Further debate?

I had to wait for a second because I was overcome with the rapturous applause from the Liberal side for the last speaker. I guess they all got together and applauded at the same time. It was quite remarkable.

Speaker, the carbon tax increases the cost of everything, plain and simple. The carbon tax drives up the cost of everything we do and everything we consume. When we talk about groceries, we have to ask ourselves—and you’re talking about over the last year. I hear the Liberals and the NDP talk about cost-of-living issues over and over again, cost-of-living issues that are exacerbated dramatically by the carbon tax because it’s this spiralling thing. The carbon tax drives up the cost of something; people have to pay more for that something. The next thing you know, people are demanding that they want to get paid more for what they’re doing, and it’s just an endless upward spiral driving up the cost of living on everything we do.

I was somewhat entertained, I must say, by the member for Timiskaming–Cochrane talking about his three envelopes. I can assure you this, Speaker, and this can go out to as wide an audience as you want: The member can prepare three envelopes if he chooses; he will never, ever have the need to open them.

In fact, let’s talk about what’s going on over there. I know, because I listened to them wandering all over the world in their dissertations, and I asked myself, “Boy, I’m just glad I’m not a member of the NDP caucus these days. Wow.” I was just watching CP24 when I took a little break here. What is going on? The poor leader of the NDP must be just beside herself wondering, “Do I even want to have another caucus meeting to hear what’s going on there?” So I know that they’re having so much turmoil amongst themselves and so much confusion that they’re not sure what they’re talking about here today, because here’s one thing that is clear: There is no provincial carbon tax on anything—no provincial carbon tax on anything.

I know the member mentioned Pierre Poilievre. Have you seen those ads, how effective they are? When you’re a consumer and you’re somebody struggling in Renfrew–Nipissing–Pembroke with the cost of living, which is a burden for us as everybody else, and you see that ad—I talk to people on the street every weekend and if I’m home during the week, and they’re saying, “Wow. It’s just amazing, when you think about it, how that is driving up the cost of everything in that grocery store.”

You’ve got the input costs. You’ve got the fertilizer. You’ve got the fuel. You’ve got the trucks that move those goods from place to place. You’ve got people who drive to that farm to go to work. When you start to think about it, it is absolutely scary, because it’s endless. And when you go to buy those groceries, if you live in rural Ontario, you ain’t jumping on the subway that’s running whether you’re on it or not; you’re getting into your truck and driving to the grocery store.

So when I talk to people, they are just—I’ve got to tell you, it pains me when I see people who are just deciding whether or not they can actually buy that item in the grocery store, because the cost not just of those groceries, but everything else, is being driven by the carbon tax. Mr. Trudeau, every so often, sends out a cheque; that is just plain and simple bribery, a little bit of a cheque back to try to convince you that the carbon tax is actually working in your favour.

The member talks about—we’re not debating about whether we have climate change. That’s not the debate here. But what is clear is that Canada produces abut 1.5% of the world’s emissions. Are we the ones who are going to have to pay for the rest of the world that doesn’t implement climate change solutions, such as India and China, which are exempt from those agreements? But we’re the ones that should suffer, and our citizens are the ones who should pay the price, because Justin Trudeau wants to have a little fun that he can play games with—him and his environment minister, Steven Guilbeault? That’s what you get when you put a radical activist in as the environment minister for Canada, because they don’t care what the average person is going through.

So what we’re trying to do here in the PC Party—and yes, we went to court. Yes, we went to court, not because of our philosophy or our beliefs on the carbon tax; it was because we believe, on behalf of the people of Ontario, that the carbon tax would be harmful to them, and we’re right. We’re 100% right. You can dance around that all you want over on the other side, but the carbon tax is hurting, and it is not leading to a reduction of Canada’s carbon emissions. So it’s failing on two counts, but it’s driving up the cost of everything the people do.

