This petition is entitled “Support Bill 21, the Till Death Do Us Part Act.

“To the Legislative Assembly of Ontario:

“Whereas there are 38,000 people on the wait-list for long-term care; and

“Whereas the median wait time for a long-term-care bed has risen from 99 days in 2011-12 to 171 days in 2020-21; and

“Whereas according to Home Care Ontario, the cost of a hospital bed is $842 a day, while the cost of a long-term-care bed is $126 a day; and

“Whereas couples should have the right to live together as they age; and

“Whereas Ontario seniors have worked hard to build this province and deserve dignity in care; and

“Whereas Bill 21 amends the Residents’ Bill of Rights in the Fixing Long-Term Care Act to provide the resident with the right upon admission to continue to live with their spouse or partner;

“Therefore we, the undersigned, petition the Legislative Assembly of Ontario to direct the Minister of Long-Term Care to pass Bill 21 and provide seniors with the right to live together as they age.”

It’s my pleasure to affix my signature to this petition and give it to Kalila.

There are a couple of items in this bill which obviously caught our attention. One of them is the ODSP rate increase for the 6% of folks in the province of Ontario who are on the Ontario disability program—they can work and make up to $1,000, instead of making up to $200. We did hear from a delegation, during finance committee, who said that this is a step in the right direction, while also acknowledging, though, that only 6% of those who are on ODSP are able to work. But at least it’s moving in the right direction. If the government is going to continue on this path of legislating poverty for those people who are on ODSP—then at least allowing 6% of the population to not be penalized for making up to $1,000. And the other thing is the guaranteed income for seniors.

I will say, though, there’s a vast majority that the government has missed—and we’ve been very vocal about this in this House and during question period and during finance committee.

My general feeling about budgets—and I feel like a lot of the people of this province agree with me—is that a budget is more than just a series of numbers on a page; it is an embodiment of our values. In other words, where the government is investing money should be reflective of what the people of the province need during that time.

It’s good to see that there are a number of students who have come to the Legislature this morning—because we also know from the Financial Accountability Officer that $400 million did not get into the system in the last quarter of 2022. I feel like resources in education, in health care need to be re-evaluated on a constant basis—especially post-pandemic, because those were tough times for the health care system and for the education system.

I will say, as we are debating the mini-budget here, Bill 36, that it was astounding to learn that the Canadian Red Cross is now in a children’s hospital in Ontario amid a surge in respiratory illnesses in children. I’m going to read from the Toronto Star article by Rosa Saba—and this is unprecedented. Children’s hospitals have been under great duress because of a number of factors, and yet the government has not pivoted and responded in an appropriate way. Had they done that, had there been resources and funding allocated to health care, then CHEO would not have to call in the Canadian Red Cross to help with their unit.

“A prominent children’s hospital in Ottawa will soon be receiving help from the Canadian Red Cross as it grapples with a massive wave of pediatric respiratory illnesses that have stretched resources to the breaking point....

“CHEO, previously known as the Children’s Hospital of Eastern Ontario, requested the additional support amid a surge of admissions from children and youth”—and remember, Madam Speaker, that this is coming after CHEO just created a second pediatric unit, because there was such pressure on that hospital. So small teams are going in.

“CHEO opened a second intensive care unit in November to treat what it called an unprecedented number of critically ill babies and children”—and this is specialized care. I think that needs to be stressed for this government.

“Government data showed that only 10 of the 130 beds in Ontario’s pediatric intensive care units were free as of December 1”—and that was Thursday. “At times last month, the number of pediatric patients exceeded the number of ICU beds available system-wide.”

This is what CHEO said: “We have redeployed staff and medical staff from surgical and medical care units, added extra beds and workers in our pediatric intensive care and emergency departments as well as inpatient units.... Everyone at CHEO has been going all out to take care of kids and their families.”

So the hospitals, the nurses, the doctors and now the Red Cross are doing everything that they can to make sure that our youngest and most vulnerable patients in Ontario get the care they need, and yet the fall economic statement had no additional resources recognizing how important and how crucial these resources are.

A quote from the same article: “‘This is a situation in which it was our responsibility as the adults in the room, it was our responsibility to do everything that we could to help to make sure that our youngest were healthy, and that every environment was safe for them....’

“According to Public Health Ontario, as of November 6 only 7% of children in the province aged six months to five years had received a first dose of a COVID-19 vaccine. But experts say it’s those youngest kids who are at higher risk of hospitalization from COVID-19 compared to other children and teens.” So you have a gap here.

“Children’s hospitals in Ontario have been cutting back on surgeries to ease pressure on pediatric intensive care units and emergency rooms.”

So the key piece in here, as it always is in health care, is the prevention piece: How do you keep people healthy? Well, clearly, with a vaccination rate of only 6%, the province of Ontario is not doing the best that it can.

