SoVote

Decentralized Democracy

Ontario Assembly

43rd Parl. 1st Sess.
October 30, 2023 09:00AM

I want to congratulate our critic here for consumer affairs. There is a theme that went through this debate that sometimes consumers don’t know what they don’t know until you buy a product or are involved with the industry; then you understand what the unfairness is.

But one of the things that stuck out for me, and I think people may not know this as well: You mentioned Canadians for Properly Built Homes and how they issued a statement about Justice Cunningham’s report and recommendations that should happen around it. But one of the questions that they were asking for the Ford government to deal with—because, as you noted, the Ford government did make a promise before 2018 to proceed with some of those recommendations. One of the things I want to highlight is, why do you think this Ford government won’t reverse the decision to allow remote inspections during construction? Because I’d bet many consumers have no idea that those remote inspections aren’t being done today.

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Thank you to the member for his speech. I appreciate that this legislation does talk about and refer to price gouging as something unconscionable. In essence, it defines price gouging as taking, let’s say, a product and comparing the price of the product to the other competitors and then looking at the range. One of the problems or challenges that I see with that is, how do you address industry-wide problems? So if a particular thing that’s being sold by an entire industry, we feel, is too expensive, how do you suggest or would you be willing to look into ways to bring down gouging across entire industries as opposed to punishing individual businesses?

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