So it doesn’t matter if you’re a farmer, a worker, a labourer, particularly if you live in rural Ontario. I remember one bill—we heat with oil in our house, and there was one bill for an oil tank fill-up—over $1,700 for a fill-up, and a significant amount of it was taxation. I said to my wife, “You know, we’re fortunate. We can afford to pay that bill, and we’ll pay it on time.” But if you’re one of those people who is struggling on everyday cost-of-living issues, and you have an oil bill, and it’s the wintertime, you either put oil in, or you don’t and you freeze. What kind of hardship are you placing on them—additional hardship—because of the federal carbon tax, for them to heat their homes? How can you in good conscience actually sit there and say, “We’re doing that because we’re going to save the world, when the rest of the world isn’t”? Little old Canada, with 1.5%, is going to take care of all of that, but our citizens are hurting deeply because of it.

The carbon tax was totally motivated by politics, not about environment—totally motivated by politics on behalf of those Liberal socialists who decided, “We have to find another way to extract more money from the people so that we could put it into the pet programs that we actually like, not because it was going to be a benefit to the people. It was going to be a benefit to us, because now we can now highlight the things that we want the people to see, at least those people we consider our core voters.” So now, that’s just what you get anew.

Speaker, we’re just seeing the tip of the iceberg, as they say, because as this carbon tax rises to 2050, what we’re getting today is just a small sample of the pain that people will be experiencing if this federal government continues on the path that it is on. The sky is the limit, and the provincial NDP were supporting a 300% increase in the carbon tax. And if they’re saying over there that the carbon tax is good and is not inflicting pain on people, then they are denying reality. If they’re going to stand there or sit there or just try to say that the carbon tax is not hurting people, they know they’re wrong. So if it’s wrong today, how wrong will it be tomorrow when it goes up and up and up? And yet those other countries that are far bigger polluters will be doing nothing. But they must be sitting back thinking, “Man, those Canadians are stupid. They are just committing”—I can’t think of a word that is parliamentary. “They’re doing it to themselves,” is what they’re saying.

But we have an opportunity as elected people—and thank goodness that Pierre Poilievre is standing up and saying, “If we’re elected, it’s gone, because we actually care about the cost of living, issues that people in Canada are facing.” He has an ally here in Ontario, because we believe the same thing: It has absolutely gone too far, and it is not succeeding in its purported purpose. We were going to reduce CO₂ emissions by inflicting this carbon tax on the people. Well, they haven’t done it. It hasn’t happened. So in spite of all that, they’re determined that they’re going to not only continue with the carbon tax; they’re going to raise the carbon tax. They’re going to increase the amount of the carbon tax. Where does it end?

If it continues like this, how does it do anything else but drive the cost of inflation up, drive inflation up continuously and incrementally even more? Because if every day you have to pay more for the things that you absolutely have to have—and I speak as a rural member, and the member from Timiskaming–Cochrane would understand this as well as anybody—it costs more. It costs more to get around in rural Ontario.

I’m grateful for the tremendous work that Premier Ford and our government is doing to increase public transit in the GTHA. It’s a tremendous expansion, the greatest in Canada’s history, the largest in Canada’s history. So that will do a lot to reduce the amount of CO₂ that we’re producing. We’re doing those things. We’re putting electric arc furnaces in our steel mills. That’s taking one to two million cars off the road. We are doing the kinds of things that will actually matter to people, but not with a carbon tax.

We actually believe over here—of course, we believe; they don’t believe. We believe that we can actually protect the environment, continue to reduce CO₂ without it having be that tremendous burden on people who are trying to raise their families and wondering whether they’re going to be able to make the mortgage payment.

The Minister of Economic Development has been a tremendous salesperson around the world, bringing to Ontario the greatest expansion into our auto and EV, electric vehicle, manufacturing system. We couldn’t have believed that was going to happen. What is it doing? We’re going to be the world leaders in electric vehicle battery production. If I’m not mistaken, $27 billion has been earmarked or invested or contracted for Ontario in these particular ventures. How much will we be reducing our emissions by because of that? Think about it, folks.

But the NDP actually want us not to continue to produce and build nuclear power facilities. So we’re going to have all these electric vehicles—world leaders in electric vehicles. But what are they going to do? Put a windmill on the roof? I don’t know where they’re coming from. They want us to be able to put all of these things that require more electricity, move them away from fossil fuels into electricity, but they don’t want us to produce electricity except by the way that they want to produce it: unreliable, intermittent sources. There is a place for solar. There is a place for wind. We absolutely understand that. But you can never have your baseload on something that you cannot absolutely depend on.

