They need a better tailor.

Falling up.

Speaker, the Ontario Line the government has proposed that would end up at its science centre, with its world-leading spa run by this Austrian company, is now costing, according to experts like Steve Munro, who is one of our country’s experts on transit, up to $1 billion a kilometre. The Spadina extension that was approved before came in at about $370 million a kilometre. Now, I know, people will tell me, “Oh, well, the war in Ukraine, the commodities crisis, global supply chain issues”—a tripling of cost per kilometre? A tripling of cost per kilometre presided over a company—let’s face it, Metrolinx, in my opinion, has not assumed its role as a agency responsible for the well-being of our transit infrastructure—

Interjection.

This is an agglomeration of managing consultants supervising other consultants. Perhaps—I’m just speculating here—they don’t want transit projects to be complete because then the gravy train stops. But the hard-working people who have suffered and made sacrifices—because that’s what construction is; you’ve got to put up with disruption until your project is complete. You’re from Hamilton, Speaker, you’re familiar with this debate.

Let me talk about them for a moment, because I think that will help the government understand what this looks like at a community level. I want to talk about Dane Williams. Dane Williams, a wonderful community leader I had the occasion to meet, is the co-founder and director of partnerships at Black Urbanism Toronto. He has seen the impact of the Eglinton Crosstown LRT project on Black-owned businesses in Little Jamaica in and around this area.

We did a round table, and these were the words that Mr. Williams submitted to that round table: “Metrolinx has shown gross negligence in the way they operate on the ground, and this has impacted small business owners’ ability to thrive and grow. There have been barricades on the roads, debris blocking business establishments, lack of parking for patrons. Many of the business owners in Little Jamaica who were in operation in 2011 when the project started are no longer operating. This LRT project has been at the expense of business owners who have been in operation for 20 to 30 years before it.

“There must be a policy change that requires a more fair economy. This means implementing a system of compensation directly to the small business owners affected by any LRT construction project. This would not only provide support for the impacted business owners, but also build more accountability into LRT construction projects”—that makes a lot of sense to me.

Further down the road, I want to cite the words of Dante Thorne, who is a lead building operator at the Holy Blossom Temple. He’s been working in Eglinton West for six years. He’s a daily commuter that uses transit, and these were his observations about Metrolinx—who is our partner for bills like this one—and their capacity to build transit. Mr. Thorne says, “There’s a reason people feel disconnected from the political process. People know that those who are responsible and making money from this are not facing consequences and will just move on to the next project.

“When I first moved here, I saw huge rats running around Yonge and Eglinton because this project and its surrounding space were not treated with respect”—the detonations. There were warnings about this, but it was unsettling to see.

“There is a stretch on Eglinton where the concrete barriers came out so far into the street that there is insufficient space for two TTC buses to safely pass each other. This is another example of negligence and the right hand not knowing what the left is doing on this project.

“The LRT project is funded by taxpayer dollars and lacks an incentive to finish on schedule, as there is no punishment or consequence for delays. The longer they take, the more paycheques come in.”

Speaker, I think I want to return to the positive aspects of where I began. There’s no person in this House that doesn’t want to see more public transit and more rapid transit. I’m taking that on faith. There is no person in this House that doesn’t want the people who operate our transit systems and encourage people to use active transit to be supported. We all do. But the conundrum happens when we think about who we rely upon to make these things come to be. That’s missing from this bill.

Let’s return, on a lighter note, because my friend from Kiiwetinoong is here and I’ve heard you, my friend, say this in the past—let’s acknowledge that public transit and what this bill will do will help some communities, but not all communities. The member for Kiiwetinoong has often joked that there are no subways that service the 28 fly-in communities he serves. There are limitations on what we can do with this bill in encouraging public transit in the rural areas and the wild areas of Ontario.

But the fact remains, Speaker, that 80% of people in Ontario do live in metro areas and there are 107 transit agencies operating in this province, according to a recent estimate. And believe it or not, there’s been a lot of innovations in smaller towns. Some towns I had occasion to visit, like Brighton, Ontario, on my bike ride down here from Ottawa, are coming up with different busing initiatives for seniors and persons with disabilities to help them get around because they don’t have access to their own vehicle and they want to stay living in a beautiful town like Brighton where they are. So public transit takes many different shapes and sizes, and I think the case for encouraging it remains incredibly strong.

I want to cite from a recent report by the International Transport Forum. I’m going to quote directly from it so people will have a sense of what public transit can do to help us become more sustainable and to help us create jobs: “Buses and trains can release up to a fifth of emissions per passenger kilometre” as opposed to “ride-hailing and about a third that of a private vehicle. Simply put, public transport, along with bicycling and walking, is a climate solution staring us in the face. Embracing it in this next decade will be a determining factor in reaching climate goals.” This is a global assessment.

