Next question.

I want to thank the member for your comments and your entertaining speech today. It was really, really good.

One of the things that you were talking about—you know, there’s that cycle of life. You were talking about the cycle of money and how that works, that the cycle of money is from taxpayers to special-interest groups into Conservative coffers through donations. Can you expand on that? Where are you seeing all this cycle of money so that we, as taxpayers, are putting in all kinds of money that gets diverted to these private for-profit corporations, and then back into Conservative coffers so that they can use that money to get re-elected and continue the cycle?

I was listening to the member quite closely and I just wanted to ask her: She talks about municipalities, and I agree with her—of course they are frustrated, and we hear that frustration, too, which is why we’re helping municipalities so much, because they had such a shortfall in infrastructure funding for the last 15 years under the Liberals—

It is now time for questions and answers.

Further debate?

I appreciate the comments from the member for Kitchener Centre about the concerns that her community has raised over the changes to the official plan. I’m curious to know, as a new member of this House, what her opinion is on a process that sees the government bring forward MZOs without community consent, then brings in legislation to reverse all those MZOs, and then brings in new legislation to un-reverse some of those MZOs. Does the minister think that that is a good use of the legislative time that we have available to us in this chamber? Does it address the real concerns of the people of this province?

I first just want to say good afternoon to everyone in the House. It really is my pleasure to rise today to speak in strong support of Bill 162, the Get It Done Act. If passed, Speaker, this legislation will drive economic growth by keeping costs down for individuals and small businesses across our province, including many in my riding of Mississauga–Streetsville.

I do want to start by thanking our hard-working Premier, Doug Ford, and our Minister of Transportation, Prab Sarkaria, for their leadership in introducing this very important bill. From lower taxes to improved infrastructure, our government is laser-focused on making life more affordable and creating good jobs. With Bill 162, we are taking significant steps towards getting more shovels in the ground faster and delivering on our promise to get it done.

Speaker, the most important issue I hear from so many small businesses is the unfair effect the carbon tax has on their day-to-day operations. That is why I am so happy to say that this vital legislation our government will introduce will help protect people from the high cost of a provincial carbon tax. Carbon pricing puts an extra financial burden on households and businesses through higher prices on everyday goods. That’s why we’re bringing in a bill that, if passed, would give voters a direct say over any future provincial carbon tax, cap-and-trade system or other pricing program.

This proposed legislation would strengthen affordability by requiring any government to obtain consent through a referendum before imposing a new carbon pricing scheme. Speaker, this builds on steps we’ve already taken through the Taxpayer Protection Act to safeguard people from unexpected tax hikes. Our focus as a government remains to keep costs down for Ontarians as they battle rising inflation.

The potential for any added provincial carbon tax is unacceptable, so we continue to urge Ottawa to immediately return the $1.3 billion it collected and set aside for Ontario businesses over the past five years and eliminate the federal carbon tax entirely. According to the CFIB, the average small business would have received about $1,245, but now, because of the changes Ottawa has made, that amount has been reduced by more than half. With families and job creators feeling the pinch like never before, protecting small businesses must be a top priority. That’s why we must lock in accountability and prevent a backdoor carbon tax from sneaking past voters.

The people of Ontario deserve to have a say over what comes out of their wallets and that is precisely what Ontario families expect from us.

Speaker, we were elected to keep more money in people’s pockets. This proposed legislation honours that commitment and guarantees transparency over any scheme that hits wallets with a punitive price on carbon.

We do recognize that more money in consumers’ pockets means more money going back into small businesses in all our local communities, and more money to help families pay for food, heat and necessities.

A carbon tax only punishes entrepreneurs and families through higher operating costs on everyday essentials like energy. Any added provincial carbon tax would push many over the edge, as they are already struggling with inflation. It would be yet another burden, with its increasing costs passed down through higher prices at the pump, energy bills, and everyday goods. For small businesses, this chips away at their competitiveness. Every dollar lost to carbon tax is a dollar that can’t be reinvested back into their businesses.