You might have the smartest guy in the world working for you, but if he only shows up to work on Mondays and Thursdays, he’s going to be a problem. But I’ll tell you—

No, she did it by email.

Just like Ford.

Like Ford.

Oh, now, now. Be careful there, ma’am—from Waterloo.

So what about that guy who is there every single day—

This is the inner conflict that the NDP is dealing with all the time—and the carbon taxes are no different. They’re up there every day, and I see them stand up there: “My question is for the Premier. I want to talk about affordability issues.” And when they have an opportunity to stand with us against the federal government, which is taxing people to death—but the people have caught on to Mr. Trudeau.

Interjection.

Mr. Trudeau has been caught, and boy, are things looking bleak for him. He’s not just an embarrassment here; he’s an embarrassment all over the world.

I’ll say to the member for Timiskaming–Cochrane, Trudeau probably should have had about six or seven of those envelopes. Anyway—

Interjection.

Anyway, hopefully he finds a way to stop the increases in the carbon tax, eliminate it from anything that is absolutely essential. I know the member is talking about groceries and grocery input costs, and I really appreciate the member from Chatham-Kent–Leamington for bringing that forward. But we have to look at the broader picture as well and look at how much damage it is doing in every facet of your life. Everything that we produce in this country, everything we produce in this province is more expensive because of carbon taxes. You can’t do a thing without being impacted by carbon taxes. So if that has so much significance that it is driving up the cost of everything—and we are in a tremendously competitive world—why wouldn’t it be prudent to ask yourself the question, “If I am harming every single citizen in this province, in this country by implementing and increasing the burden of a carbon tax that is not reducing CO₂ emissions, why would we be doing that in the first place?”

I support the motion. I thank the member for bringing it forward. I know this caucus supports the motion, because we stand firmly in opposition to the Trudeau carbon tax.

Are you using the carbon rebate to buy her the house?

You might need help this time.

Further debate? The member from Guelph.

You should use it for speech writing.

Further debate?

I’m sorry; the member opposite said “lollipops.” I’m talking about solutions to the climate crisis that are being implemented across the world, helping people save money, benefiting their local economies, attracting the $1.8 trillion in global investment that’s going to these solutions. Why not have that in Ontario? Why lose that investment to the EU and US and other jurisdictions?

Let’s make those investments right here in Ontario, address the climate crisis, address the affordability crisis and improve our economy at the same time. Those are the kinds of solutions that are going to address people’s affordability concerns, improve their quality of life and ensure their children have a better future. Speaker, that’s what I’m hoping we can deliver on in this Legislature and in this province.

Before I get into my prepared remarks here, the member from Guelph spurred me to do a little bit of research. We can’t correct anybody’s record here in the Legislature, but I just want to put this on the record for myself: A 2023 report from the Parliamentary Budget Officer says the average Ontario family is set to lose $478 based on the carbon tax. So I thought I’d just put that out there for everybody who’s watching or who might be listening, and to make sure that the member from Guelph is aware that that indeed is the case. That’s right from the Parliamentary Budget Officer’s report this year, 2023.

Speaker, it is my pleasure to rise in the House this afternoon and join the debate on motion 69, the motion introduced by my friend the member from Chatham-Kent–Leamington. I just want to go back to the premise of the motion, and that is, “That, in the opinion of this House, the government of Canada should take immediate steps to eliminate the carbon tax on grocery items.” This is a motion that I wholeheartedly support.

During my remarks today, I’ll focus on initiatives aimed at lowering the cost of the carbon tax on food, how skyrocketing food costs won’t come down if you add another tax to producers and consumers, and a historic look at how this House has tried to protect Ontarians from these taxes in the past.

We know the federal carbon tax is driving food costs higher than they already are, and what is shocking is that we may not actually know how much it is truly adding to grocery bills.

Thankfully, there is some good news coming out of Ottawa, if you can believe that, colleagues. A Conservative bill, Bill C-234, would remove the federal carbon tax from on-farm uses of natural gas and propane, which I’m going to talk a little bit about here, because it’s very important as to why these items need to be exempt from the carbon tax. Farmers use these fuels for processes such as grain drying or heating their barns. These uses are not currently exempt from carbon tax laws. This bill, which is now before the Senate, was supported by the entire House of Commons—colleagues, if you can guess, who didn’t support it, though? The Liberals. I know it’s hard to believe.

