As a purple and proud graduate of Western University, I’d like to add my welcome to the delegation here today from Western, as well as to the amazing leadership of the Ontario Undergraduate Student Alliance, who are here today to meet with MPPs.

Thank you to the member for the question.

Mr. Speaker, I don’t know if you know this, but in fact, legislators in this House have been talking about what to do with Ontario Place since the late 1980s. Since the late 1980s, legislators have been talking about what to do with declining attendance and what to do with the increasing subsidies at Ontario Place.

Mr. Speaker, we are at a point where we’ve submitted our development application to the city. We have done everything that is required by us, by law, and now we have to make a decision and move forward. This is a government that gets the job done, and we will bring Ontario Place back to life, finally.

Interjections.

Mr. Speaker, I will never be afraid to present legislation in order to build infrastructure in the province of Ontario and finally, after over 30 years of debate in this House, get it done and bring Ontario Place back to life, a place that families can enjoy 365 days of the year.

Mr. Speaker, we legislators have been debating this issue since the late 1980s. It is time to get the job done and this legislation will help us do it.

As the parliamentary assistant to the Minister of Health, I’d like to introduce Home Care Ontario, who are holding their annual awareness day today at the Legislature.

Welcome to Queen’s Park.

Introduction of visitors. The Minister of Finance.

Interjection.

The supplementary question.

Minister of Infrastructure.

To reply, the Minister of Infrastructure.

I would like to welcome members of the Ontario Undergraduate Student Alliance who are here today: Abby Samuels from McMaster University; Katie Traynor from the University of Waterloo; Carleigh Charlton from Brock University; Simi Olufowobi from Laurentian University; Riley Ambrose from Trent University; and Victoria Mills from Queen’s University. Welcome. I look forward to meeting with you later.

This question is for the Premier.

The Conservatives have had to roll back major policy after major policy because they got caught rigging the system for their friends. And while they promised to be more transparent around land use planning after the greenbelt scandal, here we are again, a few weeks later, and the Conservatives are muddying it even further when it comes to Ontario Place. They’re doing everything they can to ram their private luxury spa through, even skirting their own rules. They’ve proposed exempting the project from environmental assessment laws and the heritage act.

To the Premier: Is he overriding his own rules to avoid accountability under the law?

To the Premier: Is he just making it easier to give preferential treatment to his friends?

Back to the Premier: Why is this elite luxury spa his number one priority?

Interjections.

This government can pat themselves on the back all they want, but they know as well as we do that this was never about Toronto. The fight has always been right here at Queen’s Park to protect public interests and expose their dirty deals.

The government is spending over half a billion dollars on a luxury mega-spa to hand public funds directly over into the profits of private companies. If this isn’t about giving preferential treatment and avoiding public accountability, surely this government has a plan to invest in other municipalities.

To the Premier: Which other municipalities will get a deal from this province?

I’m very pleased to have met with OFVGA this morning. I somewhat share a farmer with my colleague from Oxford county: Mike Chromczak of Chromczak Farms, who produces some of Ontario’s best asparagus and watermelon.

Welcome to the House, and thank you for all your hard work.

Thank you to the member for Whitby for that applause.

I want to acknowledge again the great mayor of Pickering, Kevin Ashe, joined by his wife, Karen O’Brien.

Kevin and Kim Cahill also did a great job. Thank you for being here.

Theresa Deboer and Ajax ward 2 councillor Nancy Henry, welcome to the House.

And my constituent manager, the great Edward White, is up there.

He’s not here yet, but I know he’s coming for question period—I’d like to introduce former member of Hastings–Lennox and Addington, Daryl Kramp.

My question is to the Minister of Transportation.

Ontario already has responsibility for the Trans-Canada Highway, Highway 11. Last week, north of North Bay, on November 22, it was closed for 13 and a half hours. On November 24, it was closed for 12 and a half hours.

Our sympathies go out to the families involved. This isn’t something new. If your car is registered in the district of Timiskaming, you’re four times as likely to die on a provincial highway than if it’s registered in Toronto.

My question to the Minister of Transportation is, can northerners also expect a new deal to actually put Highway 11 up to standards so people don’t die on it?

Interjections.

There are many other roads in northern Ontario, and many of them were downloaded by the Harris government to municipalities—the town of Iroquois Falls, the town of Kirkland Lake, the city of Timmins. Many of these places are also suffering. They can’t afford to provide vital services because they’re actually looking after highways that should be provincial.

So those municipalities across the province—can they also expect that this government actually uploads the highways that a previous Conservative downloaded? Can they expect a new deal on roads as well?

Interjections.

As the member knows, it is our utmost priority to ensure we have safe and efficient highways across this province, and that includes Highway 11. We have some of the safest roads in all of North America. We have the trans-Ontario standard that is met by this province and this province only—across the country and across North America.

And we will continue to work—we had the Good Roads Association that was at Queen’s Park just this past week, listening about further measures that can be taken.

We commit to always ensuring that we have the safest roads, and working towards safety across this province, especially on the roads. We do have some of the safest roads, but we’ll continue to make sure that we do whatever we can, making the necessary investments on Highways 11 and 17 in the north, to do—and ensure that our roads remain safe.

