Before I begin, I just want to say how it is always an honour to rise in this House, representing the people from Hamilton West–Ancaster–Dundas, and I’m sure all the members here will share in my comments that I want to send out. Thank you to my family—all of our families. We wouldn’t be able to do what we do here if we didn’t have the support at home.

I want to say to, particularly, my grandson Sam, who’s celebrating his very first Halloween today—he’s going out as Daniel Tiger: I’m sorry that Nan’s not there, Sam, but have a fantastic Halloween evening.

To all those kids, be safe and have a lot of fun tonight.

I want to start by saying some of the things that the minister and the associate minister, when they talked about this debate, didn’t say: This rollback of the greenbelt grab is a significant victory for the people of the province of Ontario. This is a clear victory for all of us who worked to push back against the Ford government’s snatching away of our greenbelt lands. It’s significant for every citizen; for all the environmentalists; for all the housing activists; for all the regular folks who just didn’t like what they were seeing, who said to me, “I’ve never protested anything like this before”; for all the agricultural organizations, the farmers who stood up to the Conservatives. What they saw was, really, dirty dealing when it came to the greenbelt grab. So we came together, we pushed back, and we won. That shows you the power of the people. When the people really know that they’ve been wronged and they stand together, there’s nothing that we can’t do to make this province a better place.

We had First Nations who also acknowledged and understood what was at risk here. The Ontario First Nations chiefs wrote a letter demanding that Doug Ford’s government return the land to the protected greenbelt. First Nations chiefs across the province called on Doug Ford to return the land to the greenbelt. The Chiefs of Ontario said—and they were clear that the greenbelt move violates the Williams Treaties that were settled with the province and the federal government in 2018. The Chiefs of Ontario, which represents many First Nations leaders across the province, voted unanimously in an emergency meeting to oppose the land removal, and they had this to say: “The Ontario government’s decision to remove greenbelt lands did not respect obligations to First Nations, the treaties or its own policy-making process.” That was from Ontario Regional Chief Glen Hare. “The decisions made in a completely flawed process cannot in any way be allowed to stand.” I couldn’t agree more.

We had agricultural organizations, farmers, people who spent their entire lives—generations of lives—working the land and protecting the land, and see themselves as stewards of this land, who are very, very, very concerned about the loss of agricultural land.

As we have said many times in this House, 319 acres of agricultural land is lost every single day in this province, so this greenbelt grab was a risk to some of the most fertile farmland that we have—and in fact not just in Ontario, but in the country.

The National Farmers Union-Ontario had this to say: “Farmland is for those who grow food, not speculative investors. Return the 7,400 acres unjustly and irresponsibly stolen from the greenbelt.”

We also had many, many environmental groups—and honestly, I just have to shout out to Environmental Defence for the work that they have done to protect what is so valuable to all of us. And we do have Environmental Defence—for the 7,000 pages of documents that we received the other day, and those documents continue to unfold. In fact, to be frank, when I was preparing my hour lead, there was so much that I wanted to add, because these documents keep providing insight, and I’m sure that we’ll be hearing much more as people start to dig into those.

In a statement from Environmental Defence, when they were talking about the public giveaway, they said that this was a breach of MPPs’ promise not to touch the greenbelt; and that the bill is “a vast transfer of public wealth to a few select real estate investors”; and that it removes “strong legal protection for the greenbelt’s unique Duffins Rouge Agricultural Preserve....

“The passage of Bill 39 ... will enable a massive transfer of land value effectively held in trust for the public into the hands of a few well-connected real estate investors”—and we know that is true.

We have organizations like the Ontario Greenbelt Promise—and I don’t know if you saw them, but there were signs everywhere, in all of our neighbourhoods, and the signs just said, “Doug Ford, keep your greenbelt promise.” Those lawn signs had a significant impact on neighbourhoods across Ontario, so that people who didn’t really understand what was happening now understood that this Premier had broken his promise and that our greenbelt lands were at risk.

I attended, as did members of my caucus, so many greenbelt rallies. I saw people dressed up as carrots; I saw someone dressed up as a big fish; I saw kids, grandmothers like myself—all kinds of people who came out. Unprecedented amounts of people came out because they knew what was at risk.

I want to give a special shout-out to Stop Sprawl HamOnt. I’m going to say that Hamilton needs to take credit for being ground zero on the push-back to not only the greenbelt grab but the urban boundary expansion, which is really just greenbelt 2.0. So thank you for all your work.

And really, GASP, which is Grand(m)others Act to Save the Planet—fantastic work, and thank you very much. We see, we recognize you, and we have a debt of gratitude that we owe you from what you’ve done to save the greenbelt lands in this province.

