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.

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?