I thank the member for her statement.

I was working within the courts during COVID, before and after, and it was remarkable, actually, because they went from a system where we filed papers to get things done. The AG flicked a switch over the course of a few weeks, and they hit the gas and they modified and they modernized the courts in a way that literally was unprecedented when it comes to speed. He should actually be applauded for that because that was absolutely remarkable. I watched it happen in real time, and I have a real concept of how that was difficult for the legal community. But the courts worked throughout the pandemic.

I’m just wondering, don’t you think these initiatives were positive? What would be the alternative had we not been able to modernize the way we have through this new legislation?

As all Ontarians know, the NDP and the Liberals have a strong passion to protect offenders by defunding the police and also freeing the offenders back to the street ASAP.

This government’s Enhancing Access to Justice Act, 2023, would, if passed, make it easier for more victims of crime to sue an offender for emotional distress and also increase access to justice for victims by making changes to the Victims’ Bill of Rights, 1995, and its regulations, allowing victims to sue for emotional distress and related bodily harm for more crimes, including terrorism, motor vehicle theft, human trafficking etc.

So what specific policies in this proposed legislation does the member have issues with?

I thought it was ironic that the government question that just came before talked about passion with regard to crime. Ironically, it seems that the government does have passion when it comes to crime, but when it comes to helping victims, all the passion goes out of the room; there’s no passion whatsoever. In fact, they got rid of the victim compensation board, and they’ve replaced it with something that gives far less.

When people become victims of violence, their families can be destroyed. They need help. They’re counting on a government. And yet, this government has no passion to help those victims. Why?

Speaker, I move that the question now be put.

On division.

Next question?

Is it the pleasure of the House that the motion carry? I heard a no.

All those in favour of the motion that the question be now put, please say “aye.”

All those opposed to the motion that the question be now put, please say “nay.”

In my opinion, the ayes have it.

MPP Downey has moved third reading of Bill 157, An Act to amend various Acts in relation to the courts and other justice matters.

Is it the pleasure of the House that the motion carry?

I declare the motion carried.

Be it resolved that the bill do now pass and be entitled as in the motion.

Third reading agreed to.

Resuming the debate adjourned on February 29, 2024, on the motion for second reading of the following bill:

Bill 162, An Act to enact the Protecting Against Carbon Taxes Act, 2024 and amend various Acts / Projet de loi 162, Loi édictant la Loi de 2024 sur la protection contre les taxes sur le carbone et modifiant diverses lois.

Amending the environmental stuff.

It’s always an honour to speak in the House—and I hope someone can hand me a briefing note.

The working title is the Get It Done Act. A lot of parts of this bill came out in the press before we actually saw the legislation. I have to admit that the first thing that came to my mind when I heard “Get It Done” bill—in my part of the world, it’s the “get ’er done.” I thought, they’ve finally come to a new low: They’ve hired Larry the Cable Guy to write their legislation. But at least Larry is funny.

In my part of the world, when you say “get ’er done,” it doesn’t really mean quality; it doesn’t mean careful. It just means “just get ’er done.” You don’t hire a carpenter who just gets ’er done. It’s just not something that exudes confidence.

As we went farther and farther, more reports and more reports—

Laughter.

If you will recall, at some point the Ford government decided to remove the need for licence plate stickers for registration— get ’er done. They seem to have forgotten that you still needed to remind people to register their plates—when it came to where they realized that is when police started to pull people over because their plates weren’t registered. I know the police were doing that because they pulled me over as well—get ’er done. I, like many other Ontarians—we have busy lives and just didn’t realize. In true—I don’t think it’s Larry the Cable Guy fashion; this one is more Homer Simpson. D’oh. We need to make sure that people don’t get charged because we no longer need them to register their cars. That’s a big part of the “get ’er done” bill.

Interjections.

Something else that the “get ’er done” bill—I can’t get the “get ’er done” out of my head. There’s another analogy that I could compare this with, but I’m not sure if I can go there.

After I thought of Larry the Cable Guy and then Homer Simpson, what this bill really reminds me of—and my own party might not even like this analogy—the Dukes of Hazzard.

We all know who Boss Hogg is. We don’t have to go any further with Boss Hogg, right? We had—and it had been a long time, so I’ll think. I think the sheriff was Rosco P. Coltrane—

Interjections.

Enos was the apologist. Deep down, he knew what the Boss and Rosco were trying to do just wasn’t 100%—it was more “get ’er done” than it was “let’s make this work and let’s make it work for everybody.”

Really, the question for me is, who are the Roscos on the other side and who are the Enoses?

The Get It Done Act reminds me and many other Ontarians—it seems tired.

I was recently at the annual meeting, the annual banquet, of Beef Farmers of Ontario. I’m pretty sure you can’t get a much more conservative group than Beef Farmers of Ontario. We were talking about Get It Done—and I respect the people I was talking to. They were Conservatives; no doubt about it—old-style Conservatives, like, “Do things right.” They described this bill as gimmicky. Even the title, Get It Done—come on. “Get ’er done.” No.

This is the bill that takes the tolls off where there are no tolls?

