Speaker, through you to the Premier: The Premier has constantly claimed that there is no government spending on the greenbelt scandal. Yet just two days after the Auditor General released a damning report about the greenbelt grab, this government started flooding the airwaves with an ad campaign attempting to salvage their image.

So first, this government takes greenbelt lands to enrich their friends. Next, they take tax dollars to try to change the channel. Will the Premier tell us how much this vanity project is costing the people of Ontario?

I’ve been listening intently to the comments made by the members opposite, and I appreciate them, really, because I had actually forgotten about the—not forgotten; I shouldn’t say that. It had been out of my memory—about the scandals that were predominant in the previous Liberal government with respect to Ornge, and the gas plant scandal. I appreciate the members opposite for refreshing this House on that.

The members opposite talked a lot about, what was the motivation and why did we do this, but I wanted to say this first and foremost: I obviously have committed to and will be bringing forward legislation that will protect the greenbelt through legislation. What does that mean? Obviously, currently, the greenbelt can be changed through regulation and not through legislation, meaning that since its inception governments are able to bypass the House in order to make changes to the greenbelt. We will be making changes and ensuring that legislation is brought forward to codify the boundaries of the greenbelt, and I will be doing that as soon as possible.

I will go a step further by ensuring that we add the 9,400 additional acres to the greenbelt that we had previously talked about, including the Paris-Galt moraine, which I know is something that many people had talked about preserving and protecting for a long period of time, but it had never been done in the province. We will be doing that.

A lot of time has been spent by the opposition explaining to us the need to have a select committee, and I certainly appreciate hearing from the members opposite why they believe a select committee should be brought forward. Let me just say this: In their own comments here today, they show why a select committee is actually not needed and why we will be voting against that.

The members opposite talk about what happened during the Liberal time in office with respect to Ornge, and they talked about the gas plant scandal. You will remember, Madam Speaker, the members themselves have talked about the cost to taxpayers. They talked about the loss of faith and trust in the then Liberal government. The members opposite talked about how that impacted their communities, and the extraordinary work done by Progressive Conservatives to extract that level of accountability from them. But one of the hallmarks of that and one of the reasons why a select committee was so important is because the government of the day refused to acknowledge that it had made a mistake.

Madam Speaker, the Auditor General reported, and the government has accepted all of the Auditor General’s recommendations, full stop. Every single one of those recommendations, the government has acknowledged, and we are acting on all of those.

We are going a step further, and we are ensuring that we codify the boundaries into legislation.

The Premier said it on behalf of all of us, frankly—we made a mistake. We acknowledge that mistake. We thought that there would be broad public support in order to build housing as quickly as possible by accessing the greenbelt. That was a mistake for which we apologize.

But make no mistake that we are completely focused on ensuring that we can build 1.5 million homes across the province of Ontario. We will not be deterred in that. Whilst we acknowledge that it was a mistake to consider the greenbelt lands, we do not for one moment believe it a mistake to continue to focus on building homes for the people in the province of Ontario, and I’ll get to a little bit more on that.

Specific to the request for a select committee, Madam Speaker, and again, the member for Toronto–Danforth and the member for—forgive me; Algoma–Manitoulin?

A vast majority of their speech highlighted the challenges of those two scandals in the Liberal government. But in the final analysis, the government of the day refused to acknowledge that it had made a mistake—we did. But the opposition NDP, at the time, did nothing. In their speeches, both of these two members talked about how horrific those two scandals were to Ontarians. They talked about their communities. They talked about the billions of dollars that were actually spent and wasted on the gas plants. They talked about the impact it had during an election. They talked about the fact that it drove a Premier out of office. But when Progressive Conservatives went to act on those two reports—not once but twice tabling motions of non-confidence in the government—how did the NDP vote? They voted to keep that government, which they say is one of the most corrupt governments in the history of this province, which they have been talking about now for about 40 minutes. They voted to maintain that government in office.

Progressive Conservatives, at that time, were clear. They wanted that government out of office and defeated because of those two scandals, which the government refused to acknowledge were actually even a problem—those two scandals which directly cost taxpayers billions of dollars.

The member for Nickel Belt and the member for Toronto–Danforth talk about the success of those two select committees, but what they fail to talk about is their failure to hold the Liberals accountable for those two scandals.

So specifically on the creation of a select committee, I say to the honourable members, in this instance, it is not required because the government has acknowledged it made a mistake. The government has heard from the Auditor General. The government has accepted all of the Auditor General’s recommendations, and the government will move one step further to ensure that the greenbelt is protected. We will go even further. We will add additional lands to the greenbelt because we know how important it is that we do it.

In her message, the Leader of the Opposition talked about how important affordability is to the people of the province of Ontario. We’ve seen this a million times from the opposition, haven’t we, colleagues—it’s say one thing, but do something else.

