I want to thank the member for her debate. I’m going to have to ask a very quick question. I have a constituent who has had wage theft occur. I just wanted to know what you think this bill, Working for Workers Act, could do better in order to help people recoup their wages from employers who have wage theft among their own staff.

I’m pleased to have the opportunity to be able to weigh in on Bill 79, the Working for Workers Act, at third reading. I don’t believe I had the opportunity under second reading before the Legislature rose, so it’s a great time to be able to stand up and speak on behalf of workers and to really talk about what New Democrats would do for workers in the province of Ontario, which we know is very different than what we have seen the Ford government do.

They have claimed to be supporters of workers, and yet we have seen several examples of where they’ve clearly not been on the side of workers: for example, cancelling and freezing the minimum wage for three years when they first came into office. It was just put into place that workers in this province were finally going to get an increase to minimum wage, something that the New Democrats had to fight the Liberals forever to be able to get them that minimum wage increase, and when the Ford government came in, they cancelled that increase right away, of course, once again affecting and attacking the most vulnerable people in our province.

Sick days: We, again as New Democrats, had fought with the Liberals to get paid sick days put in place, and the minute the Ford government came in, they cancelled those paid sick days. We’ve seen what happened during COVID when people did not have access to those paid sick days and we had to fight tooth and nail, really, the Conservative government to be able to get paid sick days put in place. But now they’ve also been cancelled, as the time has run out on them, and, quite frankly, we’re seeing another rise in COVID cases. We have our hospitals in Hamilton, for sure, who are now asking people who work within the hospital system to wear masks once again, so we know that those paid sick days are so critical to the fabric of our community.

Someone who is working day in and day out in this province is probably just making it. Many folks are just making it. With the cost of rent, with the increased cost of mortgages, with inflation rates, with the cost of food, we know that people are living paycheque to paycheque more and more, each and every day. When you don’t have that safety net of a paid sick day, it puts families and homes—their valuable homes—at risk, and that is something that we really don’t have room to allow to happen.

I can tell you, I hear on a daily basis from friends of mine who are at risk of being homeless. They’ve lived in homes for years that they’ve rented, and now those landlords are selling those homes. They’re terrified about where they’re going to go, and to be able to pay the rent. One, for instance, is a teacher in an elementary school and works part-time as a bartender at night to be able to make the difference, to take care of her and her kids. She is one of these people who are facing eviction, and she has no idea where she’s going to go. She has health concerns. She can’t just not go to work, and she has to be able to feed her family. This struggle is real for her, and I feel for my friend, but there is just not the affordable housing that our community needs.

Another woman I know—again, another single mom—her place is also for sale, and she is struggling, trying to figure out how she is possibly going to make it work. She’s like, “I think I can pay up to $3,000 a month. That’s stretching it, but I think I can make it.” Now, that’s a lot of money—$3,000 a month, just to be able to afford to pay the rent. These are the workers in our province. These are the people who this bill is supposed to be about, and yet there is nothing in this bill to protect the workers of this province.

What else did I see in here? What else have you done? Was it Bill 28 that tried to stomp on the charter rights of Canadians? We’ve seen what happened there, as people across this province protested day in and day out, until this government had to reverse their decision—which is something that we see happen on a regular basis around here. The greenbelt decision being reversed is probably the fourth time, I think, in the six years that this government has been elected that they’ve had to reverse course on legislation they put forward, backtrack and come back in with new legislation to make up for the mistakes that they have been caught with.

I think the only mistakes that this Premier truly thinks he has made is that he gets caught, and that people stand up to him, and they are the workers of this province—

Constitutional rights—there we go. That one went there.

Bill 124, again, is another hit against workers that we have seen in this province: nurses, correctional workers, any public service worker. They’re left out to be able to receive the increased wages that their bosses, I’m sure, are receiving. They’ve been frozen at a 1% increase, and that hurts when we have a 19% increase in inflation of food in our communities. A 1% increase just certainly isn’t going to cut it.