When I reviewed the Auditor General’s report, it was astounding to me to learn how messed up the vaccination program was in the province of Ontario. This is from the report that was just released last Wednesday:

“The Ministry of Health and Ministry of the Solicitor General”—and these were her findings—“did not consistently adopt advice from experts and key stakeholders, health care organizations and workers when formulating their vaccination strategies. The Ministry of Health decided not to implement a vaccine mandate on hospital workers, indicating that its decision was informed by the Chief Medical Officer of Health’s analysis of evidence available at that time.... When identifying high-risk populations for the ‘hot spot’ strategy to prioritize vaccination when vaccines were scarce”—and I don’t know if you remember, but this House was seized with the question of, where were the vaccines? They were commonly regarded as the Hunger Games, and there was no rhyme or reason as to who was getting a vaccination clinic, who was getting a mobile unit, why core areas were being ignored. Some of these areas had the most vulnerable workers. They were the ones who were working in the grocery stores, in the big box stores, on the front line, on transit. Things still had to keep going, but these people were last on the list to have access to their vaccinations.

Again, this is from the report. This disorganization “resulted in eight lower-risk neighbourhood receiving vaccines ahead of high-risk neighbourhoods, and nine higher-risk neighbourhoods being excluded from the hot spot strategy.”

Public health units surveyed said they did not think the ministry had clear lines of responsibility for the vaccine rollout. Public health experts were not included in the provincial vaccine task force until months later. The AG said that the province’s communication strategy for supporting vaccine programs was not effective.

So when you look a year ahead and see our emergency rooms overwhelmed—if they’re open—and see the most vulnerable children having not received clear communication about why vaccines are important, and you look at where the money went and where the money didn’t go during this vaccine process, you can see the result. Those decisions about resource allocation make a difference; they matter—and they matter for the front-line health care workers as well.

“COVID-19 vaccines and vaccinations ... Ontarians may not have been as well-informed as possible in their decision-making.” The auditor “found that the ministry missed out on opportunities to educate and inform the public on the benefits of COVID-19 vaccines.... Health experts ... believed the government’s communication approach sometimes undermined public confidence in vaccinations.” There were mixed messages coming directly from the Premier and the Premier’s office about what was safe and what was not.

I hope that you’ll remember, Madam Speaker, when there was police tape on children’s park equipment, and meanwhile, the medical officer of health was saying—especially for those children and families who don’t have access to a backyard, so the park was the place where they were able to get some exercise and get some fresh air.

The other interesting part, when you look at where the money was going and where the money didn’t go, is, the ministry’s compensation structure encouraged doctors to work at mass immunization clinics where they could bill higher than they could if they vaccinated people at their office. This ran counter to common knowledge. You’re going to go to your trusted family doctor to get a shot, to get that information and to have the follow-up too, and also to build trust—but that’s not how the government decided that it was best. So they had these mass clinics where physicians could charge up to $220 an hour, nurses got up to $49 an hour, and pharmacists got up to $57 an hour. “Private sector operators”—and we also made a big deal about this during the height of the pandemic—“paid more to various professionals compared to what not-for-profit organizations” did, and there was no oversight from the Ministry of Health or the Solicitor General.

In the end, “Ontario had wasted at least 3.4 million in COVID-19 vaccine doses as of June 30, 2022”—just six months ago, as the election was happening. And there were a number of other for-profit organizations that wasted 20% to 57% of their vaccines. The government went through a very sloppy procurement process to hire these organizations to distribute vaccines.

At the end of the day, vaccines were wasted—missed opportunities all over the province—and then you have, today, one of the medical experts at CHEO saying this is a problem because only 6% or 7% of this very vulnerable part of the population have received their vaccines.

So where you put your resources impacts the health outcomes of the population that we’re serving. Wasting $3.4 million is never okay in health care, especially when this government has been crying poor for so long—that they can’t pay our front-line health care workers an appropriate wage, that Bill 124 was necessary because 1% was fair. We know now how unfair that was. We know now what kind of negative impact that had on the people of this province and the human health workforce in the province of Ontario.

We brought forward a motion from our member for Nickel Belt on behalf of His Majesty’s opposition, and that strategy called for eight serious points to positively impact the retention of health care workers and to make people feel more comfortable entering into this field. And I’ll never forget it, because I’ve never seen anything quite like it in this House—when the parliamentary assistant to the Minister of Health mocked the crisis. She actually mocked our genuine concern, when we were reflecting the Ontario Hospital Association and the five major organizations that employ nurses in Ontario.

We’ve always said this—and actually, this is something that the member for Nickel Belt has said for years now: You’ll never address a problem successfully or with any integrity if you ignore the fact that the problem exists, if you don’t acknowledge that the problem exists—and that’s what we’ve seen. We even saw that this morning, in the response to our questions around CHEO—“We have a plan.”

A nurse came to the finance committee via Skype or via Zoom, and she was very clear. I said, “Jackie, the minister says they have a plan and it’s working. Can you comment on that?” She said, “I see no evidence of a plan.” I said, “The government says that Bill 124 has no bearing or impact on your morale. You are health care heroes, and you’re doing your job, and Bill 124 doesn’t matter.” She said, “It has a detrimental impact on the morale of the workforce. We feel devalued. We feel disrespected.” And then I said to her, “The Premier says that this is not a resource issue.” She said, “This is absolutely a resource issue. We do not have what we need on a regular basis in our hospitals.”

