It’s always an honour to speak in the House. I’d like to thank the member from Whitby for bringing forward this bill. I’d like to take a couple of minutes.

As someone of Dutch descent, my father grew up in Holland during World War II, and when the Nazis invaded and conquered, they were conquered. When the Allies came, as a young man, he thought they were conquerors—that they would come and do the same thing that the Nazis did. The Canadians came and liberated and went home. And that’s actually the reason I’m here today: because my father emigrated from Holland because he thought that people who come and liberate and go home must come from the greatest country in the world—and he was right. So people of Dutch descent owe a huge debt to Canadians in World War II.

But what I really want to mention, just for a second—we all have connections. And I don’t have a personal connection, but when you come over in my riding, you come over the hill at Temiskaming Shores and—it’s one of the most beautiful sites in Ontario, in my opinion—you come through two or three hours of Canadian Shield and you’ll come over a hill and there’s a huge agricultural valley there. On the right side of the highway, there’s a lookout, a park. I often go there, but especially when I drive by there—and if you ever go there, I urge you to go look and just ponder at that park, because that park—one of the first things that I was involved in as an MPP was that the Ministry of Transportation renamed that park in honour of Sergeant Martin Goudreault.

Sergeant Goudreault was just 35 when he was killed in action in the Panjwayi district of Afghanistan on June 6, 2010. It was his third tour of duty in Afghanistan; he was a 15-year veteran of 1 Combat Engineer Regiment and First Battalion, Royal Canadian Regiment Battle Group. He continued the proud tradition of going to a place and trying to help as a Canadian, and he gave his life for it—on our behalf, and on their behalf, as so many others have done. It’s been an honour for me to recognize him in this House.

I’d like to thank the member from Whitby for giving me this opportunity. On all our behalves, I thank the veterans who, on all our behalves, defend democracy.

On a point of order: Speaker, if you seek it, you’ll find unanimous consent to see the clock at 6.

Further debate?

Mr. Coe has moved third reading of Bill 65, An Act to amend the Remembrance Week Act, 2016. Is it the pleasure of the House that the motion carry? Carried.

Be it resolved that the bill do now pass and be entitled as in the motion.

Third reading agreed to.

Further debate?

I want to thank the member from London North Centre for his motion.

Speaker, the member means well, but it’s disappointing to see the NDP lose faith in the people of Ontario. They don’t trust Ontarians anymore—if they ever did.

On many occasions, many of us in this House have risen to speak about our unique stories and those of our families immigrating to Ontario and starting their lives in Ontario from scratch. Those are inspiring stories. They speak to the courage and ambition of the Ontarians that have built this province and continue to build our communities.

Despite hearing all these stories on several occasions here in this chamber, the NDP still has no faith, no trust and no belief in the people of Ontario. They think that they can do everything better than their constituents can do. They’re dead wrong, and they don’t even see it. When they held government, they couldn’t build anything. Under that party, Ontario lost jobs, lost businesses, and it lost homes too. And they were so happy about that, that they lost homes—

Interjections.

They’re happy about losing homes, everyone.

When we finally changed governments, this party still did everything they could do to partner with the Liberals to make sure Ontarians lost even more jobs, businesses and homes. And by 2018, Ontarians saw through it all. Look at how many of them are sitting here today, Speaker. Ontarians have said enough is enough. They don’t need the government to give them handouts; they just need a government that believes in them, that believes in their ability to start a family, work in a rewarding job and to start a business.

Speaker, we’re not in the business of taking power away from the people; we’re for the people on this side of the House. And I’m proud that our leader and our Premier has made a point of emphasizing that principle over and over, at every step of his years of service.

And I appreciate that the NDP is finally showing their true colours. They don’t like free enterprise. They don’t like new businesses in Ontario. They don’t like new hospitals or new long-term-care beds. They don’t like new homes. Speaker, they didn’t even like those things under Bob Rae. They didn’t like them when they propped up the Liberal government, and they’re making it crystal clear now, by voting against each and every one of our own government’s initiatives, that they don’t like them now. Speaker—

Interjections.

The NDP wants to take over the business of housing in Ontario. They want to ensure 30% of all new housing—

Interjections.

Or in other words, they want to encroach on free enterprise in this province, one of the most cherished freedoms that we have in this country, to destroy the integrity of the free market and fundamentally to instead replace it with a province where property is publicly owned. Speaker, they’re advocating for the elimination of private property in this province, and do you know what Webster dictionary defines that as? Communism. And the NDP values—he got up and mentioned NDP values. It’s socialism, right here in this House. He just said it in his speech.

