Today is food bank day of action here at Queen’s Park. I want to welcome all food bank representatives here with Feed Ontario, with a special welcome to June Muir of the UHC Hub of Opportunities in Windsor. Welcome to Queen’s Park.

In the gallery up there is Brooklyn Mattinson, associate director of regulatory and government affairs at RBC, and her colleague Alanna Sokic, senior manager of provincial and municipal affairs. Welcome to Queen’s Park.

It’s my pleasure to welcome a number of guests from the great riding of Waterloo today. We have Justice Colin Westman, a.k.a. Santa Claus, for his kindness; Margaret Anne Voll; John Pendergast; and my friends Cheryl and Nige Gordijk, who are community leaders. They’re joining us for lunch today. Welcome to Queen’s Park.

It’s a real honour to welcome Elana Harte, Carine Nind, Jessika Kunkle and all the folks from the Co-operative Housing Federation of Canada to Queen’s Park today.

To complement the member opposite’s introductions, in the members’ gallery, from the Co-operative Housing Federation of Canada, we have Tim Ross, Courtney Lockhart, Allison Chase, Cassia Kantrow, Mary Ann Hannant and April White. Welcome to Queen’s Park.

I would like to introduce my assistant, Wendy Wei, and my guest, Jimmy Lin, who is a high school student. Welcome to Queen’s Park.

I, too, would like to welcome the members from the Co-operative Housing Federation of Canada. Thank you for coming to Queen’s Park and helping twist some arms to build housing.

I’d like to welcome to Queen’s Park today the Indo-Canadian Council for Arts and Culture, the Toronto Malayalee Samajam and the Indo-Canada Kerala Chamber of Commerce. They are going to be hosting a Kerala Day lunch reception right here in room 228, starting after question period. Everybody is welcome.

Oh, no, Queen’s Park—I’m talking, really, about the Ford government. I was just heckled, and I’d like to clarify. You guys are on the ropes. Let’s change the channel together. Let’s do something good. Let’s restore some trust by calling the Till Death Do Us Part act. And I have to—

Just to my friends across the aisle and the new Minister of Long-Term Care, when this bill goes to committee, we will be fully embraced and fully engaged in trying to make it a piece of legislation that actually protects consumers. Do you agree, my friends?

It is interesting to hear—because people are pretty sensitive around here these days. But it’s worth noting that for a number of years experts have been calling for regulation on new home sales and their warranties. I just want to thank members of our caucus. MPP Rakocevic has been stellar on this file. He knows it inside and out. He’s been solid.

This bill puts in new provisions for NOSIs—NOSIs are notices of security interest—but does not include any provisions on putting in rental hot water heaters in contracts for new homes. Why does this matter? It matters because this is a situation where people will sign the biggest purchase of their life—their entire life—and then once they’ve moved in, once they have start receiving those bills, they realize then that they’ve signed up for something that they didn’t necessarily know they were agreeing to. This is a huge concern. It’s a huge concern, and it’s a gap in the legislation, and considering that we are in a cost-of-living crisis in Ontario, these shady dealings—because this is predatory. This needs to be addressed. It needs to be addressed in the legislation, and it needs to be addressed in the regulations, because you can write the best legislation, but if there’s no oversight or if the regs don’t guide the behaviour or change the behaviour, then you have a weak piece of legislation, and that’s what I would suggest we have before us.

Our office in Waterloo has been supporting a growing number of seniors who have been victims of these types of scams. As I mentioned, right now they’re primarily elderly women. The feeling when they come into the office is complete desperation. They are filled with anxiety. They have panic attacks. They’re wondering how this could happen in the province of Ontario.

In the middle of an affordability crisis, it’s all the more reason to bring in a piece of legislation which does protect the finances of seniors, which are often fixed incomes. Why not make sure that they are protected? It’s actually in the best interests of all of us to make sure that these predatory practices are gone from the province, or at least discouraged—or at least send a clear signal that Ontario knows what’s going on and wants to deal with it.

These scams began years ago when illegitimate HVAC companies went door to door selling products to homeowners, typically targeting seniors. Sales of home appliances like air conditioners and furnaces eventually resulted in companies placing notices of security interest, NOSIs, on the properties without the homeowners knowing. Lawyers claim that these scams have resulted in homeowners losing tens of thousands of dollars.

My colleague from London was mentioning the affordability crisis in Ontario, and I too just met with the Food Bank of Waterloo Region. I hope some of my other colleagues also had the time to meet with them. But this is how bad it is in Waterloo, which is why you need to protect the very limited resources that seniors have at their disposal today: Numbers are higher for food bank use than they were in 2008, in the recession. That’s how bad it is. If you remember that time, that was a time of panic, that recession. The peak of the pandemic were also very bad in this regard, but in the riding of Waterloo, 5,201 people used the food bank last year—this was 15% more than 2021—making 58,684 visits, or 7% over 2021 as well.

