Remembrance Day is fast approaching, and today in the House I’m proud to speak of a recent initiative to help future generations actively remember and honour the sacrifices of all Canadians. This includes those who served and the many who made the ultimate sacrifice in World Wars I and II, the Korean and Afghan wars and the many peacekeeping missions, and to honour those who are serving or have served in Canada’s Armed Forces.

The Canadian Remembrance Torch initiative was founded by Karen Hunter, and the torch was designed and built by McMaster engineering students. It was lit on Parliament Hill in September 2022. Its flame was flown by Air Canada to the Netherlands, where Princess Margriet participated in a “passing the torch to the next generation” ceremony.

Throughout 2023, the Canadian Remembrance Torch has participated in many high-profile events across Canada, and in 2024, the torch will participate in D-Day’s 80th anniversary commemorations at Juno Beach Centre in Normandy. Other initiatives of the Canadian Remembrance Torch include a Student TorchBearers Program, a Faces to Names initiative to create a digital archive of all Canadians who have died in war, and peacekeeping missions and community events that take place each year.

The Canadian Remembrance Torch will be passed on to future generations to help communities and students to remember and honour those who have served and are serving so we can live in peace and democracy.

I’d like to welcome to the House Karen Hunter, the executive director of the Canadian Remembrance Torch, and Yuvraj Sandhu, a McMaster student and member of the original design team for the Canadian Remembrance Torch.

The torch is in the Legislature today, and if any members would like to get a picture with the Canadian Remembrance Torch, it will be on the grand staircase after question period.

Just a reminder to the members of the House that the Remembrance Day torch is in the Legislature today, and immediately after question period, it will be on the front steps of the Legislature. Any members who want to get a picture with the torch and the people who founded it can come out to the steps.

“To the Legislative Assembly of Ontario:

“Whereas the Haliburton Highlands Health Services board of directors has, without consultation with the affected stakeholders, closed the emergency department located in the municipality of Minden Hills, Ontario, on June 1, 2023;

“Whereas the loss of service is jeopardizing the lives of residents in the community;

“Therefore we, the undersigned, petition the Legislative Assembly of Ontario to direct the Minister of Health to use her powers under section 9.1 of the Public Hospitals Act to immediately reopen the Minden emergency department.”

I fully support this petition. I will affix my signature and pass it to page Simran to take to the table.

I want to recognize the member from Waterloo for her comments today. You were talking about this government rebuilding trust, and in this consumer protection bill, there are some real weaknesses in it. One that came up in the debate is that it’s not retroactive. We’ve got homeowners who have been hit with liens of $40,000 on hot water tanks and furnaces. This legislation does nothing to backtrack, to say that those liens are going to be expunged with this legislation. What should the government do to protect the consumers who have already been ripped off?

It’s an honour to rise in the House today and talk to Bill 142, which is a consumer protection bill. It revamps the existing Consumer Protection Act, and there are some good things in here, as my colleagues have said, but there needs to be much more because too many Ontarians are getting ripped off by unscrupulous vendors. This is a bill with an opportunity for the government to rebuild trust. This is a government that does need to rebuild trust in this province.

We’ve seen, with the recent scandals—the greenbelt scandals, the municipal boundaries scandals—the government has started to backtrack on some of those. They’ve backtracked on the greenbelt rezoning. They’ve backtracked on the municipal boundaries. The government House leader has said that he’s investigating MZOs. If there’s one other thing I would ask the government to do, please take a close look at Ontario Place and the deal for Ontario Place and backtrack on that too.

There are fences going up right now at Ontario Place. They’re about to cut down 1,500 mature trees at Ontario Place. We ask the government to pause that, to take a look at that deal and make sure that that deal is not the next scandal that this government is going to be dealing with before those trees are cut down. That’s about building trust, and this consumer act can help to rebuild that trust.

I have just received an email from a senior in my riding. She’s an older woman. She lives alone. Her husband has passed away. She’s a widow and she’s been badly ripped off of all of her savings that she had to pay for her mortgage. It was through a phone call and the call said, “Metropolitan Toronto police” and she believed what the person on the line was saying. They had this elaborate story about what had happened and that she needed to take these things and that this was the police guiding her. And she’s lost her savings now.

We absolutely need consumer protections to be strengthened in this province. These predatory companies and these unscrupulous people often target seniors, especially widows, and people with disabilities. They target immigrants and refugees. They find the most vulnerable people and often the people with the least money, and they fleece them of that money.

What we’ve seen: We’ve seen people who are sold hot water tanks and they’re locked into long-term leases for these hot water tanks. If you go to the Home Depot or another store, you’re paying $1,000 or less for a hot water tank. Some of these long-term leases lock you in for thousands and thousands of dollars over the years. Some of these contracts for new furnaces and things, these high-pressure sales tactics that they use on vulnerable seniors and people with disabilities—they lock them in and then they take a lien out on the person’s home. This often happens so that when the person tries to sell their home, they find out that this unscrupulous company has taken a lien out on their home and that they have to pay off the lien. Sometimes it’s $40,000. There’s one case where a person had to pay off $60,000; a senior had to pay off a lien for $60,000 in order to get out of the contracts that were on that lien. It’s absolutely appalling.

The government needs to take action. This consumer act, as it stands, is a step in the right direction, but there needs to be a lot more. One of the things I’d suggest is that we need better protections for new home buyers, particularly pre-sales. There’s a recent article by Barbara Captijn in the Toronto Sun, and she talks about how badly new home owners, especially those in pre-sales, get ripped off. She talks about the reasons for it, and the reasons for it have to do with government legislation. She says that if you buy an existing home, then there’s a standard contract that the government provides and that everybody follows. It’s simple; it’s plain language. You don’t need a lawyer to analyze it. You can just take a look at it.

