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.

Thank you to the member from Sault Ste. Marie.

I’m just wondering if you can build on the additional amendments that are being made and tell us how the government is making amendments related to fines for holding passports and how this goes further to protect vulnerable workers.

Thank you to the member from Sudbury. I know how important workplace safety is to him, and it is for every one of us.

I think that looking at this from a committee perspective so that we can have those types of numbers is reasonable. In fact, I’m quite curious about it myself. I think that it really can be a demonstration of the efficacy of a lot of the work that’s being done.

But the challenge I find, and it is just the greatest challenge ultimately that I see in work sites, is ensuring that the individuals there appreciate the nature of their rights and appreciate the nature of standing up when they need to. A lot of the work that we are doing is trying to ensure that people understand that, appreciate that, and that employers also recognize that their stakes are quite high if they do not have that type of an environment.

I’m very pleased to be able to be a part of a government that recognizes that importance. I’m not sure if I’ve answered; my apologies.

I do want to say—

But I do want to say that this is the third Working for Workers Act, and that is how committed our government is to ensuring that we’re getting it right for the people of the province—

I want to thank the member from Sault Ste. Marie for his debate. It was excellent. He was talking about the Occupational Health and Safety Act and increasing the maximum fines from $1.5 million to $2 million. I don’t expect him to have an answer to this, because I wouldn’t have an answer either, but I was curious when I saw this: How many fines were sent out at the maximum, in the last five years or 10 years? And how many fines in general were sent out along that line that would give us the information for why we would need to have the fines increased?

I don’t expect you to know how many, but I just ask as a commitment, when it goes to committee, if you could find that information, provide it to the committee, so we can make decent recommendations if this actually makes sense to increase the fines. Or maybe the recommendation should be that there should be more fines.

I find it a challenge, Madam Speaker, when I listen to the concerns that get raised by the members opposite. All I seem to notice, or what we seem to see on a repetitive basis, is this consistent approach of, “Well, there isn’t this, there isn’t this, there isn’t this, there isn’t that.” It’s just this “no” mentality. It’s this constant negative mentality. I heard a comment earlier today. It’s why they will always be opposition, Madam Speaker, because everything is just oppositional all the time.

At some point in time I would hope that the opposition would consider their role as policy-makers, their role as people within our Legislature who are here to make a difference in people’s lives and really just say yes once in a while to some of the good work that’s being done for the people of this province.

This is a real challenge for too many people out there. To think of an employer holding a person’s passport or work permits, that’s fairly deplorable—obviously it is deplorable actions on behalf of those individuals.

Our government has looked at trying to remedy that by, again, increasing the punishments, increasing the fines. If it is a corporation, they would be liable to a fine of not more than $1 million, and if it is an individual, to an amount of not more than $500,000 or to a period of imprisonment of not more than 12 months. That punishment, of course, can be both, so you can go to jail for a year and you can be fined half a million dollars. That is a pretty significant punishment. When we in the legal world use terms like “general deterrence,” I think that is a very strong general deterrent for employers who behave in that fashion to recognize that they can’t, and if they do, the punishment is a severe one.

I think it’s a very, very strong reason to look at passing legislation like this so that we can really protect those individuals who are very vulnerable to their employers when they may hold their passport, take their passport, and not return it to them. That is just the type of action that, again, is how we work for workers and we’re protecting workers and standing up for the little guy in this province.

I’m going to ask the member a question about schedule 1 to the present proposed bill. When I speak about the riding of Essex, we have some really great employers in the riding of Essex in the greenhouse industry, in the vegetable-growing industry. They’re so great that the employees, the international agricultural workers, come and work for the same employers year after year, decade after decade, and even generation after generation. That’s how great the greenhouse industry is in the riding of Essex.

But as we all know, in every barrel there’s one or two bad apples. In the event that there is a bad apple who tries to take away somebody’s passport, what does schedule 1 do to protect those workers?

It’s my pleasure to be here to speak about government Bill 79, Working for Workers Act 3, the empire strikes back.

It’s interesting, Speaker; I was asked to give an interview about this bill after it was tabled. They asked me what I thought about it, and I said, “Honestly, it’s a headline bill.” It’s a bill that was talked about a lot during the March break while we weren’t sitting—there were at least three press conferences that I knew of—and then tabled when we came back, and then sort of, surprise, we’re debating the next day.

If you really want to work for workers and help workers, I feel like, share the bill early on. Have the conversation. Let’s work together to figure out where the strengths and weakness are and where we can improve these bills. But I don’t get the sense from that. What I get the sense of from this bill is we want to do some press conferences and talk about the great stuff that we’re doing.

