Thank you, Speaker. It’s always good to see you in the chair.

I’m proud to rise on behalf of the people of Toronto Centre to speak to Bill 46. This is an omnibus bill with a series of housekeeping amendments that are largely supportable. There are nine schedules.

When this bill came before the House, using our time in debate—it does make me wonder whether or not we are actually cutting red tape. There seems to be a lot of talk about cutting red tape—but the actual motion of cutting the tape, perhaps not so much.

Because there are nine schedules and we don’t have a lot of time to go through all of them, I’m going to try to go through at least the portions I have flagged that I want to raise specific issues with.

I’m going to begin with schedule 2 of the bill. Schedule 2 extends the allowable time of service for retired provincial judges serving on a part-time basis from 50% to 75% of full-time service.

I recently spoke with members of the Federation of Ontario Law Associations regarding Bill 46; specifically, around schedule 2 and allowing retired judges to take more time back onto the bench. I need to be clear that I have a great deal of respect for judges and those who have retired and those who’ve served us incredibly well in the judicial process. However, I was taken back by the reaction of the members of the federation when they heard about this specific change. First of all, they were surprised. They had not been consulted about this change, and they want to know who was pushing for it. Many legal workers shared experiences that they had during the pandemic, when judges near retirement struggled with the simple use of technology, such as Zoom, which was underpinning the virtual court system and their court duties. They were apparently not ready for this change, and they were not able to do their work in the most professional and timely manner. Secondly, I heard from people who work in legal clinics, and the discussion came about this in this way: They said that trying to fix this problem in the courts from this particular angle was simply wrong. What they did share with me is that they needed more judges and more court staff to ensure that everyone has a right to a timely and fair trial. That is something that everyone is convinced is needed in order for the backlog to be cleared. I heard this loud and clear, and, frankly, the members did also describe that there was a missed opportunity by the government, by not addressing the issue structurally.

How could we expand the talent pool of our bench by bringing in more lawyers and giving them the experiences that they need to become the talented judges that they will be? This is something that requires a fundamental investment of new money.

I want to quote one lawyer who told me after hearing about this proposal—they wish to remain anonymous:

“I have to express extreme concern about this proposal to, rather than appointing new judges, bring back older judges because I can tell you that it was a disaster in the Milton courthouse. It created a complete disaster for children and families in the hopper for over a year during the pandemic. We had two Family Court judges that one Family Court judge ended up having to go on medical leave and another Family Court judge went on medical leave and then left. And as a result, we had many, many per diem retired judges coming to our court on a daily basis with no knowledge of the files, no continuation of the files, a journey many, many of the court files as long as they could, until we finally got an appointment that took, I think, almost a year to get the new appointment. And many I’m telling you the child protection lawyers, the lawyers representing the families were all very upset because it was obviously no continuity in the court cases. I think that by allowing more judges to come back and sit on a per diem basis is going to make a much bigger mess of the entire system right now, which is already in a big mess because of COVID. So I’d like you to know, I think you need to please investigate this” to ensure that you can hire more judges, that you should appoint more judges. We’re going to need more—instead of producing more per diem judges—and it’s just going to create more havoc.

Again, I want to stress that retired judges can be an extremely powerful tool in helping the court system move faster.

I also want to respect the professional experience of practising lawyers, and when they reacted to this news with disappointment and concern, that gave me absolute reason to pause.

While we’re on the topic of the legal system, I want to talk about schedule 8, which makes amendments to the Provincial Offences Act. Schedule 8 reverses prospective reforms of the early resolution process for provincial offences. The prospective reforms were passed in the 2017 budget bill to further government aims to streamline and modernize the court system by supporting early resolution of cases where appropriate. The Provincial Offences Act will continue to provide for early resolution but will no longer provide for these discussions to happen through email, would no longer permit the prosecutor to withdraw charges without a court appearance, and would require that a defendant appear before a judge in all cases where a plea agreement is reached. This change appears to be a step backwards from the goal of increasing efficiency in our court system. This change would get rid of an amendment that would never be implemented, and I understand that this government has been asked by municipalities to remove it, as this is an amendment which would be exceedingly difficult to implement.

Both schedules 2 and 8 are intended to propose changes to speed up the experiences Ontarians have in their court system, and ultimately the intention is to drive down the backlog, but we’re hearing from practising lawyers that this is not going to be the outcome that you are seeking.

