The member for Kitchener–Conestoga will come to order.

The Minister of Municipal Affairs and Housing to reply.

My question is to the Minister of Municipal Affairs and Housing. Last Thursday, we heard from 18 witnesses about Bill 39. Fourteen of those 18 witnesses spoke against the bill. They represent the overwhelming public outcry against this government’s unprecedented attack on local democracy. The Association of Municipalities of Ontario made this very point, saying, “Bill 39 will disenfranchise elected councillors and potentially destabilize and undermine the authority of municipal government.”

AMO is not alone in its understanding of this matter. It has been expressed clearly and repeatedly by countless media outlets, leading scholars, political commentators, and others who care about democracy and good government. Minister, will you listen to Ontarians and withdraw Bill 39?

“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?