Our proposed legislation is about defending small businesses and families just trying to make ends meet.

Operational costs, especially for energy-intensive industries, need stability, not unpredictable price hikes from new carbon taxes. Many business owners I’ve spoken to simply can’t absorb carbon taxes on top of other cost pressures. Some have shared fears that they may need to scale back or, sadly, even close their shop as a result. That’s not a risk we can take lightly when small businesses employ so many in communities across Ontario.

That’s why we’re ensuring voters have a say on carbon pricing. We cannot idly watch as carbon pricing threatens the very livelihoods of business owners who power our economy. The last thing they need is a carbon tax increasing their electricity bills and fuel expenses. That money would come out of hiring or capital investments.

Our proposed legislation will protect both individuals and job creators. So I do hope, on that basis, all members will be supportive.

Speaker, as the Associate Minister of Small Business and MPP for Mississauga–Streetsville, I know too well the challenges our entrepreneurs face. High costs are a major barrier that can prevent smaller companies from reaching their full potential. That’s why our government is laser-focused on creating the right conditions to success. We’ve worked hard to lower taxes and reduce costs significantly for job creators. Just last year alone, we saved small businesses over $3.6 billion through our efforts. This is money our entrepreneurs can re-invest to expand operations, hire more staff and fuel economic growth.

With families and businesses feeling the impact of high inflation and interest rates, we must act. That’s why I am so proud that this legislation includes measures to ban new highway tolls across our province. For too long, tolls have acted as an unnecessary tax on commuters and commercial vehicles alike. By prohibiting future tolls, we’re helping drivers in Mississauga and across Ontario keep hundreds of dollars in their pockets each year—money that can instead be spent at local shops and restaurants.

Speaker, this bill will also make the freeze on driver’s licence fees permanent, through our legislation. For the average Mississauga resident, this ongoing freeze translates to real savings that will add to the numerous ways our government is making life more affordable.

With the cost of living higher than ever, our government is doing everything possible to make life more affordable.

Another crucial part of Bill 162 is designating the Hazel McCallion light rail transit extensions to downtown Mississauga and Brampton as priority transit projects. As the MPP for Mississauga–Streetsville, I could not be more supportive of fast-tracking these critical investments. Our aging infrastructure can no longer keep up with the growth that we need to see in Mississauga. As it stands, severe congestion on our roads is costing the average driver in our city over 30 minutes per day, and this leads to lost productivity for our job creators and mounting frustration for commuters.

The new LRT extensions will provide for a faster, more reliable transportation option to boost mobility and economic opportunity across south Peel. And by streamlining the approval process, these vital projects can break ground that much sooner. Transit options like the LRT have overwhelmingly positive impacts on attracting and retaining talent in Mississauga, like our growing workforce, which in turn allows businesses to scale up their operations and create more local jobs.

Speaker, as the Associate Minister of Small Business, I am delighted to see changes to streamline mine permitting processes across the province in this bill. Small businesses in the mining sector are the backbone of many northern and rural economies, and the lifeblood of communities that rely on the resources that they produce. However, long application timelines were a challenge for many exploration and smaller mining companies seeking permits and approvals. That’s why our government took action by implementing the Mining Act modernization in 2019.

The current multi-year process for approving new mining projects hinders growth for many small businesses that operate in our thriving mineral resources sector. From mining supply and service companies to local shops and restaurants, these job creators depend on a healthy industry to run their operations. Streamlining rules will drive greater investment and productivity right across Ontario. By cutting unnecessary layers of bureaucracy and overlapping requirements between ministries, we can welcome more mining projects faster while maintaining the highest environmental standards. This would provide small businesses involved in the sector with greater confidence to hire staff and invest in expansion, knowing demand from mining clients is more predictable and timelier.