The NDP thinks that not only do we need to shut down the free market, but they also say they will just take $15 billion—just $15 billion—of Ontario taxpayers’ money. Housing experts say it is going to cost $100 billion to build 250,000 homes. Who are they going to tax to get that, Speaker? Are they going to tax the hard-working family that puts gas in their car? I know they support the carbon tax federally. Are they going to tax small businesses to meet that?

Speaker, I’d ask the member from London North Centre how many constituents he has who themselves or their families chose to immigrate to Canada because of restrictive socialist policies in countries like the former Soviet Union, Venezuela or China or a number of other countries who have experimented with this disastrous policy throughout recent history. I would also ask those constituents—and, frankly, I’d ask any Ontarian whose family has fled their nation of origin for this very reason—what they think of this bill.

Under the Liberals and NDP, who starved Ontario’s economy for 15 years, thousands of jobs left this province and thousands of people left with them. They came after the auto sector, they came after the energy sector, and now they’re coming after the housing sector. What industry do they want to kill next? Who else do they want to lay off? Thankfully, Ontarians see right through the NDP’s socialist agenda. They’ve seen it before, and many of them even escaped it to come here, Speaker. We won’t let them go through the pain and hurt of that again.

Our government knows that the main reason behind the housing crisis is critically low housing supply, with more than 95% of the homes being built in Ontario by Ontarians employed in the private sector. Many of these private companies build non-profit housing. They work with great housing providers like Habitat for Humanity and build non-profit housing. They take time out of their day to build that, Speaker. They don’t need bureaucrats in downtown Toronto telling them what they need in their community.

Our government increased the Homelessness Prevention Program by an additional $20 million. We now provide $700 million to our service providers for homelessness prevention programs across the province. I know that, locally, my housing service providers appreciated that because they know what is best for their communities. They don’t need bureaucrats. Speaker, we have great bureaucrats that work for us in the civil service, but I don’t know one that builds housing. None of them build housing. Bureaucrats do not build housing. The non-profit sector and the private sector build housing in this province.

Unlike the NDP, our government knows there’s only one taxpayer in Ontario, and at a time when Ontarians are already struggling with the rising cost of living, we will never support increased fees or costly policies that would put more financial strain on hard-working families. We’re fully committed to working with the private sector and the non-profit sector to incentivize getting shovels in the ground faster and allowing families and individuals right across this province to live in the home of their dreams.

Speaker, I am pleased to say that from January to August 2023, this year, we have seen a 3% increase in housing starts from 2022—which was a record in 30 years. This year again, the same months, January to August 2023, we’ve seen a 49% increase in the number of purpose-built rental starts—a 49% increase from the historic increase last year.

We need people to build these homes, Speaker. Apprentice registrations this year have increased by 24%. Our Minister of Education’s making reforms to ensure that young people who want to enter the skilled trades can enter more quickly, because we know that in the construction sector alone, 72,000 new workers are needed by 2027. These are the individuals who will build the homes for our growing population.

The member across the way talked about seniors, whether it’s downsizing or having a home to call their own or staying in the community that they helped build. I have a very good example from my own riding.

There was a development proposed down the street from where I live in the riding for seniors’ retirement living—designed for seniors so they could stay in the community they helped build, move out of their bigger houses, so those houses can go on the market and new families can move into them. Speaker, do you know what happened? NIMBYs prevented that development. They sent it to the Ontario Land Tribunal—one appeal, which held it up for years. It cost the home builder an extra $1 million in costs. The development still hasn’t started because of the extra cost. So these units aren’t on the market for people to stay in their own community, stay where they were, stay where their family is and stay where their grandchildren are.

I was proud to be part of a government that changed that. Our government reformed the Ontario Land Tribunal and the appeals process around that.

Interjections.

Speaker—

Interjections.

In the same spirit, we’ll stop at nothing, on this side of the House, to protect the hard-working people of Ontario who get up in the morning to help build this great province. We’ll continue to work for the hard-working people of Ontario that the NDP socialists don’t want to see rewarded—their job-killing agenda, their killing of the free enterprise that has contributed so much to this great province.

I know members on this side of the House and the majority over there will continue to stand for free enterprise and will continue to work—

Interjections.

I’m going to interrupt the member; sorry. Stop the clock for a second, please.

I can hear the member because he’s speaking loud enough, but there is a lot of distraction coming from this side. I would like to be able to listen peacefully to the member who has the floor, so I will thank you for keeping the order until we’re done today. Thank you very much.

