A question for the member from Etobicoke–Lakeshore: Recently, the Premier made some disturbing statements about his desire to increase political influence over judicial candidates. His comments have caused alarm in the legal community and lowered the public’s trust in Ontario’s justice system. During committee, this government could have taken a step to reverse this damage by voting for an NDP amendment that would improve the independence of the Judicial Appointments Advisory Committee.

Does this member agree that this government should be doing everything it can to improve public trust after the Premier’s disturbing comments?

I want to thank both the speakers for their speeches today. My question revolves around construction workers. I know there are some impacts in this bill that may be of use to them. Unfortunately, in my career, I’ve witnessed two construction deaths on projects that I have been involved with.

Our construction workers are building roads, highways, schools, hospitals and homes and, really, I know that our government wants to support the safety and well-being of construction workers across the province. So one aspect that has received attention in this bill, especially by the industry and many of my constituents, involves the recommendations for construction-related death investigations. Madam Speaker, may the members please explain what those changes could look like?

Thank you to the member for that question. Having worked in the construction sector for a number of years before I came to this place, I certainly understand the importance to the families, to the companies and, of course, to society as a whole.

One of the goals in the upgrade is that we want to know that workers are able to come back home safely at the end of every day, as my colleague from Etobicoke–Lakeshore said. This review would identify issues, trends and ensure recommendations that come from an inquest are provided on a timely basis, not four years, not 10 years after the incident. It currently takes approximately three years, as the member said, from the time of a death to complete an inquest. That’s way too long. Sometimes there are delays for a legitimate reason because of ongoing investigations. This will encapsulate all that—and hopefully, no more than 18 months from the time of an occurrence for a report.

We’re going to move to questions.

Next question?

Thank you to the members for their debate this morning.

We definitely have seen a court system in crisis. We’ve seen many cases being thrown out due to the lack of staffing in the courthouses, and we know that this is due to—

Point of order.

I love it, folks, when the NDP—they can’t say anything bad about a piece of legislation, so when we’re debating that piece of legislation they talk about anything else other than the piece of legislation. I’m looking forward to their full support on this bill that we’re discussing today.

What I wanted to ask the member from Etobicoke–Lakeshore about, because I know what a fierce advocate she is for victims and access to justice: I was wondering, getting back to the bill that we’re actually talking about—they could just not stand up and ask questions at all if they don’t want to talk about this—what it means to her and what it will mean for victims of crime, some of the changes that we’re making in this piece of legislation.

I will allow the member to finish her question, which needs to be about the bill.

Thank you to the member for Hamilton Mountain for the question. A number of the changes that are looked at here are going to make it easier for victims of crime, such as terrorism, vehicle theft, human trafficking and targeting of religious officials. They will also protect children and youth by banning the growth of recreational cannabis in homes that offer child care services and, even more important, limit interruptions to child protection trials that happen when a judge is appointed to another court. They will improve the safety and well-being of construction workers and also enhance access to justice for women who have been either trafficked and/or victims of intimate partner violence. These are all things that are intimated and expected to come from this bill.

It’s an honour to rise today to talk to Bill 157, the access to justice act. I’m going to talk about two different aspects of access to justice. Access to justice is a fundamental democratic right. It’s actually enshrined in our democratic Charter of Rights and Freedoms. There are a number of legal rights. Number 11 is actually about access to justice, so I’m going to talk about that. I am the critic for democratic reform, so I am taking this issue from the democratic rights perspective.

There have been by this government a number of attacks on our democratic rights in this province. Because of those attacks—including the changing of the rules of Toronto’s municipal election; they changed the rules midway through the campaign—when that came back from the Supreme Court, the Supreme Court ruled in a 5-4 decision that Canadians do not have the right to democratic municipal elections. Most people don’t know that. That’s why I keep repeating it in this Legislature, because people need to be aware that we do not have the right to democratic municipal elections.

This is something that we need to get restored, because I think for the last 160 years that we’ve been a country, when people go to the polls in a municipal election, they’re assuming that the X that they mark on the ballot is the highest law in the land and that it cannot be overruled, but that’s not the case in Canada. That’s not the case in Ontario. That’s something that we need to restore.

The other action from this government is that once they got that—that was in 2021 that the Supreme Court decision came back—once they got that decision, they passed what were called strong-mayor bills. And those strong-mayor bills stripped the majority of municipalities of the right to majority vote democracy. So in the majority of municipalities, the majority of Ontarians do not have the right to majority vote democracy any more.

