It’s a pleasure to rise this morning and speak to this legislation before the House, the New Deal for Toronto Act.

I want to acknowledge some breakthroughs in this legislation, despite the fact that I have some lingering concerns. One of the breakthroughs, I think, about this legislation is beyond what’s actually in the bill. It’s a lesson for anybody that wants to get into politics. Let me explain what I mean by that, Speaker.

We began this morning with a prayer, with the directive, as we have often heard, to use power wisely and well, to create a society where freedom reigns and where justice rules. I love that prayer. It’s a terrific prayer. But often in the five years I’ve served in this building for the great people of Ottawa Centre, I’ve heard us collectively offer that prayer, and then the moment we tumble into debate, we start doing the opposite. We start saying and holding forth in a way that disrespects each other, that insults the integrity of this place and that puts Ontario on a bad footing, in my opinion.

I believe the Premier of this province did that when, on June 21, 2023, he called Mayor Olivia Chow an “unmitigated disaster.” Those were the words that tumbled out of the most powerful office-holder in this province. The Premier is entitled to his opinions. His speech, like all of our speech, is charter-protected. But I don’t think he set a very good example for people who are thinking about getting into politics in the way he characterized someone like Mayor Olivia Chow as, again, for the record, on June 21, 2023, an “unmitigated disaster.” The Premier was making the argument, I guess, that Mayor Chow—now Mayor Chow—would create too great a toll on the revenues of the city of Toronto and was too ambitious in her plans. Well, the people of Toronto thought differently. Thankfully for us, the Conservative-supported candidates in that mayoral race would appear to have been split at least three ways because they couldn’t get their act together.

So what Mayor Chow has done since then is not respond in kind with ritual denunciations to the Premier—that’s more his gambit. What she has done is take the higher road in speech after speech. Her choice was not to fire back at the Premier and call him a bunch of names. She certainly could have. Her choice was to say, “What do the people of Toronto deserve?” They deserve good transit. They deserve community safety. They deserve money for housing; money for community services; the after-school programs that so many children in this city rely upon; the city staff, who work hard every single day, whether it’s collecting the garbage or the recycling in this city or monitoring the safety of our streets, roads and enforcing the bylaws, or making sure the beautiful parks of this city are well-maintained. That was Mayor Olivia Chow’s priority—not responding in kind to ridiculous assertions from the Premier. There’s a lesson in here for how we do politics.

And do you know what also is informative for me, Speaker? What’s informative for me is: This week, as the Premier was promoting this particular bill in the House, I saw him describe Mayor Olivia Chow as the greatest NDP leader in history. Colleagues, did you see that too? So it’s an interesting leap of logic for a man to go from categorizing somebody as an unmitigated disaster to calling her the greatest NDP leader in history. What’s happened since? Well, I want to believe that what’s happened since is that one person showed humanity in politics and the other did not. One person showed how you lead in a moment, despite the arrows slung by your critics, and the other did not.

It reminds me, Speaker, of a quotation often used by the great Nelson Mandela, someone who had the pleasure to visit this particular building twice. I have a picture of one of those occasions proudly in my office. Mandela once said, “The greatest glory in living lies not in never falling, but in rising every time we fall.” Who would know the lesson of that better than him? Someone imprisoned for 27 years by an apartheid regime that dehumanized him.

And I think about Mayor Olivia Chow and the roads she walked to the mayor’s office: losing a mayoralty race that many people predicted she was pledged to win, getting knocked down, dusting herself off and getting back up again to serve not yourself, but to serve the community that you live in.

I had great pleasure, Speaker, to knock on doors in the mayoral by-election. I came a day early one weekend. It’s always a negotiation, I’m sure, for all of us when we come to this city from out of the city a day early. I had to plead with my family: “Hey, let me go a day early to Toronto. I want to go knock on doors for Olivia in St. James Town, where she grew up.” And when I knocked on some of these apartment buildings, they are, in Ottawa-Centre terms, like twice or three times the size of apartment buildings back home—massive apartment buildings. But when I said the words “Olivia Chow,” faces brightened because those are the buildings Olivia grew up in. That was the community she proudly served as an immigrant kid coming to this country at the age of 14, with a family divided by violence and difficulty. She persevered to the office of school board trustee. She persevered to the office of city councillor. And now, St. James Town has a mayor—a mayor, in the seat of power, serving this great city. That’s not an unmitigated disaster, Speaker; it’s a Canadian success story. She withstood the arrows from this Premier. She clearly has turned him around.