In fact, the hospital in Kingston put out a call for donations just this past weekend. A professor has recognized that when you are dealing with small children in intensive care units, there is specialized equipment that you need; it is smaller, it is delicate, it is more intrinsic. They put out a call for donations because they have a resource issue.

So why would a government, in November 2022, bring forward a budget that does not address the core needs of the health care sector? Most people, like myself, regard our public health care system as something to fight for, something to protect, something to maintain. It is a core part of the values that we have as Ontarians. And yet, in this budget, there is no new money recognizing what’s happening just down the street, on University Avenue.

The finance minister also said several things this morning around building. I found this very interesting, the building part—because the coroner’s report came out as well. The government has talked a fair amount about boosting skilled trades and about ensuring that—we have a deficit; there is a labour shortage. I think my one message to the Minister of Labour and to the finance minister on this is, one of the best ways to encourage more people to go into the skilled trades is to make sure that their workplaces are safe.

We have the coroner’s report. The jury recommendations came out from the 2014 trench collapse, and they’ve been rejected by the Ministry of Labour. This was just posted yesterday, and it reads as follows:

“Ontario’s Ministry of Labour, Immigration, Training and Skills Development says it reviews all recommendations from coroner’s juries ‘carefully,’” but they have “rejected all 10 recommendations a coroner’s jury has made in an inquest into the death of a construction worker in a trench collapse eight years ago”—eight years ago.

“The ministry, which is not required to accept recommendations from a coroner’s jury, says all the concerns raised in the inquest have already been addressed.”

And yet the latest number that I have is, 41 construction workers have died this year. So for the Ministry of Labour to say, “We are addressing all of these concerns,” and then also say at the same time, “We want more people to go into the construction sector and the skilled trades”—I really need to emphasize this: When one worker is unsafe, all workers are unsafe, and therefore you have an unsafe workplace. People are not going to be drawn into those workplace settings if they don’t feel safe.

It’s very similar to what’s happening in our hospitals right now, with our nurses. Many nurses—and I met with the Waterloo region nurses’ association, and they said that even when people come into the hospital, they do a few shifts and they don’t come back. That is how hostile and how stressful those workplace environments are. Disrespecting workers is not working for workers.

Just on the recommendations that came out—this concerns Michael Picanco, who was 35 when he died in a trench that collapsed on a construction site in Toronto. “The ministry’s rejection of the recommendations comes” just two weeks “after two workers died last August in a trench collapse in Ajax, Ont. The three-day inquest into Picanco’s death began on October 25”—that’s the backlog in the justice system too, I just want to say. When a worker dies, that inquest, those recommendations, should be paid attention to, and they should be expedited.

These were just some of the jury’s recommendations:

—“more unannounced inspections”—that would be great;

—“mandatory trench safety training for workers;

—“stronger penalties for companies with repeated safety violations;

—“a requirement for health and safety representatives at smaller work sites.”

Patty Coates, president of the OFL, said, “What we’re seeing now is long, drawn-out coroner’s inquests that dredge everything up for the families, and then the Ministry of Labour simply says ‘no’ to every recommendation that could save another worker’s life.”

Targeting repeat offenders is also something that needs to happen. The Auditor General has identified this in the past. Companies that have violations still win contracts from this government. Where are the checks and balances? Where is the accountability?

I want to encourage the Minister of Labour to have another look at this because I believe that when a government, in its entirety, rejects recommendations from a coroner’s inquest like this—which was extensive—then that signals to the people who are considering entering the skilled trades that the government is not that concerned about the health and well-being of workers on sites; it reads that they are expendable, and we’ve seen this.

When I first came to this House in 2012, the Tony Dean report had been tabled in the wake of the 2009 swing stage collapse in Toronto. At that time, a young man in my riding, Nick Lalonde—I say his name every year, when I’m talking about safety, He was 23 at the time, the age of my son. There was a lack of training. There was a lack of accountability. There were very few repercussions; very few consequences—the company, for Nick, I think, was fined $125,000.

I believe this company was fined $75,000 for not having the proper health and safety measures on the work site.

What a disservice we do to the young generation in Ontario if we don’t protect their health and well-being and safety while in the workplace. Every worker who goes to work in the morning should come home to their family at the end of the day—everybody says it, but you can’t just hope and cross your fingers to make that a reality. We have a lot of work in the province of Ontario to make sure that our workplaces are safer.

Regarding Bill 36, obviously, an investment in worker safety needs to happen—the health care system. The disconnect is astounding in this place with regard to what is actually happening in our health care system.

This story just came out today, and when you read it, it’s really—especially if you have a close family member who is expecting a baby or if you’ve just had a baby. CBC Ottawa covered the story of the Duval family—it just happened this weekend. Kendra Duval had a birth plan and was supposed to go to the hospital in Winchester. When a baby is coming, a baby is coming. It’s not like you can say, “Oh, no, we have to wait for the emergency room or the labour delivery staff to actually be there to make it happen.” She went on to say that the couple chose to have their child at Winchester District Memorial Hospital. It was a half hour away. They found out very late that the doctor had to help another induction and that there were no resources for her to have her baby there. They scrambled to try to find another hospital, another place for her to have the baby—even as she’s in the middle of labour. She said to her husband, “I’ve spent nine, 10 months doing everything I can to protect this baby and make sure that he’s safe. And now I feel like everything is in jeopardy again because maybe we won’t have help in the moment, whenever the time comes.” And that is the key piece. That’s what people expect from our health care system—they expect it to be there when they need it.

