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?

I think farmers also recognize that climate change impacts them more than anything else. And I will say that the oil and gas companies take 18 cents a litre in pure profits, and that’s more important than money people get back in their pockets.

But what I’ll say is the process that they went through in this way is asking cities to bite the hand that feeds them. It was not a fulsome process. We had a world-class process that led to this result. It was democratic. It involved all levels of government. But instead, we’re cherry-picking municipalities and asking them to push back on a PC government that actually holds the purse strings to the very funds that they rely on. It is biased and problematic at best.

I know from my city council—I’m not an expert planner; I never was, and I never claimed to be. I relied on experts in my community to make my decisions. So, to me, to abandon a world-class process was getting it done wrong.

Thank you to the member from London West. What I’ve experienced, and I know from my municipalities, we have had to hire so many additional planning staff in order to meet the expectations of this government. Meanwhile, most of our funding is being cut. We aren’t getting the same funding from our developers. Our city has always said, “Growth pays for growth.” That’s not the reality anymore; instead, we keep doubling down, downloading more and more responsibilities, and less and less money, onto municipalities. Do you know what that leads to? Property tax hikes.

So, in a time of unaffordability, we are coercing our local municipalities to raise property taxes, which is really not helpful, and that’s as a result of the flip-flopping.

One thing that is not good bang for your buck is new highways like the 413. This is something that will balloon out of control. It will cost billions and billions and billions of dollars to save people 30 seconds. Meanwhile, we need two-way, all-day GO in our area. We need an LRT to—

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.

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.

I thank the member for his comments. He covered a number of subjects there and I’d maybe touch on one of them: the environment, he mentioned. Shockingly, it’s an extremely important matter for this side of the House—the government—and a few teeny, tiny measures that we’re doing, such as transit. You know, people have a choice to take the car or get on transit. The biggest transit expansion in the history of the province—a teeny, tiny measure.

Our energy system—90% greenhouse gas-free, given our thrust on nuclear.

Another teeny, tiny thing we’re doing: steel industry—converting away from coal to electricity, electric cars.

So these legacy matters for the environment—hate to say. Wouldn’t you agree that these are extraordinarily strong environmental measures the government is taking?

That’s it?

Now, Durham council is saying to the Conservatives that the only road that’s being tolled is hurting the residents of Durham. So I’m going to say to my colleague, if the council wants the toll taken off, why do you think the Conservatives, who have five Conservatives that represent that area, out of six, are leaving it in this bill? It makes absolutely no sense. Do you agree with me, take the tolls off the 407 east?

I’d like to say hi to two members of our excellent staff team, Kirsten Snider and Madeleine Vogelaar. Welcome. Hello. They do excellent work.

My question is to the member for Spadina–Fort York. You mentioned that the BC government is taking a really bold and sensible approach to the housing crisis, and we see that starts in BC are up by 11%. At the same time, housing starts in Ontario are actually going down. What is the BC government doing right? What lessons could the Conservatives learn from what the BC government is doing?

I see the member opposite questioning my number. Look it up. Just Google it. We import $10 billion more food than we export.

We also are welcoming 400,000 new people to Ontario every year, and one thing I know about those people—I can guarantee it: They will want to eat. And the most environmental and healthiest way to eat is to eat food that’s grown locally. So we need to maintain our farmland. That’s the purpose of the greenbelt. And yet, this government keeps cutting huge tranches out of the greenbelt. They did it with the 7,400 acres of the original greenbelt scandal. They did it with the expansion of the urban boundaries and they’re doing it with the paving over for the 413.

This government is not only jeopardizing our environment—I speak about this at a time when, again, the city of Toronto is engulfed in smoke, this time from forest fires in Texas—but they’re also jeopardizing our food security in the future. With global warming, it’s going to be more and more difficult to grow food because we are seeing incredible swings in temperatures. We’re seeing all kinds of climate crises around the world and it’s making it more and more difficult for countries to grow food. At the same time, when we are in this environmental crisis, this government is paving over even more farmland than was paved over by the former Liberal government. This bill is of great concern to anybody who cares about the environment and also future food security in the province of Ontario.

