Speaker, picture a family—a house in the suburbs, a car in the driveway, a mom and dad with good jobs, and kids who are safe when they walk or bike to hang out with their friends. So much about this picture—the car, the suburbs, and the safe streets—terrifies the opposition. The opposition centres their policies around making this dream unaffordable and impossible to achieve. Under this government, under the leadership of Premier Ford, soon that family will be driving a made-in-Ontario electric vehicle or will be stepping into a new Ontario Line subway station. Maybe their destination will be one of the new provincial parks we’ve created, or one of the new schools we’ve built, or one of the new jobs we’ve helped unlock.

Speaker, under the leadership of Premier Ford and this government, we are making record investments to secure the future of Ontario. We won’t let the opposition take that bright future away.

As the disability critic for the official opposition, I am honoured to rise to debate Bill 131. Transit is very important to me. I moved to Hamilton at 18 years old for school about 11 years ago. To be honest, Hamilton was the first city I felt I could freely travel around without the risk of getting stuck or being harmed. The subway systems in Toronto at the time were, and are still, difficult to navigate if you’re someone with an assistive device. Wheel-Trans had at that time, and continues to have, consistent backlogs. These reflections, Madam Speaker, are from my experiences in Toronto over a decade ago, and not much has changed with regard to barriers facing disabled people across the GTA.

I remember being stuck in a TTC subway station as a teenager because an elevator was not working. I actually got off the subway, tried to get up out of the station, and I couldn’t go backward because there wasn’t a line that went the opposite way. So a security guard had to actually help me up the stairs—

I couldn’t get up out of the station because the elevator was broken, so a security guard actually had to lift my, at that time, 299-pound wheelchair up dozens of stairs and I had to slowly climb my way out of the station. To be honest, I’m still kind of nervous around taking the subway because it’s not accessible and it’s not as accessible as it should be.

The great thing about Hamilton’s HSR system is that it’s currently free for people with disabilities who use assistive devices, and every bus is fully accessible. And it’s because of this functioning system that I was able to travel around Hamilton for work and school and to actually live fully and independently—

As a former founding member of the Hamilton Transit Riders’ Union, and as someone who still commutes using our public transit system and GO Transit system to get to work as an MPP, I really value fully functioning transit systems and see this as a disability justice issue. Functioning transit systems for many disabled people across Ontario are liberatory, and that’s why we support efforts to broaden access to public transit and to improve service levels and the quality of public transit.

This is what the city of Toronto just accomplished under the leadership of Mayor Olivia Chow. The city of Toronto cancelled proposed cuts to TTC services, utilizing operating funds that were intended to operate the delayed Eglinton Crosstown project, and this will ensure TTC riders can count on prompt service.

As my colleague in Ottawa Centre highlighted in debate just yesterday, there are aspects to Bill 131 that do need work and this is what I intend to talk about today. Firstly, schedule 2 implies the existence of a new Transit-Oriented Communities Program, of which the details remain unknown. The original idea was for Metrolinx to negotiate deals in which developers would fund a new GO station in exchange for development rights. Now the government evidently expects municipalities to assume funding responsibilities. We don’t really have any idea based on what’s written here what sort of funding agreement the government has in mind, or how risks will be allocated. Municipalities may be required to assume risks related to cost overruns without having any control over procurement or delivery.

I believe transit ought to be publicly owned, operated and maintained. Adding developers into the mix and offloading responsibilities onto municipalities could make it harder to keep jobs local and to contribute back to our communities. My faith in these P3 deals, in Metrolinx and in the government as it relates to these transit projects has really been shaken. Hamiltonians have been waiting years for a hypothetical LRT project that has displaced many people from their homes along the LRT route, with no real, tangible plans in place to give back to the community for these losses. And I was someone who was very pro-LRT when this project was first proposed in Hamilton.

I met with Metrolinx in late August to ask about a constituent who had recently been evicted from his apartment unit along the proposed LRT route due to the build, and I was told by Metrolinx that he would be compensated for his loss, but there was no real plan or tangible outcomes in place. Meanwhile, we know that there are a handful of Metrolinx properties that are no longer on the proposed LRT route in Hamilton that could be put toward housing people right this minute.

Madam Speaker, I have also met with people living in encampments in Hamilton, living in tents, who did live along the proposed LRT route who now have nowhere else to go. Often, they were on fixed incomes such as ODSP and could not find new places to live on the current rates. This government and Metrolinx need to move with more care as they continuously tend to push through transit projects because I do not want to see more people displaced for a transit line that is epically failing, like the Eglinton Crosstown. People deserve more well-thought-out planning, and that includes people in Hamilton Centre.

Secondly, the government has also said, without much detail, that municipalities can only levy a station contribution fee on developers building housing projects and amenities at GO stations provided an incentive of some kind is offered. Given recent instances when this government has engaged the private sector in controversial or questionable infrastructure projects, this is concerning. They cannot keep offloading the responsibilities of what should be a public good or service onto developers. A transit station charge offers a more focused revenue tool in which developments most likely to benefit from a new station are responsible for more of the costs, as opposed to a development charge that applies to all developments across a municipality, including those that would not benefit much from the station.