The other thing that this government has done that’s an attack on our democratic rights is that they have introduced three bills in this Legislature that utilized the “notwithstanding” clause. It’s a bit of a euphemism, the “notwithstanding” clause. The “notwithstanding” clause is from section 33 of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. I was talking to my colleague from Humber River–Black Creek and he said that when I speak, I often sound like a friendly professor. That’s the attitude that I’m trying to have today, the friendly professor, because I really want people—

Interjection.

I just want people to be aware of how important our democratic rights are and how they’re being attacked and being taken away under this government, including our right to access to justice.

Section 33, the “notwithstanding” clause, actually reads that a provincial Legislature or the federal government can pass a piece of that “shall operate notwithstanding a provision included in section 2 or sections 7 to 15 of this charter.”

Section 2 of the Charter of Rights: What they’re doing is they’re saying a provincial Legislature can pass a piece of legislation that overrides section 2, which is our fundamental freedoms: our freedom of speech, our freedom of religion, our freedom of conscience, our freedom of association. All those fundamental freedoms have been overridden by this government three times, with three separate pieces of legislation.

Sections 7 through 15 of the charter include our equality rights. Section 11 is our rights in legal proceedings. Specifically, in section 11 it says the right to an independent and impartial judge. We have a charter right to an independent and impartial judge if we have to go before a court. This government has passed three pieces of legislation that strip Ontarians of that right.

Now, what’s most concerning: Over the last couple of years, the Conservative Attorney General and the Conservative Premier have taken steps to strip us of that right to an impartial and independent judge. It started in 2019 when the Attorney General said that he wanted to appoint like-minded judges. He wanted to have judges who had similar values to his own.

Then, in 2020, we found out through the media that the Attorney General was actually interviewing Chief Justice candidates. These people were applying to be the Chief Justice of the Ontario Court of Justice, and the Attorney General was personally interviewing them.

Then, in 2021, the government passed Bill 245, which stripped the Judicial Appointments Advisory Committee of their power. This Judicial Appointments Advisory Committee are the ones who make recommendations. They’re the ones who are supposed to interview judicial candidates. They’re supposed to make recommendations to the Attorney General, and the Attorney General is supposed to choose one or however many they need from that list. But instead, the government passed a piece of legislation that stripped that independent committee of most of their powers. So this government is now appointing the judges directly—

This part about this principle of having impartial and independent judges—I asked the Attorney General in question period a few days ago. I said, “When you were interviewing candidates for the Chief Justice position, what questions did you ask?” I was thinking about this because, last week, the Premier said that he did not want to appoint NDP or Liberal judges; obviously, he wants to appoint Conservative judges. The Attorney General reports to the Premier, so what questions is the Attorney General asking these judicial candidates in this interview process?

I asked him that. I said, “Do you ask the judicial appointments, ‘Which party do you vote for?’ Do you ask, ‘What donations have you made?’”

Madam Speaker, a point of order?

Yes, it’s back to that amendment to restore the powers of the Judicial Appointments Advisory Committee. That’s what I’m considering about.

I also asked the Attorney General: Did he think that it was appropriate for a government that’s under criminal investigation to be appointing judges? And I will read his response. He said, “There were four candidates who applied to become the Chief Justice, and as I’m charged with making that decision—the establishment thought that maybe they should make the decision for me and give me a recommendation.” Well, that’s not what the establishment thought; that’s the role of the Judicial Appointments Advisory Committee that the NDP is fighting to have restored through this legislation.

The Attorney General said, “I thought that wasn’t really the appropriate way to go forward. I sat down with each candidate for an hour. Politics never came up. It’s not appropriate. The opposition may not understand. Judges don’t take direction and it would be foolish to try. It would be crossing a line.”

So I just want to harp on this for a second. The Attorney General, who was interviewing candidates because he wanted candidates, in his own words, with similar values and views to his own, and who is reporting to a Premier who wants Conservative and not NDP or Liberal judges appointed, said in these interviews, “Politics never came up. It’s not appropriate.” So there’s a contradiction. There’s a hypocrisy here, in that if we are to have access to independent and impartial judges, then he should not be interviewing them. He should not be asking them questions. In his own words, “It’s not appropriate.” His actions and the words of the Premier are not appropriate. So he should be saying to the Premier, “The actions, the words that you said were not appropriate.”

Interjection.

The other response that the Attorney General made to a question about these judicial appointments and the powers of the Judicial Appointments Advisory Committee was that he said that the Liberals appointed Liberal judges.

