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 And then they got something else done: They repealed the bills.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 This was just repealed a couple of weeks ago, after the Court of Appeal of Ontario overturned it and said this is an unconstitutional violation of the charter rights of public sector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 They threatened a general strike, and the next week the government repealed Bill 28.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to Patrick Brown, the dissolution was going to cost the taxpayers in Mississauga and Peel region $1.3 billion, so they repealed that one.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.