I would like to thank Dr. Sally Palmer for her tireless advocacy for people on OW and ODSP.

“To Raise Social Assistance Rates.

“To the Legislative Assembly of Ontario:

“Whereas Ontario’s social assistance rates are well below Canada’s official Market Basket Measure poverty line and far from adequate to cover the rising costs of food and rent: $733 for individuals on OW and $1,227 for ODSP;

“Whereas an open letter to the Premier and two cabinet ministers, signed by over 230 organizations, recommends that social assistance rates be doubled for both Ontario Works (OW) and the Ontario Disability Support Program (ODSP);

“Whereas the recent small increase of 5% for ODSP still leaves these citizens below the poverty line, both they and those receiving the frozen OW rates are struggling to survive at this time of alarming inflation;

“Whereas the government of Canada recognized in its CERB program that a ‘basic income’ of $2,000 per month was the standard support required by individuals who lost their employment during the pandemic;

“We, the undersigned citizens of Ontario, petition the Legislative Assembly to double social assistance rates for OW and ODSP.”

I fully support this petition. I will sign it and give it to Ananya.

Thank you to the member from Nickel Belt for your comments.

I have a lot of seniors who have problems with furnaces, water heaters and so on—contracts that are quite old, that are costing them lots and lots of money, and they don’t know how to get out of those contracts. Can you explain to me whether the bill addresses that? Does it go backwards? Is it going to help people who have been stuck with this now for 10 years?

I am rising today to speak to Bill 142, Better for Consumers, Better for Businesses Act, and I have to say there are certainly things in this act that I really applaud and find interesting.

For example, it adds language barriers as a reason a person may not be able to understand a consumer contract and therefore could get out of that contract. I think that’s a very important provision. Also, it’s an unconscionable act to enter into a contract with a consumer “if the person doing so knows or ought to know that there is no reasonable probability that the consumer will be able to pay the total amount owing under the contract.” That really stands out to me as an important change.

But what is interesting for me—now, I spend a lot of time in a particular seniors residence, a commercially owned seniors residence—I went through the bill, just doing a search looking for the word “seniors” and it actually doesn’t appear anywhere in the bill. Now, maybe that’s fine. We refer to vulnerable people getting taken in by unscrupulous actors, so perhaps it’s fine that it doesn’t mention seniors, but I really worry about seniors.

For example, I’ve seen, in this particular commercial residence, that the contract is not being met in terms of the food service that’s offered and promised. There are supposed to be three highly nutritious meals a day and yet often they are being served hot dogs and wieners, frozen hamburgers—a lot of things that really don’t qualify as nutritious food. So what does a senior do in that circumstance? Who do they go to? They can complain to the home, but things just don’t change. That is something I worry about.

Also, what I’ve seen are increases in rent by 7.5%. Over a couple of years, two rent increases, the cost has gone from $5,000 to $6,000. That’s a very significant increase and, again, I worry: Where does a senior go to complain? There is the seniors’ bill of rights; there’s a phone number you can call, but you will sit on hold forever and you’ll wait forever for somebody to call you back.

In this instance, I’m actually thinking back to the idea of having a seniors’ advocate. I also know that when people reach a certain age, they’re no longer confident about picking up the phone and making a lot of different phone calls to try and figure out who on earth is available to advocate on their behalf. This also brings me back to the idea of the consumer watchdog, so that people are not flipping through their phone books or going to their friends and saying, “Do you have any idea how to address this problem?” If there’s one place they can go and know that they can get good advice, I think that’s very valuable. Knowing that there are all kinds of particulars in the bill, these clauses and so on that might be get-out-of-jail-free clauses—they’re not accessible. They’re not easily accessible to people, so there needs to be a central place.

I want to add to that a comment that, again, when we’re thinking about seniors, what we have seen is the transition of almost every single government service into an online platform. Again, I know many seniors, including my mother who is 96, who is fluent on the computer—

Interjections.

Yes—but still gets overwhelmed by these long forms and all these things that you have to fill out. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if you called and a human answered the phone, and it was for a government service, and you actually could speak to someone?

That is something I’ve put out there as something for the government to think about, that when we’re actually implementing things, to be thinking about the human side: How do people find solutions? What’s the easiest for them without people feeling overwhelmed? Because the other thing I’ve seen in this particular home is that people often just kind of shrug their hands and say, “Oh, well. I can’t do anything about it,” when, in fact, there probably is something they could do but they don’t know where to reach out for that.

I do have concerns about shifting everything into regulations, and my example for that is ODSP, where there are 800 regulations. There’s a regulation in there that says if you live with somebody else, your money will be clawed back. In other words, the money that is there is not to support you with your disability. As soon as you live with somebody else, you start to lose that support.

Now, I think if the people of Ontario actually knew that that was in the regulations, they would reject it, because I think it’s a human rights violation. The problem is, you put so many things into regulations, there’s not the kind of scrutiny that needs to be there, and it does put an enormous amount of power into the minister and the ministry. Again, it doesn’t have that level of scrutiny.

Again, to mention the ODSP situation, no other person is denied the ability to pool their resources with someone else, but if you’re poor and you’re disabled, you are not allowed to pool your resources with somebody else. That just shouldn’t be. So that’s fair warning that things happen in regulations that don’t come under scrutiny but have a very, very serious impact on people’s lives.

I’m quite interested and, frankly, very happy to see changes to time-share contracts. I’m of an age when people were really excited about time-shares. It seemed like this great deal, and you were going to be able to go and visit these places. Of course, much later, in the fine print, it said you’re obliged to keep them for 50 years and your children will inherit the debt—you’re going to have to keep paying and paying forever.

I see that there are some ways of ending those contracts, but I also see that there’s a termination fee and other requirements, and I’m just hoping that when this gets to committee, that could be looked at more closely, to look at the specifics. I have been looking at time-share contracts, and it seems to me that, first of all, they’re hard to get out of, but that the termination fees could be very, very high and disproportionate to what actually should be there. So it’s my hope that that comes up in committee.

The thing—and it has been mentioned before—that does worry me is that there are no provisions in here for price gouging, where collusion is taking place in industries. We know that in the grocery industry there are very few players, and they have made a practice of colluding with each other, and they’ve been caught once or twice. I remember when we got these little $25 gift certificates to make up for everything that we’d overpaid in bread. I also remember when people on ODSP and people in food banks were saying, “Would you mind donating those $25 vouchers, because people really need help.” It’s another reminder of how many people are struggling—that was quite a few years ago, as well—but it’s also a reminder of how common it is for collusion to take place when there’s really minimal competition amongst those industries.

Finally, the concern about new homes and the lack of proper oversight by Tarion—and I think we’ve been hearing these concerns for quite a few years. We’ve all been hearing horror stories about people losing buckets and buckets of money and never actually getting the home that they’d been promised—or they get the home and it’s so poorly built that they can’t live in it. So I do think that Tarion needs to be looked at vary critically, to make sure that it’s not industry insiders who are populating that organization. It needs to be people who don’t have any kind of vested interest—they’re not friends here, friends there. It needs to be a group of people who can think like consumers, who can think like first-time homebuyers, and can protect people from some pretty awful things that we’ve seen going on over the last few years.

I want to thank everyone for the opportunity to speak to this bill. I’m happy to take any questions.

Thank you for the question. I can’t really answer why. I wish that the government had addressed price gouging, because it really is such a central area where people are being ripped off. I don’t think that it’s an easy thing to fix, because those corporations are extremely powerful, but it is the place of government to be protecting all of the people of Ontario from that kind of price-fixing.

Thank you very much for your question.