The member for Perth–Wellington has the floor. You can continue. Start the clock.

Further debate?

We are experiencing a major affordability crisis, and a big part of it is the housing crisis. We have a record number of people who are unhoused and sleeping on our streets. We are seeing record evictions.

We’re seeing rising mortgage payments. We’re hearing of terms like “negative amortization period,” which I had never heard before—where payments don’t even cover the interest portion, and the remaining unpaid interest is added to the principal amount owing. Imagine that: making payments but owing more. We’re also seeing longer amortization periods—90 years. Imagine that: a lifetime of paying for your home, only to end up not owning it.

We are seeing generations of people feeling like their dream of owning a home is just that: a dream.

We need to build more housing. The Conservative government’s own Housing Affordability Task Force has said we need 1.5 million homes in the next 10 years. Speaker, I want to be very clear: The housing crisis we’re facing right now is both a supply crisis and an affordability crisis. I have always said that the affordable housing crisis is of such a massive scale that if we’re truly going to address the crisis in a meaningful way, the response must be of a similar scale. The scale of the response must meet the scale of the problem.

We need to build more housing, but we also need to build different kinds of housing, because people’s housing needs are different. After World War II, there was a huge need for affordable housing in Canada, especially as veterans were returning home and the population was growing, and then there was the realization that the private market alone was not going to build the kind of housing that was needed for people who were of low and moderate incomes, because it wasn’t profitable. That’s why the CMHC, the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corp., was created with a mandate to improve housing access for everyone.

Shamefully, the federal government—both under Conservatives and Liberals—abandoned that responsibility, and in Ontario, the Harris government abandoned that responsibility. In the 15 years of Liberal government since, they did not reverse course. This is among the many Harris policies that the Liberals maintained.

And here’s the thing: Private developers have said that they alone cannot solve the housing crisis, and yet the Ford Conservative government is leaving it only to private developers to meet the demand and the need. What the NDP is proposing through this motion is that governments resume their responsibility of building non-market, deeply affordable housing based on people’s needs—housing that the market won’t build. We can do that by establishing a new public agency, Homes Ontario. Let’s get it done.

Thank you—with all housing providers, whether that is co-op, non-profit, and, yes, the private sector. I know, when we all work together with our communities, we can achieve great things, because this is the province of Ontario—and I still believe in the Canadian and Ontario dream.

I want to reintroduce the House to reality here.

I want to thank the member from London North Centre for bringing forward this bill to create a Homes Ontario agency to actually build housing. The solution to our housing crisis is to build 250,000 units of affordable housing as well as the 1.5 million units of housing that we need to address the supply.

This government believes that the market will solve the problem. While they give the market a little bit of money—they actually gave $5 billion in development charges that they downloaded the cost of onto municipal taxpayers. They also have flown all the way to Las Vegas and made deals on massage tables, to try to build housing. And the result? Housing starts are down in Ontario.

And not only are housing starts down, but when I talk to people in my riding, tech companies—I’m the tech and innovation critic. When I talk to tech companies, they say the biggest competitive disadvantage we have in Ontario is housing costs, because talent want to come to Ontario, but they can’t afford to live here. So we need affordable housing. Speaker, 100,000 people—mainly young people—are leaving this province every year because of housing costs.

The other result of this government’s policies—we have tent encampments in every community across this province. The nickname for them is Fordtown. We have Fordtowns everywhere. When you travel to any city in this province, you’ve got tent encampments. That’s this government’s solution to housing.

But what the NDP want to do is to leverage public land to build not-for-profit housing. We want to build on the Ontario Line stations, like the one in my riding. The government is going to be building condos on top of them. We’re asking that 30% of those condos be affordable. This government is not mentioning anything about affordable housing being built above the Ontario Line stations.

In my riding, we’ve got 18 co-ops, 10 TCHC housing units; we’ve got supportive housing run by agencies like Evangel Hall—all of them date back at least 25 years, because since the Conservatives and the Liberals have been in power in the last 25 years, they have refused to build housing. So we need to build affordable housing in this province.

The housing crisis was created by government policies of the Conservative and Liberal governments, and it can be solved by government policy—like the one brought forward by the NDP today.

It’s a pleasure to always debate housing in this House because we have a housing crisis. I just want to say to those who are watching and to my colleagues on all sides of the House, solving this crisis is going to require the private sector to be engaged in market housing to build the homes we need, and it’s going to require the government to partner with non-profit and co-op housing to build deeply affordable homes.