You see it in the questions, Speaker. Through debate today, multiple times the Conservative government has gotten up to ask, “Will you support firefighter cancer coverage?” It’s not in this bill. It was in the press conferences, but it’s not in this bill. “Will you support clean washrooms? Will you support gender washrooms?” It’s not in this bill. It was in the press conferences, it was in the headlines, but it’s not in this bill.

What about the young worker apprentices? I don’t think that’s in this bill either. We had a lot of conversation about it and it was talked about in many headlines, but it’s not in this bill. So it leads me to believe that the government, perhaps, is not as interested in working for workers as they are giving the papers the appearance that they’re working for workers.

I’ll go on a tangent on the clean washrooms. I think it’s a great idea to bring in clean washrooms and gender washrooms. I also think we should do a step above that now, because we no longer need to have porta-potties. There are washroom facilities that you can bring on a trailer that are much nicer than a porta-potty, that also include showers. If we want to really work for workers, let’s not go for the bare minimum. Let’s go above and beyond.

The other thing that stands out to me with the washrooms—which isn’t in the bill, and I’ll move on, I promise, Speaker—is that when I drive down from Highway 69, some of the gas stations are closed in the evening, but they have roadside stops for the truckers. Some of those are not super pleasant. My former colleague from Thunder Bay–Atikokan used to talk about coming down from Superior, and in the winter, they just close the washrooms completely. These are run by the MTO; these are government washrooms. So it makes me wonder, if we can’t keep our own washrooms open and clean, then how good are we going to be at enforcing that a third party does it on a work site? It’s neither here nor there because it’s not in the bill.

Really, this is a bill—and the OFL has called it the lowest of the low-hanging fruit. I have an image in my mind at our camp—cottage for people in southern Ontario; we say camp—big crabapple tree, and every year in the fall when the crabapples fall, the bears come out and just eat them off the ground. It is one of those things—it’s not a terrible bill, but it really is just low-hanging fruit. There are better things that we can do and focus on.

We’ve talked about it in the past. You want to help workers? Paid sick days: I know it sounds like an “us versus them” type thing, but it really would help a lot of workers, and small businesses as well, because when workers are sick and they go to work sick, they get their colleagues sick, including their employer. It would really help people to be able to stay home with their sick kid or stay home when they’re sick themselves. These are the things that workers are looking for. It’s not that this bill is bad, right? There’s supportable stuff in it, for sure. But there’s more we could do. There are more things that workers are looking for from us.

We had some conversation about very unscrupulous employers taking advantage of migrant workers and withholding their passports. Throw the book at them; I agree with you guys on that. I think, absolutely, that’s important. But there aren’t many details about how this is going to work. So the first thing I thought about is, how do we ensure that migrant workers have this information? How do we ensure that they’re aware of the laws? Because I don’t know the laws in other countries that I go to. How do we ensure that migrant workers are aware of these laws? How do we ensure those migrant workers for whom English isn’t their first language, that it is available in their language? How do we ensure there are no reprisals for workers who bring this up? Because it is not uncommon in a workplace that when a worker brings up safety concerns or any kinds of concerns, there’s suddenly a lack of work. There’s enough work for all of his friends. But for the squeaky wheel, there’s no more work. “I’m sorry, lack of work.”

I’ve seen that. I worked in construction for more than a decade. On construction sites, the person who asks questions—all of a sudden there’s not enough work. Construction is booming in the summer, but there’s not enough work for the guy who asked some questions. So if you’re a migrant worker and your family and you are depending on this work every year as you come into Canada and then go back home, and come into Canada and go back home, are you going to risk that you might not be able to come back into Canada if you bring up any safety questions?

The other thing too is, why are we raising this? Perhaps I don’t know, right? Our critic might have a better handle on it, but one of the things I thought about is, we’ve precipitated this. We have examples where this was happening multiple times. How do we drill down with the recommendations that we’re moving forward? Possibly they are, but I’m not aware of it.

Also, we have Ministry of Labour inspectors who go out. Have they been following up on reported cases happening? Are they visiting worksites unannounced to see what’s happening? Do they have the ability, perhaps with a translator, to speak to workers on their own, away from the employer, to really find out what’s happening? That’s what Ministry of Labour inspectors do in my workplace. But my workplace is established. It’s been there for more than 100 years before I came here.

The other part is—and you hear this a lot during debate: Why won’t we do this? I talked about paid sick days, but repealing Bill 124 is in no man’s land. So every couple of days, in the news you find out that the employees have won back pay, employees have filed a grievance, employees have been able to move forward on negotiations, but Bill 124 still exists and the government is still appealing it. If you read the Superior Court of Justice report on this—if you thought you were going to win the first time, you didn’t. You’re definitely not going to win this time. That is ironclad, and it’s a little embarrassing how ironclad it is. But what you’re doing is you’re punishing a lot of workers.

