The member from Cambridge is asking about the carbon tax. Honestly, what we’ve heard since October of last year is carbon tax and carbon tax and carbon tax. The Conservative government at the provincial level wants the people of Ontario to think that they’re fighting for them, but do you know what they’re doing, Speaker? They are petitioning us to write a really stern letter to the federal government. That’s the authority we have at this level. This is a strawman argument. We’re going to get a fancy ostrich-feathered pen, and we’re going to write a letter, or maybe we’ll do a fancy font or something.

This sounds like you’re fighting for affordability for people, but you’re not. The things you could do for people that are not performative, that are not writing a stern letter, where you can have people make at least minimum wage and not get ripped off by their employer while you can go after wage theft—that you ignore. But everything else, it’s just fluster.

If we can hire workers making a decent wage, we should pay them the decent wage. We shouldn’t pay an agency an extra $1,500 on top of that to provide the services. That would be better for us. That would bring our taxes down. That would be more affordable for hospitals and health care.

We could build affordable housing and define what it means and not pretend it is affordable and say things like “attainable.” The newest iPhone is attainable but not affordable to everybody.

The other thing is, all this bill does is say, if you’re going to bring something in, there’s going to be a referendum. It is sabre-rattling. It doesn’t amount to anything. It is just pretending you are doing something. We can stop talking about this, this thing that we don’t have direct control over, and we can help people put money in their pockets by doing simple things like removing the digital workers’ rights protection act so people can make minimum wage per hour and not less than minimum wage. That’s what we need to focus on: putting money in people’s pockets in a substantial way and not colouring around the edges.