Before I begin my formal remarks, I just want to acknowledge that it is International Women’s Day. On Saturday, I was marching in the International Women’s Day parade, and I was speaking with some women from the Equal Pay Coalition. They were telling me a little bit of the history there. In 1970, there was a federal commission that recommended equal pay for work of equal value, and the Pay Equity Act was passed in 2017, 47 years later. It was actually enacted in 2020. So it took 50 years to get from the recommendation for equal pay for work of equal value to actually having the act enacted, and still, today, women make 69 cents on every dollar that men do. So there are actions this government can take, and I would say the first action this government should take in respect to International Women’s Day is to repeal Bill 124, which suppresses the wages of nurses and other health care professionals, which are professions where the predominant number of employees are women. I just wanted to start with that.

I heard the member opposite talking about his love for northern Ontario. I also have a love for northern Ontario. I lived off and on in Geraldton for four years, in the 1980s. Geraldton had a silver mine at one point. At that time, it was a logging town. And today, there’s a giant open-pit mine in Geraldton, so it’s another mining centre.

There are 37 active mining operations in Ontario. They generate $11 billion worth of minerals every year. They contribute $8 billion to the GDP. There are 75,000 jobs in mining and related fields, and they paid $2.9 billion in wages and salaries last year. The mining sector is a vital sector to our economy, and it also creates the opportunity to not only mine the minerals here, but to smelt the minerals and to build the cars and other products from the minerals that are mined.

I will speak to this partly because I’m from Oshawa. Everybody in my family—my brother works at General Motors, my father, grandfather. My great-grandfather was building horse carriages when they converted over to building cars.

Interjection.

The member from Sudbury was saying today that if you take a car and remove everything that is mined from it, the only thing you’re left with are plastic bumpers, the windshields, and the vinyl and foam on the seats—the rest of it is all mined, it’s all aluminum and steel.

The mining sector is vital to all of the things that we enjoy in our modern lives. So we need to support the mining sector.

That’s why, generally, we want to support this bill, but there are some flaws with the bill, and I’ll get to the flaws in a little bit.

I mentioned that I lived in Geraldton. Most of my work was in the logging sector, but I did have a job through one winter cutting line for a mining company. I was a sub-sub-subcontractor for a mining company. The idea of cutting line is that you cut a grid pattern through the bush, and, every 100 feet, you put up a marker. Then somebody comes along after you with a magnetometer and measures the magnetic readings in the land, they create a map of the magnetic readings and, from that, they can determine where they think the iron is, and, from that, they can determine—and this was a gold prospecting operation—where they could send down test drills to see if there’s gold in the ground. My job was to take a chainsaw and cut these lines through the bush and mark every 100 feet. It was often minus 40, and I was doing it in four feet of snow. I tried doing it with snowshoes on, but I couldn’t operate a chainsaw with snowshoes on. I’ve got to say, maybe it’s because I’m a southerner, but I was not that great at it. I didn’t make that much money. There was another guy from the area, though, that I knew—his name was Sonny Gagnon; he actually became the chief of Aroland later—and he could cut one and a half to two miles a day. I think, if I remember right, we were making $200 a mile for what we were cutting. If I cut three quarters or one mile a day, that was a darn good day for me.

Anyway, the thing about it is that the mining sector is really vital to the north.

The other experience that I have with the mining sector is that I used to teach a course at York University on the history and economics of Ontario. We did it through an equity lens. One of our guest speakers one year was the CEO of Detour Gold. Detour Gold is a large mine northeast of Timmins. He talked about how that mine had been developed. They had made agreements with five Indigenous communities. They were providing good-paying jobs, and they had money set aside for a cleanup fund. He told me and the class that they had invested $2 billion before they got an ounce of gold out of that mine. That really speaks to the amount of investment that has to go in. And they’re so far off the grid that they created their own hydroelectric dam to generate electricity for the mine site. The scale of these mines is astronomical, absolutely enormous.

I want to talk about one of the concerns that we have with this bill, and that’s the cleanup fund. The CEO of Detour Gold talked about the cleanup fund, and that’s absolutely vital.

When I lived in Geraldton, across the highway from where I lived there was a field of mine tailings. These mine tailings contained mercury that was leaking into the local lake, Kenogamisis. So even though Geraldton was built on this beautiful lake, they couldn’t use the drinking water from that local lake. They had to pipe the water in from a lake farther north because of these mine tailings. Another guest who came to my class, Michael Power, was the mayor of Geraldton at the time. He actually organized the community, and they sealed in those mine tailings and they built a golf course over it. For decades, those mine tailings had been leaking into the local lake. He was actually able to organize a project to restore that land.

We’ve got to make sure, when we are building mines, that we don’t leave the next generation or local communities with a toxic mess to clean up. There have been a number of times when this has happened.

There’s the Kam Kotia mine disaster—this is a mine that operated from September 1943 to December 1944, so it operated for a year and three months. It left behind 200,000 tonnes of waste rock and six million tonnes of mine tailings on the site. This was a toxic mess that the community had to deal with for decades afterwards. Finally, the government—which means us as taxpayers—had to contribute $28 million to clean up the site.