The Parliamentary Budget Officer, who we’ve talked a little bit about here today, analyzed Bill C-234, and what they found is that farmers would save—this is a staggering amount, colleagues. Having natural gas and other heating fuels exempt from the carbon tax for on-farm use would save farmers $978 million between now and 2030—almost a billion dollars back into the pockets of farmers. And we all know that hard-working farmers reinvest that money into their businesses; it’s no surprise. Anybody who has had an opportunity to travel the province and speak with farmers knows this.

In the words of Dr. Sylvain Charlebois, the senior director of the agri-food analytics lab at Dalhousie University in Halifax, Bill C-234 is just a start. The professor shared an op-ed titled, “The Hidden Cost of Carbon Taxes and How it Will Impact Food Retail in Canada.” The article begins with a very concerning point, and this is the point that I was getting to make earlier: We may not have an idea how much carbon tax increases will impact food security. That’s really what we’re talking about here today—food security and food affordability. The professor wrote, “On April 1, the carbon tax will be set at $65 per metric tonne. We are slowly marching towards a carbon tax of $170 per metric tonne, by 2030”—which is just around the corner, whether we like it or not—"which is more than double what it is today. Yet so far, not one study has looked at how the carbon tax will be impacting food affordability in Canada. Not one.” So we know that it’s going to drive up the price of essential goods like food. We know that this will impact vulnerable people the hardest, but we do not know how big the impact will be. Quite frankly, that’s a recipe for disaster. The Liberals’ approach to feeding Canadians has been all stick and no carrot.

To quote Professor Charlebois again, “According to a report from the Canadian Federation of Independent Business (CFIB), more than $8 billion will be collected from small business through the carbon tax by the end of fiscal 2023, and as little as $35 million will be given back as credit in the form of programs. Many small businesses, especially family businesses, are in the food industry.”

So what will happen if the federal government goes with the status quo? And to quote the professor one more time, “Food processors, artisan shops, and restaurant owners need more and better support or else, by 2030, the carbon tax will have the potential to become a ... more significant driver of food inflation than climate change itself. That’s right, the policy to penalize polluters could hurt citizens more than climate change, the very thing we are all trying to mitigate.”

So this is very concerning. The price of food has already increased dramatically over the last few years, and you don’t need to look far to see the impact of food inflation. Kim Wilhelm, the interim CEO of the Food Bank of Waterloo Region, said in a recent article that over 1,000 students used the food bank just this August. That is, roughly, a 150% increase since last year.

Another telling stat is how much they are spending on food at the food bank. Pre-pandemic, the food bank would spend about $200,000 on very specific food purchases. Now they estimate, by the end of this year, they will spend about $2 million on those same purchases. So what happens when that $2-million bill goes up by another unknown amount, Madam Speaker?

I want to go back in time a little bit to 2008. The Dark Knight had recently been released in theatres; a young Justin Trudeau still had a political future. Prior to the federal election, the McGuinty Liberals moved a motion calling on federal party leaders to commit to treating Ontario fairly. For context, this was during the time that Stéphane Dion’s Liberal Party was championing a carbon tax, back in 2008. The federal member from Thornhill moved a motion to amend that as following: “fairness in Ontario’s taxation policies so that people already overburdened by taxes in this province are not subjected to the proposed carbon tax.” That was a motion on the carbon tax that was being introduced in Ottawa. And the Liberals, of course—can you guess, colleagues? What did they do? They voted down the amendment.

Of course.

It was only one member that’s still here.

Of course. Every single member that voted “nay” no longer serves in the House of Commons. There are, however, some yeas that are still in the House.

I want to talk a little bit about some of the comments that happened during that time. And I am sorry, Madam Speaker; I’m getting a little confused as we go a little later into the afternoon here, and I’m going to snag a little bit of water.