“Public transport,” they also write, is “key to an intersectional approach to addressing climate change in the transport sector—connecting with equity, health and economic development. When done well, it can provide more equal access to jobs, education, services and other economic opportunities, particularly to those without private vehicles and in underserved areas—all at a lower cost to consumers” than if they had to deal with it on their own. “The transit industry also provides millions of jobs globally that are important to local economies.”

There are other health challenges addressed through public transit, Speaker. I am a booster this afternoon. “Cities with good public transport have fewer traffic fatalities. Transit riders tend to have more active lifestyles,” like walking home from a station or rolling home from a station or on their way to work, “and cleaner buses carrying more people than private cars can improve air quality and reduce exposure to dangerous pollutants in traffic.” So the next time you’re stuck on a 400-series highway, let’s return to that collective mission we have in this place to encourage public transit, because that’s one critical way we can work together.

In the time I have left, I want to go back to schedule 1 of this bill, because I talked about the labour rights dimension of this, which I expressed to the ministers responsible. I think there are good moves this government can make this week to resolve that. We don’t need a conflict. But let’s just quickly talk about what could happen if we let it fester—if I come back next Tuesday and we still have the incompetent management of Metrolinx and if we still have a potential major conflict with the people who operate our transit systems.

The law has been pretty clear on whether or not Legislatures can interfere in the collective bargaining process. They said very clearly that section 2(d) of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms guarantees collective bargaining as a right, and it’s not a right that can be suspended or massively interfered with by legislation that we put in this place.

I will point to a ruling for Bill 28, that the government introduced, in the Ontario Superior Court of Justice, which said they “accepted the applicants’ position that a governmental measure, such as legislation, will interfere with the collective bargaining process if it:

“(1) prevents or denies meaningful discussion about working conditions;

“(2) prohibits provisions from being dealt with in collective agreements;

“(3) prevents employees from having their views heard in the context of a meaningful process of consultation and discussion; or”—and this is important—“(4) imposes arbitrary terms on collective agreements.”

Speaker, I read from the arbitrator’s ruling, Mr. William Kaplan, who very much affirmed this. So I know that sometimes governments can say, “Well, we’re elected. We want to drive policy. We don’t share the concern that ATU 113 has. We think that the TTC has their best interests at heart, and we’re not going to concern ourselves with operating any way other than opening up the City of Toronto Act and saying, ‘Your contracting-out provisions for your collective agreement don’t apply.’”

With benefit for my colleagues here, let me just share an anecdote I had in commuting back home to Ottawa once in the midst of that massive labour uprising that happened around Bill 28. I’m taking the VIA train—which has a lot of issues; we’ll talk about it another time. I’ve complained to the federal Minister of Transportation several times—but I’m taking the VIA train home, and I’m getting past Kingston, where the cell reception is working relatively well. A text comes across my phone from taxi drivers I know in the city of Ottawa, because I’ve done a lot of work with them over the years about their working conditions. And they write, “The plan is to take the road in front of the Ottawa airport.” I immediately respond by saying, “I’m an elected official. I’m not a member of your union. Please take me off this chat.”

But what I found striking about that was that they were seized with what they perceived as the injustice being brought to bear on low-paid education workers in the public school system in Ontario. The 55,000 people who are ECEs, EAs, library technicians, receptionists, custodians—as I saw in the text stream, which they looped me into, and then I looped myself out—were incensed and had family members who worked in these occupations. And they said, “Look, these people make some of the lowest wages. Our union, which isn’t even party to the negotiation, out of sympathy with the negotiation, is going to shut down the airport parkway in” my city. That would have an enormous impact on transit coming in and out of Ottawa. It would shut the airport down, probably.

And I put the phone down after getting myself off that, and I said to myself, this could really be a galvanizing moment for the labour movement. I spent many years in my life, blessed, learning from people who have organized unions, people who have negotiated collective agreements, doing research for them, and I’ve met people in all different sectors, in all different places in this country. And what I always remember is their lives are so busy. They’re like politicians; their phones are tied to their head. They are always trying to figure out ways to help members with their problems to address grievances, but when bargaining comes up, to make sure the union is as well represented as it can be at that critical, critical, critical table. It’s a sacred place, the bargaining table.

But here are unionized taxi drivers in the city of Ottawa telling me that, in a fight that is not their direct fight and a labour negotiation that is not their direct negotiation, they are prepared to blockade the airport parkway in solidarity with education workers—55,000 of them across Ontario. And they indicated, before I jumped off, that this wasn’t just an Ottawa thing. This was going to happen everywhere. And anecdotally, when I started talking to people—and you remember those times, Speaker, I’m sure; we had a lot of people visiting the Legislature, upset and rallying and such—I heard that story from other employee groups.