I used to be a high school teacher, and often kids do things that they’re not supposed to do. It’s part of being a teenager. And then when you call them in, they sit before you and you say, “Look, you did this thing. You weren’t supposed to do it. You broke the rules,” they’ll often say—their first response is often, “Well, Jimmy did it first.” Okay.

I’ve got to say, the Attorney General’s response that, “Yes, we’re trying to appoint Conservative judges, but the Liberals did it first,” it’s sort of like Jimmy’s response. The response that every teacher gives is, “If Jimmy jumped off a cliff, would you jump off a cliff?” If the Liberals appointed partisan judges, should you appoint partisan judges? No. In the words of the Attorney General, “It’s not appropriate.” It’s not appropriate to be appointing partisan judges. It’s not appropriate for the Attorney General to be interviewing, having private interviews with candidates for the Chief Justice position.

And the most recent twist on this, on how we are going to get independent and impartial judges, is that yesterday the Attorney General said in the media that the judges become independent after they are appointed. So they go through a process where the Attorney General interviews them. He determines whether they have appropriate Conservative credentials. He determines whether they have values that align with his own. Then, after they’ve been appointed, they become independent. But what he’s missing there is that, in section 11 of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, it doesn’t just say that the judge has to be independent. And I don’t know that you become independent after you’ve been vetted, chosen and hired by somebody who’s asking you about your values and trying to align them with their own—

Interjections.

The reason that I bring it up here is that we’ve already seen bias, or evidence that seems to point to bias, in some of the tribunals and the tribunal appointments by this government.

There’s the Ontario Land Tribunal. The Ontario Land Tribunal is where community members or municipalities who think that a developer—or when a developer tries to build something that’s beyond what’s allowed within the official plan of a community, they can go to the Ontario Land Tribunal. The community members and the municipality can take them there. This government has appointed a bunch of those overseeing the tribunal, and the Hamilton Spectator said that 97% of the decisions are now in favour of developers. This is the kind of bias.

How independent are those tribunal appointees after they’ve been appointed if 97% of the time they’re actually favouring developers? It’s scary. It’s scary because it shows the kind of bias that can creep into a system if the government is making partisan appointments. We do not want to see that happen in our courts.

The other thing that this government has done, when we’re talking about access to justice: They cut our legal aid. When they got into power in 2018, one of the first things they did was they cut legal aid by 30%, or $133 million, per year. The shame of this is that it means that low-income people do not have access to a lawyer. Even the cut-off for legal aid is $17,000 per year. If your annual income is beyond $17,000 per year, you can’t even access legal aid.

When you think about all the challenges—whatever issue that people have to go to courts about, if they’re being renovicted or demovicted or illegally evicted and they need to go before a tribunal, they’re not able to access legal aid if they make more than $17,000. Well, if you’re able to survive in this province on $17,000 per year, then you’re doing something incredible. You sure as heck do not have another $10,000 or $20,000 to hire a lawyer if you’re being illegally evicted from your place.

The government is talking about efficiency in this bill. The Enhancing Access to Justice Act is supposed to improve the efficiency of our court system. But the Chief Justice of Ontario George Strathy—this is from a newspaper article—said, “What we judges can say is that reducing legal representation for the most vulnerable members of society does not save money. It increases trial times, places greater demands on public services, and ultimately delays and increases the cost of legal proceedings for everyone.”

If the government wants to increase access to justice, the first thing that should be in this bill is not just a restoration of that 33% of legal aid funding that they cut but, actually, an increase in legal aid funding, so that people who need a lawyer can access a lawyer, so that they’re not going into courts without the proper documents, without proper representation, and they’re not clogging up our courts as the judge tries to navigate through somebody who is not prepared.

The other thing that the government needs to do in order to increase access to justice is to end the chaos that’s happening in our courts. I’ll give the case of Emily. This was in the media a little while ago. She was raped in her home. She took the rapist to court. She went to the hospital. She went to trial. She actually testified in the trial. You’ve got to think about the courage that it takes to go through all of those steps in order to have your day in court and in order to see justice.

What happened was, after she had already testified, the delays in the court case—and these were caused by staffing shortages in court and by the chaos created by this government in our court system—went beyond 18 months.

People have a charter right. The person charged has a charter right to have a trial within an allotted time, and that allotted time is usually 18 months. So when it hit 18 months, the judge threw out the case.

So this woman had gone through all of the trauma of having to relive that experience, of having to go to the police and go to the hospital and go to court and actually testify with the person that she’s complaining about in the courts, and then to have the trial thrown out on a technicality, on the fact that this government has not provided enough funding for our courts.