That was actually a motion that was put forward here, in our chamber, and those members who are no longer here sat on this side of the House. So—

So let’s talk a little bit about the members that are still here. We have our Minister of Health, the member for Sarnia–Lambton, the member for Oxford and, of course, the member for Nepean who are still here from that 2008 election, even though the Liberals got voted out of office. And if you can believe it—here’s the interesting part, Madam Speaker—across the way, the member for Nickel Belt at the time, who still serves in this chamber, as well as the current mayor of Hamilton and former leader of the NDP Party, Andrea Horwath, voted in favour. They voted in favour of the amendment to make sure that a carbon tax was not going to unfairly penalize the people of Ontario, and I would hope that the NDP offers its support to this motion, Madam Speaker.

This motion is following the spirit of that 2008 amendment by exempting the carbon tax on Ontarians already overburdened by the cost of simply trying to eat. Or, to quote the former member for Timmins from an exchange in question period at the time, “the Dion Liberals want a carbon tax that will hurt hard-working Ontarians.” That was the former member from Timmins, who sat in this chamber for many years.

We will see which version of the NDP we get today. As several of my colleagues have pointed out, they have a role to play here as well. We urge the Ontario NDP to call on their federal counterparts, who hold the balance of power in Ottawa, to demand the federal government remove the carbon tax.

Speaker, as I want to conclude my remarks, I’d like to thank the member from Chatham-Kent–Leamington for bringing forward this motion. I would also like to congratulate our new Minister of the Environment, Conservation and Parks. She has spent years working to advance environmental issues while also protecting consumers, and if I can I’d like to borrow a line from the minister: We can fight for the environment—we can treat climate change seriously, we can work with industry, but we’ll not pass the cost down to the consumer.

It is in this spirit that I support this motion and I call on all other members here in the House to do the same.

Further debate?

Sadly, my eyes require a little bit of guidance here today.

I wanted to spend some time today talking about this motion, but mostly not just to repeat a phrase that our Premier has made but to expand on the why. The Premier said last month, “The delivery of every product we have in the province is being affected by the worst tax this country has ever seen—it’s a useless tax—and that’s the carbon tax.” I couldn’t agree with the Premier more on this one, and there are lots of reasons why.

I listened very carefully to the earlier discussion, and there are some things that I appreciated and agreed with, and there are some things that I just patently don’t agree with. I think that when you put a carbon tax in the country, and here in Ontario, you really are putting a tax right from the beginning, right from the farm to the table.

When you put a carbon tax on the fertilizer that’s going in the ground to grow the food that we eat, when you put a tax on the fuel that that farm is going to consume to pick the food and the fruits off the farm—then you put the fuel to transport that food. Then you need to put the fuel to refrigerate that food in the warehouses, who are all adding the carbon tax at every step of the way from in the ground all the way—now we’re at the distribution centre with the refrigerators or freezers in that case that have a carbon tax on top of everything that they are buying. Then you transport that around the province or around the country and you’re consuming gas with a carbon tax on it. Then it gets to the grocery store who have to refrigerate—again, you’re adding a carbon tax on that fuel. Every single step of the way, from the farm to the business to the family’s table, you have taxed. You have put a tax, and you wonder why we have inflation today, why we have the high cost of food.

We stood in this Legislature—I’ve been here 12 years and three weeks, and we’ve talked about lowering the cost on every item. That’s what we on this side stand for: lowering costs. Lower costs create more wealth in the communities. Taxing never—never—creates jobs, never creates any help for families, and I’m going to give some examples about what we did to lower costs and what that resulted in. So it’s a little bit of a storyline that I’ll take you on, but you’ll see that, by lowering costs, we have had huge benefits to families in Ontario.

By putting a carbon tax, you have increased the burden on every single family. Now, the price of gasoline alone is 14 cents per litre—right now, today, at the pump, the carbon tax is costing an extra 14 cents a litre. As the member from Renfrew–Nipissing–Pembroke said earlier, we live in rural Ontario. We don’t have many options. It is a vast land that we have to travel by vehicle, and in many cases, larger vehicles, as well, for our own safety on those back roads.