I have lots of Conservative friends back home. One gentleman rung me up and told me I shouldn’t be supporting the strikers. We had a good conversation. He said, “Well, the government has introduced a bill, Bill 28, Joel, that will levy $4,000 fines on those people if they decide to strike and defy the law, and a $500,000 fine on their union. They will absolutely back down. That’s the power of the province there. They’ve got to listen to the people who were elected.” This is what the neighbour told me. And I said back to the neighbour, “Well, who do you think levies that fine on the striker? It’s an OPSEU member. It’s somebody working for the Ministry of Labour.” How motivated do you think that person is going to be to walk up to an EA, who works eight months of the year, and makes an average of—what was it, member for Sudbury, the average wage—

Interjection.

It’s known as “falling up.”

—$39,000 a year?

Interjections.

So I said to the neighbour, the Conservative neighbour back home, “I understand the province is a powerful entity. I understand they can introduce back-to-work legislation. They can legislate a collective agreement. They can threaten fines. But, ultimately, they require the compliance of the working people responsible for administering that fine.” And I told him, “I don’t know how many people are going to be motivated to walk up to a low-paid education worker, who spends their day working with people with disabilities, and say, ‘Here’s a $4,000 fine.’”

What I’m saying with this particular bill is if you open up transit workers’ collective agreements and they are faced with the prospect of their working conditions dropping, when these are the people, during the pandemic, that made sure we could get safely to work or to the hospital, that took risks of getting sick and getting hurt on the job—I don’t know where this is going to lead, but it won’t lead to a good place, not a good place. As my friend from Sudbury will say and has said many times, you come up in the labour movement by demonstrating your capacity to listen to members and fight for them. You don’t hold on to your job as an elected representative or a staff member in the labour movement if you do not rise to the occasion.

Let’s hope, in our country, unlike other places around the world, it doesn’t have to get to that. But in November 2022, we almost got there. We almost got there. When I was a university professor, Speaker, I used to have to teach about labour history in this country. We would recall moments like the Winnipeg General Strike, and the students would say to me, “I can’t even imagine what that would look like.” Then, of course, we went through the convoy movement and have a heckuva better idea of what throttling a city looks like.

But the fact of the matter is I don’t want and I don’t think—I hope no one in this place wants to pick a fight with transit workers. I don’t think we want that. I think what we want to do, as I began, is build public transit.

If the government wants to work with willing municipalities who would administer a transit administration fee to build GO stations in their communities—places like Bowmanville or elsewhere—it sounds like a great idea, provided the regulations make sense and we’re not favouring people like Mr. De Gasperis, who, as I understand from my friend from Spadina–Fort York, purchased the land across from the Ontario Science Centre a month before the Ontario Line announcement. Or the $450-million, now $600-million, subsidy we are putting into a parking garage for an Austrian spa, at a time when, if we were all to go together and go down under the Don Valley Parkway, we would see people living under bridges, and we would see, as we have said in this place, young people trapped in their parents’ basements, looking for housing—and we have $600 million to give to an Austrian conglomerate to build a luxury spa at Ontario Place? And we have a transit authority like Metrolinx, which has increased the price of building subways to $1 billion a kilometre?

Alarm bells should be going off in the Premier’s office. Alarm bells should be going off, Speaker. We need to clean a little house, as my grandmother used to say. We need to get our act together.

The good news is, we’ve got people—smart people—who know how to build public transit. We’ve got a public desperate for more public transit. We’ve got workers who are ready to operate and build public transit. But who we work with matters—who we work with really, really, really matters.

My colleague from University–Rosedale once said in this place, on October 29, 2020—her words—“Toronto is a graveyard of failed transit” plans. To quote from what she said, “It’s an absolute graveyard.”

She says, “The Eglinton West project”—that was, you know, the Crosstown that we are discussing ingloriously today—“which has a lot of merit, would have been built right now” if then-Premier Mike Harris hadn’t filled in the holes that were being prepared to build it then. It might have been built 20 years ago, according to my colleague, had we followed previous progressive mayor—previous to the progressive mayor we have in Toronto right now—David Miller’s Transit City plan. We might have had a line “from Pearson to Kennedy.” The Sheppard extension could have been built back then. The Finch West extension could have been built back then. The Eglinton East extension could have been built back then, but, according to the member from University–Rosedale, what seems to be the recurring theme—and we heard Matt Gurney talk about it before is—idea after idea, vision after vision, and the consultants’ meter starts running, but the product does not get built, or in our case, in Ottawa, when it does get built, it does not operate terribly well.