There is an impact for inaction. This is a core understanding that we certainly have. I know our member from Kiiwetinoong has also tried to draw the connection to the social determinants of health, the impact on the economy, the impact on the health care system, the impact on education. That’s what the Food Bank of Waterloo Region really drove home today, along with Feed Ontario, is that there is a cost to not addressing the risk factors around affordability.

When people have paid their higher rent, their rent that goes up now—obviously in new builds—by 3%, 5%, 10% or 24%, a senior cannot absorb a 24% increase in their rent. It’s just not possible, and so they have a choice: They either pay their rent and stay housed or they go to the food bank. It’s a huge issue for a senior to go to a food bank after their entire lives. You can’t underestimate that.

And yet, the piece of legislation that is before us is very permissive, actually embedding some loopholes whereby people can still practise these predatory practices of ripping off seniors.

Actually, I just met with the Canadian Bankers Association, as well. They have identified that this is now a priority for the Canadian banking sector, to train their tellers to look for fraud—I was going to say “corruption;” it just comes so naturally—and for predatory practices. Their tellers are specifically trained to watch for those vulnerabilities, because they’re happening so often.

So the private sector, the Canadian Bankers Association—I had a great meeting with them. We talked about some common areas that we can move forward on, but certainly consumer protection was an issue where we found common ground. I feel that they may be actually submitting a delegation to this particular piece of legislation, as well.

So I just wanted to give a shout-out to the Food Bank of Waterloo Region, Feed Ontario and the Canadian Bankers Association. It’s so good to see a not-for-profit that understands the affordability issues in Ontario also connect the need for labour laws, for housing, and for the social assistance reform that is needed.

We can do so much better for the most vulnerable in our society. I don’t know who in this House could possibly live on $730 a month; it’s just not doable, on Ontario Works.

I think there’s a level of malaise, if you will, with this government—to bring forward a piece of legislation, understanding where the gaps are in society, understanding that those safeguards do not exist, and claiming to understand how vulnerable seniors are, in particular, and then leaving these loopholes in the legislation.

I reached out to the Waterloo region police, as well, and they say that scams like these persist due to loopholes in provincial legislation, under the Consumer Protection Act, that make it possible for the notices of security interest to be placed without the homeowners knowing. We’re in a housing crisis, everybody agrees; it’s one of the very few things that we can agree on in this House. Why make that very precarious purchase even riskier by not addressing these loopholes? Homeowners, especially senior homeowners, deserve to be protected, and this bill, this government is failing to do that.

It always leads me to wonder, if you had the power to fix this, if you had the privilege to be in a position of power to address a piece of legislation and to get it right, why wouldn’t you? This goes back full circle to the whole trust issue. Who’s driving the agenda for this Ford government? We’ve seen multiple examples now of decisions not being driven or not even being motivated by the people of this province. Therefore, you have the Auditor General calling the greenbelt issue indefensible. You have the Integrity Commissioner calling into question the lack of oversight and accountability and lack of transparency of the Minister of Municipal Affairs.

When you get to this point, when trust is so broken, this is an opportunity for the government to say, “This legislation is going to be strong. It’s not going to be weak. It’s not going to be flaccid. It’s not going to be passive. It is going to be a strong piece of legislation,” to demonstrate that the government actually understands what the people of this province are experiencing, that lived experience of Ontarians.

If you go back—and you have to go a little bit way back—we don’t actually see the actions that will address the situation where consumers are exploited by unethical HVAC companies. It’s not here in the legislation.

Back with the Liberal government, we saw that there was a ban on door-to-door sales, and that was a good thing. It did take them a monumental amount of time to actually bring in this ban, after multiple cases that were brought to their attention here on the floor of the Legislature. It was near the end of 2018, and let’s be honest, people were getting a little desperate to do something good, so the ban on door-to-door sales happened. That was a start, sure. It was another half measure. However, as I mentioned, that legislation had no teeth, so there really wasn’t much by way of enforcement.

This government has heard for numerous years about the exploitive actions of many of these companies. I just want to say that some of these companies are fully aware of where those loopholes are. They have pushed the envelope. They’ve never got caught. There were no consequences—almost like the Landlord and Tenant Board, when we saw that only 11 landlords over the last five years actually faced punitive measures for being negligent, for being predatory landlords in Ontario—only 11 in that time. We have 11 open cases right now in Waterloo, in my office, of landlords who are looking to renovict or demovict or just evict, just testing the system. That’s the power imbalance with regard to consumers and with regard to some of those predatory businesses.

As I said, many in the private sector have recognized that trust is important in building those relationships and ensuring that the most vulnerable are kept safe and secure. And then you have a government that doesn’t necessarily understand that when that trust is broken, you should use every opportunity—every opportunity—to rebuild that trust.

Obviously, this piece of legislation is going to move through the House. It is going to go to committee. When it gets to committee, we, as Ontario’s official opposition—and certainly as the finance critic for the province of Ontario and Treasury Board critic, I’m going to be following the money on this because there is a cost to the economy and to our communities when a piece of legislation is so weak and flaccid.

Once again, Madam Speaker, what a pleasure to stand in my place and address this piece of legislation.