You have this carbon tax that is adversely affecting especially smaller and rural communities, but it’s 14 cents today. If we think we have pain, it’s on its way to reaching 37 cents a litre. We can see that everything we’re consuming, every single thing we’re consuming, whether it’s the clothes you’re wearing that were shipped to the stores to the food on your table to the shoes, your vehicles themselves—every single thing that you buy has an inflation built into it now because of this carbon tax. It can all be tracked back to this carbon tax. You need to support this bill to scrap that tax to give our hard-working families this needed relief.

I want to talk a little bit about what we’ve done here in our government to illustrate that in order to increase your government’s revenues to be able to do things that we’re doing—like the roads and transportation that we’re building and the subways, our health care system and our education system, all the things that we’ve been adding billions of dollars to—you don’t need to raise taxes to do that. In fact, I’m going to illustrate how lowering taxes actually gives you more revenue. I know that sounds counterintuitive, so let me give you the exact example of what has actually happened here in Ontario in the last five years.

We all have heard our wonderful successes in the electric vehicle business; $27 billion has landed here. That does not happen by accident. That happened because we lowered the cost of doing business. We began by reducing the workplace safety insurance, the WSIB, by 50%—the premiums. The benefits to the workers have not changed; the premiums to the employers have been reduced. There was so much cash in there—stuffed with cash—that it was beyond any financial requirement, beyond any moral requirement. So we have said to the business community, “Enough.” We’ve reduced that by 50%. That is a $2.5-billion annual savings to those businesses that are paying WSIB, especially in the auto sector—129,000 employees, so it really affected them.

You can see, so far, $2.5 billion annually. Then we put in what’s called a capital cost acceleration, where you could write off the cost of your brand new equipment. You could write that off in-year, and that tax savings is $1 billion a year to the businesses. So now we have $2.5 billion and another $1 billion. That’s less revenue for the province.

Then we lowered the cost of industrial and commercial energy by 15%. That’s $1.3 billion. Then, through the great work of our Ministers of Red Tape Reduction, we have seen almost $1 billion in savings. It’s getting close to $1 billion in annual savings.

The Liberal government, before we were elected, had put in a series of tax increases, and one was to come due January 2019, about a half a year after we were elected, but we did not let that go through—$465 million annual savings by not having that tax, and then we stopped any tax increases when we were elected. So not only did we not go ahead with the Liberal $465-million tax; we stopped any tax increases—not even your hunting licence. But then we rolled back the provincial share of local property taxes by $450 million, and that’s a savings to business. Add it all up, and a whole bunch of other savings that we did: We reduced our revenue from the business community by $8 billion annually. So the business community saved $8 billion a year; we had $8 billion a year—temporarily, I’ll say—less revenue.

What did the business community do? They did exactly what we expected them to do: They put 704,000 people to work since we got elected five years ago. Now, those 704,000 people pay income tax. That’s 704,000 more income tax cheques the province had than the day we started. And those companies that hired those 700,000 obviously got bigger. Without increasing the tax rate, our tax revenue increased.

You can see where I’m going with this, Speaker. When we got elected, our tax revenue was $154 billion annually. We rolled back our revenue. We let the business community keep that to hire those 700,000 people. We had a short-term rollback of $8 billion every year, but today our revenue is $194 billion. We started with $154 billion in revenue; by lowering taxes, our revenue went to $194 billion. That is economics 101. That is a very conservative platform, a very conservative way of looking at things.

The other side will say, “You need higher revenue? Raise taxes,” not understanding at all that a carbon tax or other taxes—when you raise those, you punish the families, you punish the business community, you stifle investment, you stop everything, you don’t grow and you just keep increasing taxes, because your revenue keeps falling by increasing taxes.

It works the other way: When you lower taxes, your revenue goes up. That is exactly what happened in Ontario. It is an absolute fact. It is inarguable. You cannot argue against the fact that we rolled back $8 billion in revenue to make $40 billion a year higher revenue, a $22-billion-a-year increase from corporate taxes. That’s where that money came from. That’s the money that we put into health care and education, the $200 billion that we’re investing in infrastructure, buildings, roads and bridges; and 50 hospitals and schools that we’re building. All of that comes from that new revenue, because we lowered taxes.