For rural and Indigenous businesses in particular, economic spinoffs from an accelerated permitting system could truly be transformative. We must also reduce the burden placed on Indigenous communities through the current permit-by-permit approach. Coordinating engagement on a project would address consultation fatigue and support business relationships between mining companies and First Nation suppliers. Getting resource developments approved in a timely yet thoroughly responsible manner will fuel economic prosperity across multiple regions, all the way from mines in Timmins to the tech companies that use those minerals to make computer chips in southern Ontario.

Speaker, the proposed changes mean more sustainable growth and good jobs in communities that depend on our thriving natural resource sector and the small businesses that support them. Our government is committed to reducing barriers for job creators of all sizes in all sectors. With a streamlined mining permitting system, we will create exciting new opportunities for small businesses all over Ontario.

I know several of the opposition members have constituents who earn their living in the natural resource sector, so I do hope they support these proposals that promise widespread economic benefits for many, many years to come.

On top of that, Speaker, the transit priorities in Bill 162 contain amendments to speed up key infrastructure like highways, rail lines and power grids through environmental assessment reforms. While maintaining our strong oversight and protections, these targeted changes could shave years off project timelines, and that means less time spent tangled in red tape and more time spent building.

Expediting processes, as this bill proposes, will help infrastructure dollars go further, building more roads, more hospitals, more schools and other necessities with the same public funding. And if these projects can be completed sooner, the economic spinoffs will also be returned to the communities more quickly through jobs and new business opportunities.

In Mississauga, getting shovels in the ground faster on priorities like Highway 413 could not be more critical. These proposed expressways will slash commute times for our residents by up to 30 minutes each way on some of the busiest corridors in North America. That’s an hour back in the day for working parents or an hour gained for a local small business to serve customers better. With a population projected to grow by one million people in the next decade, Ontario desperately needs new road infrastructure simply to avoid gridlock.

By fast-tracking responsible development, Bill 162 will help ensure Mississauga and the rest of the GTA have the highways, the transit and logistics networks required to support sustainable growth well into the future. And Speaker, of course, none of these benefits matter if we cannot build more housing to meet sky-high demand.

That’s why I’m so thrilled to see this legislation support streamlining municipal planning approvals. For too long, tedious red tape at the local level has constrained new development. If we want young families to call Mississauga home, or businesses to set up shop, having an adequate supply of housing options is a must.

With the proposed changes, our municipal partners right across the GTHA will be better equipped to modify this quickly and get much-needed projects off the drawing board. Residents will see results faster, from new waste water treatment plants to community centres, as municipalities gain more control over their destinies. Meanwhile, our small business community will have an expanded customer base as our population grows responsibly.

Speaker, I urge all members of this House to vote yes on Bill 162 and, if passed, this forward-thinking legislation will drive investment, attract top talent and build the modern infrastructure our growing communities require, accelerating Ontario’s economic recovery. Streamlining processes while maintaining strong environmental protection strikes the right balance. With a common-sense, efficient approach like this, we can get critical projects done on schedule and on budget. Most importantly, we can deliver for the hard-working people of Mississauga and all of Ontario who just simply want to get ahead in life.

This legislation is about unleashing job creation, revitalizing our municipalities and affirming our government’s unwavering commitment to get it done. Bill 162 will move key projects off the drawing board and into construction, and that means more opportunities for every one of all of our constituents in this House and a brighter economic future we can all be proud of.

Speaker, in closing, let’s all get it done for the people of Ontario.

Thank you to my colleague for her remarks. I officially welcome her to the House—I know I’ve welcomed you earlier, but officially now that I have the floor.

I know the official plan changes the member from Kitchener Centre referenced are being made after careful consultations with the affected municipalities. This is what they requested, and I know the member, from her time on Kitchener city council, will understand that process very well.

