see that opportunity for people to be able to work from home, which presented an incredibly opportunity for them to upskill themselves as well. Being able to work from home gives a tremendous addition to that work-life balance, but for a lot of people, they were afforded an opportunity to upskill. For a lot of people, it was an opportunity to be able to examine their current position they were in and look at other opportunities that might exist to them.

That is something that we saw change in a tremendous way, and we saw also as a result of that the opportunity to have people move into a lot of our smaller communities across this province. Certainly myself, coming from the city of Sault Ste. Marie, I was always proud to be able to see a growth in my community of people relocating because of the work-life balance you can have in a smaller place. And when you look at just the simple cost of real estate in the downtown Toronto core, and what people saw as an opportunity to be able to move from the downtown core and move into smaller communities across this province but still be able to work in that downtown core, that was a tremendous positive.

There is a changing economy, though, of course, that comes with that. Our government wanted to respond to that increase in remote work and so we have introduced legislation that is putting workers first. Our government is updating how a workplace is defined in Ontario’s labour laws to extend the same protections that everybody else is afforded to those people who are working from home. Furthermore, we’re also proposing changes that would require employers to provide new hires with basic information in writing about their job, such as pay, work location and hours of work, before their first shift. These are, again, building on changes from our previous iterations of the Working for Workers Act, 2021 and 2022 and are part of our plan to make Ontario and help the province become more competitive.

Now, in terms of the size of business that would be able to meet this proposal for mass terminations, it would apply to medium- or large-sized employers if there are 50 or more employees, now including employees who work exclusively remotely. If those individuals were terminated at an employer’s establishment within a four-week period, mass termination provisions under the ESA—the Employment Standards Act—would click in to protect those workers’ interests. These mass termination policies are providing workers with greater notice or pay in lieu of notice. Mass terminations can make it more difficult for employees to find alternate employment, and by providing employees with these protections, once again our government is standing up for workers who are being laid off in large numbers at the same time.

When we look at provisions for health and safety, this is an area—I know I only have a few short minutes to speak about this, but realistically, I don’t know if we’re ever going to be able to do everything that we need to do to make sure that workplace safety is always treated as of the most paramount importance in the workplace. It’s one of these areas that, as much as from a policy perspective, a lawmaker’s perspective, we want to do everything we can and we are putting a great deal of effort into doing everything that we can as policy-makers to ensure that workplaces are the safest they can be, but of course, on those work sites—a message that I would like to just say in about a minute or less here: Having been personally impacted in my own family and friends lives with having lost loved ones and very close friends in workplace accidents, I can say that it is imperative that every worker on every job site is always making sure that their safety comes first. That is absolutely imperative.

Our government has been working hard to ensure that we can create that environment where that very sense that individuals possess and ought to possess that they need to be working in safe environments—where all of the deterrents are present for the employers to ensure that they’re creating safe environments. Some of the work that we’ve done in that area is ensuring that we have the highest maximum corporate fines in Canada under workplace health and safety legislation.

For instance, under our new act, the new—

I enjoyed listening to the member’s debate, but I didn’t hear him talk about paid sick days. Paid sick days are something that we know is greatly needed across this province. When the government first came into power in 2018, they cut the measly two paid days that were there. And then we were able to work hard enough as New Democrats to convince the government to bring some in throughout COVID, but those paid sick days are expiring March 31. We know that many people across this province are still needing those paid sick days. We still see folks with COVID being forced to take 10 days off.

Does the member not think that a true “working for workers” bill would have included paid sick day measures to ensure that people have the ability to stay home when they’re sick and to not spread any illness that we know is airborne currently in our communities?

Unfortunately, we are out of time for debate.

It is now time for questions and answers.