It’s now time for questions. I recognize the member for Kitchener–Conestoga.

To the member opposite: You may be aware that in the fall of 2022 the federal government had implemented a federal vaping tax, and subsequently, the federal government had invited all the provinces and territories to participate in this tax. Ontario is responding to this invitation to enable the federal government to levy an additional excise tax duty on vaping products which are intended for sale here in Ontario at the same rate as the existing federal excise duty.

My question to the member opposite is, do you agree with our economic statement and will you vote for it? Because what we’re doing is we’re entering into a coordinated vaping product taxation agreement.

It’s always an honour to rise here in the House, today to debate Bill 146, the budget measures act to implement the fall economic statement.

Speaker, we are debating this bill at a time when the people of Ontario are facing a huge affordability crisis, driven by an unprecedented housing affordability crisis. You would not know that reading the fall economic statement.

The government had an opportunity with the fall economic statement to change the channel on their $8.3-billion greenbelt scandal, to change the channel on the fact that they’ve wasted the last two years not building homes that ordinary people can afford to live in in the communities they know and love, close to where they work, and instead prioritizing benefits for a handful of land speculators.

Speaker, I want to tell you what I would like to see in the fall economic statement to address the housing affordability crisis coming out of what many have described as a master class plan to deliver the solutions Ontarians need to address the housing crisis that I released over two and a half years ago. There are three key points that we need to see in this fall economic statement: (1) is support to help co-ops, non-profit and supportive housing providers address the needs for deep affordability in our housing supply; (2) is we need to increase market supply by supporting municipalities to be able to build the infrastructure, to provide infrastructure for that supply and to actually legalize housing, which are in the Bills 44 and 45 I have proposed; and (3), the government could have used the fall economic statement as an opportunity to drive speculation out of the housing market so first-time homebuyers can be on a level playing field.

Why is it so important that this government actually make investments in non-profit and co-op housing—which for whatever reason they refused to do in the fall economic statement even though we’re facing an unprecedented housing affordability crisis? Well, first of all, 0% of rental housing is affordable for a minimum wage worker in almost every city in the province of Ontario; 180,000 households in this province are on a wait-list to access housing.

We know the previous governments, prior to 1995, invested in non-profit, co-op and social housing. As a matter of fact, 93% of the deeply affordable homes built in the province of Ontario were built before 1995. That was the year that the upper levels of government stopped supporting that kind of housing. Why is it not in the fall economic statement?

Think of somebody on ODSP trying to survive on $1,200 a month when rents in places like Guelph and Kitchener are now $2,000, even higher in a place like Toronto. Even the government’s own Housing Affordability Task Force—I don’t know if the government has ever read their own task force report—says, “While many of the changes that will help deliver market housing will also help make it easier to deliver affordable housing, affordable housing is a societal responsibility. We cannot rely exclusively on for-profit developers nor on increases in the supply of market housing to fully solve the problem.” That’s the government’s own task force. That’s why we need a fall economic statement that’s going to support co-op, non-profit and supportive housing.

Second, we have to drive speculation out of the marketplace. You know that multiple property owners now own one third of the homes in Ontario. Investors bought 77% of the over 3,000 condo apartments built in Kitchener-Waterloo between 2016 and 2020. There are now 16,000 homes being used for short-term rentals in the city of Toronto alone. So what can we do about that? The government could have introduced regulations for short-term rentals. They could have brought in a multiple-home-speculator tax to help drive speculation out of the marketplace. They could have had a province-wide vacant homes tax, so that first-time homebuyers, young families trying to own their first home, could be on a level playing field instead of bidding against deep-pocketed, oftentimes financialized investment vehicles.

Third, we have to increase housing supply in this province by legalizing housing: legalizing multiplexes, four-storey walk-up apartments, six-to-11-storey buildings along major transportation corridors. That’s exactly why I’ve proposed bills to do that.

Do you know what, Speaker? If you look at what the government has done, according to AMO: $5.1 billion taken away from municipalities to build infrastructure for housing, $227 in my own riding of Guelph, $40 million just down the road to my neighbour in Kitchener. It is clear that Kitchener needs an MPP who’s going to say yes to housing and is not going to say no to housing but also an MPP who’s going to join me here and demand that the government provide the funding that municipalities need to service those houses, otherwise they’re not going to be built. That’s how we can increase non-market supply, increase market supply and drive speculation out of the market to address this housing affordability crisis.