And now, before the House, we have a piece of legislation that is proposing some significant investments that I want to talk about this morning. One of them is something that I have had occasion to talk about many times as the transit critic for this province: funding for operational transit. In this legislation is $300 million in a one-time transfer for subway and transit safety recovery and sustainable operations. Another is a $330-million investment over three years—that funding accumulates over three years—for operating support for new integrated provincial transit projects.

People have been rising in this House for years, encouraging this government, encouraging governments before it, to not come to the people of Ontario and say, “We have a wonderful transit plan. Billions of dollars of aspirational transit projects”—be it the Eglinton Crosstown LRT, the Finch West LRT, the Confederation LRT in my city. “Look at the wonderful products we have. Look at the consultants we’re hiring. Look at the beautiful ticker tape we’re going to cut at press announcements.”

This is what I call aspirational transit. That is what governments have been seized with in Ontario for years, but it hasn’t moved a single human being, and the only person who has been employed by aspirational transit are the consultants hired to come up with the dreams. Meanwhile, the women and men who woke up this morning early to move people around this great city have been struggling with a poorly funded transit system.

But again, what precedes this bill? What precedes this bill is a mayor of the city, Olivia Chow, who said on September 20 that as this government’s aspirational transit plans continue to fail, the Finch West LRT, the Eglinton Crosstown LRT—both over budget, both delayed, both being built by consultants who rake huge salaries from the taxpayers despite delivering nothing. Mayor Chow announced that she was going to reallocate, based on advice from staff, $10.3 million from these delayed aspirational transit projects to the TTC that actually exists. She said in that press conference that 160 more staff could be hired with that $10.3 million to make sure staff were visible on our trains, to make sure neighbours who are having mental health challenges, whatever they may be—feeling themselves unsafe, making other people feel unsafe—they would visibly be interacting with staff so transit could be safer.

While we’ve had a government for years that has gotten up in this building and talked about aspirational transit, here we had a mayor of this city who said, “Actually, I’m going to redirect money from your failing transit projects”—I’m adding the editorialism; Olivia is a bigger person than me—“I’m going to reallocate money to make sure that people are safe in our subways, because the aspirational transit systems of this government and governments before it are failing.” That’s leadership.

But what’s also leadership in this bill is the fact that we have finally convinced the Premier of this province to take an interest in operational transit. But as the member for Orléans just said, the transit needs in this province are much bigger than the city of Toronto. We need a new deal for transit all over this province. We need it for Sudbury; we need it for Niagara Falls; we need it for Windsor; we need it for Thunder Bay; and we absolutely need it for Ottawa, Speaker. I can tell you that. Because what we just learned at city council in Ottawa is that in 2024, we are going to have 74,000 fewer service hours in our public transit system—74,000.

I took the bus over the weekend, as I was finding my way around community events. I took the number 6 down Bank Street, headed back to home near where I live, near Billings Bridge—packed to the gills, barely a place to sit or stand. But do you know what was great, Speaker? You could always see, as I’ve seen on so many buses, so many subways, neighbours helping elderly folks, people with children finding safe places to sit.

But you ask yourself the question, “Why isn’t there another bus right behind this bus at peak hours? Why is there one staff member on this entire elongated bus sitting in the front, behind Plexiglas, and no other staff members that are available, dispersed across stops to help people figure their way on and off the bus who have mobility challenges?” Cutbacks, Speaker—cutbacks from this government.

What we know is, we’re $500 million short in operational funding for transit across the province of Ontario. We have been making the message very clear to this government that in their upcoming budget, they need to put that $500 million back into the system so the buses, the subways, the streetcars can run safely and run effectively to get people to work and get people back home, get people where they need to go. But that hasn’t happened.

So who has been the stopgap, as this government loves its aspirational transit but neglects its operational transit, loves its dreams but disrespects the people who deliver every single day? I’m going to tell you: It’s the riders who are organizing to get together to bring messages into this place and, close to my heart, it’s the workers who operate the public transit system.

I want to spend some time this morning talking about someone who has got a message for this House. His name is Cory MacLeod; he’s the president of ATU 1320, which is in the great city of Peterborough. In Peterborough, Cory MacLeod just presided over a terrific campaign that sadly had to lead to a strike, in which he told the city of Peterborough that 2%, which was the original wage offer being offered by the municipal authorities in Peterborough—2% is good for milk, but it’s not good for people fighting to make a living.