So here is what we can do. We can commit, as a Legislature, to recognize that transit is critical and valuable, that active transit is critical—let me go into some more positive notes, Speaker. Something I love to use, in the city when I have to take a plane—I try not to, but when I have to take a plane—is the Bike Share program that Metrolinx offers. That’s a success story. Let’s say something positive about Metrolinx for a moment. All you got to do is put an app on your phone, you tap it, and a bike pops out of its docking station. You don’t have to bring your own bike to Toronto. You jump on it and you head to wherever you need to go at a very, very, reasonable cost. In my case, I’ll go all the way down to Billy Bishop, if I have to. It’s fun. I don’t drive fast. I need to remember to bring my helmet, but it’s a great way to get around the city; it’s a fun way to get around the city. So that’s a positive thing. It’s a pilot we have.

Down the road from me—I see the member from Glengarry–Prescott–Russell over there, so it’s down the road for both of us into the province of Quebec—is the city of Montreal, which may be the foremost cycling destination right now in all of North America. They have a plan from 2023 to 2027 to build an incredible amount of bike infrastructure.

Commuters with cars love it, because the streets are less congested. Cyclists, wheelchair users, walker users and pedestrians love it, because they’re protected. Montreal is currently in a boom. It works, but here sadly in our city—the run-up to the last mayoral by-election—we had many mayoral candidates presenting themselves as anti-bike-lane warrior and divisive. That’s not going to get us far at all.

I don’t believe in the war on the car. I don’t believe in the war on the bike lane. I don’t believe in that language at all when it comes to how we get around our cities, because the obligation instead is for us to all keep each other safe. It’s for us to all keep each other safe.

On my bike ride that I just did to Toronto, before I left, I had occasion to talk to a mom, Anita, whose daughter Serene, 14 years old now, will have a brain injury for the rest of her life. She was struck with her brother when she was crossing Fisher Avenue. The driver, if you can believe it, fled the scene and later tried to sell the car to avoid being detected by the Ottawa police. I give the Ottawa police full credit, because they did a full publicity campaign, a picture was found and they ultimately found this guy. But that was the level of malevolence that that person exhibited behind the wheel.

If you are a young person trying to get around your community—going to school, doing groceries for the family, meeting up with your friends—what’s going through your mind? Because what happened to this fellow two weeks ago is before a justice of the peace, he was levied $1,000 fine and had his licence suspended for a year—and that is the exception to the rule. That is more penalty than normal. The maximum fine normally is $500, but only because he fled the incident was the penalty worse, was the licence suspension in effect. In the beginning of the sentencing, the guy showed no remorse. He was smirking, in fact—smirking. I was talking to Anita, the mom, and she was just saying, “It’s really hard for us to live through that moment and to know for our other kids and for Serene that there is no justice.” So what would any parent do? You’re going to put that kid in a car, which you deem to be a safe place, and you’re going to drive them where you feel they need to go. But now we’re moving in the direction, as we talked about off the top, that we don’t want to go.

I talked to a lovely fellow named Randy when I stopped in Brighton, Speaker, who was one of the coordinators for the cycling groups out in Brighton, Ontario. I talked to Minister Piccini before getting there and got a sense of the different groups to contact before I got there. But Randy tells me that, out there, it is all too common, when they have those group rides and they’re doing them safely, that someone will buzz them within like six inches, that people will be swiped off the road.

I’ve talked to dump truck drivers, construction workers who don’t feel like cyclists or pedestrians or other drivers have a sense of how poor their sightlines are. I’ve sat in the cab of the truck and I’ve tried to imagine, could I see someone down there? The dump truck driver had told me, “You know, when I’m on a construction site, I’ve got a flag person following me around everywhere to make sure people are safe, but when I leave the construction site, that person’s not there and I’m just expected to figure it out.”

There’s so much we could do with this legislation, with the companion pieces of legislation to make the province safer. I really, really do think, as critical as I have been of aspects of this legislation, that there’s a lot here that we can come around and work together on: expanding public transit, GO stations. There’s a lot here we’ll agree on. The notion of people being safe, getting to work, getting home—we’re going to agree on that. These should not be partisan issues. They should be political priorities of this place. We should be able to come behind it. We should be able to give parents and kids and everyone out there confidence that this House will design laws that will make sure people can get around this city and other cities, that people can do that safely and, moreover, to return to the context, that we’ll do our part for the climate crisis.

Thirty years from now, you and I, Speaker—I don’t think I’m ever going to retire, it’s just the nature of my hyperactivity, but whatever I’m doing 30 years from now, I’ll be able to say, “You know what? I did my part. I worked across the aisle. I worked with my caucus. We were active in our community. We made sure that you had the opportunities that I was lucky to have.” Let’s hope we can make Bill 131 like that. I welcome questions.

A couple of things: Obviously, filling an hour, you’ve got a lot of leeway, moving back and forth with parts of debate, but there is one thing that struck me, which is the lack of movement on previous governments. You mentioned my father’s government. We can blame them for this too. I’m with you on this one. There wasn’t enough foresight, I think, for a lot of previous governments to really see how big and how quickly Ontario was going to grow over the last 20 to 30 years and how far behind we truly were with transit.