I actually think Bob Rae removed rent control back in the mid-1990s, if I’m not mistaken—the one chance the NDP ever had at government.

But I do want to talk a little bit about ODSP because the member did bring that up as well. I just wanted to let her know that, since 2022, there’s been an 11.5% increase in ODSP rates, and not only that but for the first time in the history of the province it’s actually tied and indexed to inflation.

So when we look at what we’re doing around minimum wage, when we look at what we’re doing around supporting low-income earners by removing the provincial portion of income taxes, when we look at what we’re doing to support people on ODSP, when we look at what’s happening in the fall economic statement, we are on the right track to helping Ontarians, we are on the right track to bringing more money back in their pockets, and I just can’t understand why the member opposite wants to stand in the way of that.

Further questions?

I’d like to thank the member for Ottawa West−Nepean for an excellent presentation on Bill 146. What the member has pointed out is what amounts to a clear and calculated omission of discussing rent or rent control within the fall economic statement, as well as Bill 146.

My question, though, is, how has this government ignoring the gaping loophole of vacancy decontrol, as well as the removal of rent control in 2018, exacerbated the homelessness crisis?

Thank you to my colleague the member for Ottawa West–Nepean for her remarks. I want to focus on what she’s talked about with regard to the education system. My colleagues and I in London had the opportunity to meet with the Thames Valley District School Board trustees and senior administration last week. One of the things they told us is that the special incidence portion of the education funding that flows to school boards has not increased in 10 years. This is funding that is used to support the highest-need kids in our classrooms. The lack of that funding has meant that school boards can’t hire the EAs they need, and they can’t offer the wages that EAs need, to support kids in classes.

What does the member think this budget should have done to deal with those high-needs students in our schools?

At the beginning of the previous Liberal mandate, they introduced the biggest single tax increase in the history of the province of Ontario. They then racked up the hugest debt, and leaving at the end of their mandate—making Ontario the largest indebted sub-jurisdiction in the world—the highest tax rate, the worst debt.

My question to the member is this: How many years do you think it’s going to take this Progressive Conservative government to undo the massive, massive damage done to the finances of Ontario by the previous Liberal government?

I’ll ask the member from Guelph the same question that I put earlier. When the previous Liberal government took office, they introduced the biggest tax increase in the history of the province of Ontario. Then, over the course of the next 15 years, they racked up the largest amount of debt in the history of the province of Ontario, leaving Ontario as the most indebted sub-sovereign jurisdiction in the world.

The biggest tax increase and the biggest amount of debt: How many years does the member from Guelph think it will take this Progressive Conservative government to undo all of the massive damage done to the province of Ontario by the previous Liberal government?

I appreciate the question from the member from Oshawa. Actually, Guelph is doing pretty good—much to contradict maybe some of what we’ve heard from across the aisle—but we have more to do, and partly what we need is a government that is going to replace the fiscal hole that it created for municipalities.

Over a year ago, the government said they would make municipalities whole, address the $5.1 billion they took away from municipalities to service new home building. They have not done that yet. So municipalities like Guelph are looking at a 10% tax increase because of the hole created by the provincial government. So I’m calling on the government to make municipalities whole so they can build the infrastructure needed for homes.

I was the only MPP in this entire Legislature—there was one MPP in this Legislature who voted against the licence plate gimmicks, costing this province $2.5 billion in the first year, $1.5 billion each and every year afterwards, a policy that disproportionately benefits wealthy households. Imagine if we had that money to reduce the deficit now, to invest in health care, to invest in affordable housing, to invest in things that will address the affordability crisis people are facing—

But what this really means for the people of Ontario is somebody struggling to access a doctor or an emergency department, somebody whose school doesn’t have an educational assistant so their child gets the services they need, somebody at Community Living whose housing is being closed, somebody who needs an affordable home but can’t get one because they refuse to invest in co-ops. Those are the real-world implications of underfunding services in this province.

Questions?

I was at AMO, and a lot of folks there were talking about this government’s targets for municipalities and the contingent targets that were required so that they would get the funding needed to build housing and all of that. Because Guelph has been oft maligned in this place by the government, I would ask the member how it’s going when it comes to meeting those targets in your neck of the woods?

