Madam Speaker, through you to the member for Mississauga–Malton: You often talk about your journey here, from India to Canada, and how proud you are that you were able to build a career, raise a son and a daughter, and take advantage of the opportunities that Ontario provides.

I would like you to share with the Legislature this afternoon what our government is doing, the measures we are putting in place, so that other new Canadians can also pursue a career and perhaps even realize the dream of home ownership.

I noticed that the Ontario government has made a decision to change the definition of affordable housing. Currently, the city of Toronto has a definition of affordable housing that would put a one-bedroom unit at a purchase price of $190,000; that means you could buy that if you were earning about $58,000 a year. Well, now the Ontario government is looking at changing the definition of affordability so that a one-bedroom unit would cost $444,000, requiring a household annual income of at least $130,000, which is really shocking.

What is this government’s plan to build more affordable housing in Ontario?

I want to acknowledge and thank the member opposite for that question. I was listening intently. I thought he was probably going to take the whole 10 minutes asking the question.

Our government wants to make sure that every worker who is able to work, can work, wants to work is on the path of the dignity of a job.

Talking about the re-entry jobs and the ODSP that the member opposite is talking about—we have seen, in 2019, 88% of all the injured workers were able to return to work and earn 100% of their pre-injury wages within one year.

We have increased the ODSP rate by 5%. Through this statement, we’re actually moving further, by increasing the Ontario disability support monthly earnings exemption from $200 to $1,000 per month. This change would encourage as many as 25,000 more individuals to participate in the workforce.

Madam Speaker, our government supports our injured workers and anyone and everyone who is on ODSP. We will continue to focus on creating hope and opportunity for all Ontarians.

I remember when I landed here on January 15, 2000—and even before I landed, my wife came home from the office and said, “We’re going to Canada.” I said, “What’s that?” She said, “That’s the land of opportunities.”

Proudly, 17 years after landing in Canada, I want to say thank you to my extended family and God for giving me an opportunity to become a candidate in 2018. Eighteen years after landing, I became a member of provincial Parliament.

What I’m trying to say to every newcomer is, if you can dream it, with your hard work, with the support of other Ontarians, you can achieve it here. That’s what we do here.

I still remember when I came here, when we bought our first house in Brampton—70 Native Landing in Brampton—we used to go and see it almost every second week to see how far it had gone up.

This government is committed—as we heard this morning from the Associate Minister of Housing, we will continue to support Ontarians, and we will make sure that we will build 1.5 million homes in the next 10 years.

Again, going back to, if you can dream it, through hard work here in Ontario you can achieve it—that is what our government is doing.

When I came here, the first thing I did was, I went back to Sheridan College. I understand the value of education. Back then, we used to start in the morning—by the evening, we would have two or three jobs. Back then, also, in 2000-01, there was a huge labour shortage, something which we are facing now.

Thankfully, we have a government that believes in and understands giving a hand to Ontarians through the SDF program. We are helping Ontarians through Better Jobs Ontario. We are making sure anyone who is looking for a job, who wants to do a job, who is able to do a job—through the small credentials, we will support them.

Along with that, we know that our youth needs a hand, needs help. We know there are going to be over 100,000 jobs in construction alone coming up. That’s why we are investing in the Ontario Youth Apprenticeship Program. I encourage everyone: Reach out to your guidance counsellor. We are actually doing career fairs across the province. We want to tell these youth: Come join the skilled trades and enjoy the benefits.

Regarding the question the member asked, I have a very simple answer: Read this wonderful document you have. There is a lot for our province of Ontario. Together, all of us—

I have a very simple question for the member: Why does your government’s fiscal update not include any new money in the health care budget?

My question to the member is about keeping costs down.

The people of Ontario work hard, and our government understands that taxpayers are under pressure.

Could the member tell us some more about why the proposed plan in this legislation keep costs down while investing in the priorities that matter to the people of Ontario—and also my riding, my constituents of Markham–Unionville—so critical during this time of economic uncertainty?

Speaker, there are so many aspects to Ontario’s Plan to Build. I want to therefore ask the member from Mississauga–Malton if he could explain how this proposed legislation will support the government’s efforts to address the labour shortage in Ontario, particularly the shortage in skilled trades, and in reference to the Skills Development Fund.

Next question.

We are going to continue with further debate.

I am pleased to rise today, on behalf of the people I represent in London West, to participate in debate on Bill 36.