Even this past weekend, Norfolk emergency room closed, following a series of small rural community ER closures.

She went on to say that when the time came, there were two days of early labour—this is high stress for this woman. To find out that these short-term closures—that’s what they’re called now in Ontario, because they do not have the people.

The finance minister talks about building Ontario up. You cannot build Ontario up without the people.

It is interesting to note how many hospitals are having these short closures for their ERs: “Across the province this year, 25 hospitals have temporarily closed their birthing units at least once since July 6”—and that’s really just when Ontario started tracking the closures and tracking the problem.

Ontario Health, unfortunately, would not provide CBC a list of which hospitals closed birth units.

It is important to note that since July 6, 25 hospitals in Ontario have temporarily closed their birthing units because they didn’t have the resources. This is a resource issue.

A budget provides resources for the health care system. So this is a fall economic statement and a mini-budget that does not meet the needs of the people of this province; we cannot say it enough.

This couple were denied at Ottawa’s Queensway Carleton Hospital, so they ended up back at Winchester. She was completely panicked. She said that she was erratic and everything was happening so fast. She said, “I can’t do this, I’m going to die, I just didn’t feel safe.” Does this sound like a positive, no-problem-here kind of issue? I don’t think so—in fact, I know so. The umbilical cord was wrapped around this baby’s neck. It was too short to be removed. It had to be cut. So the nurse, the doctor—it was all hands on deck at that point to make sure that this baby was okay.

I just want to leave you with one quote that she said at the very end of this article, because it’s very powerful. She said, “We deserve better....” The nurses did their best. It’s not their fault. But the system failed them, because their experience was so traumatic.

People who have babies in Ontario should not have traumatic experiences. They should not be scrambling to find a place to have a baby. I think that this is the missing part of the narrative from this government, when they consistently and constantly say, “We have a plan”—this experience for this couple was not a plan.

Various medical health experts predicted that this would happen after so many years of underfunding. In fact, it is hard to believe that the Financial Accountability Officer, in this year, has said that the government underspent by $900 million. We trust the Financial Accountability Officer because that officer is non-partisan, that officer is independent, and they actually measure every quarter—where the money is going or where the money is not going. Increasingly, the pattern for this government is that they say, “Oh, the health care system needs this amount of money,” and then they fail to get that money out, even when they know there’s a crisis. So it’s really discouraging.

If you’re paying attention, if you’re really connected to your community and you’re listening to the informed voices in your community, you will know that by this time in Ontario, there have been 50 femicides in Ontario—50 women in this province, to date, have been killed by somebody they know. Someone specifically killed them, murdered them, because they were a woman.

Jennifer Hutton from Women’s Crisis Services of Waterloo Region is someone I deeply respect. They stretch their dollars as far as they can. It is incredible how they meet the needs of a community to the best of their ability. But at times this year, Women’s Crisis Services had to “turn people away because our 90 shelter beds are full. With the affordable housing crisis, families are staying with us for upwards of one year if not longer.”

So you have women who have enough courage to flee a violent partner and bring their children with them, and they show up to one of the only places, and because Women’s Crisis Services’ funding has not been annualized for child and youth in shelter and rural and remote funding—that has still not happened. The increased base funding to ensure staffing levels and essential programming and to reflect the increased costs of running residential programs—that has not happened; to enhance initial investment in transitional housing and annualize this funding—that has not happened; to provide for youth education. They saw 400 youth through their shelter at Women’s Crisis Services last year.

The Renfrew county inquest, which was a call to formally declare intimate partner violence an epidemic—this year, 50 women were murdered, intentionally, because they were women. Was there additional funding in the fall economic statement to address this crisis? No, there was not.

She did try to get on the list to come and speak to the committee, but obviously—she missed the deadline, I think, by two minutes and wasn’t able to get on the list. But I felt it was really important to bring these concerns to the floor of the Legislature—because the government has said that we say “no.” Yes, we say “no” to a budget that doesn’t meet the needs of the people we serve. That’s what we’re doing, because we’re not going to support a budget that doesn’t address the crisis in health care, the crisis in mental health, the crisis in domestic violence.

People say, “Oh, you say ‘crisis’ too much.” Well, when I tell you a story of a family who couldn’t find a place to have their baby in the Ottawa area, and that things could have gone very sideways very quickly, that is a crisis, and it certainly is not a situation that the parliamentary assistant should mock when we bring it to the floor of this Legislature.

Moving on, though—because you could really talk about health care for a long time, because it is the primary concern, I think, that comes into our offices.