My question to the member for Guelph is around that over $5-billion contingency fund that’s been set aside in this budget.

The CCPA did an analysis looking at program spending over the last five years with the numbers adjusted for inflation. They found that real per capita spending on post-secondary education has dropped 11% since 2018 when this government was elected; in children and social services, down 12%; in education, down 11%. What does the member think about a government that allows program spending to decline to that extent and also puts aside over $5 billion in an unallocated contingency fund?

That’s a lot of hospital.

It’s an honour to rise this afternoon to speak in support of Bill 146, the Building a Strong Ontario Together Act, introduced by the Minister of Finance.

Before I begin, I want to offer my deepest condolences to the minister on the passing of his mother, Ester. As the minister said, she came to Ontario as a refugee when she was just nine years old, with her family from Budapest, Hungary, at the end of World War II. Like other Hungarian Canadians, she did so much to help build a stronger Ontario, and I was proud to introduce the Hungarian Heritage Month Act to recognize their contributions.

As the minister said, Ontario grew by almost half a million people last year, including over 60,000 refugees that came from the Ukraine. We’re on track for another half a million people this year. That’s more growth than any US state, including the fastest-growing states, like Florida and Texas.

But after 15 years of mismanagement and underinvestment, the previous Liberal government left us with an infrastructure deficit in health, long-term care, transportation, energy, at the municipal level and in so many other critical areas, as well. Our infrastructure needs to catch up and to keep pace with the growth we expect. The Minister of Finance said that this is one of the reasons he ran for office. It is one of the reasons I ran for office, and I think it’s why many of us ran for office, because we know you can’t have long-term prosperity without infrastructure.

Last week, I joined the President of the Treasury Board at the Royal York for a speech from the Minister of Finance to the Canadian Club. As the minister said, we can’t build a hospital, road or subway overnight. We need to have a vision of how the province will look in 10 to 20 years, and we have to focus on that. That’s what the fall economic statement does.

Speaker, that’s why we have the most ambitious capital plan in North America: $185 billion over 10 years. This includes the largest hospital and long-term-care building program in Canadian history. In my community of Mississauga–Lakeshore, we’re building the largest hospital in Canadian history, and we just opened the largest long-term-care home in Ontario.

After the minister’s speech here two weeks ago, I joined the Premier and the Minister of Long-Term Care to celebrate a real milestone in my community: the grand opening of Wellbrook Place. Speaker, this is now the largest long-term-care home in the province—larger than the Credit Valley Hospital when it first opened 38 years ago.

From 2011 to 2018, the number of Ontarians over 75 increased by 75%, but the former Liberal government, with the support of the NDP, built only 611 new long-term-care beds across the entire province. When we were elected five years ago, there were over 4,500 people on a wait-list for long-term care in Mississauga alone. We had 20% fewer long-term-care beds than the provincial average, and some of them were badly out of date, like the four-person ward rooms at the Camilla Care Community.

But now, in just one location, on Speakman Drive in Mississauga–Lakeshore, 632 residents are moving into a modern, comfortable, safe new home which follows the latest standards for long-term care design and safety, including single-person rooms, appropriate-sized dining rooms, outdoor spaces and enhanced HVAC systems with 100% fresh air supply. This will be part of the new campus with programs and services for seniors, including a new health services building, with special services for residents living with kidney disease and advanced dementia, as well as the first residential hospice in the city of Mississauga. Again, I want to thank Tess Romain and her team at Partners Community Health, and Karli Farrow at Trillium Health Partners for all their hard work to deliver this project on an accelerated schedule.

I also want to take a moment to thank our former Ministers of Long-Term Care Merrilee Fullerton, Rod Phillips and the government House leader. Because of their work, our government is making historic investments of $6.4 billion to build and upgrade almost 60,000 long-term-care beds here. There are projects like Wellbrook Place that are under way right across the province of Ontario, including over 1,100 beds in Mississauga–Lakeshore alone—more than any other riding in the province of Ontario.

Under the leadership of this Premier and this Deputy Premier, the government is also investing over $48 billion in hospital infrastructure, including a historic multi-billion-dollar investment in the complete reconstruction of the Mississauga Hospital. Last month, we hit an important milestone on this project as well, as the RFP process which began last April has now closed. Construction can now begin next year on this project, which will be the largest and most advanced hospital in the history of Canada—almost triple the size of the current hospital, with 24 storeys, three million square feet, 1,000 beds and 80% in private rooms.