I want to quote Daniel Goldbloom from the Law Society of Ontario, who described Ontario’s case backlog: “If you ever speak to an American about how long it takes to get to trial in Ontario, they’re shocked. They can’t believe that it can take a year and a half for trials in the lower courts, and up to two and a half years in the Superior Court.”

Nicole Myers, an associate professor at Queen’s University who studies our court system, said, “Across Canada, 67% of the people in provincial custody are in pretrial detention, and in Ontario” that number goes up to 77%. “The rate with which we hold people in pretrial has more than doubled in the last 40 years, and the number of actual individual people held in pretrial detention has more than quadrupled in that time....

“Keeping a person in pretrial removes them from the community and may provide some short-term safety; this protection, however, is temporary. It is undermined by the long-term negative public safety outcomes. We need to be mindful that custody is extraordinarily expensive, but it’s also criminogenic. Even short periods of time in custody make it more—not less—likely that someone is going to commit offences in the future. And there are many reasons for this, some of which include pretrial being overcrowded, harsh, dangerous, and rehabilitative programs being virtually absent. Removing people from the broader community is also incredibly destabilizing, disrupting connections to the community, families, employment and other social supports.”

Speaker, legal experts are telling our government how to speed up the courts. They are trying to make Ontario safer. They’re trying to say the following: Resource the courts, hire the staff, and ensure that the court schedule is operating efficiently. Use the real estate that you have. Get it going.

We should be embarrassed that Americans cannot believe how slow our system is, when Ontario leads America in most indicators of well-being.

Again, if we really want to cut red tape, we have to help Ontarians navigate the invisible rules and procedures that hold our legal system together by reversing the cuts to legal aid and increasing funding to legal aid.

I want to dig into how inadequate legal aid funding is creating so-called red tape for Ontario.

First, our court system has many precedents and rules that internally operate to ensure that all Ontarians have the right to a fair trial. This puts a significant onus on the courts to determine that people charged with provincial offences are treated equitably and fairly. I need to stress this point: Many court cases are mostly, if not entirely, resolved before going to trial, in pretrial meetings and resolution meetings. Here, legal aid lawyers are the subject matter experts in fighting to ensure that marginalized people’s rights are protected and that due process occurs. This takes a massive and hugely expensive burden off our courts. It saves us court time, thereby saving taxpayers money.

Secondly, legal aid funding ensures that people’s time in court is well used, as much as possible. When people represent themselves—and this does happen—it is often not only detrimental to the likelihood of the success of their cause, but also the time of everyone in the courtroom.

Third, legal aid clinics help stabilize people’s housing and other essential life needs so that they can then stabilize their lives and mitigate the crushing impacts of poverty that so many in our court system face. They often serve a rehabilitative role, connecting people to local health organizations and to local service providers, and helping people access the government benefits to which they are legally entitled.

It is for these reasons that studies in other jurisdictions regularly find that legal aid is at least revenue-neutral, if not a net source of savings, for government spending. But this government has not reversed the cuts to legal aid made in their first year of government, and the legal aid clinics and practising lawyers are all crying for help—not to mention those who are recipients of legal aid.

A member of the Federation of Ontario Law Associations was discussing how to modernize access to justice in Ontario and told me: “We’re concerned about the financial cut-offs in terms of whether people are eligible because there’s such a gap between the top limit of eligibility for legal aid and people who are unable to afford a lawyer. We have major areas within the province where no one is able to access their legal aid certificate. And that’s a huge problem for us within the clinic system. We also in the clinic system have funding issues because of inadequate compensation” for lawyers “we’re having a great deal of difficulty maintaining staff. So without continued adequate funding going into that system, we’re really undermining the administration of justice—particularly for our most low-income residents.”

Another lawyer told me, “One of the things that I’m hearing a lot from my members is that a great deal of the backlog and wasted judicial resources in the system comes from the high turnover rate that we are seeing. It’s difficult maintaining staff who have experience and who are more efficient in particular areas. So I encourage you” to take a “look into that. Because I know that it has been impacting my practice and the practice of others that I represent.”

Speaker, lawyers from all over Ontario are in agreement: Our legal institutions need to be better resourced, and funding must be in place in this budget coming this Thursday. If we are to retain the good staff, the qualified and experienced staff, in order for us to deliver this service most effectively, then we need to make those investments. Every business will tell you that investment in people is the number one way to get the best outcome—and if you want to call it “return,” the very best return.