The other key piece of the affordability issue in Ontario—and I didn’t even get into the privatization of health care, because I’d need another hour—is the housing crisis. This morning, several of the PC members talked about housing and 1.5 million homes, and yet they’ve introduced a piece of legislation, Bill 23, which runs counter to the goal of improving the affordability of housing and of getting housing built. And it’s backed by several experts—there’s one expert, actually, from the University of Waterloo, and I know the minister knows her. Her name is Dawn Parker. She did offer to consult on Bill 23. If you’re going to try to bring a housing bill forward, then listen to the people who actually know what they’re talking about. Base the legislation on evidence. Dawn Cassandra Parker is a professor at the School of Planning at the University of Waterloo. I know the minister thinks highly of the University of Waterloo. She said the policies of Bill 23, the More Homes Built Faster Act, will not increase housing affordability—that’s her biggest concern right now—because its provisions to require high-rise zoning to increase development profitability will contribute to land-value uplift, or rising land prices. We’ve seen some people really benefit from rising land prices.

She also said that the incentivized high-rise builds provide expensive housing, not affordable housing. Actually, we heard this at Bill 23—the committee—as well; I sat in on that for a while. Basically, if you’re talking about affordability of housing—and the metaphor was a bathtub. If you’re filling that bathtub up and you’re trying to fill it with affordable housing—this government has left the plug out, and we’re losing the affordable housing, because now we know that 86% of new housing in Ontario, especially in rental form, is $3,000 and above. That’s unaffordable for so many people. At the same time, we’re down to 38% of affordability rents around the $1,000 mark and under.

There are a lot of people in Waterloo, which is fairly affluent, as an area—poverty hides really well in some places. In Waterloo, we’re seeing more and more homelessness, and people are shocked. But when you look at the housing prices—we have a community called Sunnydale. The corporate landlord from Toronto has increased the rent by 5%. These are mostly refugees. These are mostly new immigrants. These are mostly people who are genuinely living hand to mouth. They are making minimum wage, which, you’ll remember, the government froze back in 2018. During the pandemic, the average lost wages during that time period was about $7,000—$7,000. This is a government that talks about, “We’re going to get our hands out of your pocket. We’re going to put more money in your pocket.” And yet, this government really removed a lot of expendable income from very marginalized people.

Finally, on the supply piece, she recommends incentivizing repurposing of parking lots for housing through subsidizing multi-level parking and reducing or eliminating parking requirements, allowing at least four units on residential parcels, and implementing non-principal residence vacant-unit taxes.

So there are solutions to the housing crisis; they just don’t happen to involve the greenbelt.

The government’s own housing task force has said very clearly to this minister and to this entire Legislature that Ontario has enough land to build the needed housing units and stock that we need. There’s no need to infringe on the greenbelt. So that’s where we are with that.

Finally, just to circle back to the health care piece: The Waterloo Region Health Coalition held an event in Waterloo not that long ago—I think it was last week, actually. Really interesting stats—according to the coalition, there were 937 hospital beds in Waterloo region in 1961, well before I was born. They serviced, at that time, just 172,000 people. In 2020, we have 20 fewer beds than we had in 1961, based on our population of 620,000 people. So it’s proof that the resources and the funding need to be there.

According to the Ontario Nurses’ Association, there are now 140 registered vacancies in Kitchener and Waterloo. We have seen—because I was at Grand River not that long ago—that people have just had it; they’re retiring early, or they’re choosing other careers, or they’re going to other districts. Bill 124 has had a cooling effect on the entire sector.

When I was reviewing the decision based on Bill 124, through the courts—the finding around Bill 124 was very clear: It violated the Charter of Rights. The government provided no rationale for even extending to moving over into those charter rights and essentially running them over.

Remember, this legislation came in 2019. So the impact of wage suppression legislation has been clearly felt. There was no excuse for the finance minister to not recommend repealing Bill 124; now the courts have done that for you. They’ve decided that this legislation is null and void and reparations will happen. The reparations can be up to $8 billion. That is what the initial finding was. The 10 specific unions that took the government to court are going to have to seek those reparations separately.

But of course, the government is going to fight for this legislation. The Premier and the minister have said, “No, we don’t accept this.” So this will continue a long-standing tradition of this government—to spend a lot of money in court, but then to block us from finding out how much money the government is spending.

And if you were on this side and we were doing the same thing, you would have none of it.

It goes hand in hand with your mandate letters, which this government has never revealed. We have legitimate questions about what’s in those mandate letters, given where you’re putting public money—into private health care. We want to see those mandate letters. Right now, I believe it’s with the Supreme Court and it’s pending there. I suspect you will lose that too, because one of the core principles and tenets of our democracy is transparency—but we should tell that to this government, because they’ve been anything but transparent, which is why it is important to have the Auditor General report and the Financial Accountability Officer’s report as well.

So Bill 124—not listening to the core people who have made these really powerful testimonies to the government, including Jackie, who was in finance committee. The members who sit on that committee should be red-faced about this, because she basically told it like it is. Bill 124 is part of the problem. Wage suppression legislation is driving nurses out of the province of Ontario. And now we have the Canadian Red Cross in the children’s hospital in Ottawa. You can connect the dots on this.