Speaker, in September, I joined the Premier and the Minister of Health to announce that this will include a new 200,000-square-foot women and children’s hospital, which will be the first of its kind in Canada. It will transform how health care is delivered for women and children and families in Mississauga and Etobicoke. As the Minister of Finance said, this is our vision for health care, and I want to thank him again for these investments.

Speaker, I also want to thank the minister for making a new $200-million investment in a Housing-Enabling Water Systems Fund for the repair and expansion of core water, waste water and stormwater infrastructure. Last week, I was proud to join the minister and the Minister of Infrastructure to announce this fund at the Arthur Kennedy water treatment plant in Lakeview in Mississauga–Lakeshore. An expansion there will support the construction of 16,000 new homes in the Lakeview Village on the site of the former OPG coal plant. The new water systems fund is an important step towards our province’s target of at least 1.5 million homes by 2031.

Neil Rodgers, the CEO of the Ontario Home Builders’ Association said that this investment “will accelerate the construction of more housing,” and his “4,000 members across the province applaud the Minister of Finance for making this necessary investment, and we join him in calling on the federal government to match this investment to unlock even more housing choices for Ontarians.”

The water systems fund will build on several other programs, including the Building Faster Fund and strong-mayor powers.

It’s worth taking a moment, Speaker, to reflect on how far we’ve come. Just a year ago, Mayor Crombie and our Mississauga city council supported only 30% of our Housing Affordability Task Force recommendations. They opposed fourplexes, and they actually shared pictures of residential streets with giant, scary orange boxes to show what a fourplex would look like, but last month, when a council motion to allow fourplexes failed, at least there was a tie of five to five. Unfortunately, Mayor Crombie missed the vote. She was busy campaigning—

I also want to thank the Premier and the Minister of Finance for their leadership in removing the HST on new purpose-built rental housing, including apartment buildings, student housing and senior residences built for long-term rentals. For a new two-bedroom rental unit valued at $500,000, this will mean a $40,000-tax cut from the province, and $25,000 from the federal government.

The Federation of Rental-housing Providers of Ontario will be here at Queen’s Park next week, and I know that they are very excited about these changes.

I want to join the minister, as well, in calling on the federal government to match our $42-million top-up to the Canada-Ontario Housing Benefit, to provide urgent help for newcomers claiming asylum. This is a federal-provincial program that should be cost-shared 50-50. As the Minister of Finance said, Ontario has done its part, and now the federal government should do their part.

Speaker, the minister’s plan also includes $71 billion for transit infrastructure, including the new 18-kilometre Hazel McCallion LRT line on Hurontario, which is still on budget and on schedule, to open next fall. Last year, I joined the President of the Treasury Board, who was then the Minister of Transportation, to see the first piece of LRT track installed in Mississauga. And just this past week, we marked another milestone, as the first LRT tracks were installed in Port Credit. They will connect to the Port Credit GO train station, with 15-minute service or better, and the new bus rapid transit line on Lakeshore. We’re working towards a modern, reliable transit network right across the GTA.

We also recognize the cost of traffic gridlock. That is why this government is investing $28 billion to expand and improve our highway network, because we know this is critical to the economic well-being of Ontario.

As the fall economic statement notes, we just hit another important milestone, as the first phase of the QEW/Dixie interchange improvements is now complete in Mississauga–Lakeshore. And then, at the end of August, the new twin bridge over the Credit River opened to traffic on the QEW. This is part of the $314-million QEW/Credit River improvement project.

When I spoke last year about my friend from Brampton North’s motion in support of Highway 413, I mentioned that the highest court in Alberta found that our federal Parliament is not allowed to require federal oversight and approval of intra-provincial projects like Highway 413—in other words, the federal Impact Assessment Act that they were using to target Highway 413 for a potential federal EA is unconstitutional—and a month ago, the Supreme Court of Canada agreed. In a 5-2 decision, Chief Justice Wagner wrote that the federal government clearly overstepped. So, again, I want to call on the federal government to withdraw so we can complete the provincial EA for Highway 413 and build this important provincial project as soon as possible.