When we were most successful in Canada in building homes that people could actually afford to own and rent, we had a mix of for-profit and non-profit market and non-market actors engaged in the housing market. Market supply—that’s why I put forward bills to end exclusionary zoning and to make it easier for builders to build homes that people can actually afford in the communities they want to live in, on land already approved for development.

Speaker, we also have to acknowledge that, up until 1995, about 20,000 homes a year in Canada were non-profit, co-op and social housing—deeply affordable homes. That’s exactly why 93% of the deeply affordable rental homes in this province were built before 1995.

Now, the federal government got out of housing in 1995, and the provincial government got out of housing in 1995. The crisis has been getting worse ever since, and now we’re at a breaking point. A new report has shown that we would need a drop in housing prices of more than $500,000 on average for the average millennial to afford a home. It takes 22 years for the typical young person to be able to save enough money for a down payment to buy a home. To afford rent for a one-bedroom apartment in Toronto on minimum wage, you would have to work 80 hours a week. I look at my own riding, in Guelph. The average one-bedroom apartment now is well over $2,000. And so the market is going to solve a lot of our challenges, but it’s not going to solve all of them.

While I don’t know if the numbers add up of what’s been proposed here—but I can tell you, the sentiment of having government re-engaged in non-profit, co-op and social housing is absolutely vital if we’re truly going to build enough deeply affordable homes for people.

And I also want to say that supporting co-op housing is about putting a roof over somebody’s head, but it’s more than that; it’s about building community. It’s about having democratic control over the place where you live. I’d love it. Fife Road co-op in my riding every year invites me to their holiday parties and their summer barbecues, where it’s an opportunity to build an inclusive community of people who are struggling to be able to find an affordable place to call home, who have an affordable place to call home because back before 1995, government was involved in helping build deeply affordable housing.

So it’s going to take non-market and non-profit solutions. The government is going to have to be involved in supporting non-profit co-op and, I would add, permanent supporting housing, with wraparound mental health, addictions, employment and other supports for people, because some people have acute needs. They’re going to need not only a roof on their head, but they’re also going to need those supports on-site to help them maintain their housing. And we will save money, because it will actually take pressure off our health care system. One of the largest drivers, one of the biggest reasons poverty costs our province $33 billion a year, is because the intersection of homelessness, mental health, addictions and poverty puts so much pressure on our health care system.

Finally, Speaker, I want to say that when we build these homes, we have to make sure these homes are energy-efficient, not only to help address the climate crisis but to also help address people’s bills each and every month to heat and cool their homes. I want to tell you about a project that I’m working with in my riding with Habitat for Humanity that will build 70 affordable homes for people with an array of solar panels on them that will save them $62,000 a year in utility costs. We can do this if we have the will to do it.

I would like to thank the members from Spadina–Fort York, Parkdale–High Park, Ottawa West–Nepean, Thunder Bay–Superior North, Perth–Wellington as well as Guelph for their comments on this motion here today.

The NDP is the party of housing. We built the most significant amount of affordable housing, supportive housing and co-op housing of any government and have never been beaten at that.

Here on the official opposition side, we believe in listening to the experts. We believe in helping non-profits and co-ops and non-profit housing providers to do what they’re good at. This government would much rather prioritize a for-profit market. As I said, there’s nothing wrong with the for-profit market, despite the misunderstanding across the way, but we have to look at all different aspects of the housing spectrum.

I also want to turn to the greatest generation, the people who fought in World War II. They, because of the housing that was provided for them by the Bill Davis government, gave rise to the baby boom generation, which had incredible economic benefits the likes of which we have never seen before. I am shuddering to think that the member from Perth–Wellington would call Bill Davis, who created a tremendous amount of housing, a raging socialist.

I also want to thank the member from Spadina–Fort York for mentioning the $5 billion this government is content to hand over in development charges, but I want this government to think about this as an opportunity. They have an opportunity to listen to the non-profit and co-op housing providers. They have an opportunity to listen to Ontarians across the spectrum of housing need, and they have an opportunity to act. It’s disappointing that only on this side of the House, we have heard co-op housing. On that side, there has been a curious and conspicuous absence of listening to the people of Ontario. I hope they will vote in support of this incredible motion today.

I want to thank the member, our NDP member, for bringing forward this motion to create and fund a public housing agency called Homes Ontario to finance and build 250,000 affordable and non-market homes on public land over 10 years.