She spoke of agriculture. Obviously, as she knows, my riding has a lot of agriculture in it. I know she hasn’t had the opportunity yet to vote on a budget bill, but in the last budget, we invested a lot in agriculture and supporting our farmers. We have a Grow Ontario Strategy. Will she support us in calling on the federal government to remove the carbon tax, which the OFA calls for?

It’s now time for questions.

There have been a number of motions passed in this House relative to the carbon tax: to remove the carbon tax on the transportation of goods, to remove the carbon tax on food production at our farms, to remove the carbon tax on home heating.

Can the member please tell me how this bill will continue to work towards and protect consumers against future carbon taxes?

I really appreciated the minister’s comments for this debate. She was speaking about the mining industry and how this bill will actually help to move that forward. Leaning into her own experience as the Associate Minister of Small Business, I would like her to talk more about the multiplier effect; how all of those small businesses, which are the vast majority of businesses in this province, will continue to thrive and continue to build the revenues for this province like has never been seen before.

It’s the first time I stand up today. I just wanted to say on the carbon tax, it was your government that brought in the carbon tax; we supported cap-and-trade. You should at least tell the citizens of Ontario the truth, and you should tell the truth about the tolls in schedule 6. We know that you privatized and sold off Highway 407, but the east part of the 407 is owned by your government, and just the other day, Durham—where you have a number of MPPs—voted asking your government to take the tolls off Durham and that 407 east, which you’re in charge of.

My question to you: Are you going to support the residents of Durham and take the tolls off the 407 east, which you could do today?

I want to thank the member from Windsor West. However, that question really didn’t pertain to this bill. However—

One way to do that is calling on our federal government to remove the carbon tax off everything; however, we are going to do our part. What is in our control is to make sure that no future governments can add a carbon tax or carbon pricing or cap-and-trade—whatever they want to call it—without holding a referendum first. Let the people of this province speak. The people of this province did speak last year when they brought back our government with a bigger majority, because they wanted us to get it done and to make life more affordable for the people of this province.

So I’m excited about this bill. When it’s passed, it’s really going to make sure that those communities like Timmins continue to grow and continue to thrive.

Today, we are debating Bill 162, the Get It Done bill.

So in the vein of getting it done, I just want to give some acknowledgement and a shout-out to some of my colleagues, my colleague from Humber River–Black Creek, my colleague from Hamilton Mountain and my colleague from Nickel Belt because, today, in the province of Ontario, is the first day that the ban on celebrities and athletes being used in gambling ads for online gaming that this government brought in with no regulations or plans around that. So, in the vein of getting it done, I would like to say to my fellow MPP colleagues, congratulations on pushing so hard along with so many vulnerable people in our communities to actually get the ban on celebrities and athletes to be enacted.

I would just like to say that this government needs to acknowledge that you have—and this, believe me, comes from the Fraser Institute: This government has the highest combined debt per person—actually, the second highest. Newfoundland is the only province that has a higher combined debt than Ontario. So while you put out all these numbers and say that you are going to save people money—you’re not.

In fact, the biggest expenditure of this government is interest payments on the debt. The debt has ballooned under this government at the same time as you’re underfunding—you have the lowest per capita spending on the things that people need, like hospitals and like education. So how does this square up? How can you have a huge debt and deficit but you’re not spending enough money and you’re saving people taxpayer dollars? No. They have to pay the taxes on the debt that you have accumulated.

I’m going to ask for the indulgence of the members in the House today. I haven’t had an opportunity to address Ed Broadbent’s passing. I’d like to take a moment at the beginning of my speech here to talk about Ed Broadbent.

I’m from Oshawa. I grew up in Oshawa. My father worked at General Motors, and my brother works there now. My grandfather, great-grandfather—everybody worked at General Motors. Ed Broadbent was also from Oshawa. His father and his uncles and other family members also worked at General Motors. My father worked with his uncles in the tool and die department in the north plant at General Motors. My best friend’s mother went to school with him. So although I never had a ton of interactions with him, I feel like I knew him pretty well. And in the late 1970s, when I was a teenager, I was putting up signs for his campaigns in Oshawa.