Somebody has to give that lesson to the Liberal government in Ottawa, that lower taxes create higher revenue. When we’re out selling Ontario, it becomes so much more difficult in the US, because they do not have this punishing carbon tax in the US. It comes up at every meeting: “Yes, but what about that tax you have in Canada?” That’s what they ask; they ask us specifically about that carbon tax, because they know that the fuel they’re going to consume is not a choice.

It’s not a choice for the construction worker who has to get to their worksite in the morning, or the parents who have to drive the kids to the hockey rink. It’s not a choice; it’s a necessity. The federal government has put this burden, and that’s why cutting the gas and fuel tax that we’re doing—we’ve reduced that by—I think the Premier uses the number 10.7 cents. That’s our plan. We reduced the tax of gasoline. The federal government increases the tax by 14 cents on gasoline. We can continue to do things like reduce the licence plate sticker renewal fees, all of these kinds of things. Everything that we’re doing is to put money back in the pockets of families, back in the pockets of that farmer, the business community, the end-users, so they have more money. Everything that that Liberal government in Ottawa is doing with the carbon tax is taking money out of your pockets. It’s just really simple: The more money that you put in the pockets of the families, drivers, the better off our economy is.

Speaker, we’re doing everything that we can in our government to continue to reduce costs for families. The Minister of Energy had a great announcement last week. As of November 1, we’re going to increase the electricity rebate. For the average residential customer, it will decrease their bills by $26 a month. That is the kind of relief that the people of Ontario need to grapple with the increased costs they’re getting from the federal government.

So earlier we talked about this $27 billion in auto EV. The member from Guelph certainly was right: that in itself is going to lower our carbon emissions. The fact that we are seeing this EV revolution, and it’s being led, by the way, in Ontario. It was 2019 that Reuters announced that there would be $300 billion spent on EV production in the next five years and zero of it—zero—was coming to Canada, zero was coming to Ontario. The fact that we turned that ship around—that sinking ship that the Liberals, supported by the NDP, left us in 2018 when we won our first majority—we were able to have an announcement by Bloomberg only a short while ago that from zero to $27 billion in EV investment. We are the number two global supplier of EV parts in all of the world. We are only behind China. We are number one in North America, ahead of all of the US.

Ontario is leading this EV revolution and the fight to get to zero carbon. That is being led here in Ontario and a big part of that is the fact that we are making green steel, not only in Algoma, in Sault Ste. Marie, but at Dofasco in Hamilton. And that green steel—when we make an EV in Ontario, you are buying a car that is assembled with 94% clean energy, you’re buying a battery that is assembled with 100% clean energy and a car that has green steel all around you. You are driving a true, clean electric vehicle. That changed at Dofasco.

To go to an electric arc furnace from burning coal is equivalent to taking one million cars off the road. The same thing can be said for Algoma in northern Ontario. By converting from coal to an electric arc furnace, that’s what we have done. That is part of this EV revolution that we have created—green steel. We’ve created clean energy assembly of vehicles; 100% clean energy batteries. You buy a battery made in Kentucky, it’s 6% clean energy. You buy a battery made in Indiana, it’s 7% clean energy. You buy a battery made in Ontario, and it’s 100% clean energy. You have a true zero-emission goal when you buy products that are made here in Ontario. So we will continue to be laser-focused.

Each and every one of these investments that we see these companies making, they’re all geared here not only because we have this clean energy and not only because we have the mega sites—we have the talent. We have that talent, and that talent in Ontario deserves to be able to get to and from their place of business without having to be punished by this carbon tax that the federal government has continued to place here.

Despite this carbon tax, we have been able to be successful in Ontario. Even though the Liberals and the NDP continue to vote against measures we’ve introduced to make life more affordable, we continue—but now we encourage the federal government to reconsider their approach. Scrap the carbon tax. Give the people the much-needed relief at a time they’re already struggling with the increased cost of living.

Speaker, our government will always work to put more money in the pockets of hard-working people of the province. We encourage the federal government to see what we’ve done here in Ontario. See what lower taxes has done. See the revenue that has been increased because we lowered the taxes. Lower taxes equal higher revenue.

I beg to inform the House that the adjournment debate standing in the name of the member for Orléans scheduled for today has been withdrawn. Consequently, the adjournment debate will not be held today.

Further debate?