I was a former small business owner—the member from Waterloo will know this well—in Waterloo region, and I actually had to close a business because of transit construction delays on King Street with our LRT, and it was tough. I’ve been through it. I understand what it’s like and how disruptive it can be. But could you imagine, if we aren’t getting shovels in the ground now and trying to really bridge the gap and really catch up, how much worse it’s going to be in another 20 years, when we have even more exponential growth?

I guess my question is—I know you don’t want to stand in the way of transit projects and moving things forward—will you support this bill, and can we expect you to work with us on trying to make transit better here in the province?

Thanks for that context. I had no idea that that happened to you. That’s really rough. When your dream has to go up in smoke because of something you didn’t account for, that’s rough.

I’m going to see what bears out in this debate, quite frankly. We’ve had a caucus discussion already. We want to see what you guys are putting on the table.

But I will say again, for the record, the notion of building in laws here that would intervene in other people’s collective agreements is a red line. It’s a red line for anybody who believes they want to stand up to help working people. The good news, as I tried to communicate today, is that you don’t need to do it. You do not need to do it. There are provisions within the collective agreement that would allow the government, I think, and TTC to do that transit service integration.

So I’m cautiously optimistic—let’s put it that way. But on Tuesday, I would like to see schedule 1 out of this bill. Any help you could provide in persuading your colleagues on that front would be great.

Questions?

I want to thank the member from Ottawa Centre. I think that many of us, if you’ve been paying attention to Metrolinx, have some genuine concerns around that agency. I feel like they have completely and utterly forgotten their mandate, which is to construct and improve public transit in the GTHA. There’s a lot of work to be done on that front, and I wish the new Minister of Transportation well in that job.

I am concerned about this new station contribution fee. Kitchener is desperate for a new GO station. Under this schedule, the original idea was for Metrolinx to negotiate deals in which developers would fund a new GO station in exchange for development rights. This government’s relationship with developers is a little dicey right now, and so now they evidently expect municipalities to assume funding responsibilities. We have no idea what sort of funding agreements the government has in mind or how the risks will be allocated. Municipalities may be required to assume risks and cost overruns. This is a pretty serious issue.

If we’re serious about building transit infrastructure, can the member address these concerns that municipalities have?

Just a quick follow-up on that labour piece: It’s my understanding that there had to be a tool implemented for municipalities to have those cross-border conversations, if you will. This isn’t necessarily intended to infringe on anyone’s bargaining; it’s actually to allow that to happen. For example, if Wheel-Trans in Toronto was going to drop somebody off in York region, there wouldn’t be an ability for York Region Transit to then link up, or they have to stop at the Steeles border, if you will, because they’re not allowed to operate in another municipality.

Again, let’s take the politicization out of it, which I know for you and I sometimes can be a little challenging. I just want to offer that this isn’t something malicious. This isn’t something that the government—you guys use the term “poison pill” fairly often; this isn’t something that is that. This gives municipalities the ability to then go ahead and negotiate those types of contracts. I think that’s an important piece that we need to be able to do to have that more seamless transit for people here in the province.

I want to thank the member from Ottawa Centre for his comments today. It’s really enlightening.

I will say that in my riding, I’m deeply concerned about Metrolinx and their continuous failures. We’ve had P3 projects in Ottawa, in Hamilton and now the Eglinton Crosstown—it was just announced today that they do not have a finish date. They started that project in 2011. It’s now $4 billion over budget. The Liberals started it as a P3 project, even though the Auditor General says that P3 projects cost 28% more and do not deliver on time and on budget.

My big concern is this Ontario Line is breaking ground in my riding right now. Metrolinx’s Eglinton Crosstown debacle has bankrupted 400 businesses along Eglinton. I’m concerned that this government refuses the NDP request for an inquiry into what’s happening at Metrolinx. If you were in government, what advice would you give to this government so that we do not have another debacle with the Ontario Line?

You know, it’s interesting: an act called the Transportation for the Future Act is right up my alley as a civil engineer. Even though Metrolinx and GO Transit really don’t touch upon my constituency of Windsor–Tecumseh, certainly I see a lot of potential in this bill to make things better for the people of the GTA, improve transit connections to surrounding communities and get us out of the infrastructure deficit that I know we have province-wide.

The main things are, number one, GO Transit stations will be built faster. Adding more capacity to the ability to pay for a station through the station fee gives that opportunity to implement the changes needed as they are needed, not 30, 40 years behind, and that’s something I will get into in a little bit.

Incentivization of housing around transit stations: We can best leverage density in those locations and the available services. The greater Toronto area is legendary for its congestion. I make that trip often enough; most of the time, I do take the train, and I’ll elaborate a little bit on that further in the debate. But really, I’ve driven in Los Angeles on the 405. It doesn’t compare to the 401. There is so much traffic here that keeps families from getting home.