I think that this government themselves might have been surprised by how many people actually cared about the greenbelt, and I think maybe this government is also surprised to see that when people stand up, that they know that they need to make changes—it took them a while to come back to it, but they did.

So the province of Ontario—we said no to selling off our natural heritage, we said no to cronyism and backroom deals, and we said no to a government that puts billionaire friends ahead of Ontarians and ahead of the future of our children when it comes to the environment and our green lands in this province. But it really should never have taken this—really, it shouldn’t have taken people to take time off work, to take time with their families to stand on the roadside, to stand in front of MPPs’ offices with signs, even though the signs were pretty fantastic. I saw some pretty funny signs, homemade signs, so that was also a great feature of these rallies. But it shouldn’t have taken this for the Premier to do the right thing, to undo the damage that he had done; it shouldn’t have taken this government and, really, the Premier and his ministers getting caught, which is really what happened—making backroom deals with speculators.

This whole scandal has really pulled the curtain back on a Conservative government that seems to be really all too comfortable operating in the backrooms. And this comes at a time when we know people are really hurting in the province. All of our constituents—we know they are really, really struggling. They’re struggling with an affordability crisis. They are struggling with a housing crisis. People are concerned about getting timely access to health care and to treatments in this province; they’re concerned about paying for treatments that are now privatized. People are genuinely concerned and hurting in this province, and really, this government has wasted so much time and so much effort and so many resources trying to implement this transfer of public wealth to his buddies. Really, we are nowhere nearer to addressing the housing crisis that people are facing. We know that the housing crisis was really something that this greenbelt grab was never about.

The Premier still has a lot more questions to answer. We will keep asking the hard questions. We hopefully will get some answers in this place—although I’m not a fool; I haven’t seen that so far. But we’re not going to stop asking the questions.

What we have seen work is that three ministers have resigned—Conservative staff resigned. Now there’s an RCMP investigation, as I said, with almost 7,000 pages of documents that tell us all roads lead back to the Premier’s office. The buck that the Premier talked about stopping stops at his office.

We’re going to continue on to make sure that people get accountability in this province for what has actually been the biggest scandal in the history of the province of Ontario. This is something that this government, without being insulting, should actually take to heart—and should say that they are part of a government that is now in the midst of the biggest scandal in the province of Ontario. That’s saying something.

I listened carefully to the minister, and I listened to the associate minister when they did their hour lead on this bill. I have to say, the one thing that stuck out to me significantly was that the minister said that the people were not brought along in this process. Can you imagine? The people were not brought along in this process—that is the biggest understatement of this whole greenbelt debacle.

No, Minister, the people weren’t brought along; they were taken for a ride. It is the developers and billionaires, friends, who were at the heart of all these decisions that were not in the interests of the people—that’s who was taken along—developers and the government’s speculator friends who stood to make huge profits. We know $8.3 billion in profits from these greenbelt removals, the forced urban boundary expansion, MZOs, zoning changes, official plan amendments—all of these interferences and meddling that have set us so far back in the province, all on behalf of not the people but insiders and billionaires, making rich people even richer—and, I would just like to add, without building a single home. None of this resulted in a single home being built. It is scandalous.

Let’s go back. This is such a sordid tale, and you will be forgiven if you’ve lost the plot a little bit. But let me just highlight. It goes sort of like this. Doug Ford got caught on video in 2018 saying that he was going to take a big chunk out of the greenbelt. It was a promise he made to developers, but he got caught. He said, “Oh, no, no. I’m not going to do this,” when he was campaigning in 2018. Then, when he was elected in 2018, they had some bills that were going to try and touch the greenbelt, but they got pushback. He said, “No, I guess I won’t do that.” Then, he campaigned in 2022 on a promise that he would not touch the greenbelt. That was a campaign promise.

Then, when he was elected, we started to get signals from the Premier. He called the greenbelt a scam. He called it a field of weeds, that a bunch of bureaucrats in a room with crayons drew up the greenbelt. We should have known then that the Premier had the greenbelt in his sights. He was signalling that he was moving behind the scenes against the greenbelt and really trying to get public sentiment on his side by saying that the greenbelt was a scam. He was trying to malign the greenbelt, hoping that when he did make his move, the people would have bought his lines on this, but clearly it didn’t work; they didn’t. Then what do we have?

We had two scathing reports from the Auditor General and the Integrity Commissioner. I have to commend my leader, the leader of the official opposition, Marit Stiles, who I’m fully in support of. She has done a fantastic job holding this government to account. It’s her actions—writing to the Auditor General, writing to the Integrity Commissioner—that helped result in these reports that have finally shed some light on what was going on in this government and in the cabinet.

The Premier has said that he was sorry—very, very, very sorry; very sheepishly sorry.