It’s really important to recognize that in many municipalities in my region of northwestern Ontario—I warrant this applies in eastern Ontario as well—it is not profitable to build housing. It’s extremely expensive to build housing because of the distances. You might be able to build in Thunder Bay, but you cannot build in the communities along the north shore, nor can you afford to build in the communities on Highway 11, because the cost of transporting the materials, of bringing in the workers, is so high it’s prohibitive, and they’re not getting housing. That’s merely a thing of ignorance, I think, that’s not there, that’s not recognized, that it’s not going to happen without support.

Now, we’re supposed to have a Building Faster Fund, and a portion of that fund was supposed to be allocated to single- and lower-tier municipalities that have not been assigned a housing target, including small rural and northern communities, in order to address their unique needs following municipal consultations. Unfortunately, we’re still waiting. Where is that fund? How much is it going to be? What’s the criteria? What are the deadlines? Municipalities are desperately waiting for that.

But in the meantime, Ontario has announced the Ontario Municipal Partnership Fund. And guess what? No increases: It was reduced in 2020. It’s at the same amount now. But interestingly, eight years ago, the Conservative government was complaining about how unfair it was that this fund had been cut. So not only did they not increase it, they cut it, and then it’s at the same amount, and it’s simply not enough for municipalities to do anything. They just cannot do the work that they want to do. I have municipalities coming to me saying they want to build housing for seniors, supportive housing. There is no money for that. If they could, they could move seniors into those supportive places. There would be more housing available in the communities. They know jobs are coming to those communities; there’s nowhere to put them. There’s nowhere to put health care professionals. We’ve been hearing this for a very long time.

I just want to refer to something that apparently puts the fear of God into members on the other side of the floor, and that is to talk about co-operatives. Some 45 years—

Interjection.

Some 45 years ago in Thunder Bay, a need was recognized for affordable housing. Decent affordable housing was in short supply. As they noted, this was the case in 2002. Guess what? It’s still the case in 2023. This has been incredibly successful. It is still beautiful. This is 45 years ago. There’s a five-year waiting list to get into this co-op. We have a second co-op in the neighbourhood. People love living there. They have real communities. It’s a successful model. Frankly I’m surprised that people on the other side of the House have no concept of how successful those models can be.

Thank you for the opportunity to speak.

Further debate?

Thank you very much, Speaker, and just so you know, you’re in for a double bill tonight, so this should be fun.

First of all, I want to thank everybody for being here: the table, the Chair, my colleague on the other side whom I have a great deal of respect for even though we don’t always agree.

I want to back up. We’re going to talk about the question about whether the legal fees and the criminal investigation of those legal fees, those fees for lawyers—whether we should pay for the lawyers of politicians, MPPs, ministers and the staff who are caught up in this criminal investigation that’s going to happen over the greenbelt.

But we have to back up a bit and see where we start. How did we get here? We had, of course, the Premier change direction very precipitously on the greenbelt after promising for years and years that he wasn’t going to touch it, under the guise of “We’ve got to do this. It’s an emergency, and I have no choice.”

We have an Auditor General’s report that says, well, in actual fact, what happened here, there’s all these pieces that we’re missing—we can talk about process—but at the end of the day, the actual uplift in value in that land, that land that was owned by a few well-connected insiders, people who were, by the Premier’s own admission, his friendraisers—fundraisers and friends—and friendraisers, too. We all know who they are because they own land in other parts of the province that we’ll talk about later on. She really identified what the problem was here, and that there was an $8.3-billion backroom deal. We all know that.

The government then reversed course on it after the Integrity Commissioner’s report. The Integrity Commissioner’s report was very detailed, and it’s important in this debate because it will help us understand why we’re talking about legal fees and fees for lawyers in this criminal investigation. The Integrity Commissioner said two things. He said that this whole investigation, what he saw was, it was marred by brown envelopes and deception—those are his words. So what was evident from the Integrity Commissioner’s report was that the Minister of Housing at the time, who I’m going to talk a bit more about later in the second half, was reprimanded and he stepped down, which was the right thing to do.

It was evident from the Integrity Commissioner’s report that a lot of people were lawyering up. Everybody had a lawyer, and probably with good reason. Those lawyers cost money.

I think it’s fair to say that in this instance where we have the kind of things that we saw go on, the questions that the Integrity Commissioner raised, the concerns that he raised and the evidence that he brought forward and the fact that we have the RCMP—the Mounties—conducting a criminal investigation into these dealings and that we had four senior members in the Premier’s office, who are no longer connected, or no longer connected to the government, who were caught up in this. We have the former principal secretary, former executive assistants, the director of housing; we have Ryan Amato who was appointed as Minister Clark’s chief of staff by the Premier’s office. So all roads lead to the Premier’s office when you look at this.