His passing is the loss of a really great Canadian. He was the NDP leader from 1975 to 1989. He was a member of Parliament from 1968 to 1990 and, again, from 2004 to 2006, when Jack Layton asked him to run and to be part of the federal NDP again.

There are so many stories about Ed Broadbent, but two that I’d like to just briefly share—I recently read a book about John Robarts. John Robarts was the Conservative Premier of Ontario from 1961 to 1971. I saw Ed Broadbent at a convention, and I said, “I read this book about John Robarts.” You know, he increased the high school graduation rate. He built our public colleges. He expanded our university system. He fought against public health care in 1965, but I said, “On a lot of the things that we care about, he seemed to be on the same side.” Ed was old enough to remember John Robarts; I don’t remember that time. But he said, “Yeah, he was a true Progressive Conservative.” He really wanted to see progressive policies. He wanted to see people’s lives made better and more affordable through progressive policies and through very affordable access to post-secondary education.

I would say that’s something I wish this government would get back to. I’ve seen this Conservative government being taken over—the Conservatives and the Liberals. I mean, our whole political spectrum has shifted so far to the right that even fighting for public education, public health care, public colleges and universities—now, the NDP is the only party that’s still fighting for those things.

The other story I’d like to tell about Ed Broadbent: I saw him in downtown Toronto just a couple of years ago, and he told a story about how the Constitution was repatriated, how it was written. He said that in the discussions, in the early 1980s, Pierre Trudeau just wanted equality rights enshrined in the constitution, but he didn’t want to break down those rights. He didn’t want to, so he said, “A person is a person is a person. We don’t need to define who has those equality rights.” Ed Broadbent had, I would say, a different understanding of equity and how equity is not giving the same thing to each person but making sure that everybody has the same opportunities.

There’s a section, equality rights enshrined in our Constitution, and this is one of the things that Ed Broadbent fought for in the early 1980s. This is part of his legacy. I thank the members of the Legislature for giving me the opportunity just to put this on the record.

The equality rights: There are two sections of them. Everybody is entitled to equal protection and benefit under the law without discrimination based on race, national or ethnic origin, colour, religion, sex or mental or physical disability. This is excepting affirmative action programs.

This is part of Ed’s legacy. He passed away on January 11, 2024, at the age of 87, and he leaves a very important legacy for all of us in Canada.

I begin my speech now in downtown Toronto, where we have got a haze over the city from a forest fire, the largest forest fire in Texas’s history. The smoke has reached us all the way up here in southern Ontario. Last summer, there were days and days in southern Ontario when we were engulfed with forest fire smoke from northern Ontario and from the western provinces because we had a record number of acres burned in Ontario last summer. There were 45 million acres of forest burned in Canada last year. That’s three times the previous record. We are in the midst of an environmental crisis, and you just have to step outside and look at the sky to see the impact of this environmental crisis.

This government has brought in legislation. This legislation that we’re debating today is Bill 162. It’s called the Get It Done Act. This act actually further reduces the Environmental Protection Act and removes the requirement for environmental assessments for projects like the 413. It’s actually taking us backward. It’s actually putting our environment and also our farmland at greater risk.

The excuse the government usually uses is that we need more housing. We all know we are in a housing crisis in Ontario. But this government’s response is that they’re selling off public services and assets to private for-profit corporations. Many of these are owned by their friends and colleagues. We all know that we have this housing crisis, but even tech companies—I’m the tech and innovation critic for the NDP—are telling me that the biggest barrier to attracting talent to Ontario is the lack of affordable housing.

Between 1972 and 1996, however, an average of 15,000 affordable and social housing units were built each year in Ontario, so we were building affordable housing. Then, in the 1990s, the federal Liberals cancelled the National Housing Strategy, and the provincial Conservatives started downloading housing responsibility onto cities. And the cities simply don’t have the tax base to even maintain the housing that was downloaded, let alone build the housing that we need. So this crisis in affordable housing is 30 years in the making.