We have to start addressing our capacity issues. This bill brings us down that path. In fact, I think it was data from transportation group Inrix—they did a study recently—that noted that Torontonians lost 118 hours waiting in traffic just last year. That’s about a 60% jump between 2021 and 2022. In 2021, the city was in 22nd place for congestion; in 2022, it was in third place. We can definitely combat this by making transit and the broader travel network more convenient and give more options for the residents of the GTA.

As noted, this bill doesn’t apply to the residents that I represent in Windsor–Tecumseh, but certainly applies to the goods and services that my constituents buy. A lot of them originate here from distribution centres. They’re manufactured here. Services are predominantly hosted here.

Down in the southwest, we don’t have a lot of the professional services. We have, certainly, a strong manufacturing base, but when we are reliant on banking, insurance and other matters, we need those people at work to answer our calls and to actually make the decisions that will facilitate our livelihoods. We know, in Windsor, that delays mean costs, and delay after delay could mean the difference between a shop opening and a shop closing. Just-in-time delivery is a necessity for local competitiveness. I don’t see why it would be any different for Toronto.

Our rights of way are not infinite. There’s only so much widening you can do of a freeway. Investing in public transit is certainly a tool in the tool box to help make sure that our lands are used well and that we use the best possible assets to bring people from point A to point B. Shifting modes of transportation is truly vital. It’s one of the things I do appreciate about the time I spend here in Toronto, where I get to walk from where I live. And really, supporting public transit is a tool that we have to support our goals, and the most recent Ontario budget had an ambitious capital plan. I believe it’s the most ambitious capital plan in the province’s history.

We know that gridlock on highways and roads costs the economy more than $11 billion a year in productivity, including the time that was lost to commuters and drivers—the higher costs of doing business if your employee doesn’t show up for work because they’re stuck in traffic, or your delivery is stuck. Hey, someone has got to eat that cost. It means that things become more and more expensive for us and it keeps people, more importantly, from getting home to their families faster.

To support this growth, the Ontario government is investing $70.5 billion over the next 10 years for transit. Building our province through critical public transit projects is vital to supporting Ontario’s economy, to get people home faster and alleviating gridlock, connecting people to their jobs and to housing, creating thousands of terrific jobs—I know there are a lot of terrific jobs. In fact, I remember when I was canvassing for my municipal election for the first time, I wanted to identify all the people I knew in town—bad for me. I looked at my voters list, and I just wrote every name on there of someone that I knew or grew up with who had moved out, moved away. Yes, they’re on the voters list; they did not reside locally anymore because they could not find work in my region, in the Windsor-Essex region. They came here to Toronto because this is where the job opportunities existed.

We do need to invest, as a government, to catch up, but the demand for service that is created from land development very much ought to be satisfied through the land development projects. This is where we see lots of local issues, and I’ll certainly get to go through them and I’ll mention a couple.

Development charges do exist to help pay for the capital costs of infrastructure to support new growth. If we want to avoid the mistakes of the past—we heard earlier in the debate, a lot of assumptions were made in the past that growth would be more static than it is realistically—we need to have foresight and to plan for that growth, and that means capitalizing the projects. We need to set a good path for the future. The GO station contribution fee is an appropriate measure in which to ensure we have the funds that we need and avoid having to play catch-up later.

The consequences of unrealized investments in my area are visible every single day. During a 1983 public meeting, as I found published in the Windsor Star, the Ministry of Transportation advised the local community that an interchange, the freeway, at Banwell Road and E.C. Row Expressway, would need to be constructed within a decade. An environmental assessment of the expressway 10 years later in 1993 confirmed that the traffic volumes were set to be reached in 1994.

Forty years after that mention and 30 years after the stats showed we needed that interchange—and this key interchange is located right where the NextStar Energy battery plant is being built—there is no interchange. The intersection has not changed. This is the result of not enough capitalization of our infrastructure projects. E.C. Row Expressway turns into County Road 22 at its east limit, where Windsor meets Tecumseh, and it’s still a controlled-access road. In 2005, it was determined that grade separations at Lesperance Road and Manning Road would be warranted as the 2005 level of service was E. In traffic engineering parlance, that is a step away from failure. The 10-year level of service was failure. That was 10 years ago. We have been in failure for 10 years.

These projects are supported by property taxes; they’re not supported by development charges. The funding is planned for between 2034 and 2037. But truly, think of the cost of a highway interchange. They’re running about well north of $50 million these days—probably closer to $80 million. Given that Essex county’s capital budget was $43.6 million for the entire county, every single project combined, the chances look pretty challenging, to say the least, that those two interchanges will come online in the 2034-37 time frame.