My question is for the Minister of Economic Development, Job Creation and Trade.

The federal carbon tax is hurting businesses across this province. It’s significantly harmful to small and medium-sized businesses, which are crucial sources of employment for our regional communities.

When the federal government hikes energy costs with their carbon tax, it hurts these small businesses—their bottom lines. Unfortunately, this has meant that many small businesses and businesses have been left with the difficult choice of scaling back production, laying off employees, or closing their doors altogether. Sadly, the federal government, along with the independent Liberals and opposition NDP, do not care.

Can the minister please explain how, unlike the NDP and Liberals, who want to penalize businesses, our government is providing support for them?

There is a very clear and concise differentiation between the Liberal-NDP coalition and the PC Party. They hurt business. We help business.

We’ve reduced the cost of doing business by $8 billion annually. We’ve created the climate for businesses to succeed.

Speaker, we have regional development programs. We’ve invested $110 million in regional development programs for 100 companies. Those 100 companies, in turn, invested $1.18 billion in the province of Ontario and hired 2,300 people.

That’s what you get when you have a favourable business environment that is created. That is exactly what our party is doing. We can only imagine the heights we could achieve if we did not have a carbon tax.

I’m more than happy to discuss the historic deal that was created by the Premier and the mayor of the city of Toronto, an extraordinary deal that will make sure that we are protecting our highways in the city of Toronto, that we’re supporting the TTC and keeping riders safe, that we’re providing more operational funding for new transit lines that we are building and also—contingent on federal government funding—additional funding for homelessness. The deal that was struck yesterday is an extraordinary deal for the people of the city and for the province.

As the member opposite knows, we are bringing forward legislation around use-it-or-lose-it. The reason we can bring in such legislation is because this government is putting billions of dollars of infrastructure in the ground, and we want to make sure the infrastructure both below and above the ground is used for building homes for the people of the province of Ontario.

I’ll remind the Leader of the Opposition that her party has voted against every single investment that we’ve made in terms of helping unleash home building. She and that party have voted against every single investment that we have made in terms of building transit and transportation across the province of Ontario.

We are bringing forward use-it-or-lose-it legislation, because we expect those people who have permits, who are holding up sewer and water allocation, to get shovels in the ground. We’ll bring it forward. We’ll do it in a fair way that brings our municipalities on board as well as those who are building homes, and I fully expect that the Leader of the Opposition will get up in her place and support that legislation. For the first time, she’ll support building homes for the people of the province of Ontario.

The socialist NDP are in a frenzy. Do you know why? Because we’re creating jobs, because our municipal partners want to work with us to get shovels in the ground. Do you know who has come on board? Mayor Olivia Chow, an NDP stalwart. A former councillor, a former member of Parliament for the NDP has come on board, because she and the Toronto council understand that the best way to create jobs and economic growth is to cut taxes, work together, get shovels in the ground. It is only they who don’t understand that.

Do you know why we were able to strike a deal with Olivia Chow and the NDP council in Toronto? Because we work with them, Mr. Speaker. We work with our municipal partners, and that is why we are seeing growth across the province of Ontario, the likes of which we’ve never seen, despite policies of the federal government to hold back our economy.

Speaker, I’m reminded by the member for Waterloo that it has been one year and one week since this government promised to make municipalities whole, but here we are.

Toronto is not the only municipality that needs support. Municipalities all across Ontario are doing everything they can to issue permits to encourage affordable housing developments, but they don’t have the power to force developers to start building after they get their permits, and this province is doing nothing to help. They still haven’t brought in use-it-or-lose-it legislation, as we suggested.

So, to the Premier, I’ll ask again: When will this province give other municipalities a new deal too?

So, Speaker, back to the Premier: What will it take for this government to finally put the people of Ontario first and before their insider friends?

Interjections.

And the supplementary question.

To respond, the Minister of Transportation.

The Minister of Municipal Affairs and Housing.

It’s pretty clear that the member opposite and the NDP have no interest in doing anything creative or anything different or innovative in the province of Ontario.

We have partners like the Don Mills surgical centre, which moved their 20-bed facility to a different location. It does in fact not contravene the Private Hospitals Act.

But what we have been able to do, what the member opposite does not want to talk about, is actually expand the access that is available. When we expanded the cataract surgeries in January, when Premier Ford made that announcement—we now have 14,000 people who have had access to minor surgery and cataract surgery, who are now back in communities, back volunteering, back working, back reading stories to their children. That’s why we’re doing this innovation. That’s why we’re doing this expansion.

We knew that because of the condition our health care system was left under the Liberals and the NDP, because of the conditions as we paused during the pandemic, we needed to aggressively work with our hospital partners to ensure that we were dealing with surgical backlog and surgical recovery.

And that billion-dollar investment has led to some incredible innovations, where we have partners—as the member opposite mentioned—where we now have ORs that are operating over later hours, into the weekend. Why? Because those hospitals have submitted proposals, innovative ideas, to the ministry. We funded them, and we are dealing with that surgical backlog.

Supplementary question?

Interjections.

Minister of Health.