I’d like to commend my colleague the member for London North Centre on his remarks. We come from a community where there are currently at least 2,000 homeless people who are on the by-name list. There are many other people who are precariously housed. We have 6,000 applications for social housing, representing 11,000 parents and children in our community.

London has identified a need for a minimum of 600 net new supportive housing units. We know from a recent supportive housing complex, Embassy Commons, which has only 72 units, that the cost is significant. That was $22 million for one 72-unit building.

Will this budget enable London or any other municipality to meet the need for supportive housing?

I would like to thank the member from London North Centre for his in-depth debate on the budget.

In Hamilton, we definitely have a huge homeless problem. We’ve seen, in the last half of last year, 22 people die while homeless; the average age, I believe, was 43, and men highly grouped—a lot of criminal activity, drug abuse, mental health issues.

We’ve definitely seen this budget miss the mark when it comes to our vulnerable population.

Can the member talk a little bit more about what he sees in his community when it comes to homelessness and whether the $202 million will even touch the mark when addressing supportive housing in our communities?

I’m pleased to have the opportunity to question the member from the government on the budget bill and to talk about housing, as it affects all of our communities. Hamilton has said that they need approximately $60 million to be able to address the homeless issue in our city. We just had a report that said in the last six months of last year, 22 men died who were homeless—average age of 43. Some 53% of the homeless population in Hamilton are women. We’re watching overdoses, we’re watching violence. The government put in a measly $202 million to help 444 municipalities. CMHA asked for 8% of a budget increase; the government gave them a 5% increase.

How do you think that this budget is actually going to help the people in our communities?

It’s my pleasure to rise today to participate in this debate on the 2023 Ontario budget. I have to say, Speaker, I was really struck by the editorial in the Toronto Star that described this as “An Ontario Budget Without Vision.” The Toronto Star editorial writers said, “If this budget were a Christmas present, it would be a three-pack of white socks. Not entirely useless. But an exercise in going through the motions.”

Speaker, the leader of the official opposition has very clearly described this budget as a document that fails to meet the moment. It fails to acknowledge the reality of the hardships that people in Ontario are facing. For me, as the representative for London West, it certainly fails to address the homelessness crisis that we are seeing in our community, the lack of access to affordable housing, the crisis in access to health care services.

I want to focus my remarks on housing and homelessness.

A couple of weeks ago, we had a proud moment in our city. Indwell, a non-profit supportive housing provider, opened up a new 72-unit supportive housing building in London. That came at a cost of just over $21 million for 72 units of supportive housing. Of that $21 million, the province contributed the absolute bare minimum that was necessary for Indwell to be able to access federal dollars.

It’s encouraging, finally, after years of avoiding any involvement in providing supportive housing, to see this budget make an allocation for supportive housing. But $202 million across the province is going to do nothing to address the breadth of the need that communities are experiencing. The 72 supportive housing units in London came at a cost of $21 million. This government is allocating $202 million for supportive housing for 444 municipalities across Ontario.

In London, we have seen a dramatic increase in the number of people who are homeless on our streets. We currently have more than 2,000 people who we know are experiencing homelessness on a daily basis. That doesn’t take into account the number of people who are precariously housed, who are couch-surfing, who are not counted in the by-name list. We have more than 6,000 applications for social housing in our community. That represents 11,000 parents and their children who are trying to get access to housing they can afford.

Our community came together and acknowledged the health and homelessness crisis as a major priority—as the number one priority—for the city of London to move forward on in a collaborative. So 60 social service providers and 200 individuals came together with funding from a very generous anonymous donor family who provided a gift of $25 million to jump-start an innovative, never-seen-before plan to develop a whole-of-community response to deal with health and homelessness in the city of London.

That plan alone calls for 600 net new supportive housing units that will be necessary just in London alone, and that is just what’s needed in the next three years. So you can see, Speaker, how the $202 million that’s allocated to meet homelessness needs across the province is nowhere near enough to address the concerns of other municipalities outside London.

Now the city of London’s pre-budget submission had actually called on the province for a significant investment of $15 million in capital funding to support the construction of these net new supportive housing buildings, as well as an additional $4 million in annual operating funding for the supportive housing programming. So that is the mention of London that we would have expected to see in this budget. We saw one reference to London—one reference to a school that’s being built. We need new schools, there’s no doubt about it, but this was an announcement that had already been made by this government, and that’s the only reference to the city of London in the entire budget.

London is looking at a $97-million deficit caused by the measures that this government brought forward in Bill 23 that were supposed to tackle the housing crisis that we see in Ontario. Instead, this budget actually confirms that not only did the measures that the government set out in Bill 23 fail to move Ontario forward to meet that 1.5 million homes goal, but we’re actually falling further behind. The numbers that are reported in this budget show that Ontario is lagging in the pace that it will need to meet if we are going to achieve that 1.5 million home target.

When I talk about Bill 23, there’s the financial impact on municipalities with the revenue hole that it’s going to create in municipal budgets, but there is also, associated with Bill 23, the attack on the greenbelt. This budget would have been an opportunity to actually take some serious measures, some bold and strong measures, to deal with climate change mitigation and resilience. We saw none of that in this budget, and that has people in my community very concerned.

The other thing that is of huge concern to people in London is the money that this government is allocating to expand for-profit private health care facilities. Instead of investing in excellent stand-alone facilities like the Nazem Kadri ambulatory surgical care centre that is run under the oversight of a hospital, this government decided not to invest in those kinds of services and hospitals but instead to funnel yet more money to investor-led private for-profit health care facilities. They’ve increased the budget from $18 million last year to $72 million this year, and that has a lot of people concerned.

We’ve heard not just from the Auditor General but from patients of private health care facilities who talk about the aggressive upselling that they have experienced at these facilities. As much as the government would like to say, “Oh, no, you won’t pay at a private health care facility,” the experience of patients in this province has been very different. They have had to pay. They’ve been told they need surgeries that, when they’ve gotten a second opinion, they find out that that surgery was unnecessary. They’ve been told they have to pay for the ability to stay longer than they would otherwise have been asked to stay. So there are huge concerns about funnelling public dollars into private health care facilities.

But, Speaker, just to get back to what I said initially, this is a budget that falls flat. It really ignores the pressures that Ontario families are facing, the affordability pressures that Ontario families are facing, as daily, we get calls from people who tells us about the huge spike in their Enbridge gas bills. The price of food in grocery stores, the price of Internet services, the price of insurance—everything is increasing, and this budget includes no measures to help people deal with those realities.

In particular, for those who are the most vulnerable, the most disadvantaged, those living on social assistance, this government provided a measly 5% increase when we know what’s needed is a doubling of social assistance rates.

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.