I now want to discuss schedule 5, which deals with oil and gas resources. This bill does nothing to address the 27,000 oil and gas wells across Ontario, 15,000 of which have been identified as abandoned and almost 4,400 that have been identified as posing an immediate and significant risk to both property and life. The Auditor General talked about this in her very recent report. She said the province failed “to identify and inspect high-risk oil and gas wells, even though improperly maintained or abandoned wells are a safety risk for people.” We know this to be true because we had the explosion in Wheatley, Ontario that flattened their downtown core and sent 20 people to the hospital.

I want to read the Auditor General’s report into the record on this matter:

“Few oil and gas wells are being inspected annually. The ministry has not assessed the risk of all 27,000 oil and gas wells in the province, and is therefore unable to determine whether it is focusing its proactive inspection efforts on the highest-risk wells. Furthermore, based on our analysis of inspection data in the ministry’s database for oil and gas wells, we found that only 19% of oil and gas wells in the province have been inspected since 2005. Of those, 38% of inspections occurred more than a decade ago. The low rate of inspections could lead to a risk of complacency by well operators.”

This is red tape cutting? You’re putting people’s property, their lives, their communities at risk.

“Unreliable information on how many high-risk wells have been plugged. Wells that are poorly maintained and improperly plugged can lead to contaminants getting into the province’s groundwater or rising to the land surface around the well. Based on our own analysis, 6% or 1,625 wells are not in use and have not been plugged. A further 30% or 8,011 were plugged prior to 1970 when materials used to plug them included logs, gravel and lead which can lose their integrity over time. As a result ... 36% of wells could pose a danger. Further, we found that three high-risk wells have been leaking since ... 2018, but only one is scheduled to be plugged during 2022-23. We were told that the gas explosion that took place in Wheatley, Ontario in August 2021, was in part due to a well that had been plugged in the 1960s, where the materials used to plug the well had deteriorated over time.”

Speaker, these incidents can be prevented. Lives can be saved. Property and communities can be protected. That’s not red tape; that’s just providing good government. If we want Ontario to be open for business, we need to think of red tape not just as regulation but all of the avoidable systemic barriers that matter to the lives of Ontarians and people doing business here in this province. This bill is opening the act governing oil and gas to allow carbon sequestration and storage for oil and gas recovery. Right at the time when we collectively need to find ways to keep fossil fuels in the ground, this section of the bill wants to put carbon back into the ground only to squeeze it out for more oil and gas at a later date.

To be clear, it is not offensive that I’m seeing that we can move some carbon into the ground, but I am worried that maintaining our society’s commitment to an industry of the past is not any kind of innovation; it’s certainly not the direction that Ontarians are expecting from this government.

This brings me to schedule 9 of the bill. Schedule 9 tinkers with the Workplace Safety and Insurance Act, removing the requirement of a strategic plan but still requiring that the board meets four times a year. On one hand, injured worker groups are concerned with the removal of the requirement of WSIB to produce a five-year strategic plan, as they have made submissions about this plan. However, the injured workers additionally point out that none of their plans have been adopted.

One way that this bill could actually cut red tape for WSIB would be by ending the controversial practice of deeming. Jessica Ponting, a legal worker at the Industrial Accident Victims Group of Ontario, has described deeming as an egregious and pernicious tactic used by WSIB. WSIB identify suitable occupations that they think the worker can do, and then they cut off the workers’ benefits as if they were working that job, even though many workers never find a job that they can do.

Migrant workers said, in an open letter to this government last year, “We believe that the workers’ compensation system is racist and that we are treated very badly. This systemic racism does not treat us like we are human.” The letter says, noting that migrant workers are hit hardest by the province, “Rather than helping us heal, the current system makes it worse for us. We have been denied the right to function as humans in Canada. For those of us who have been repatriated, we are returning to our home countries with injuries and traumas.” That is their souvenir after working and toiling in our factories and our fields in Canada.

If this government really wants to cut red tape surrounding WSIB and Bill 46, this government would have made the acknowledgement that COVID is an airborne disease. This has been said by the World Health Organization and by the Centers for Disease Control. It has been singled out by every order of public health in Canada, but it has not necessarily been said in this House, and it has not been said by the members of the government side. This matters, because workers who are getting COVID on the job—that is still happening, and sometimes those COVID symptoms are long-lasting. Health Canada estimates that up to 15% of people now have long COVID, and COVID-19 Resources Canada projects that over 858 Ontarians contract COVID every single day in our province. They have life-limiting symptoms that last more than three months—they’re not able to go back to work any single time, but WSIB doesn’t cover them. It’s a safety net, WSIB. Our safety net is supposed to be integrated into our building code. Our health guidance and recommendations are there to avoid the suffering, but instead it reinforces the suffering. It actually condemns the workers to less and not more.