But if you buy a condo or a new home in a pre-sale, then the contract is written by a developer. These contracts are often 40, sometimes 60 pages long. It’s almost impossible to decipher what the actual meaning is. In that is an addendum; usually buried at the back of those long contracts is an addendum. It’s 11 pages, and it’s written by Tarion and the Home Construction Regulatory Authority, which are two agencies that are created by the provincial government, ostensibly to protect homebuyers. These addendums are 11 pages long, and they’re supposed to provide a warranty that the consumer—when you buy a new home in a pre-sale, you buy a warranty. You pay for a warranty to Tarion, but Tarion has got a horrific reputation for not actually protecting the consumers who pay for it.

This addendum that’s in the back of the contract, one judge said this is a “convoluted and confusingly long and obscure document” and “a trap for the unwary, particularly the unwary layperson.” This addendum written by agencies of this government needs to be addressed. If there’s one thing that should be changed in this legislation, this consumer protection, and that should be added, it’s that there should be a plain-language contract for pre-sale, pre-construction home buying, whether it’s a condo or a house.

The other thing is that condo owners—the other suggestion for this legislation: If you buy a new condo in a pre-sale, you have a 10-day cooling-off period. If you sign on the dotted line, and you go home and you think, “You know, maybe I don’t have that much money; maybe this isn’t such a good deal,” you’ve got 10 days, and you can just walk away from that deal. But new houses do not have that cooling-off period. This is something else that needs to be changed. This is the kind of consumer protection that people need in the province of Ontario.

This government has said—the Premier and the ministers of the Conservative government here have talked about how they don’t want weasel clauses in these home contracts where you sign with a developer, you lay down your money, there’s a timeline when they’re supposed to actually develop the home and build the home and they don’t follow that, or they cancel. There are actually what are called weasel clauses in these contracts. The rhetoric from the government is, “Hey, we’re going to protect new homebuyers,” but the legislation allows these contracts, written by developers, to use weasel clauses to get out of their commitments to the homebuyers.

I will talk about one good thing that’s in this: gift cards. I went to a major Canadian retailer, and I had this gift card. I’d had it; I found it in the back of a drawer. It said on it that it was $20, and I took it to the store, and they said, “No, we’re not honouring that anymore. It’s expired.” And I’m thinking: Well, that’s a hell of a scam. There’s $20, and sure, I lost the card for probably a year and a half or two years; I don’t know. It was in the back of a drawer. But that $20 doesn’t belong to the retailer. How come the retailer gets to keep my $20 and they don’t have to pay out the $20? To me, that gift card should be like cash. There is a protection in this to make sure that those gift cards do not expire, so I would give the government credit on that.

But there are other weaknesses in this bill, and I’d say one of the biggest ones—and my colleague was talking about this—I mentioned at the beginning seniors and other vulnerable people who have been ripped off, and they had these liens on their homes by these unscrupulous companies that have ripped them off. They used high-pressure tactics. The liens are often $40,000. There’s nothing in this legislation that’s retroactive. So what the government is saying is that, “Well, we’re going to provide some protection. We’ll see how strong the protection is when the legislation gets rolled out and when it’s implemented.” But for those who have already been ripped off, the consumers in Ontario who have already been ripped off, this legislation does nothing. That’s absolutely shameful, because if somebody has fallen victim to an unscrupulous vendor, then they should have some recourse. This government’s legislation right here is an opportunity to give them recourse and to expunge those bad debts.

I look forward to the questions. Thank you for letting me speak.

Spadina–Fort York.

I thank the member from Nickel Belt for the question about Ontario Place. It is really a vital place. It was designed to celebrate this province.

I will say one thing about those 1,500 trees that imminently could be cut down by this government: They came from every provincial park in this province, so some of them came from Nickel Belt. The idea was that for everybody coming from any part of Ontario, this was a place to celebrate this province, and you would recognize the trees at Ontario Place.

These trees have matured over the last 50 years that Ontario Place has been in existence, and so you’ve got a mature forest. You’ve got 125 bird species. You’ve actually got mink and beaver living at Ontario Place—and this is not Nickel Belt; this is downtown Toronto waterfront. This forest, this mature beautiful forest, has to be kept for future generations. That’s why we’re asking the government, don’t cut down those trees. Investigate the deal with Therme, because it seems to be as dirty as some of the deals with the greenbelt.

In my own riding, there have been people demovicted, people illegally renovicted. Thousands and thousands across this province are being renovicted and demovicted. The doubling of the fines—it may be a good talking point, but if they’re never applied, if they’re not actually a deterrent, then they’re not actually protecting consumers.

This is a real concern. Most people—and people watching—probably don’t know the difference between legislation and regulation and even a memo, right? But legislation is a bill, and it becomes law. It’s debated in this Legislature. We have a democratic right to analyze it, to debate it, and then we vote on it here in the Legislature. That’s the democratic process.

A regulation is something that the minister just does. He can make a regulation to implement—and the idea is that this is to actually develop the implementation plan for the bill, for the legislation. But what has been happening over the last—and it’s not just this Conservative government; it’s the previous Liberal government, as well. They keep moving more and more powers into regulation.

This government has taken out sections of the Consumer Protection Act from the act and they’ve put them into regulation, so that the people will never have an opportunity to listen to a debate about those consumer protections and whether they’re good or bad.

Taking pieces of the Consumer Protection Act out of legislation and putting it in regulation actually is a concern to us on this side of the House, and it should be a concern for all consumers in Ontario.