And one of the judges, Judge Jones, in this decision about this case said, “This case should serve as a chilling reminder that this inexcusable state of affairs must never be allowed to happen again.” He attributed it to the inappropriate funding for the courts, that there isn’t enough funding. And this government has actually just cut the base funding—in their fall economic statement, they just cut the base funding for our courts.

So when this government is talking about access to justice, they need to increase the base funding in our courts so that we have the staff in our courts so that trials can be heard on time, so that trials and cases like this are not thrown out.

They need to restore the funding for our legal aid services so that everybody who needs access to legal aid will have access to legal aid.

Most important of all, they need to restore the impartial and independent process for appointing judges. We cannot have partisan judges appointed in this province. It’s a violation of the rights of all of us under the charter to an independent and impartial judiciary.

Order.

Start the clock. The member for Spadina–Fort York can continue.

Thank you to the member for Spadina–Fort York. During committee for Bill 157, government members voted down a motion to increase access to legal aid. We know that when more people have access to legal aid, they get their fair day in court. It can speed up processes because people are not representing themselves. They’re not well informed, because they’re not lawyers, on how the process works.

How does a lack of access to legal aid affect residents in your riding?

I believe the member from Etobicoke–Lakeshore is talking about the budget bill. And the budget bill—the way that this House works and the game that’s played is that they always say, “Oh, you voted against this. You voted against this.” Well, in a budget bill, there are all kinds of things.

There’s a gross underfunding of our public health care and our public education system. Under this government, there’s been an inflationary cut of $1,200 per student in our schools. That’s what’s in the budget. And there may be some good things—some funding for transit and things—in that budget as well, but we don’t get to pick and choose.

And so we voted against the budget because we believe in public education and public health care. This government was underfunding them in order to create a crisis, in order to privatize those systems.

So no, we’re not going to vote for the privatization of those services. We will hear this again and again. The government will always say, “Oh, you voted against this,” and they will cherry-pick something—

I’ve sat on committees for the last five years. Many times, we’ve brought in friendly amendments to pieces of legislation. There was a piece of legislation about expanding broadband to rural communities, and it was supposed to be—in their speeches, they all talked about rural, remote and Indigenous communities, but it was nowhere in the bill. We brought in amendments just to insert those words, and the government voted them down.

They do not understand that the role of the Parliament and the role of democracy is to listen to the other side and to take that into account so that you can improve the legislation so that you’re not making so many mistakes and that you’re not having to reverse every other bill that this government passes—

These things are urgent and need to be heard. But instead of having a lawyer so that the process can be heard and a decision made and people can move on, the court’s time is being taken up—

I listened with interest to the member from Spadina–Fort York’s speech. I noted with interest that while he had some suggestions on things that could have been put into the bill, he actually had no criticism of the bill. So my question is, will the member from Spadina–Fort York and his caucus be voting in favour of this bill when debate is finished?

We’re making it easier for victims of crime to sue an offender. We’re protecting children and youth in this piece of legislation. We’re going to limit interruptions to child protection trials. So many good things that I think we all agree on in this House are being put into this piece of legislation. I’m not going to put the member on the spot on whether he’ll support this or not, but if the opposition chooses not to support this piece of legislation, what would that member say to someone in his riding who asked him about why he didn’t support this legislation, seeing as the NDP has no criticism of the piece of legislation?

Entertaining discussion, as always, this morning. I was intrigued, my friend from Spadina–Fort York, how often you’re interrupted because I’m starting to realize that the government really doesn’t like criticism. Really—they don’t like it internally. We’ve have had five people other there jump ship. There’s probably going to be more. We have a Premier under criminal investigation by the RCMP, and you keep getting interrupted.

My question is this, my friend from Spadina–Fort York: Why does this government have such a hard time hearing criticism? Do you think that might be why they want to hand-pick judges, they want to hand-pick people that mirror their values?

And on transit, I have to just say for the record, the member for Etobicoke–Lakeshore, right now, her crowning achievement is a hole in the ground at Mimico station. It’s not much to brag about.

It was certainly an interesting perspective of something; it wasn’t really about the bill. So I want to continue on the questioning of transit. I know the member opposite lives in Spadina–Fort York. I know that area extremely well as I used to live in his riding.

It has the GO trains. We have Exhibition Station. We’re going to grow that. We have the 509 streetcar. You have so many streetcars. Everybody takes transit in that community because you don’t want to have a car in downtown Toronto. It’s almost impossible to have a car. There’s nowhere to park.

I’m wondering the NDP and the member opposite voted against historic investments into our transit system.

We’re going to move to questions.

We’re going to move to the next question.

Next question?

Next question?

Next question?