These are the issues that Ontarians are dealing with, and these are the issues that are not necessarily dealt with in Bill 46. So is it a perfect bill? Far from it. Can this government do more? Yes, they can.

At this point in time, Speaker, I want to thank you for the opportunity to rise to speak to the House. It is an absolute honour to deliver these remarks.

I’m rising this afternoon to speak to Bill 46 which, if I understand it from my friends in government here, is about reducing red tape. In my remarks this afternoon, I want to focus on three schedules of the bill. I want to focus on schedule 5 and schedule 6 to highlight what the bill could do more on taking the climate crisis seriously. The member from Guelph spoke about this earlier this afternoon. I also want to begin by speaking briefly about schedule 9, the changes to the WSIB from an angle you may not expect, Speaker, and I hope you’ll give me a little latitude with this.

We had a significant event last week in the province of Ontario. On Thursday last week, the province of Ontario saw the election of the first Black Somali Canadian disability rights activist to this chamber in this place’s history: Sarah Jama. The people of Hamilton Centre elected Sarah Jama to take her seat in this place, and she’ll be doing that next week I’m excited to tell members of this House. For those of you who haven’t had the chance to meet Sarah, you’re in for a real treat, and for those of you who are from the great city of Hamilton, you know about Sarah and you know about the work she’s tried to do to help people with disabilities, and beyond that, just to be an incredible community organizer in her own right.

I had occasion to talk to her earlier this afternoon; she came and caucused with us for the first time. I asked Sarah as we were getting ready to move into that caucus meeting, “What are you feeling right now?” She said, “You know, I’m feeling the burden of a responsibility.” The burden of a responsibility as someone coming from a physical disability, coming from the legacy city of Hamilton—a significant amount of folks in the city of Hamilton live with physical or mental disabilities or challenges all the time. She told me, “I feel a responsibility to come into this place and not just criticize the government but to bring something positive home to my community and do something with the resources we’re given in my community.” I thought how fitting to be debating what this government could be doing with this bill to reduce red tape for people with disabilities.

The member for Thunder Bay–Superior North has spoken about it in a number of the question she has posed this afternoon. I think about the penalties assessed to persons with disabilities when they enter into a romantic relationship with someone—even with a modest income, immediate penalties in their income. You and I both know, Speaker, as people who live in Ottawa and work with people with disabilities, that they live in crushing poverty already. People are living in crushing poverty already, and there should be no penalty for falling in love. There should be no penalty for making administrative errors on one’s account, for missing a letter.

But right now, I want to impress upon this government that a way you can improve this bill is by dealing with the incredibly suffocating amount of red tape that people with disabilities and their loved ones and their families and their friends, through them, face every single day.

And do you know what is also related to that, Speaker? I want to impress upon the government that working for this government right now are thousands of caseworkers who work with folks on ODSP and OW who would like to see their talents put to better use. In Ottawa, Speaker, it is common for an ODSP caseworker to have a 400-to-1 ratio. You heard that right: 400-to-1. How is one supposed to be an empathetic voice, an enabler of opportunity to someone when you have that kind of caseload? You can’t. You do triage. You do communication by email, by text, by happenstance. That is an army of folks, available to this government, that could be sent out into the community to actually help people find opportunities in their lives.

I just want to impress upon the government that if you want to reduce red tape, if that is the intent and purpose of this bill—I was listening to the member from Durham in his remarks, and I appreciated an opportunity to talk to him off-line; I know he and other members of this government care about people with disabilities—think about the red tape that you could do to reduce the burdens in people’s lives so they can embrace those opportunities the member was talking about.

Second—and this is another diversion, Speaker, so you’re going to have to maybe give me some latitude. Maybe our friends in government won’t call me on a point of order and I can get this out. I think something that’s missing in this bill is help for local and amateur sport. And I had occasion just earlier this afternoon to briefly talk to the minister responsible. As you know, Speaker, I came to this chamber, still kind of surfing and glowing because the Carleton University women’s and men’s basketball teams both won the national championship last weekend. Speaker, I’m not trying to—I know the University of Ottawa is in your riding and it’s a great university with great sports teams, including basketball teams. But as I took in that national championship on YouTube in the basement of our family home with both of our kids that play in the Ottawa system, and both universities draw heavily upon the amateur system, something occurred to me that I think is red-tape-related.