This situation that I get to face back home in my own neighbourhood speaks to why development charges for regional arterial roads and transit infrastructure are terrific tools in the tool box that can help accelerate infrastructure investments. Development charges are discretionary fees. Sometimes they’re the right tools; sometimes they’re the wrong tools. But municipalities can choose whether to use development charges, and if they are used, which services or infrastructure they want to include from the services that are listed as being eligible in the Development Charges Act. Truly, there is no greater opportunity for the province of Ontario than to further develop GO Transit to move our people quickly and safely.

Speaker, my father often told me that in order to pursue his career in his company, moving to the GTA was the only option. It was the only opportunity for promotion because the headquarters were here in Toronto. Then they moved to Mississauga and, ultimately, they ended up in Hamilton. But for the sake of myself, my brother and our whole family, he would forgo those career opportunities because it meant that approximately 90 minutes of his day in each direction likely would be spent in traffic. And that’s away from us, his family. He worked 12 hours a day, as it was, often longer. My own commute back home when I worked in downtown Windsor was 30 minutes on a bad day from the eastern limit of the town of Tecumseh, the far east of my riding. Happily, we’re in a better, more nimble world now. Those choices aren’t as necessary.

But having lived here in Toronto during our legislative sittings, I have benefited from the connectivity that transit provides. I can get on board the Walkerville VIA station in Windsor. It’s right in my riding; I’m very proud of that. I can then take the train, which takes about four and a half hours, transfer onto the TTC subway and then get off at Wellesley station and walk two blocks to where I get to sleep while I’m here—and, truly, finish that walk here to the Legislature each and every day.

You know what? I know there’s always room for improvement. Certainly, I’d love to get home earlier than 1 in the morning after House duty tomorrow. But I’m truly happy that this service exists for us. There are tremendous benefits that go to those communities where these stations are built, and access to transit is something I truly appreciate having here. We can unlock so, so much opportunity for our people by having the capitalization to respond to those stations being built.

Even back home, when I was on municipal council, public transit service was offered on a loop basis, but it only connected at one point in Tecumseh Mall. That’s the unfortunate byproduct of a dispute over inter-jurisdictional coverage, which is also another part of this bill. But they truly did rely on transit to get to and from work, to go shopping, to find stores that carry clothing. Living in a suburb, there aren’t a lot of options, to be honest. We had a time in the 1980s when residential was the only type of development that was built, and so the mix of communities is not always there in the built environment. That’s why it’s important that we have that connectivity to go between communities.

I remember also at the University of Ottawa, I often took the 95 and the 97 on the Transitway, and it certainly gave me access to all the services I needed. I did not bring a car up to Ottawa. I often took the train. Sometimes I flew out of Detroit, actually, to get to Ottawa; it was the shortest way. But the 95 and 97, which have now been somewhat supplanted by the LRT, truly provided me an opportunity to access the services, the stores and the various things that I needed while living, including access to recreation.

I truly commend the foresight that the city of Ottawa has put forward in its broader network to develop its transit system. I know there were almost certainly good intentions with the LRT and, undoubtedly, I hope we all learn from their experience. It’s truly a shared responsibility to make sure that we are where we need to be.

Municipalities may have goals to accelerate construction. I’ll give one example: The city of Windsor does require developments to pay for their arterial roads. There was a time, though, when the developer didn’t want to build. There’s an arterial called Wyandotte Street, and it crosses the entirety of the city, really. It doesn’t quite reach the eastern limit at the town of Tecumseh, but it comes darn close. For many years, there was a gap because the land developer was just truly not ready to build. Still to this day, the lands are vacant where that gap in Wyandotte Street was.

The city council took the initiative to use its development charge fund and complete that road so that it’s unbroken from start to finish, with one small block in the east still remaining. Having that ability to be nimble, have access to funding and to be able to not only assess from our existing financing methods but also have the municipalities be able to collect as well through the station fee is something that I know will turn the corner and ensure that we’re not always playing catch up on infrastructure.

The other part of the bill spoke to the cross-border connectivity of the systems, and the city of Toronto had requested that they be given this permission. Transit disputes between jurisdictions are pretty common. I mentioned Tecumseh and Windsor; Windsor didn’t want Tecumseh operating in the city. There is a connection point at Tecumseh Mall; they had to go to the transportation board to get that. But in an ideal world, we would all work together, Speaker, and we would put transportation and opportunity front of mind, but sometimes life is not like that. This paves the way for an opportunity to open the discussion between the city of Toronto and its neighbouring municipalities to consider the cross-border transportation options so that someone doesn’t reach a barrier or a wall that’s unnecessary at the municipal limit. There are many people who would like to go in both directions to visit, to shop, to see family. This is an essential part of life, connectivity.