Part of this bill is about the cleanup. It’s about extracting minerals from existing mine tailings. This is a really good project because those mine tailings—the technology has changed over the decades.

The previous mine in Geraldton, the silver mine, closed in the 1960s. It operated, I think, from the 1940s to the 1960s and it had left these tailings. Those tailings were actually quite mineral-rich, but they didn’t have the technology to extract the minerals that we do today. Some of those technologies are biotechnologies, and they can extract the minerals in environmentally friendly ways, and then they can leave the site cleaner than it was.

One of our concerns with this legislation is that, currently, the Mining Act states that when you’re going into mine tailings to extract additional minerals—the wording is, “The condition of the land with respect to one or both of public health and safety or the environment is improved following the ... remediation, as determined by the director” of mine rehabilitation. This means that if you’re going to go into those tailings and you’re going to remove some of the remaining minerals that are in there, you have to improve the site; you have to leave it in better condition than what you got it in, and this is going to be determined by the director of mine rehabilitation. The director of mine rehabilitation is an expert in the area, and they are a public servant. The new language, and what the government is proposing with this bill, is that the condition of the land following remediation must be “comparable to or better than it was before the recovery, as determined by the minister.” There are two concerns in this new language. One is that instead of saying you have to improve the site—you have to leave it at least comparable, and the measure, the scorecard for this will be determined by the minister.

My colleague from Sudbury, when he was making his opening remarks, said he has great respect for the Minister of Mines, but the Minister of Mines doesn’t necessarily have the expertise that the director of mine rehabilitation has. The Minister of Mines—and it’s not just this minister, but in future governments, because when you change the act, it’s not just for today; it’s for the future. The future ministers may not have that expertise, and they will also be under political pressure. They will be under pressures from their government members, maybe from their Premier, to potentially not bring the site up to snuff, not bring the site up to an improved state of condition, and that leaves the communities to deal with the toxic waste, the toxic mess, and it also leaves the taxpayers of Ontario to deal with the additional cost of rehabilitating that site in the future. So, these changes are deeply concerning. It’s the politicization of this process, and that’s a danger. There’s a reason that we have public servants and we maintain some distance between the ministers and the ministries, between the public servants—so that you can have processes like this where the public good is protected and not subject to political influence.

The other thing I wanted to talk about with the mine tailings is that it’s a good project. As I mentioned at the beginning of my remarks, we need mining. It’s an essential component of our economy. This mining of these tailings, or the re-mining of these tailings, to extract the additional minerals, is a good thing, because not only do we have biotechnologies to remove some of those minerals—and so we remove some of them, and some of them are toxic in themselves—but we also save the energy of removing the initial rock. So if it’s much cheaper and much more environmentally friendly to look at mine tailings, to extract minerals from mine tailings, than it is to dig a new mine—because if you dig a new mine, you’ve got to go into the ground, you’ve got all the energy, all the environmental damage of doing that. So it’s actually environmentally friendly in a number of ways.

As I mentioned at the beginning of my remarks, there is incredible potential in our mining sector. We can build electric cars. I was actually at three different events a year ago in my—well, one was outside my riding but two in my riding. One was a tall timber building at George Brown College, down on the waterfront in downtown Toronto. This is not related to mining—I’m diverting a little bit—but it’s good for northern Ontario, because we’re finding new ways to utilize lumber in Ontario, and it’s environmentally friendly, because the carbon in that wood is being sequestered in the building. So this is actually an exciting project. If you’re driving along the Gardiner, you can see the frame of that building going up right now.

It’s also good for our northern communities, because where I lived, in Geraldton, the next town was Longlac. They had a big pulp mill, and pulp mills across northern Ontario got closed down over the last 15 years. Those communities need—we need new ways to use the lumber industry.

The other event in my riding was the launch of Canada’s first electric ferry. The Marilyn Bell ferry goes across the channel between Toronto and the Toronto Islands and to Billy Bishop airport. The electrification of this ferry was designed and built in Ontario by Ontario companies, and now it has set the standard. The city of Toronto is looking at electrifying all of the ferries that go out to the Toronto Islands. So there is incredible potential here for building electric vehicles, even ferries.

The third event that I attended, and this one was outside my riding, was at Daymak. It’s a company in Scarborough, and they make electric bicycles and scooters and things. They launched just over a year ago what they’re billing as the world’s fastest three-wheeled electric car. Now, I got to sit in it; I didn’t get to drive it, so I can’t verify that it’s the fastest in the world, but it did look pretty slick. It looked like the Batmobile, I’ve got to say—the new Batmobile, not the 1960s Adam West Batmobile.

Anyway, we have the potential here in Ontario to have the entire supply chain, from minerals to smelting to building the cars and the vehicles, the electric ferries, the batteries that we’re going to need for the future. But in order to do this, we also need to build on our competitive advantages, and we’ve got many competitive advantages. We’re talking about the mines. We’ve got the minerals here. We’ve got the technology, and we’ve got the people who can actually smelt that here. We’ve got the factories to do that. We’ve got the factories to build the cars here.