So the women played their national championship against Queen’s University Gaels—fantastic team, had the fewest points allowed this year, 515; great team, tough game—in Sydney, Nova Scotia. It’s a great place—I got family in Nova Scotia—but it’s far-flung.

The men played their game in Halifax in front of 9,000 fans. Quite a disadvantage for our squad, I have to tell you, Speaker, because the STFX X-Men that played the Ravens men’s team this year, who have appeared in 17 consecutive national championships, had 9,000 screaming fans in there, and they played a heck of a game. But what struck me as red tape in that viewing experience as a lifelong basketball fan, as a sports fan and as someone who really believes that sports is an enabler for our youth—and for people of all ages, frankly, but particularly for youth—is that the women were playing hundreds of kilometres away from the men in a tiny stadium at the same time as the men. And I said to myself, “That seems ridiculous.” If we want to travel this national championship around, absolutely—let’s give that economic opportunity to different places. But I want to see an Ontario that platforms women’s sport as much as it does men’s sport. I want to see 9,000 people out to cheer the women on, not just the men.

It’s the case locally in Ottawa, Speaker, where we have a harder time finding volunteer coaches in the women’s basketball programs, more cancelled games. And I want to say to any of the friends opposite, if you go on our website, I wrote an update. My last column was on this historic weekend—the first time in 38 years that one university has captured women’s and men’s national championship. It’s a really incredible achievement to coaches Taffe Charles and Dani Sinclair—an incredible accomplishment. But my daughter remarked to me—we watched the women’s game in its entirety and then we switched to the men’s, as it just happened to be going into overtime. I said to myself this game, as every game at the university you and I serve, Speaker—we always have both games there so fans can celebrate both teams.

So I want to invite my friend in government who I know takes sport very seriously and that responsibility—let’s pursue that conversation with youth sports and the people who regulate basketball, because I certainly was so proud to be a Carleton University Ravens basketball fan, but there was a little sting in the tail there as I took that in, and I think we can improve that. I think that’s something we can maybe work on together at committee.

Okay, let’s get to the topic of the week as far as I’m concerned, and that is the climate crisis. Schedules 5 and 6 of this bill deal with two different acts, two different statutes, that I think will be really important in the actions this province takes on climate change—not the only statutes, but important. In schedule 5, the government is making the case that carbon sequestration is going to be an important part of our ability to mitigate against climate change, to address climate change. My friend the member from Sarnia talked earlier about how important carbon sequestration is in his community, and I take his point to heart on that. But I just wanted to make sure we read into the record—and I believe the member from Guelph did it earlier, but I want to do it again because some things bear repeating.

The United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres said yesterday in a press conference to the world: “Our world needs climate action on all fronts—everything, everywhere, all at once.” And there were three particular demands he put forward to the world, because as I am going to talk about in my remarks this afternoon, this is not all doom and gloom. I think too often when we think about how we can change our economy and our society, we get trapped in doom-and-gloom conversations and people tune out. We can’t do that as politicians. We have to make people excited to embrace the challenges and opportunities presented to us by the climate crisis we’re living in.

There were three things Secretary-General António Guterres mentioned we absolutely cannot do. One was we absolutely have to stick, hard and fast, to the goal of ensuring net-zero electricity by 2035; two, we have to stop any expansion of existing oil and gas reserves all over the world; and three, we have to be shifting subsidies from fossil fuels to a just energy transition for folks who work in the fossil fuel industry, something I think is critically important.

I say that, Speaker, because there are people from our families, from our great province here in Ontario—my own family—who have gone out to work in the oil sands in Alberta or on the east coast on oil rigs. They are incredibly skilled people. I often say to myself, as a researcher, what do we do with these skilled trades folks? What is their future, going forward? Because when I look at their own industries, whether it’s the enormous dump trucks that are driven in the oil sands or whether I look at the servicing of the oil rigs on the east coast, increasingly all those jobs are being automated, like so many other jobs in our world. The fossil fuel industry does not care about those workers. The fossil fuel industry is increasingly finding ways to get rid of those workers. But we urgently need those workers to plug into the green energy transition in our economy. That is essential.

You and I both live in Ottawa, Speaker, and just for the benefit of everybody else here, I’ll repeat an example I mentioned in debate with the minister—the minister; maybe one day he’ll be a minister—the member for Guelph. I said to him, “Ottawa-Gatineau has a particular contribution we can make to bringing Ontario to that finish line of net-zero electricity by 2035 that Secretary-General Guterres was talking about yesterday, and that is by renewing the energy partnership we currently have with the province of Quebec.”