But as the minister said, we know that Ontario taxpayers alone can’t build all the infrastructure we need. We need to attract trusted investors, like Canadian public sector pension plans, to help us build essential infrastructure. Many of these plans already make investments in infrastructure around the world. Just take one example: The Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan has over $200 billion in investments, including water infrastructure in Australia, roads in the US and India, electricity infrastructure in Brazil and Chile—and I could go on. The Ontario Infrastructure Bank will give pension funds like this new options to put their members’ investments to work right here in the province of Ontario. And as the minister said, it will follow in the steps of many other places around the world with similar banks—including our federal government, the UK government, and US states like California and Connecticut.

Finally, in the time I have left, I want to thank the minister for schedules 3 and 4 of Bill 146, which would extend our gas and fuel tax cuts until the end of June 2024. As Jay Goldberg, the Ontario director of the Canadian Taxpayers Federation, said, “This gas tax cut extension is great news for Ontario taxpayers.” This “gas tax cut has saved the typical Ontario family hundreds of dollars over the past 18 months, and this will ensure that critical relief continues into 2024.”

At the same time, the federal government has announced an exemption to their carbon tax for home heating. Unfortunately, Speaker, it only applies to home heating oil, which is used by 40% of homes in PEI and 32% of homes in Nova Scotia, but only 2% right here in Ontario. And I want to join the Premier—and the Premiers across the country, including the newly elected NDP Premier Kinew in Manitoba—in calling on the federal government to provide an exemption for all Canadians, including those who are heating their homes with natural gas.

As the Premier wrote in an open letter, providing relief only to Atlantic Canada is not fair and it is causing division across the country. As the Premier pointed out, the federal Liberal ministers said on CTV that Atlantic Liberal MPs lobbied for a special exemption for home heating oil, and if other provinces want exemptions, “perhaps they need to elect more Liberals.” Speaker, there are 76 Liberal MPs from Ontario, and now we’re counting on them to treat Ontario fairly and cut the carbon tax on all home heating, including natural gas. As New Brunswick Premier Higgs said, no Canadian family should have to choose between heating their homes or buying Christmas gifts for their children.

Speaker, I want to close my remarks by thanking my friend Dr. David Jacobs, the president of the Ontario Association of Radiologists. As many members know, he’s been a strong advocate for scanning for breast cancer in women aged 40 to 49, and we’re now lowering the age to receive publicly funded mammograms to 40, beginning next year. Dr. Jacobs said the day of this announcement was “the proudest and most impactful day” of his medical career, because we know that scanning saves lives.

And that’s the reason I introduced Bill 66: to encourage people to get a stethoscope check for heart valve disease. Unfortunately, Canadian women are less likely to get a stethoscope check than Canadian men.

I want to thank Dr. Jacobs again, and I want to thank the Minister of Finance and his team, including his parliamentary assistants, for all their great work on the fall economic statement and on Bill 146. I look forward to voting for this bill, and I encourage all members in this House to support this bill.

Further debate?

Thank you to the member for his remarks on this bill.

People in Ontario are really hurting right now. We have record numbers of Ontarians using food banks. We have people who are living on our streets and in homeless encampments because they can’t find affordable places to live. We have people who are waiting 12 hours at the hospital to see a doctor, 2.2 million Ontarians who don’t have a family doctor, and yet this government is sitting on a very large contingency fund of $5.4 billion. Instead of spending that funding down during the first part of the budget year, in fact, halfway through the year, they have now increased it by adding another $2 billion.

Can the member explain why on earth the government needs such a large contingency fund that they’re not actually using, instead of investing in services and measures that would actually address the very immediate and urgent challenges that people in Ontario are feeling today?

It’s now time for questions.

I want to thank the member from Ottawa for that question.

As you know, our budget last year—we had a $202-billion budget in the province of Ontario and $81 billion went to health care alone. Now, I compared the 2017 budget that the former Minister of Finance had presented here in the House—whom I defeated in Mississauga–Lakeshore. He invested $59.4 billion; we’re at $81 billion just in health care. And we put $6.4 billion into long-term care, to build infrastructure, and another $48 billion to build hospitals through the province of Ontario. That was neglected by the previous government, which you propped up for many years here in the House.

As I said, we have the largest budget in Ontario’s history, and we’re going to continue spending as we have through our mandate here in this House.