The minister really did a good job of avoiding actually answering the question.

Windsor Salt workers are here today, members of Unifor Locals 240 and 1959. They’ve been on strike for 40 days, fighting the outsourcing of their jobs by US-based holding company Stone Canyon Industries. These workers and every other worker in Ontario deserve to have their rights and jobs protected.

The Conservatives had many opportunities—since the legislation has been tabled 16 times—to support anti-scab labour legislation, and they didn’t.

You can’t honestly say you’re working for workers and vote against anti-scab legislation. It just doesn’t jibe.

Speaker, Windsor Salt workers and workers across Ontario want to know: Will the Premier stand up for collective bargaining rights, stand up for workers, and finally pass anti-scab legislation? No more rhetoric. Look right at those workers and tell them yes or no.

Interjections.

This morning we had workers drive all the way from Windsor, from Oshawa, from Toronto coming to Queen’s Park to ask the government to bring forward anti-scab legislation. The reason they’re coming to Queen’s Park is that they see the detrimental impact on scab workers themselves, who tend to be vulnerable employees, vulnerable Ontarians, who get hired to cross picket lines. But they also see the long-term effect on the people who cross the picket line, on their family, on their community, when at the end of the day, it does not help the employer and it does not help the workers to drag this on. Do you think anti-scab legislation would be working for workers?

Earlier today, workers from Windsor, workers from Oshawa, workers from Toronto came to Queen’s Park. They came to Queen’s Park because they are part of this very small percentage, about 2% of collective agreements, that do not get negotiated but end up in a strike or lockout.

Unfortunately, their employers decided to hire replacement workers, scab workers. Most of those replacement workers don’t speak English or French. They are new arrivals to Ontario. They don’t know the labour law, but they will pay for the consequences of that work for the rest of their lives.

Does the member think that it would be working for workers to enact anti-replacement workers legislation in Ontario, like they do in British Columbia and Quebec?

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.

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.

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%.

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.

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 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?

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—

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.

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?

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?