I certainly have some thoughts about the government’s progress on their so-called plan to build, but first I did want to observe that I think what we see in this document and this bill that is before us today is another fundamental misread of what the province of Ontario is looking for from this government and where Ontarians are at in their daily lives. We saw that with the government’s decision to ram though Bill 28, the bill that used the “notwithstanding” clause to remove workers’ rights to bargaining and impose a collective agreement on the lowest-paid education workers in our system. It created chaos in our schools, and it completely ignored some of the issues that are priorities for the people in the province. That’s what we see today in this bill. That’s what we saw yesterday when the minister stood up to present the fall economic statement.

The priorities that the people in this province have identified right now, the pressures, the crisis that they are living through, are in our health care system, and one would have expected that the government would have recognized this as they were preparing the fall economic statement, and that they would have put in additional funding to mount an aggressive campaign to recruit and retain and return nurses. We have seen nurses burnt out, exhausted, leaving the profession in numbers that we’ve never experienced before in Ontario. They’re switching careers. They are retiring early. They are going to other jurisdictions where they’re better compensated. Instead of seeing this government taking the aggressive actions that would be necessary to shore up that health care workforce, to prevent the overwhelming of our pediatric ICUs, of our pediatric ERs, and prevent the closure of emergency rooms in small hospitals across the province—this government decided, “No, that’s not a priority for us right now. We’re not going to put in any additional funding to deal with that crisis.”

We saw nothing in this fall economic statement or this legislation to repeal Bill 124. That has been consistently raised by nurses and health care workers and public sector workers as one of the biggest impediments to their ability to sustain the kind of workforce that we need to deliver those vital public services, those vital health care services to Ontarians. We saw nothing in here to indicate that the government has any kind of a plan to put forward a comprehensive and effective public education campaign to get people to mask, to get people to recognize the link between wearing masks in public places and protecting kids from having to go on ventilators in pediatric ICU rooms. We saw nothing in this legislation or this statement that would indicate that the government understands the severity of the crisis and how much Ontarians care about the government dealing with the crisis, taking the actions that are necessary.

In my community, in London, the Children’s Hospital reported double the typical volume of pediatric patients ending up in the pediatric emergency room. Typically, they would have about 100 visits a day. Now they have 200 and more visits a day. These are critically ill children who are, with their parents, waiting hours on end to get access to the care that they need and they deserve.

I’m sure that other MPPs in this room read the comments from the CEO of Toronto’s Hospital for Sick Children on the weekend. He was talking not just about cancelling surgeries—because that had happened previously—but he was talking about the overwhelming of the pediatric ICU beds at SickKids hospital. He said that the cancellation of surgeries was “heartbreaking for the families” and “morally distressing” for medical professionals, who are not able to do the surgeries that they know these kids need in a timely manner. He said, “There is no child who ever has an elective surgery. There is just a question of what is life-saving, what is very urgent and what is less urgent.”

So I would say that it’s shameful that this government made the decision not to rise to the occasion and do an all-hands-on-deck response to the crisis that we are seeing in our pediatric ICUs.

Also, in London, we are continuing to see the problems with off-load delays of ambulances, of code zeros being declared when there are no ambulances on the road to be dispatched to help people who need emergency assistance.

We had a motion that we debated in this House just a couple of weeks ago—and it was actually passed unanimously, if I recall, by members on all sides—calling on the government to develop a plan to deal with the code zeros, to put an end to code zeros, because people in this province deserve to know that if they are in a crisis and need an ambulance to come, that ambulance would be available.

In London, we are seeing regular lineups of 16 or more ambulances waiting in the bays to off-load patients. That means that those ambulances can’t be on the road responding to emergencies, and the paramedics in those ambulances can’t be providing the support that they need.

Again, just as with the nursing workforce, we are hearing about paramedics who are experiencing burnout at levels never before witnessed. They are also making decisions to leave that profession.

We also know that in London and across the province there is a dire shortage of family physicians. There’s nothing in this economic statement to deal with that shortage of family physicians. I hear regularly from people in London that they can’t get access to a family doctor. That just puts more and more pressure on our emergency departments at our hospitals across the province.

We have a crisis in children’s mental health. I am hearing awful stories of the kinds of experiences that parents are having to go through with their children who are in dire mental health crises and absolutely cannot get the supports they need.

CSCN, the local agency that helps children who are having mental health issues, told at least two of the families who recently contacted my office that the needs of their children were too high for the programs that they had available. A response that we got from the ministry, when we contacted the ministry about one of these families, was that there is no provision in the existing model that facilitates a crisis response if or when one is indicated. We are reliant on community-based, ministry-funded services to address the needs of the community youth, to the extent that they are able. Well, they’re not able to address the needs of youth in the community, the needs of youth who are self-harming and are attempting suicide and all manner of experiencing mental health distress.

We also know, in my community in London, that there is a housing crisis. I want to point out, Speaker, that this document that we received yesterday has just three mentions of London, which is Ontario’s fifth-largest municipality, and one would think that, in a document of this size, London would be mentioned.