With regard to Bill 36, though—Bill 23 runs counter to the goals the finance minister expressed this morning. You cannot build a province up if you’re not supporting the people who are part of that building process—and this goes from everyone from health care workers to the construction workers I talked about earlier. And then you have a growing recognition—the members of the government side must feel it in some regard.

I’m going to quote from a Hamilton Spectator editorial from last week:

“The Ford government tried to improve the optics around one of the two most contentious issues in Ontario right now—the crisis threatening to break our hospitals ... particularly around how many children are getting sick at a time when McMaster Children’s Hospital is running at 140% of its capacity.” The Premier made a phone call that day—and I have to say, I think this hospital deserves more than a phone call.

“A phone call to share the pain isn’t exactly what patients, families and health care workers need at this point.

“They need help, not a hug from the Premier.”

The commentary from the Minister of Health at these press conferences, which are heavily scripted and heavily messaged—refused to recognize that the system is in crisis. It actually has not been said.

This editorial went on to say, “Those 13-hour waits, kids not getting ICU care, kids being sent for treatment to adult facilities”—and this was on CTV News last night, and it’s something that I hadn’t thought about. When you send a 13- or 14-year-old to an adult unit—the nurse said, “These are still kids. They’re still scared.” There’s a reason why we have pediatric units—because they have specialized care for children. Someone who is 13 or 14 is still a kid.

The minister “no doubt intended to make people feel better,” by saying, “We’re doing everything,” but “she ended up sounding horribly out of touch and even”—I can’t say that word; it’s unparliamentary, so I’ll catch myself.

The editorial from the Hamilton Spectator went on to say, “But how about the thousands of other kids and families left waiting?” Hospitals are triaging. They’re triaging because they don’t have the people and they don’t have the resources. “They are hardly getting appropriate and timely treatment. For Jones to suggest otherwise is, frankly, an insult to those sick kids, families and the health workers” the Premier “cavalierly calls heroes.” The nurses have actually pushed back on this hero talk for quite some time.

The editorial went on to a solution: “Repeal Bill 124, which freezes nurses’ salaries or caps raises at 1%, which amounts to a pay cut in inflationary times. We have previously called for that more than once. It’s unfair and inequitable legislation which penalizes nurses, especially compared to other comparable front-line workers like police officers and firefighters”—which are male-dominated.

I asked the finance minister in committee about this. I said, “Minister, have you costed out repealing Bill 124? You’re either going to pay now or pay later. Why not pay it now and restore some hope and some credibility to the health care system? Have you had that conversation around the table?” He was kind of flippant with me. He said, “Oh, your response is always, ‘Get rid of Bill 124.’” Well, we’ve identified it as a problem. We’ve listened to the front-line workers in the health care system. They have clearly articulated that this is a piece of legislation which is part of the problem, and yet the government refuses to deal with it.

The money is there to deal with Bill 124. The money is there to pay health care workers respectfully and to retain them—because it costs more to actually go through that hiring process and train a new nurse.

It went on to say, “You probably know that nurses have left hospitals by the thousands. What you might not know is that the nursing staffing shortage is forcing hospitals to use private agencies to provide nursing staff. Or that nurses employed by such agencies earn considerably more than nurses in the public sector. Or that agencies themselves then charge a premium for their services, which hospitals have to pay.”

So it is costing the health care system more money. Bill 124 is fiscally irresponsible because the dollars that are going into the system are not benefiting the people in the system; they’re benefiting people outside of the system, and mostly these for-profit agencies.

Finally, it said, “So rather than give nurses a decent wage increase that keeps pace with inflation, the government is forcing hospitals, which are already strapped, to pay a premium to cover staffing shortages that the government, in part, caused. Now you know that, too. Perhaps you should let Ford and Jones know as well, since they don’t seem to know what is really going on in Ontario hospitals.”

I fully agree with that editorial from the Hamilton Spectator—and that is actually what I hear from people in the Waterloo region on the regular.

I’m running out of time.

Bill 36 has a very contentious piece on pension reform. I want to get this on the record. I raised it at finance committee. We’ve done some consultation with various stakeholders. On page 72 of the fall economic statement, the government outlined a plan to implement a target benefit plan pension framework. This is a bit of a “hangover” from the Liberals—to use the Minister of Energy’s term from today. They started down this road because the Liberals promised everybody in the province of Ontario a pension. In the 2014 election, that was the issue at the door. People thought that if they voted for the Liberals they were automatically going to get a pension. Of course, that was based on their advertising, which the Auditor General had to call into question. Then, this government changed the rules around advertising—and she has also found that this government is doing exactly the same thing.

However, be that as it may, we can learn from other jurisdictions. New Brunswick has embraced this new target benefit plan pension framework, and they’re 10 years in, and what has happened in 10 years is that the defined benefit plans have now slipped over to target. Why is that important? Because target pension plans traditionally are just that: a target. And the target can move if the pension plan does not perform well. Like defined contribution plans, it shifts the risk of performance of the investment from the employer to the pensioner.