The member opposite talks about the motivation for doing this, and I think it really speaks to the affordability question that the Leader of the Opposition talks about. The motivation was to build homes for people who can’t otherwise afford them. Do you know why they can’t afford them? Because we’re not building enough homes. Why are we not building enough homes? Because of the obstacles and the red tape that was put in the way by the Liberals and NDP over 15 years—full stop. It goes further than that. It’s not only red tape and obstacles that they put in the way. Not only did they have the opportunity, between 2011 and 2014, to vote the Liberals out of office so that we could address some of these problems—in their own words, two horrific scandals—in select committees to review those scandals. And what action? Nothing. But they continue to vote for policies which take money out of the pockets of the people of the province of Ontario.

We’ve talked about this a lot. One of the first things we talked about was a carbon tax. And they lost their minds.

The member for Toronto–Danforth talks about affordability. This is a member who supported a policy that saw our electricity rates skyrocket. This is a gentleman who is singularly unconcerned with the fact that millions of Ontarians had to choose between heating and eating because of the policies that he supported then and that he continues to support now—policies that we are fighting against. That is the record of the NDP, in co-operation with Liberals.

When we said we had to get rid of a carbon tax, what did they say? No. They said it would have a huge impact on reducing greenhouse gas emissions. Do you know what has impact on reducing greenhouse gas emissions? Our nuclear fleet. Do you know who is restoring our nuclear fleet? It is this government. Who is against that? It is the opposition who is against that.

Think of what the carbon tax costs us. Do you want to talk about—

Interjections.

It really is a sad afternoon when we are talking about the many scandals that have happened in this province of Ontario—the gas plant scandal, air Ornge—but what we saw with those scandals was an appropriate legislative response.

I want to add to this the Airbus affair, which refers to allegations of secret commissions paid to Conservative Prime Minister Brian Mulroney and other members of his ministry in exchange for then-crown corporation Air Canada’s purchase of a large number of Airbus jets. This resulted in a RCMP investigation. It resulted in much media coverage. There was an ethics committee struck, and there was also the Oliphant commission inquiry.

This is the kind of response that we need when there is such suspect behaviour on the part of governments, Liberal and Conservative alike.

The Premier was asked recently, “What’s the worst scandal in the province of Ontario?” and he was trying to say that the greenbelt scandal wasn’t quite as bad as the gas plant scandal. It was a terrible spectacle to watch the Premier decide which was the worse scandal in Ontario. But I would say, perhaps he forgot his outrage at Kathleen Wynne when she had the Fair Hydro Plan, because, at the time, the Premier said that this was the biggest political cover-up in Ontario’s history.

And this government—in October 2018, one of the first things they did when they came to power was, they struck a Select Committee on Financial Transparency. They did this. Members of that committee now—the Chair was the member for Brampton South, who’s now the Minister of Transportation. The Vice-Chair was Ontario’s Attorney General, the current Attorney General. The members from this government included the chief government whip; the member for Sault Ste. Marie, who is in the House; Roman Baber—remember?—the previous member for York Centre; we had the member for Eglinton–Lawrence. These were the current government members who thought that it was important to strike a select committee, and I agreed. The purpose of this committee was “to investigate and report on the accounting practices, decision-making and policy objectives of the previous government or any other aspect of the report that the select committee deems relevant. The public has a right to know the true state of the province’s finances and demand accountability from the government.” Sound familiar?

“The committee hopes that the current government will adopt the recommendations and commit to ensuring and maintaining transparency....” This is what we’re asking for today.

This committee—we got tens of thousands of emails. We subpoenaed the secretary of the cabinet, the Deputy Minister of the Environment. We subpoenaed Kathleen Wynne herself, who testified for two and a half hours, and the former Minister of Energy Glenn Thibeault. I spent the better part of four months in this committee getting to the bottom of this—all these members did this. And these are the kinds of legislative responses that we expect that your government would undertake. But despite this, despite this government’s outrage, we have a government here that has clearly signalled that they’re going to vote against our suggestion that they strike a select committee on the restoration of the greenbelt; they said that they’re going to vote against it, quite clearly.

At the time, Doug Ford said in a speech, “We will demand answers about where the money went. A lot of the Liberals got rich, really, really rich, under Kathleen Wynne and off the backs of the taxpayers of Ontario.”

“The purpose of our committee was to ask a lot of the questions the people of Ontario wanted answers to, and I’m confident we asked those questions,” said Ross Romano, the senior Progressive Conservative MPP, about the committee.

So this government has a record. You’ve done this, just five years ago, when you were outraged by the scandal of the Ontario Liberals. But suddenly you’ve fallen silent when it comes to your own dodgy dealings.

Despite all of this, despite all the province’s outrage, despite the fact that this is the right thing to do, we’ve heard that the government House leader is going to vote against this. And you can bet, if the House leader says that he’s going to vote against this, all these PC members are going to tuck in beside him and not support what is the right thing.

So I will say, you’ve done it before—you sat on a committee, you tried to get to the bottom of what is important to the people of the province of Ontario. My question to you now is, what changed? Why are you not committed to transparency and accountability now that you are in the hot seat?