I am pleased to read this petition into the Legislature and was very pleased to host the MPP from Ottawa Centre on his #SafetyRide when he met with folks from Oshawa. I wanted to share appreciation for this petition and initiative.

“I Support the Moving Ontarians Safely Act

“To the Legislative Assembly of Ontario:

“Whereas we’re seeing an alarming rise in road accidents involving drivers who injure or kill a pedestrian, road worker or cyclist;

“Whereas currently, vulnerable road users in Ontario are not specifically protected by law. In fact, Ontario’s Highway Traffic Act allows drivers who seriously injure or kill a vulnerable road user to avoid meaningful consequences, often only facing only minimal fines;

“Whereas this leaves the friends and families of victims unsatisfied with the lack of consequences and the government’s responses to traffic accidents that result in death or injury to their loved ones;

“We, the undersigned, petition the Legislative Assembly of Ontario to:

“—reduce the number of traffic fatalities and injuries to vulnerable road users;

“—create meaningful consequences that ensure responsibility and accountability for drivers who share the road with pedestrians, cyclists, road construction workers, emergency responders and other vulnerable road users;

“—allow friends and family of vulnerable road users whose death or serious injury was caused by an offending driver to have their victim impact statement heard in person in court by the driver responsible; and

“—pass Bill 40, the Moving Ontarians Safely Act.”

Of course, I support this petition. I’m going to affix my signature and send it to the table with page James.

To my friend from Oshawa, thank you for those remarks. I wanted to follow up on something given the skepticism you expressed and others have expressed about Metrolinx’s capacity to build transit. It would seem this bill itself, as I mentioned earlier in debate, is a vote of non-confidence in Metrolinx if we’re asking municipalities to take on this risk burden.

I also note, from the Auditor General’s 2020 report on the Eglinton Crosstown, my friend, that Metrolinx was continuing to work with an agency, Crosslinx, despite the fact that Crosslinx has over 380 rejected designs. They were continuing to build in a capacity called “building at risk,” which meant they were building with designs that had not been properly approved by people required to scrutinize them.

So, my friend from Oshawa, what the heck is going on at Metrolinx?

I really do appreciate the comments by the member from Oshawa. I mean, we’re really at a tipping point here with Metrolinx. They’ve abandoned their original mandate. They are essentially leaderless. Phil Verster once told me in a briefing that, “Catherine, trains run on tracks.” I mean, that’s the level that we’re working with here. What do you think is moving forward for Metrolinx?

It’s a pleasure today to rise to speak to Bill 131. I do want to congratulate the member from Oshawa, because it was such a good metaphor: “shouting into the abyss.” I don’t think I will ever forget that. I haven’t heard that before; I probably should have. Let’s hope I’m not doing that right now.

Here’s the thing: Schedule 1? Yes, it makes sense. Good idea; I can support it. Schedule 2? It’s kind of hard to understand why we’re collecting development charges for provincial infrastructure. GO trains, GO Transit is provincial. I don’t know when we started collecting DCs for stuff that we fund here as a government. That’s another issue. So that’s one issue with schedule 2.

The second one is collecting development charges for infrastructure that we pay for. The simplest way is to just build the station, pay the money, like we do with the other stations. So something has changed.

Number two: development charges. I have this vague recollection—I don’t know if anybody can help me. In Bill 23, we eliminated development charges because we said, “You know what? This is making it hard for people these days. It’s making it harder for them to buy a house. It’s making it harder for them to rent. We can’t get stuff built, so we’ve got to eliminate DCs.” Now we’re putting them back on. At a time when people are just struggling to pay the bills, we’re making housing more expensive by adding DCs. I don’t understand. I think they call it cognitive dissonance. It doesn’t make sense. They don’t add up.

In the first place, to compare the DCs, is that with Bill 23, if we thought the DCs were actually going to be saved on the cost—if anybody here thought that was actually going to happen and it was going to make things more affordable, no, it wasn’t. I know builders. We all know builders. The DCs will go down, but it’s not going to change the price of the house. They’re just going to gobble that up. They’ve got space. That’s what’s going to happen. We all know that. Bill 23 actually removing those DCs was more about doing something for the development community and the people who were building the houses than the people who were owning the houses or renting the houses.

Then you would say, “Okay, now that we’re collecting DCs to build this provincial infrastructure, who is it benefiting?” Developers again, right? If they get a station built below the thing, they can go up 30 storeys. Who’s going to make the money? Developers. I’m not against people making money, but right now, we’ve got a problem with people not having enough money to be able to afford living.

The other piece is you won’t allow cities to collect DCs for things like, oh, fire stations, community centres, pools, kids’ playgrounds, but you will let them collect money for something that we pay for here. It just doesn’t make sense to me. It doesn’t sound like this is a decision that’s benefiting everyday Ontarians. It makes it hard to support.

I’m not going to support DCs going on the price of rental housing or the price of a house in my community—it’s not going to happen in my community, because I don’t have GO Transit, but in other communities in Ontario—because that’s going to make it harder for people. We’re actually asking cities to collect money for stuff that we already pay for. It’s just that we don’t seem to want to pay for it anymore.