I wanted to raise this because, right now in New Brunswick, they face legal challenges over the change. I feel like this government—you’ve been in court a long time. A lot of lawyers have made a lot of money under this government, but this is something that we should learn from. Stakeholders note that the pension plan model shifted the risk of bearing financial market volatility almost entirely onto the plan members, which runs counter to the idea of having a pension. The pension should keep pace with the cost of living and inflation, so that when you have a pension, you don’t find yourself not having enough money.

Very few people have pensions, or a growing number do not, and so the people who do have one need to know that this government may be moving in the model where you have target benefit pension plans. The federal government backed off of this because the unions and retiree organizations pushed back hard on it because of, they claimed, wage theft. So their defined benefit pensions were a form of deferred wages.

I have to say that the response from the minister on this one is that, “Well, we’re going to start the consultation.” We did move a motion. We tried to amend the fall economic statement, to no avail, because the government has a majority.

Okay, I have 11 minutes left.

I wanted to address the general gist of what’s going on here, what we can see is happening. What is actually validated by the Auditor General’s report that was released last week is that there does seem to be a very concerted effort, Madam Speaker, to really unravel our democracy. It may look a little chaotic in some regard, but it does seems very, very mindful.

This is from a Globe and Mail editorial, which I quite liked because it sort of summed up how I felt about the government. It goes on to say that when the government was first elected, they said that this would be the first-ever government of the people, ignoring, of course, Bill Davis and various other strong Premiers. They even gave each other these little placards for their desks. Do you remember that?

Interjection: “For the people.”

“For the people.” If you’ve got to have a placard on your desk saying that you’re here for the people, you may be in the wrong job, I just want to say.

“Most people saw that random assertion as garden-variety political gas; a meaningless slogan from an inexperienced populist who had lucked into his party’s leadership at the last moment. What no one could foresee at the time was how truly vacuous it would turn out to be.” This is the Globe and Mail editorial—just saying.

It goes on to say, “Last week, his recently re-elected government tabled a bill that, if adopted, will sacrifice a fundamental tenet of democracy—majority rule—on the altar of his political agenda.” This is called the Better Municipal Governance Act, otherwise known as Bill 39: “The mayors of Toronto and Ottawa will be able to adopt or amend bylaws with just one third of the vote on their councils.”

This is unprecedented, Madam Speaker. Nobody else, not even that newish Premier in Alberta, is going down this road. In fact, they’re going to have to walk back some of their draconian legislation.

“The lone caveat is that those bylaws must relate in a still undefined way to priorities that the Ford government will name at a later date....”

Let’s just unpack that a little bit. The government is going to give these two mayors, for now, these additional powers to override a duly elected council just in the last election, but only if the municipal council aligns with whatever the Ford government’s priorities are. And we still don’t even know what those priorities are.

They go on to say, “There are so many ways this is wrong. Let’s start with the fact that it’s utterly unnecessary.”

We do know that municipalities are creatures of the provincial government. This Premier seems to be very fascinated by that concept, which is why we saw the “notwithstanding” clause come into effect in the 2018 municipal election, and then he did it again with the Strong Mayors Building Homes Act: “Among other things, that law gives the mayors of Toronto and Ottawa the power to veto bylaws and override council decisions, again in the name of provincial priorities,” but undefined provincial priorities. “Councils would have been able to overturn a mayoral veto with a two-thirds supermajority vote. Now even that modest check on the mayors’ new powers has disappeared.”

It was interesting seeing John Tory this weekend in a press conference saying that the loss of revenue—because there has been some language that somehow the provincial government is going to make the city of Toronto whole again, indicating that they won’t take a financial price for the loss of development charges. He said very clearly that even the concept that municipalities have hundreds of millions of dollars that they’re just sitting on, saving for a rainy day—his word was “ridiculous.” So it’s interesting to see. I guess you have to be careful what you ask for or what you wish for, because now the mayor of Toronto has got a new set of problems.

Basically, this is the state of affairs right now: The government is not content with overriding some basic tenets of democracy here in this Legislature, but now they want municipalities to essentially do their bidding for them. We’ve heard that on Bill 39 at committee, and you have to wonder why our democracy is so inconvenient for this PC government, Madam Speaker.

This is the final line: “Doing so would present political challenges, so rather than use the popular franchise” the Premier “earned by winning a majority of seats in the Ontario Legislature, he intends to pervert the democratic principle that put him in power and let a minority on the Toronto and Ottawa councils do his bidding.

“It is almost impossible to believe that this is happening in Canada”—almost impossible, and yet here we are.

I have to say, municipalities across the province are reeling from this. I did write all the five lower-tier, and then I approached the region of Waterloo, and I’m going to get numbers from them, because they are quantifying the impact of Bill 23. The minister has said they’re just sitting on this money, and they have said no, because there’s a five-year economic forecast, a capital forecast that municipalities try to plan for, and it has to be in a measured way, because there is a skilled worker shortage. And they’ve said very clearly to this minister, “If you had consulted with us, we do have solutions,” especially like inclusionary zoning.

We heard at committee about regulating and legalizing rooming houses. Not everybody can afford an apartment or a house. There are a lot of creative solutions out there, Madam Speaker, and people feel very strongly about their greenbelt, as they should.