Years ago, I had the chance to go to Ghana and Burkina Faso—no public transit to be had in either of those countries that I could tell. But everyone had a cellphone—actually, multiple cellphones. The reason why they had those cellphones is because it was the only way they could talk to their families. Cellphone coverage was so expensive because each network had high roaming charges. But that phone is a lifeline. We’re blessed that we don’t have that in Canada, that we have the opportunity to actually find a way to go see our families. They are often expensive, but there are methods to do that here that we can leverage.

I look to the interoperability of systems in different municipalities. In York region, the Viva system is one that—honestly, routes have come and gone, but it’s had a number of operators. It demonstrates you don’t really need a consolidated operator within a given network.

Looking at Metrolinx and the fare integration that has already been attempted, really, that’s going to be a game-changer. As I mentioned, in Windsor–Tecumseh, you still have to pay several fares when you hit the municipal border—or, actually, at the last stop. You get off, and the transfer is not recognized, and that’s unfortunate. I’d love to see a consistent fare to encourage public transit and to ensure that we have the opportunity to go access what we need to have a great life here in Ontario and to make those journeys as seamless as possible and as hassle-free as possible.

I’ll conclude by going back to my time in Ottawa: The STO, which is from the province of Quebec, operates somewhat in the city of Ottawa, with a transfer station at Eaton Centre—or the Rideau Centre, rather. There was Eaton’s there, but no longer. Now it’s Simons. We also have that in Windsor-Detroit. We have the tunnel bus that crosses into the United States. It opens up a world for those that cannot afford a car to go see pro sports, go see the fabulous Detroit Institute of Arts and the different amenities. The architecture there is phenomenal. It’s such a quality of life improvement for us in Windsor and Essex county to have access like that, but it’s made possible because of the investments in infrastructure. So this bill provides the opportunity for that investment, to capitalize those projects and making sure that the services can exist, that we’re not always playing catch-up, as many municipalities have experienced.

I’ll conclude there.

Further questions?

Further debate?

Thank you, member from Windsor–Tecumseh, for that wonderful presentation. He spoke from the heart because he came from the municipal world. Thank you for sharing your Windsor experience and how we can improve transit, and the transit-oriented communities we can build in this wonderful province.

I have to thank the Minister of Infrastructure and also the Minister of Transportation for their wonderful vision, and our Premier for bringing this transit-oriented development, building transit-oriented communities across the province.

My question to the member: Infrastructure plays a critical role in supporting the quality of life for all walks of life of Ontarians. So please explain, how will the station contribution fee enable transit and building more houses in the province?

Thank you, Speaker, and thank you as well to the member for Windsor–Tecumseh. I had a question, and it relates to the member for Ottawa Centre, in his debate. Schedule 1 really looks like it’s going to interfere with collective bargaining rights. There’s been a history with the Conservative government bypassing collective bargaining rights and it costing the taxpayers a lot of money. Bill 28 is a perfect example. Bill 124 is another good example where the government is just spending a countless amount of money fighting these battles, often losing these battles. Knowing that there’s a clause in ATU’s collective agreement that might allow for this anyway, doesn’t it make sense to the member to remove schedule 1 so we don’t have the taxpayers paying this needless battle?

We’re going to move to the member from Sudbury for questions.

Further questions?

I thank the member for Sudbury for his question. I will add, doing finance committee, I was so pleased to visit your lovely city. I really had a great opportunity to be there and appreciate that you were there, supporting the different organizations of your community.

Really, the TTC and the ATU are the parties to that collective agreement, and I understand that there are ongoing discussions, given that the TTC did make the request for this cross-border service. So, implementation details are a necessary next step, but the Ontario Ministry of Transportation is not a part of those discussions between the TTC and ATU, so the city of Toronto might be able to better answer your question on that.

Truly, we know that building high-density communities around transit has always been the goal of the transit-oriented communities movement. I know I witnessed it in my many discussions, being a member of the engineering staff of the city, with the planning staff of the city. By expanding the design and construction of these new stations, that station contribution fee can help the province meet its goal of building at least 1.5 million homes by 2031.

But we don’t want the new fee to slow down new housing development, so this tool will include a requirement that municipalities demonstrate an offset to the costs, and this requirement will be outlined in the subsequent regulations for this bill.

I was listening to the member from Windsor–Tecumseh, because I was sitting there and I had to, but it was good. And you had such empathy for municipalities. I was like, “Okay, so this guy understands the situation that municipalities are in.” And yet, with this new station contribution fee, the municipality must first complete a background study, meeting prescribed requirements. They can only do this with the consent of the minister. The station contribution fee is payable upon receiving a building permit, so there’s a little red tape mixed in here. A transit-station-charge bylaw is not appealable to the Ontario Land Tribunal, unlike development charge bylaws. So you’re putting the responsibility onto an already stressed municipal level. This actually has the great potential to slow down transit in the province of Ontario.

Further questions?

Further debate?