There was one mention of raising the speed limit on Highway 402 between London and Sarnia, and then there were two mentions of long-term-care homes in London that are getting upgraded beds. But interestingly, Speaker, as we consistently see from this government, the focus on beds comes without any kind of a plan to ensure that the staffing is there to care for those long-term-care home residents who are in those beds. There is nothing in the legislation, nothing in this document that suggests that the government has any kind of a plan to get to those four hours of hands-on care that long-term-care residents certainly deserve and have been waiting for, for far too long.

Nothing about the housing crisis in our city, and as my colleague, our finance critic, the member for Waterloo pointed out that, in fact, what the government does highlight in this document about housing is a downgrading to the targets they had previously committed to to reach the 150,000 new housing starts that are needed annually in order to get to that 1.5-million-homes target that we need to achieve in this province over the next decade. So the government has now reduced its projections for new housing starts and leaving it—you know, even after they announced this plan to carve out the greenbelt and they introduced Bill 23 to deregulate, to restrict the role of conservation authorities and housing development and to make it easier for for-profit private sector developers to build. But we know that the needs for deeply affordable housing, for non-market housing, are not going to be met by the private sector, and yet the government has not included the kind of investment that would be necessary to meet the needs of Ontarians in our community who are under-housed, who are living in substandard housing or who are homeless.

I just want to refer to the Vital Signs report for London that came out earlier this month. According to the city of London, there are more than 6,000 people currently on the wait-list for social housing, and as of September 1, 2022, 2,241 individuals in our community were experiencing homelessness.

London Cares is an agency of the city that provides wraparound supports through an outreach team for people who are experiencing homelessness, and they have reported a 68% increase in their outreach team’s interactions with homeless individuals in the last year.

We need supportive housing, Speaker. We need housing that that will address the mental health needs of people who are homeless, who are under-housed.

I just want to share a couple of shocking stories that were in the media just over the last week in London. Charles Pearce is living at Bruce Residence in London. He’s been living there for two years. He is on ODSP. Bruce Residence is a for-profit business. They announced a $200 rent increase for him, even as there is a rampant bedbug infestation and a rampant cockroach infestation at his building. He gets about $1,100 in ODSP. He’s being asked to pay $1,000 in rent for this facility that he is living in because there are no options. There are no options for people like Charles, who ends up having to stay in a horrifying place like that.

Another story just came out yesterday. Tom has both legs amputated. He has lost several of his fingers to frostbite. He was discharged from London Health Sciences Centre and has been lying at the corner outside the hospital for the last four days because the electronic wheelchair that he was discharged in—the battery died, and he has no way of getting somewhere to stay.

This is the kind of dire circumstances that people on ODSP are facing. The government’s plan to allow recipients to earn $1,000 before they start clawing back ODSP instead of $200 won’t do a thing to help Tom. Tom has difficulty with a lot of issues around daily living. He’s not able to go out into the workforce. He needs the doubling of social assistance rates that the NDP had called for, as does Charles, who is living in that bedbug-infested Bruce Residence.

Speaker, we also know that Londoners are experiencing food insecurity, again, at rates that we haven’t seen before. The London Food Bank said that the record for monthly visits was broken three times over a four-month period, and many of these people who are visiting food banks—one in three, in fact—are first-time users of the London Food Bank. Many are students. Many are seniors.

My colleague the member for Waterloo talked about the fact that in last year’s budget, the government underspent OSAP funding for students by $83 million. They withheld $83 million of financial aid to students that would have made a huge difference. But we also know that this government has decided that student loans are the way to go, instead of the grants that students in financial need should have access to, to attend post-secondary.

But when you have students who are facing big loan repayments and interest rates are rising to the extent that we’ve seen them, you’re going to see things like what we saw at Western University: Demand at food banks for Western University students doubled. Students are facing financial hardship, again, like they haven’t seen before. And more students are turning to the food bank on campus, to the food bank operated by London Food Bank, than they ever have before.

I also want to, in the last minute and 40 seconds I have, highlight that November is Woman Abuse Prevention Month. Today is Shine the Light on Woman Abuse. It’s a campaign that originated in London to raise awareness of gender-based violence. In June of this year, we had an inquest release 86 recommendations coming out of the Renfrew murders of three women by an intimate partner. Over the last year, there have been 43 femicides in this province, and yet the government has decided: no new investments in violence-against-women programs; no new investment in counselling and support for survivors of gender-based violence.

We know that those deaths, in all of those inquests that have been held into intimate-partner violence, were preventable if the proper supports had been put in place. It’s very disappointing that what we saw today—or yesterday, when the statement was read and the bill was tabled. We saw a bill that really fails to address the highest priorities and concerns of Ontarians. But frankly I’m not surprised, because that is what we have seen all along from this government.