I talked about police officers as well. The police services, when they met with me, the first thing they said is Bill 124 is keeping people out of the service and we need people to protect their communities. The Conservative government loves to wrap their arms around the police, and I think they provide an excellent service. I don’t have anything bad to say about the GSPS where I live, but if you can’t attract people to a profession that every little kid plays when they’re little, something has gone wrong, and what’s gone wrong is Bill 124.

We could be raising the minimum wage. The Conservative government very often talks about the number of unfilled jobs as if people don’t want to go to work. People can’t afford to make ends meet while going to work on minimum wage. They can’t afford the rent; they can’t afford food. What they want are careers. Minimum wage jobs don’t provide careers to people and they don’t provide substance to people. Why do you think it’s acceptable as the government to have workers go to work full time and then take their kids to a food bank to feed them? It’s disgraceful; it really is. You inherited it, but you didn’t fix it, and it’s gotten worse over time. This stopgap with food banks was supposed to be a temporary measure. It is growing now as an industry unto itself.

I would love to go back to my community and tell the food bank, “You’re no longer needed. We’re putting you out of business.” I’d love to be able to tell them that. The reality is, though, more than likely they’re going to be busier than ever, busier than ever and busier than ever. It’s cyclical, because as more and more people go to food banks, less and less people have the ability to donate food or money or time to volunteer to the food bank, and the bottom is going to collapse on that.

There’s a section on occupational health and safety, and I asked my colleague from Sault Ste. Marie if he’d be willing to bring it forward and get the data. I don’t think anyone knows—I mean, some people may know this in the ministry, obviously. It’s about raising the fines from $1.5 million to $2 million. I worked in health and safety for 17 years. I like to pay attention to the news and stuff, and I don’t remember a lot of record-breaking fines. So raising it is fine, but if no one’s being fined, what does that mean?

I do know when it comes to health and safety that the Westray Act, in terms of finding employers liable for workplace deaths, is almost never used—almost never. It’s not that I think that every time there’s a workplace death the employer or supervisor is liable, but if I were to sit on the side of the road and watch cars go by for 10 years or 20 years, sooner or later, someone is going to speed and break the rules. But for some reason, when it comes to workplace deaths, it’s always the worker’s fault. It’s always the worker. That’s what’s missing in here: actually protecting workers.

I only have one second, Speaker, so I’ll save you the time from standing and cutting me off.

Further questions?

It’s now time for questions and answers.

Second reading debate deemed adjourned.

Report continues in volume B.

I appreciate the member’s presentation, but you said that you don’t think there are many bad actors out there and that’s why the Occupational Health and Safety Act fining them $1.5 million to $2 million is not as applicable. But actually there are a lot of bad actors out there.

I would like to also ask you about the holding of the passport for foreign workers. We are giving them a fine of $500,000 maximum to make sure that they will not hold the passports for these individuals. Do you think that it’s doing something to support and protect our workers?

Thank you very much, Speaker, and to the member. Families are struggling. The price of food is going up. Gas is going up. Hydro is going up. Rents are going up. Interest rates are going up. In this budget, there’s nothing in there that says to the families, “Here’s that little bit of help to make your life easier.” As a matter of fact, in things like education, the government is making their lives harder. If you have a child with special needs that are not being met at school, guess what? The message is, you’re on your own. If your child is struggling with school and can’t get the help that they need, here’s the message—

Can you explain to me why the Working for Workers Act doesn’t actually work for workers?

I appreciate the member’s question on Bill 79. He was talking about the price of food and stuff. When we talk about workers and what’s missing in the bill—I mentioned this with Bill 124: When people’s paycheques are restricted, when you’re caught with a maximum 1% increase and inflation is hovering around 6% or 7%, it’s a cut in your wages. And I noticed this summer—it’s five years now that I’ve been elected, and this is the first time when people who are more affluent phoned me and said, “I just did groceries. I can cover it, but I don’t know how somebody with less money can.” It was people phoning me and saying, “I’m worried about my neighbour. My neighbour cannot make ends meet. My neighbour can’t pay the bills. My neighbour can’t afford bread. I can do it, but I’m worried about them.”

That’s why you need to address the budget and repeal Bill 124.

I’ll give you an example of bad actor. I had a workplace before where I was the health and safety rep. I notified the manager that they were going to kill a worker in this location, and a worker died in that location about three months later because of unsafe practices. It was tough on everybody, and the manager and I talked about springtime and how spring isn’t the same anymore, how the smell of it reminds us of Paul Rochette, who is no longer with us.

So I do know there are bad actors. I don’t think they’re all bad actors, but I know that there are people out there who have certain responsibilities under the Occupational Health and Safety Act who aren’t doing them properly and have to be held accountable.

I’m all in favour of this increase; I just want to know that we’re using it effectively.