Isn’t that crazy? Exactly.

So are you anticipating that you will need to protect yourselves from this? It just goes beyond anything that anybody has seen. We know the government has pushed the envelope with indemnifications like this before. We saw that they gave long-term-care operators indemnities. We saw that they give themselves indemnity when it came to some other bills. But these go so much further than any previous legislation. But what for?

Interjection.

Let me just say that this is not normal. Governments that behave like this are not generally democratic, I would say. This kind of concentration of power, exempting themselves from the rule of law, does not speak to a democratic government. Nobody you would ask would say that. I don’t know how you can think that this speaks to a democratic government. There are governments around the world that would pass laws like this that would be called autocratic. People would never expect to see something like this in the province of Ontario, but here it is.

This is not the only assault, I would say, on our democratic norms in the operating of this House with these two bills—not only the Ontario Place bill where debate was stifled on. There was no committee. All the people who were upset—Ontario Place for All—all the people who were concerned about all the things that you were going to do with Ontario Place were not allowed to come to committee to speak to the government to say, “I don’t agree with this. Why do you have to cut down 850 trees? Why is this necessary? Why are you spending, basically, three quarters of a billion dollars of my money to build a parking garage for a private spa?” They don’t get to ask those questions. I can understand why the government wouldn’t want them to ask those questions because none of the answers are a good look at all for this government.

The idea that you are time-allocating these important bills—both the Greenbelt Statute Law Amendment Act and Bill 150, which is the bill to restore the forced urban boundary expansions of this government—is nothing short of an assault on our democracy. There is no other way of putting it. People that I talk to feel this.

As I said, what the government did when it comes to the greenbelt—I have never seen people mobilize like this on any other issue. And the fact that this government had to walk this back is because of those people, because of their work in this province.

But a normal—

Our normal process is, we have second reading debate and then we send bills to committee. If you really concerned yourself, as I know some of the MPPs opposite do, with our Westminster parliamentary tradition, you would know that committee is a vital component of our democratic functioning. People come to committee to speak directly to their government on bills that impact them and their lives. They come with expert ideas. They come with lived experience. They make suggestions to make bills better. But the government did not allow this. In fact, at committee, the government only allowed one hour to hear from the Minister of Municipal Affairs and Housing, who promised that he was an entertaining guy when he gets going. The jury is out on that, I have to say.

When I asked this question in the House—don’t get angry now—about why people weren’t allowed to come and speak to this bill, the Premier stood in his place and said the people of Ontario “don’t give two hoots about” the greenbelt. Come on. People do care. They’ve shown that they care because they’ve written to all of you; I know they have. And despite the fact that they weren’t allowed to depute at the committee—which, again, is an important part of our Westminster parliamentary norms—the committee room was packed. There were people in the hallway. Even if they weren’t allowed to speak, they wanted to hear what was being done with the greenbelt.

So I just have to say that, in all the disappointing things that we have seen when it comes to the greenbelt, the fact that people were shut out from this debate is right up there with one of the biggest disappointments that I share with this government, along with some of the other actions that, again, seem to shut out people from this House and from the things that are important to them.

When it comes directly to the bill itself—I have three minutes left—there were a lot of questions that I have and that residents and stakeholders have, and I have here many, many of the submissions from stakeholders who weren’t able to speak at committee.

One of the things that they were really concerned with is that this government restore some, but not all, of the protections to the greenbelt. Let’s be clear: The greenbelt is not better off. There are still protections for the greenbelt that have not been restored with this bill, particularly when it comes to the Duffins Rouge Agricultural Preserve. That important area had four layers of protection; only two have been restored. We moved amendments that would have restored those amendments, but the government voted those amendments down. As was said by one of the stakeholders, by only returning two of the four prior Duffins Rouge Agricultural Preserve protections, the Ford government is not keeping its promise to Pickering residents—that’s from Stop Sprawl Durham. They have quite a few things to say, but they weren’t able to say them at committee.

The other thing that I think is important to note is that when it comes to protecting the greenbelt, people were very concerned that there still exists in this legislation a process for removals. So there still exists, in the legislation, a process for this government to continue to remove, at a future time, lands from the greenbelt. First of all, that is in direct conflict with what the Premier and, in fact, the minister has said—that we won’t be making any changes to the greenbelt in the future. Unfortunately, I feel like that’s a dog-whistle signal to developers—“Hold on. We’re doing this now, but there is provision here to allow things to be removed from the greenbelt.”

I also want to say that many questions remain. Will this government, now, that they have returned this—does this mean that the government does agree with their own housing task force, that they did not need the greenbelt to build housing? Many people are not buying what they consider a cover story about housing, because many experts, including your own task force, said that the greenbelt is not needed to build the housing that we needed.

Unfortunately, we have wasted so much time in the province. We’re so far behind in getting people the housing that we have needed. We have spent a year, a year and a half—even longer. The government has been in power for five and a half years. All the time, effort and angst over this greenbelt grab could have been spent developing strategies and developing good ideas to help people with their housing, because we know people need housing.

In our riding, in Hamilton, we have people sleeping on the street, on cardboard. They need to be housed. We have seniors struggling to keep a roof over their head.

I wish, rather than the government carving up and eyeing the greenbelt, that they had their eye on people in this province—