We need to build on our public services because our public services are some of our biggest competitive advantages. I’m thinking in particular, in this context, of our public colleges and universities. I toured Laurentian University and Cambrian College in Sudbury a few years ago, before the pandemic. That college and that university have close links to the mining industry in Sudbury. A lot of the technology that they use in the mines is being developed in partnership with our public colleges and universities in Sudbury, and our public colleges and universities make business partnerships across this province to develop our technology here and give us a huge competitive advantage, and we need to invest in them.

This government cut tuition fees by 10% four years ago, which was a good thing because we had the highest tuition fees and the highest student debt levels, but it was an unfunded tuition cut. It meant that the colleges and universities lost somewhere—well, it wasn’t a full 10%, but they lost a huge percentage of their income and the funding has been frozen since then. Government funding for our public colleges and universities has been frozen for almost a decade. We need to unfreeze that because that’s almost a billion-dollar cut.

The other competitive advantage that we need to maintain in this province is our public health care system. When companies are deciding whether they’re going to locate in Canada or the United States, one of the factors they look at is our public health care system because our public health insurance is far, far cheaper for employers in Canada than it is in the United States. So the government’s current drive to privatize our public health care, to profitize it, to convert it into a private, for-profit industry is actually undermining one of our big competitive advantages.

I’m going to conclude with a few concerns, like we need to support the mining industry. It’s absolutely a vital component of our economy in Ontario. But there are concerns with this bill, and we’re hoping that we can work out those concerns in committee.

The concerns are that the government is replacing the duties of the director of mine exploration and the director of mine rehabilitation with the minister, so they’re politicizing this process, and that politicization of that process can leave communities stranded with toxic waste that they can’t deal with, and it can leave taxpayers dealing with billions or millions of dollars in cleanup costs for future generations. They’re weakening the environmental requirements. It’s not the right thing to be doing at this time.

The third concern that we have on this side of the House is the Indigenous right to free, prior and informed consent. The Neskantaga First Nation is deeply concerned and expressed their opposition to the Ring of Fire.

I look at what’s happened. This government has to start building trust with our First Nations communities. When he and I were elected in 2018, the first question my colleague from Kiiwetinoong asked the government was, “Will you help provide clean drinking water to remote First Nations communities in the north?” The Minister of Indigenous Affairs at the time, his response was, “Well, actually that’s federal jurisdiction. We’ll help you write a letter.”

If the government had actually cleaned up the drinking water and provided clean drinking water over the last four years to all First Nations communities in this province, you would have built some trust, so that when you’re dealing with the extraction of minerals in the north, you would have a framework of trust to start those negotiations.

I thank the member from Brantford–Brant for the question. We did support that bill to expedite the development of the battery factory in St. Thomas. The big concern that we have is that governments in Ontario, governments in Alberta—Conservative governments in particular—do not have a good record of enforcing regulations so that mining companies leave the site clean and safe for local communities.

In Alberta, for example, they’ve got 170,000 abandoned oil wells that the taxpayer is now on the hook for cleaning up and sealing. We don’t want the communities to be left with a toxic mess and we don’t want the taxpayers to be left with millions or billions of dollars in cleanup costs. That should be part of the operation. That’s the concern we have.

The government has not created trust in their ability to be stewards of the environment for future generations.

First of all, I can appreciate the need for jobs in northern Ontario. One of the things that I would recommend doing is that if the government is working on a last-mile strategy for broadband—broadband is absolutely essential to northern and remote communities, and right now, the government’s standard for rolling out broadband is 50 gigs upload and 10 gigabytes download. That’s an old standard. The broadband that this government is rolling out is actually obsolete before you roll it out, and you’re going to be cutting job opportunities from future generations and from this generation of northerners.

I would highly recommend you go for one gig symmetrical for the broadband rollout. That would be one way that I would create jobs in northern Ontario and create opportunities for people in northern Ontario.

This Bill 124 wage-suppression bill that disproportionately targets women needs to be repealed. It’s actually already been declared by the courts to be unconstitutional, that it’s an infringement on the constitutional, fundamental freedoms of the health care workers, and yet this government is appealing that in court.

Our post-secondary education system: I would have to give them an F on that, but I’m out of time, so I’ll have to wait for a supplementary question to answer.

One of the things that drove me most crazy before I got into this House was that the Conservatives, when they were in power from 1995 to 2003, started to break up and sell off Ontario Hydro. Then the Liberals finished that off by selling off the majority share of hydro. Our hydro rates in Ontario used to be one of our biggest competitive advantages, at four cents a kilowatt hour. We’re now paying four times that, and we’re subsidizing a private, for-profit company that used to be Ontario Hydro: $6.9 billion a year.

We’ve got to maintain our competitive advantages—health care, education, post-secondary education—and somehow, we’ve got—