Thank you. We’ll move to question and answer. The first question to the member for Scarborough–Rouge Park.

Report continues in volume B.

I enjoyed the remarks from our friend from London West.

Just to continue this discussion of Bill 124: Ottawa’s nursing leader back home in our community, Speaker, is Rachel Muir, president of ONA Local 083. She’s referred to Bill 124—which the member was talking about—as “misogynist” legislation, which seems like pretty heavy rhetoric. But when Rachel explains that, she says there are exemptions in the public sector for first responders, who do valuable work in our communities—police, fire—but for the predominantly women-staffed professions—like nursing, personal support work—there’s a 1% cap.

So I’m wondering if the member could talk about the fact that, if the government is in fact doing as the member is suggesting, which is throttling the finances of this province by capping wages—not spending money that’s announced, to the tune of, if I understood the member from Waterloo correctly—

Thank you to the member from London West.

One of the things she said very early on in her debate was the need to repeal Bill 124. We hear this everywhere we go. I’m sure the Conservative members hear it as well; I’m not sure they’re listening though. She talked about how this is leading to shortages, how people are exiting from the health care system and leaving the profession in record numbers.

Often the government will talk about the number of people they’re hiring or planning to hire, but I often try to explain to people: That is like filling a bathtub with the plug pulled; it doesn’t matter, as long as people are exiting faster than you can pull them in.

Could the member from London West explain why repealing Bill 124 would be an excellent step forward to showing respect for our health care workers and also to increase retention and attract people into that profession?

Speaker, we know that affordability measures like the gas tax cut work. When the gas prices were slowing down the past summer, the Statistics Canada Consumer Price Index for July reported that the gas price fell most in Ontario compared to other provinces because of this temporary gas tax cut.

Right now, we are proposing to extend this gas tax—meaning to reduce the rate of gasoline and diesel—to remain at nine cents per litre until next December, 2023.

Will the member opposite support the proposed extension of this proven measure?

Thank you to the member for her passionate and informative presentation, and thank you also for raising the fact that sexual assault survivors are often left without any support, frankly, under this Conservative government.

I’m wondering if the member can offer any insight on how the fall economic statement is helping survivors, who currently, in some cases, have to travel out of town for hours, or even go home in the clothing in which they’ve been assaulted, sleeping in that clothing, because there are no staff or there’s a shortage in staff at the hospitals to take care of them. How is this government taking care of survivors, if at all?

Look, the NDP has been pushing for action to address rising cost of living for months, if not years. This is one of the things that we have called for.

This government, however, seems to forget that there are people who don’t drive cars. There are people like Charles who I mentioned, Tom who I mentioned, who need some relief from cost of living through increased ODSP.

There are students who don’t drive cars who need some relief from rising food prices through breaks on financial aid. They need more OSAP. They need grants instead of loans.

Even the people who do drive cars—one of the biggest things that I hear consistently is about the need to rein in auto insurance companies who are jacking up premiums for no reason whatsoever.

These are the kinds of measures that we would like to see in this—

Yes, certainly. Bill 124—when that was introduced by this government back in 2019, what it said to all public sector workers is, “We don’t value your work. We think that your work is worth a 1% wage increase regardless of what the cost of living is, regardless of inflation, regardless of the value of the services that you provide to our community.”

And Bill 124 has become a symbol—for public sector workers, for health care workers—of just how much this government disrespects and devalues the work that they are doing, and the constant call for the repeal—not just from us; from health care workers across the province—are to tell this government, “Take that bill back. Tell us that you value our work, and maybe we will stay.”

We have seen and we have all heard, I think, from the violence-against-women agencies in our communities that they are seeing a huge spike in calls, they are seeing a huge spike in service levels and don’t have the capacity to respond effectively.

Speaker, as we know, the gas tax cut is not only for the eight million drivers in Ontario, but, frankly, for everyone, because we know that when the price of gas is low, things like food, for example, are also maintained low. When our farmers want to bring their produce to market, well, guess what? They use our highways and they do go to that gas station to tank up. So it’s not only beneficial for the eight million drivers, but, frankly, for all of us, who eat every day.

But since we’re talking about health care, I want to point out a number from the Financial Accountability Officer. He states that there is an 8.1% average annual growth, from $6.8 billion in 2021-22 to $10.9 billion in 2027-28, so this government is investing heavily into our health care sector, like long-term care, by hiring 27,000 more PSWs into the sector, which are largely women professionals. Why can’t the opposition support the work this government is doing in hospital infrastructure, in health care workers?