To achieve the goal—this government set the goal, and it’s the right goal, of 1.5 million new homes in 10 years. In order to achieve that goal, we should be starting 15,000 housing units a month. But last month, there were only 5,000 housing units started in Ontario. I want to contrast this with the New Democratic Party in British Columbia. There, per capita, they had three times the number of housing starts. They also had 5,000 housing starts, but they have a third of our population.

The reason that they’re doing this is because they are using every tool that’s available. They are building public housing. They are not afraid of saying, “Hey, you know what? The for-profit market is not building the housing we need, so we’re going to just build it directly,” just like previous governments did all the way from post-1945, after the Second World War, right up to the mid-1990s, when the federal Liberals and the Harris Conservatives cancelled their housing programs. So we need to get back to building housing. We need to get back to building public housing.

I want to give credit to the new mayor of Toronto—well, six months in office—Olivia Chow. Six months in, she already has a plan for 65,000 units of affordable housing. Within six months, she’s already broken ground on 2,000 units, including a 900-unit co-op at 2444 Eglinton Avenue East. This is the biggest co-op—in fact, the only major co-op development that’s been built since the last time the NDP were in government.

So we know the solutions. We need progressive policies. We need a government that’s not afraid of just rolling up their sleeves and saying, “Hey, the for-profit market is not building the housing we need. We’re going to do it directly.” That’s what Olivia Chow is doing in the city of Toronto. We need that plan across this city because housing is not affordable anywhere in this province anymore.

One of the things that I saw when I was travelling around this province last summer is that there are tent encampments in every major city. That’s a legacy of this government and the last Liberal government, which were just afraid to build government housing, were afraid to build the housing we need, because we’ve known for decades that the for-profit market does not build housing that everybody needs.

So the title of this bill is “getting it done.” I would prefer if the government had actually titled their bill and written a bill called “getting it right.”

Interjection.

Thank you to the member from Hamilton West, because it really allows us to highlight some of the work that we’ve been doing. It’s actually quite interesting, because there’s not a tax that they don’t like—there’s not something that they don’t want to add cost to people. But it’s this government that has been saving money, whether it’s saving money on the per-litre of gas—10.7 cents. We’ve been doing that.

Also, this government is making record investments. Yes, we are spending money, because we need more hospitals, we need more schools. We’re building the Ontario Line. We’re building the Hazel McCallion LRT. We’re building infrastructure right across this province. We are going to get the Ring of Fire built. This government is going to invest in the facilities and the infrastructure that we desperately need, and we’re not going to apologize for that. Actually, we’re proud of that fact—that we are able to invest in our communities, in our businesses, in everyone who wants to come to Ontario because we are the best place to live, to work, to raise a family, to invest, and to own a business.

Further questions?

That would have been nice, eh? That would have been nice, and I’ll just give you an example of getting it right versus getting it done. This government says they’re getting it done. I was talking to my colleague from Sudbury earlier, and he was giving me an example. His father, one time, was given a job—a bunch of guys, a whole crew went out, and they were supposed to dig a trench. So they all had shovels. They all spent the whole morning digging the trench. Then, they broke for lunch. At lunchtime, they got a call, and they were told that they were digging the trench in the wrong location. So they spent the whole afternoon filling in the trench. In one sense, they got it done. They dug a trench, and then they filled in the trench. They got two things done. But from a practical perspective, they didn’t really accomplish anything.

This government keeps passing bills and legislation, and then having to repeal them. They’ve done it seven times. There’s seven different bills that this government has passed that they’ve had to repeal. So getting it done—they got something done. They passed a bill. And then they got something else done: They repealed the bills. So it’s like the trench; it’s really like the trench.