So my question was just simply—this isn’t civil litigation. This isn’t what we’re all protected from when we’re ministers and we’re working and we make a decision that affects people and they want to contest that decision. They can come and they can sue us—civil litigation; understandable. But we shouldn’t be paying for the lawyers of those that are implicated in a criminal investigation, and that’s what we have here. I think it’s unfair to Ontario taxpayers. I think it’s a cost that should be borne most appropriately by the Ontario PC Party. I think it’s evident that there is some connection that’s there. I think it would be the right thing to do. I think it would be the right thing to do for Ontario taxpayers.

I look forward to the response of my colleague, the government House leader.

Really, in fairness, should taxpayers be on the hook to pay for lawyers in a criminal investigation?

Now, we had a reversal on the urban boundaries. It’s not the greenbelt; that’s not the thing we’re talking about, but urban boundaries. A very precipitous reversal, hastily set up, which raises the question, why are we doing that? Is it because of the RCMP’s criminal investigation? Are there concerns with that?

We know in Ottawa, the Watters Road property sticks out like a sore thumb. The city didn’t request it. It’s prime agricultural land. It’s got a geological formation. It’s hard to service. It shouldn’t even be there. It was included, and the people who owned the land, their land tripled in value—tripled in value in one day. And they’ve got a history of donations of $50,000 to the party. That’s what I was talking about earlier.

We have Hamilton, where a farmer gets three offers for his land the day before the boundary expansion is announced. That sounds a bit like somebody’s got some insider information there. The connections between what we saw on the greenbelt and what happened with the urban boundaries, well, we kind of see the same thing happening there.

So why are we paying for the lawyers to cover people’s tracks? Why would we pay their legal fees? Why would the government of Ontario, why would the people of Ontario, why would taxpayers do that? That’s not right. The Ontario PC Party should pay for it. It looks like they were a beneficiary.

The other thing I want to mention is the former Minister of Housing, who I think did the right thing when he was reprimanded here in this assembly or—I’ll correct my record— reprimanded by the Integrity Commissioner. I know the member quite well. I sat with him for a long time. I have a lot of respect for him. I have a lot of respect that he did the right thing, and the objection that I have today is that with this urban boundary expansion and with all things around this RCMP investigation, the Minister of Housing is—they’re doubling down on it. He already threw himself under the bus. Now the Premier is backing up over him.

I mentioned earlier those people connected to the Premier’s office, that all roads lead to the Premier’s office on this one. I think it’s fair. Who are the people who are missing? They’re people who worked in the Premier office and the one who was appointed by the Premier’s office. All roads lead to the Premier’s office. So I don’t know why we should pay for lawyers in this criminal investigation, but even more, I don’t know why the former Minister of Housing is being backed over again. I find it objectionable. I think the Premier should take responsibility. It was his office. It was his direction. The member can’t effectively defend themselves. As a matter of fact, that former Minister of Housing won’t be able to benefit by what the government says it’s going to do to pay for the lawyers in this criminal investigation. He won’t be able to. He’s not attached to the minister; he’s a private member.

So let me figure this out: The person who admitted that he did a wrong thing, that did the right thing in here, who can’t defend himself or it’s going to cost himself money to do that, because they can’t do it here—they’re backing the bus over him again. That’s not right. I don’t care what side of the House that member is on; I don’t. I don’t care whether they sat here, whether they sat here, whether they sat there. I think any of us would objectively say that’s unfair. And when I saw that and I heard that, it upset me a great deal, because I have a lot of respect for that member.

I’ll just leave it at that, Speaker.

The time provided for private members’ public business has expired.

Mr. Kernaghan has moved private member’s notice of motion number 65. Is it the pleasure of the House that the motion carry? I heard a no.

All those in favour of the motion, please say “aye.”

All those opposed to the motion will please say “nay.”

In my opinion, the ayes have it.

A recorded vote being required, this vote will be deferred until the next instance of deferred votes.

Vote deferred.

Pursuant to standing order 36, the question that this House do now adjourn is deemed to have been made.

The member for Ottawa South.

The member will have, again, up to five minutes to debate the matter. The government can reply for five minutes.

I appreciate the opportunity. I will take the member’s advice under advisement. Thank you.

A response from the government House leader.