I just want to, before I begin, acknowledge that February 28 is Pink Shirt Day, and you will notice my colleagues and members of the House are all wearing pink today. This is an important day to raise awareness for bullying with our kids and our children. At a time when one in five kids is affected by bullying and struggling with mental health, raising awareness by wearing pink shirts on one day will help all of us work to create safe environments, to create kind and inclusive environments for our kids and our youth in Ontario and across the world. They deserve that, absolutely, so thank you.

I also would like to acknowledge, as have other members in my caucus—the member from Oshawa and the member from Ottawa Centre, particularly, who spoke so eloquently in describing and acknowledging the passing of Ed Broadbent. He meant so much to us in this NDP family. He represented a lifelong commitment to social justice, to inclusion and just human decency, something we need more of.

I also wanted to talk about the fifth anniversary of the passing of another exemplary legislator, Dr. Richard Allen. Dr. Allen was elected as the NDP MPP for Hamilton West in 1982. He went on to serve in the 32nd, the 33rd, the 34th and the 35th Parliaments, and under Bob Rae, he served as a cabinet minister. I had the privilege of being the next NDP in the same riding, following along Dr. Richard Allen.

He was a remarkable historian; he was a fearless politician and universally described as a wise, caring, compassionate person. Richard was the son of a United Church minister, and this influenced his life’s work, which was dedicated to social justice. His first book was The Social Passion: Religion and Social Reform in Canada. Richard described his belief that there is an essential connection between our faith and social action, and this was at the heart—the guiding principle in his political career. That is a tradition that goes back through the NDP to important CCF figures like J.S. Woodsworth and Tommy Douglas.

Richard was always a really busy guy, and he published his last book in his 90th year, just before his death. That book was entitled Beyond the Noise of Solemn Assemblies: The Protestant Ethic and the Quest for Social Justice in Canada.

I was lucky to have had Dr. Allen as a mentor. When I was first elected, it was a difficult time, and I confided in Richard that I was feeling a little despondent in the changes that this government was making and my ability to help the people in my riding. So he sent me a note, and I think this is inspirational advice that we could all use. It comes from a script from John Wesley. I’ll just read it here: “Do all the good you can, by all the means you can, in all the ways you can, in all the places you can, at all the times you can, to all the people you can, as long as ever you can.” I want to thank you, Richard, for that piece of inspiration.

Now turning to the bill, Speaker, I just want to set the tone or the theme, if you will, the motif for my debate today on this bill, and I want to set it in the light of the Premier’s recent remarkable comments in this Legislature. They weren’t the comments about his political interference in the judicial system; those were remarkable enough. But these were the comments that he made in response to a question from our finance critic, the excellent MPP for Waterloo.

Interjection: All-star.

Did the Premier address any of MPP Fife’s concerns for the struggles of Ontarians? No, he did not. Instead, he told the Legislature that we need a lesson in marketing and sales. Imagine. And that’s when I really understood—that’s when the penny really dropped, Speaker—that this isn’t a Premier that wants to govern in the best interest of the people. He’s not governing; he’s selling.

I don’t know if anybody has seen the movie Glengarry Glen Ross. Has anyone seen that excellent movie? The line in that is, “Always be closing. A, B, C.” And I would say that is very telling of the pattern of this Premier.

This bill, the Get It Done Act, Bill 162, really is the Premier’s lesson to us in marketing and sales. It just exposes his modus operandi when it comes to addressing the people of the province of Ontario.

So is this a bill? It’s really, actually, a bill of goods. I mean, if I could rephrase it: The Premier is marketing, I would say, an empty promise and he hopes that the buyers of this empty promise will be all of us, the people of Ontario. But after what we’ve been through with this Premier—the greenbelt scandal, the land grab, the RCMP investigation—people don’t have faith in this government, so I’m pretty sure nobody is buying what he is selling with this bill.

Now I will admit—I don’t know; maybe I need a lesson in sales and marketing. I’m not quite that slick. But I don’t know, colleagues, maybe it’s just me, but I don’t think it’s a fantastic strategy to give bills titles that just beg to be mocked. I mean, you can’t help it. Let’s do it together: “Get ’er done.” We tried—

Interjections.

Let’s be clear that people see through this. They’re tired of the theatre. They’re tired of hearing sales pitches in the Legislature. They’re tired of the Premier actually just paraphrasing the ads that go on ad nauseam on our TV.

The media, they got into the fun. The Star said, “It’s not unreasonable to say that Ontarians might have gleaned a better understanding of the contents of this unholy mishmash had the province named it the crazy clown car act, or the empty political gestures act, or, as a political historian once joked, the poke the opposition in the eye act.

“In the era of constant campaigning, it appears governments now see even the simple act of titling bills as just another opportunity for partisan messaging.

“But there’s more to the matter than mere mischievous wordplay. At core in this bill, the Ford government is again flaunting its ... disregard for transparency and accountability.”

I can’t help but quote the TVO article that says, about this bill, “In the meantime, we’re left with the irksome elements of the so-called Get It Done Act. We could call it a stunt, but stunts are usually captivating or entertaining. This bill is a dull retread of an idea that was bad the first time. And if it does anything at all, it will be to make the electorate even more ill-informed about governance than it already is. In a better world, the government would never have introduced it. In the world we actually have, we can perhaps just pass it speedily and never speak of it again.”

So while this is kind of funny, I have to actually say that none of this is actually funny at all. It’s not funny. It’s deadly serious because people in the province of Ontario, as you all know, are struggling. We know. It seems to be that there’s a cone of silence on the other side. They don’t seem to understand that people can’t pay their bills, that people don’t have access to primary health care. People don’t have adequate housing. People are going to food banks to feed their children in this province. That’s what’s deadly serious in this province.

But what we see again and again is a PC government that only gets it done for their friends and their donors and their insiders. This continues to be an insiders-first agenda that we have seen from day one from this government. So, let’s just say, what can they get done? Well, they can get it done by overriding democracy, by stacking the courts with their like-minded politically appointed judges, but apparently they can’t fix the system that they’ve broken so that that it works for people seeking justice. They can get it done for a for-profit corporation, giving them a 99-year lease on Ontario Place public lands, destroying parkland, thousands of trees and natural habitat, and they can pony up millions of tax dollars for Therme’s luxury spa, but they can’t provide the taxpayers of the province of Ontario with the details of this sketchy deal.

They can get it done, as we are seeing over and over again, for private, for-profit health care operators by destroying our public health system in order to privatize it, but they can’t get it done for the 300,000 people who are currently waiting for a mammogram in Ontario that will give them the life-saving care that they need.

Who can this government get it done for? They can get it done for Enbridge. They can get it done for Staples. They can get it done for Walmart. They can get it done for Loblaws. Who have I missed, folks? They can get it done for Metrolinx.

Can they get it done for the people of Ontario? I would say, and this bill is proof positive, no, they can’t.