Meanwhile, I heard the language this morning, as well, from several of the members: “We have to be cautious. We have to be careful.” We haven’t seen any evidence of cautious or careful around the fiscal management of some of this funding. In fact, we have an Auditor General’s report that clearly articulates a huge amount of waste in Ontario. Maybe I should have started with the waste, because I could have spent a lot of time on this. But I did reference the 3.4 million COVID-19 vaccine doses, as of June 30, that were destroyed, that we couldn’t use.

The OLG awarded certain contracts based on weak bids, especially in the west GTA contract awarded to Great Canadian, and after assigning casino contracts, three contractors successfully renegotiated them with lower revenue projections, resulting in $3.3 billion in less revenue to the province over 10 years.

The Auditor General said the Ontario government spent $13.75 million on ads she believes are partisan, which is nearly 20% of all the advertising that happens in the province. Then about $3.5 billion—$3.5 billion—of the $7 billion spent on COVID-19-related contracts were non-competitive procurements between March 2020 and March 2022.

A lot of money came into this province during that time. A lot of that money was federal money. I think it warrants some attention, because what we saw was, of those COVID measures that the government owned, 94% were on the federal tab—94% of the money that went to COVID measures during the height of the pandemic was on the federal tab. Health care spending in Ontario is expected to be the equivalent of $1,180 a person during that time, but only $160 of that was on the province’s tab.

This government has been very good at selling this concept that they’re doing their due diligence, but thankfully we have an Auditor General’s report. I asked the question of the finance minister last week around the money laundering that is happening in our casinos, and he seemed more concerned about the Auditor General’s method of exposing that laundering than he was about the actual laundering of the money that is happening in the casinos.

Finally, we have this really strange thing. The government decided that they were going to give licence plate sticker rebates. They know of this case. I asked the finance minister in the committee. One person received $38,000 from Ontario’s licence plate sticker refund program, while some $32 million ended up with people who appeared to own five cars. I asked a very simple question of the minister. I said, “I don’t think that the government intended that people get $40,000 so that they don’t have to pay their licence sticker fees, but clearly this is a design flaw. Are you going to fix it?” That remains the question of the day.

In summary, I have to say, aside from the ODSP and the seniors’ guaranteed income piece, this is a budget, once again, that misses the mark on so many levels. And the damage, which I generally am concerned about, is, how are we going to build back stronger when the government doesn’t recognize that the funding and the resource issue in our health care system is very real, that people’s lives are stake, that our education system and the skilled trades are issues that have to be carried out with some dignity, some integrity and, at the end of the day, yes, with some resources?

I thank the member for the question. You have to remember, the government says that you’re spending this much money, but the FAO says that $900 million didn’t get spent in the last year. That’s almost a billion dollars. It’s a lot of money that didn’t get into the system. What we have consistently said to the government is that this money should be there. And then you also have Bill 124, where hospitals are spending two, three times the amount on nursing. That’s fiscally irresponsible. Bill 124 has to go. Reparations have to be made, and confidence back in that system has to be rebuilt, because this government has stubbornly been attached to Bill 124.

The interesting thing about the gas tax—and we would have included this amendment had we been able to—is that this is another financial hit to municipalities. So not only is this government, through Bill 23, hurting them by lost development charges fees—and we’re quantifying that right now—but there are so many other things that this government could be doing to really acknowledge the pain that people in this province are experiencing. That includes addressing price gouging in grocery stores, for instance. That’s why we’re seeing food bank usage up 30%.

I think what’s really happening at CHEO right now with the Canadian Red Cross coming in—the Canadian Red Cross usually comes in when there is a disaster. They are an emergency option. So it goes back to the disconnect, with the parliamentary assistant saying, “Oh, this isn’t a crisis,” and not really acknowledging what’s happening in our system.

I think what could have been in this fall economic statement is, the government could have recognized that their vaccination strategy was so poorly rolled out, based on what the Auditor General said in her report—because only 7% of children in the province aged 5 to 6 years received a first dose of COVID-19 vaccine. So the smart money is on prevention. But this government seems really happy with thinking outside the box, by calling in a national health institute to try to pick up the pieces.

People do not want to enter the skilled trades because they don’t think it’s safe. The coroner’s report that just came out yesterday indicates that our workplaces—well, 41 construction workers have died this year in Ontario. Speaker, 41—some trades, but it doesn’t matter that it’s not just construction; it matters that 41 people went to work and they didn’t come back home again.

If you want to inspire people to enter the skilled trades and not just use your words in this place, then you actually have to put some resources to keep those workplaces safe. That’s the missing piece with this government.

Thanks for the presentation.

I appreciate that the member brought up the importance of skilled trades.

The government has said that they want to pull more skilled trades workers into the sector. However, 41 workers have died this year on work sites, and the Ministry of Labour has just categorically dismissed the 10 recommendations from the coroner’s jury on the two workers who died last August in a trench collapse in Ajax, Ontario.

What does the member say to the government about ensuring that we do pull people into the skilled trades, and that connection to workplace safety and feeling supported as workers in Ontario?