The province of Quebec right now has more power than it knows what to do with. We are—and I think this is a positive element of what the government has been doing recently—encouraging investments in electrical vehicle manufacturing in Ontario. I give the government credit for doing that. But the question is, we can encourage the manufacturing of these products here, but how do we make sure that those products are going to be able to be used here in Ontario?

On this note, I speak from personal experience, because the summer before last, my partner and I, we took the leap; we bought the same vehicle the member from Guelph drives, a Chevy Bolt EUV. It’s a great car, but in the winter, you get a range of about 200 kilometres to 250 kilometres on that car. You need to know where all the charging stations are. Forget driving to Toronto; that is a tricky enterprise, potentially, if you need to stop and recharge. I often take the train. But if the members opposite are serious about the electrification of transport in Ontario, which I think is a fantastic goal, we have to build the infrastructure to sustain that.

What hydroelectricity in Quebec represents, as some advocates have said—think of it as a giant battery, a giant battery beside our existing hydroelectricity system, our existing, though not large enough, renewable energy system and the way the grid functions with nuclear power. Thinking about that opportunity with Quebec that costs, depending on whose estimates you believe, five cents to seven cents per kilowatt hour, that is an enormous opportunity for us.

But instead, what I’ve heard the Minister of Energy—who is someone I’ve enjoyed debating and talking to over the years. But I’ve heard him say, recently, “No, Joel, we’re going to be moving out of this permanent agreement with Quebec. We are going to be moving into spot markets.” That’s kind of transactional, in the moment. That’s not a commitment. So what does Quebec do? Well, Quebec says, “If Ontario is not serious about taking our power, let’s sell it to the United States.” In some cases, depending upon the amount they’re cranking out, they may be selling that at a loss.

But here we are, their neighbouring province, desperately in need of this power. Depending on whose estimates you believe, we have to have either a 75% increase or double our electrical capacity in Ontario if we want to electrify buses, if we want to encourage more electrical heat pumps in people’s homes or if we want to do that in larger buildings—or if we want to have more electric buses running in our streets, as I know the great city of Toronto is doing and Ottawa is trying to embrace, and I’m sure other cities. We need more power for that. So Quebec presents an opportunity for us to explore that relationship further, Speaker, and we’re not taking it. We’re not taking it.

I want to make sure that members of this House are aware of some of the news from yesterday because, as I said earlier, sometimes when we talk about the climate crisis, it can be doom and gloom. Here’s the truth. The truth is, in 2015 the countries of the world met in Paris and made a collective recognition that we have to try to limit the growth of emissions, we have to stop the heating up of the planet, we have to stop it at 2 degrees Celsius. In 2018 they revised that estimate and they said it needs to be 1.5 degrees Celsius.

We were on track at that point to get to 3.5 degrees Celsius of a warmer planet—3.5 by the end of the current century—and we know what that means. In Ottawa, we’ve seen it: five major massive weather events, two once-in-a-century floods and two massive windstorms. This has been devastating for farmers, devastating for homeowners, devastating for our electrical system. Tens of millions of dollars of damage. So that’s where we were on track, but actually, if you look at what the scientists are telling us, given some of the changes countries around the world have committed to, we course-corrected to some extent to 2.5 degrees Celsius warmer, which is still way too hot.

But if you look at what was recently negotiated in the last round of the global Conference of the Parties discussions, we are now back on a track potentially of 1.7 degrees Celsius. So these commitments and the changes some countries are making are making a difference. I want people watching at home to know that that does matter. Writing me and writing any politician in this House, pressing with your employer, pressing with your community organization to embrace the climate crisis: All of that work has led us to something. We’re on track. But it’s not far enough.

The big step Ontario made was phasing out coal-fired electricity. That was an enormous step we made, and I give the previous government—previous to this government—credit for doing that, having been pushed, of course, by environmental advocates.

But what we cannot do, what we absolutely cannot do, is what my friends in government have currently proposed, which is massively increase the footprint of gas-fired electricity in this province. As the member from Toronto–Danforth said earlier in question period, that will erase all the benefit that this government has attempted to do with major manufacturers, major emitters like Dofasco or Algoma Steel. Any of that work you’ve done with the EV industry in attracting that investment is all wiped out if you increase gas-fired electricity by 300% or 400%, depending upon the estimates you believe. Don’t just believe the socialist from Ottawa Centre; look at the scientists that are informing the UN report and the IPCC report from yesterday. They—

Interjection.