Thirdly, I echo our transit critic’s ask that schedule 1 of Bill 131 must be repealed, as it is unnecessary. The Amalgamated Transit Union Local 113’s collective agreement already allows for transit service integration, provided reciprocity of service is assured with other transit agencies. An interest arbitration award confirmed this union rate. If the government opens up the TTC’s collective agreements from this House, transit workers will push back. And as the member from Ottawa Centre said yesterday, they are proud of their collective agreements and have worked for decades to ensure the quality of TTC service and well-being of TTC workers. An unconstitutional intrusion into their workplace will not be well received.

In Hamilton, the Keep Transit Public coalition, alongside ATU Local 107, are fighting for their right to maintain and operate Hamilton’s future LRT system, which could bring dozens of jobs to Hamilton. The Hamilton Community Benefits Network have also struggled to get real agreements from Metrolinx and the province on the ways the LRT system can cause the least amount of harm to workers locally. I echo the calls of the Keep Transit Public campaign to allow Hamilton’s LRT to be publicly maintained and operated.

There are serious concerns about this bill, including the potential interference with collective bargaining as well as a potential plan to download financial responsibility for provincial infrastructure onto municipalities. In the midst of issues with the Eglinton Crosstown and the Hamilton LRT, and in light of the ability for Metrolinx to commit to finishing projects that they start, we ought to move cautiously and ensure that this government does not continue to set itself up to fail in the realm of transit by clearly biting off more than it can handle. Like TTCriders, for reasons of accessibility, I also do support fare and service integration that would allow riders to travel seamlessly across transit agency boundaries without paying multiple fares or waiting for the right kinds of bus, but there has to be a fair agreement between the TTC and the union.

There is also a lot of other work that this government is neglecting around meeting its accessible transit deadlines for 2025. Creating accessible transit doesn’t always mean coming up with quick, new projects. We need to commit to making sure the transit systems that we currently have available are actually accessible, and I’ve received several calls specifically from people with visual impairments who find the current GO train system very difficult to navigate. I have also had many calls and have experienced myself how unreliable the West Harbour GO train times have been and continue to be.

I would urge this government to consult with disabled community members about what is and isn’t working and commit to creating an accessible Ontario by 2025, as promised, rather than continuing to start and fail multiple times at creating new transit systems and projects. We need to focus on a transit system that gives back to communities and stops these failed public-private partnerships.

Interjections.

Thank you for the question. For a long time, the city of Toronto voted 13 times to build the Sheppard subway line, and nothing happened—until the provincial government stepped in and took over the building of the transit system in Ontario. No government has the magic wand to address issues accumulated over the previous government’s 15 years of reign.

So everything will be addressed on time, and we have already started seeing the results of our government commitment to Scarborough. The three subway stations on the Kennedy line are the best demonstration of that commitment, and the commitment to start the study on the Sheppard East expansion is another demonstration that our government is serious. And the people of Scarborough, they deserve the attention they need from this government.

First of all, if I remember correctly, the member is a York University graduate, in my community. With the advent of the new subway through York University, the issue that you are raising is something that I well know. This is going to pass like everything else is going to pass, not necessarily because it’s good or bad legislation, but because it’s a majority government, okay? Ask majority governments that you may have opposed in the past or your members would have opposed in the past.

All I’m saying, and it’s very simple: If you talk to the management of the Toronto Transit Commission, talk to the workers, too. Talk to the leadership of the workers. You gain something when you talk to the management, and certainly they have ideas and understanding, as well. But talk to the front-line workers and get their perspectives. I think all governments benefit from doing that and I think this is something that this government and all governments should be doing. I think that the best way to create comprehensive policy is to listen to everyone.

That is certainly an issue. We mentioned the Conservative government of the late 1990s, as well, that another one of their great achievements was lots and lots of downloading. Certainly that was one of the issues, and we continue to hear about that. We continue to hear that from the TTC—their management, I’m sure, in those conversations and consultations you’ve had with them, have told you that they’ve been requiring, needing, consistent funding and not one-offs.

And so absolutely, from that perspective, if you really want to help transit in the city of Toronto, get back to the table and bring back funding to the Toronto Transit Commission, because it is something that people across Toronto desperately need.

There have been challenges along that line in particular, but that line, whatever challenges we’ve faced, pales in comparison to others in the city of Toronto, south of us along Eglinton, and in other parts of the province. That is something that’s of concern, and that’s something that we hope, as we move forward and build more transit projects, is resolved, because I think all communities where we build deserve not just the lines that are being built, but better during the process of construction itself.

And so, this is something that I really hope, as this government moves forward, is really taken very seriously: service levels that exist in and between different regions and municipalities. It’s good to build infrastructure. It’s good to build sensible infrastructure. But if we don’t have the service levels on existing lines, and if our transit providers are not operating with adequate funding, then we are really doing a disservice to the people, the millions that take transit in whatever form it is every single day.