These bills that they’ve passed that they’ve had to repeal, we all knew that they needed to repeal them. Bill 124 imposed unconstitutional wage caps on public sector workers. This was just repealed a couple of weeks ago, after the Court of Appeal of Ontario overturned it and said this is an unconstitutional violation of the charter rights of public sector workers. Bill 28, they brought in Bill 28. It stripped education workers of their charter rights and it also stripped them of protections under the Ontario Human Rights Code. And the public, the people of Ontario, were very angry. The unions mobilized. They threatened a general strike, and the next week the government repealed Bill 28.

Bill 39 included changes to the Duffins Rouge agricultural plan, and that also was reversed.

Let’s see. The dissolution of Peel: Bill 112. They decided they’re going to dissolve Peel, break it into three different municipalities, and then they crunched the numbers, and according to Patrick Brown, the dissolution was going to cost the taxpayers in Mississauga and Peel region $1.3 billion, so they repealed that one.

I won’t go through the other ones—oh, Bill 150 reversed the urban boundary expansions. So we all know about the greenbelt scandal that happened here, but one of the other things that happened is they expanded urban boundaries. So a lot of the Conservative developers—or friends of the Conservatives, developers—bought land just on the outskirts of cities, and this government expanded the urban boundaries of those cities to encompass that greenbelt farmland outside the cities. Then, the new Minister of Housing, when he was appointed, he said, “Hey, that process was wrong. We did not follow proper process.” He repealed it.

Do you know what’s interesting about this bill here? They’re back in. They’re repealing the repeal. I’ve never seen that in the Legislature. Going back to the trench metaphor, this is like going back to digging the trench and then filling in the trench and then realizing hey, you know what, maybe we can put a trench here, let’s dig it out again. You’ve got to wonder about all these reversals.

Let’s just look at the greenbelt scandal: 7,400 acres were involved in the greenbelt scandal. The take on this—the Auditor General said that the developers who bought that farmland stood to make $8 billion. They have paid $300 million for it. She estimated that they’d be able to sell it for $8.3 billion when the greenbelt protections were removed.

One of these developers bought 2,400 acres of greenbelt farmland. That developer, De Gasperis, he stood to make, looking at the numbers, just approximately $2.6 billion. He also bought land on the outskirts of cities that were covered by the urban boundary expansions.

So why would the government expand these urban boundaries? Well, it was pretty clear that there was a lot of push. They said it was for housing, but there were also Conservative donors who had bought farmland there who were standing to profit. And then they reversed the urban boundary expansion, because it was a very hot item in the news and they were afraid that their popularity was diminishing.

Then, they reversed it again. So they’re going to actually allow this developer to make a ton of money.

And the danger, for all of us in this province, is that we’re losing farmland. I can’t speak enough about the importance of farmland. Ontario is an enormous province. I used to teach a course on the history and economics of Ontario, and at the beginning of the year, I would put up a map of Ontario and then I’d superimpose a map of France over the northwest side of Ontario, and then I would superimpose a map of Germany on the northeast side of Ontario, and then I’d superimpose a map of Britain across southern Ontario. That’s how big we are. We are a million square kilometres. That’s how big this province is, but only 5% of that land is arable. Only 5% can be farmed. So we’ve got to protect our farmland.

Under the Liberals, we were losing 175 acres per day. Under this government, we’re now losing 319 acres per day. That’s 110,000 acres of farmland that we’re losing every year. If we keep at this level of development on farmland, then we will have lost all our farmland before the end of the century.

Another project that this bill touches on is the 413. This bill allows the 413 to go ahead without an environmental assessment, without raising concerns about the environmental impact or the impact on our future food security. And it’s absolutely frightening what they’re doing, because even today, with a relatively small population and a large land mass, in Ontario, we import $10 billion more food than we export. Let that sink in. We are already a net food importer and yet we are paving over 319 acres of farmland per year.

Interjection.

It is now time for questions.

I recognize the Solicitor General.