I’ve been looking at some information, as I was a speaker the other evening at the Frozen in Time town hall, to talk about ODSP and OW and how those rates have been frozen for so many years, and the effect that that has on our community and what it has on folks. The reason that I’m raising this is, well, first of all, because they need to be increased—doubled; there’s absolutely no doubt. A person on ODSP is making $1,227 a month; a person on Ontario Works, $733 a month. The average rent in Hamilton is $1,800 a month for a one-bedroom, probably pretty-much-nothing apartment, so those folks are definitely struggling.

But what that brought up to me in this point and why I wanted to raise it is because in my notes from that town hall that night, I talked about Canada’s Market Basket Measure, which is a formula to determine how much an income has to be, to be able to survive in the community. For folks in Hamilton to be able to live modestly, it’s $49,952. A person earning minimum wage is not coming close to that mark, and it’s forcing them into extreme poverty. It’s forcing them into tents in our communities.

We’re seeing this time and time again. We have so many people who are going to work every day; they’re sleeping in tents, they’re sleeping in cars, they’re couch-surfing, they’re living with their parents and they’re just trying to figure out how to make it work in the province of Ontario when they simply cannot afford to do so.

Another thing in this bill in schedule 4 is the collection of personal data from post-secondary institutions relating to employment services programs in the province. So I’ll take you back again: People who are on Ontario Works or ODSP, the employment services were rammed through our local municipalities—and it was a knowledge base, it was a relationship base where they understood our city or our small little town or wherever the person lived, and they could relate to the jobs that made sense there, what was working and what wasn’t.

When this government again decided to attack the most vulnerable people and thinks that the best social service and social safety net is a job—even when you’re disabled, they think that everybody can go to work—they contracted out the employment services. They took it away from our municipalities. Hamilton is a municipality that bid for the contract to be able to provide this service, and they lost the bid. They lost the bid to a private company. This is how it went—“contracting out of employment services for the Muskoka-Kawarthas, the Peel region and the Hamilton-Niagara region. The Hamilton-Niagara contract has been awarded to American firm Fedcap. The Peel region’s services will be contracted out to WCG, a subsidiary of Australian company”—

Thank you for the question. Yes, our government has a really ambitious plan to build across Ontario, and to deliver on that plan, we need all kinds of workers and we need women in the trades. Currently, only one in 10 construction workers in Ontario is a woman. To attract more women to these really well-paying and rewarding careers, we need to make our job sites safe and welcoming.

The standard for PPE fit and sizing in construction has historically been a male body. This has made it harder for women and others outside of the standard fit and sizing to find equipment that properly fits the proportions of a woman’s body, with many having to refashion ill-fitting garments or equipment to fit, potentially compromising the effectiveness of the PPE. The proposed changes would clarify and make explicit the requirement that PPE and clothing be a proper fit, taking into account all factors, including consideration of diverse body types.

Do you think that this bill, Bill 79, has done enough for sick workers—workers who get sick and need sick days on the job?

You know, there are so many things that we could do to ensure that workers are supported and regulations are in place, like better safety training on the job—we know that that has been left to the unions to be able to do that work, and I’m so grateful for them, but ensuring that the dollars are there to fund them and to support them.

I think increasing wages, increasing benefits, making sure that people have proper pensions, WSIB coverage, get rid of deeming—these are the types of things that people in this province need and want and have been asking for, for many years.

The government needs to truly stand up for workers, stand up for people who have been injured, stand up for families who have lost loved ones on the job by focusing on these kinds of issues.

We’ve seen the increases in our food banks. We have seen more tents pop up in our communities. You want to do something? Double the rates. When they actually have rates and they can somewhat afford to live, then we get them into the job field. You can’t stick someone who lives in a tent out to work when they can’t even afford to eat.

Think about a mom with a special-needs kid who doesn’t have an EA in the classroom and has to go and pick her kid up from school because they can’t handle the kid in school; there’s nobody there. What’s that mom going to do? She needs that paid sick day to be able to make up that cost.

But instead, we’re telling mom, “Listen, you’re going to struggle with supports because your kid hasn’t had any supports for autism, and we’re going to not keep the kid in school because we don’t have enough adults in the classroom, and then we’re going to tell you that you can’t pay the rent because you couldn’t go to work that day.” Paid sick days are a social safety net for vulnerable people and people who are working in our community.