I’ve got 45 seconds. I’ll just mention the other thing I’ve got to say: The government is really good at selling their bills. When they brought this one out, they announced that there were going to be no more tolls on Ontario roads and then they didn’t mention that—except the only road that has tolls is the 407, which the Conservatives sold to a private, for-profit, Spanish corporation at the time and sold a 99-year lease. So it’s not just we who are paying those tolls; our children and grandchildren are going to be paying those tolls forever. But they got this blurb out in the media, this message out that, hey, they’re going to remove tolls—except the one that exists.

The other thing this government should be doing, the 407—initially we paid for it and it was our asset. As taxpayers in Ontario, it was our asset. This government sold it off with a 99-year lease and then their tolls are so high that people can’t afford to drive on it, and because they can’t afford to drive on it, the 401 is much more congested. So the 407 was fined $1 billion for increasing congestion, for not having enough vehicles on the road and increasing congestion on other roads. Do you know what this government did? The response is that they waived the billion dollars because they said, “Oh, the taxpayers of Ontario don’t need that billion dollars back.”

You don’t get anything done if you don’t get it right. If you keep having to reverse, then you’re just spinning in circles and you’re not actually accomplishing anything.

That’s what’s been happening with this government’s housing plan. In order to build that 1.5 million homes over 10 years, we need to be starting 15,000 housing units per month in this province. Last month, there were 5,000 started, so only a third of what is needed to achieve that goal. So our housing shortage is exploding under this government because you’re not getting it done.

I would just contrast this with the British Columbia NDP. They are also building 5,000—started 5,000 housing units last month—but they’ve got a third of the population. So their housing starts are three times per capita what ours are in Ontario. The NDP in British Columbia are getting it done, and they’re getting it right.

Well, thank you, Madam Speaker. I listened very attentively to the member. I also want to acknowledge the late Mr. Ed Broadbent. He was a great Canadian, no matter where you sit as a parliamentarian in Canada.

Madam Speaker, the opposite of getting it done is not getting it done. The opposite of building roads and transit, infrastructure and hospitals is not doing it. So I just don’t understand, having listened to the member, why he feels all the actions that the government is taking to lay the seeds for people to come here, to have a job and to start a family—I’d like to ask him a simple question. Why does he feel that getting it done is not good for people who want to start a family, have a job here and contribute to our economy?

What the BC government is doing to build those houses is that they’re not afraid of building government housing. They’re not afraid of just rolling up their sleeves and saying, “Hey, in the government, we’re going to build housing.” Because that’s what we did from 1945 to 1995 in Ontario: the government built housing. The private sector was also building housing and we need the private sector as well, but the government wasn’t afraid of doing it and the government built the housing that made it affordable.

After the Second World War, the government was building the strawberry box war houses that you still see in communities across this province. They built it so that the soldiers would have a home to return to when they got here. The government did this. This government? Somehow, the Conservative Party—I don’t know what happened to them, but they call that a communist plan. I actually heard the member from Perth call it a communist plan.

So, what he really called was all the former Conservative Premiers who were building public housing, and that includes Bill Davis, George Drew, John Robarts, Leslie Frost—he called them all communists because they wanted to build housing because it’s a solution that works. The British Columbia NDP are not afraid of building housing; they’re doing it and they’re getting it done and they’re getting it right and people will have a place to live in British Columbia. I wish it was that case in Ontario.

The 413 is being built and it’s crossing 132 watersheds, and also there are 26 species that are at risk from the development of the 413. There are tens of thousands of acres of farmland that could be paved over with the 413, especially if it leads to more sprawl. It’s not the kind of housing that we need and it’s certainly not going to leave the next generation or the next seven generations with a healthy environment. That is the legacy that we have to leave the next generation.