This is the bill that tries to force future governments to have referendums on carbon pricing, except for the carbon-pricing regime that this government already employs. Let’s make it clear: This government does have a carbon-pricing regime, but Ontarians can’t vote on that one, but for any subsequent one, they can have a referendum.

There are many other things that could have had referendums. Perhaps a referendum on the greenbelt, before they—

To the government’s credit, they made a mistake and they retracted. But if they had had a referendum early on—“Do you want to destroy the greenbelt?”—I think Ontarians would have said a loud no. It would have saved them a lot of grief.

Applause.

It was just like this, and it was done.

You know, the Get It Done Act is probably one of the best names I can think of for everything that our government has been doing for the last several years.

I actually got into politics—and I appreciate that the member is concerned about his constituents and his community, as well as anybody in this room. But I remember knocking on doors when I wasn’t a politician and wondering—and I represent Thornhill. It doesn’t have a subway. It hadn’t had a subway. It hadn’t gone north of Finch for decades, and it was traumatic, literally, to get cars up and down the corridor. I would knock on doors, as I said, as a young mother, saying, “When are we going to get this infrastructure in? When is it going to happen?” Previous governments did not get it done but, God bless us, because you know what? I’m at Finch subway station, they’re digging and they’re getting things ready. We’re getting it done, and that’s what we do.

And a well-deserved round of applause.

It’s now time for questions.

Speaker, you know, you can’t make this up. This government put out these blue plates not that many years ago. Those plates couldn’t be seen in bad weather, couldn’t be seen in the light of day, they couldn’t be seen in the night, and it was an embarrassment, right? Because border officials, officers were saying, “Guys, get it done. Get these plates off. They’re a safety issue. They’re a safety issue”—over 150,000 on the road.

And so what did this government do? The minister came out and he announced a plan. Do you know what he announced the plan to get it done was? To let weathering and rust take care of the plates. The plan was to do nothing.

My question is, why can’t this government get it done right?

This government fails to see the ramifications—even if it’s smallest changes to legislation that affect people’s lives who literally have to pay the price, they pay figuratively and literally.

I also think this government’s tendency to pass hasty legislation and figure it out later is negatively impacting our communities time and time again, and I’ll give an example. Tom is one of my constituents. He got pulled over and got a $300—

Interjection.

Tom got a ticket because his driver’s licence expired—$300, Speaker. Now, Tom honestly and genuinely didn’t know his licence was expired because this government stopped sending out notices to people, but they forgot to tell people.

I’d like to ask the member, now that Tom has received a $300 fine, what would you think this government would say to Tom and will they take ownership for the mismanagement that they’ve created for people like Tom who got a $300 fine for not having a licence?

Congratulations to the member on a wonderful speech.

I know the member is from northern Ontario. I am from Brampton, which is north of here but not quite north Ontario, and I heat my home with natural gas, so I pay carbon tax on that. I drive in to work—took the train today, but about half the time, I drive in to work—and pay the carbon tax on that one. When I go to the grocery store—I’m not old enough to remember what groceries used to cost, but they certainly seem to cost a lot of money—I pay the carbon tax on that.

So I guess I’m wondering—the member, I presume, heats his home and drives a car and pays for groceries, so I’m just wondering how much carbon tax does the member pay and, I guess, if we had a referendum on implementing a carbon tax, how would the member vote on that referendum? Would he vote yes or would he vote no?

I agree with the member from Thornhill. This government is certainly digging. They’ve been digging a hole for a long time, and deeper and deeper it gets.

But I want to ask you about tolls. The government says we’re banning tolls. A big news release goes out all across Ontario with the news headlines saying, “We’re banning tolls.” But in actual fact, they’re part of a party that ensured there would be tolls on the 407 in perpetuity and that they would increase. But here’s the kicker: They’ve got a piece of highway from Brock, not quite going up to Peterborough on the 115, that they own, so they’re outlawing tolls except they’re not outlawed on the piece of road that they own. Can you explain that to me?

Next question?

Thank you to the member from Brampton. That’s actually a great question. I don’t pay as much current carbon tax as you might think because I heat with wood. So I spend a lot of time chopping wood.

But if we had to—we have voted several times in this House against the federal carbon tax. We, as a party, have never supported the current federal carbon tax. We do believe there should be some kind of pricing regime to—we voted for cap-and-trade, which is actually pretty close to what your government has implemented. Yes, you don’t want to talk about it. You don’t want to talk about it, but we have never been in favour of the carbon tax. At least, I have never voted for the carbon tax, and I’ve been here for a long time.

I distinctly remember: “We’re going to find a way to remove the blue plates.” And now they’ve found a way. They’re just going to wait until they fall off, which is kind of funny, because you would think if you were designing a new plate, you would want one that would last a long, long time. You know, if you’re not happy with the old ones, you’re going to design something—they’re kind of more plastic. I don’t know. They’re much different, so I’m assuming they designed them to last a lot longer, but it doesn’t seem to be the case.

So the new plan is we just wait long enough and they’ll fall apart, and that seems to be kind of emblematic about how a lot of things in this government run: Just wait long enough and it will fall apart.

But I do recall long before I was here that actually—and we’re going to get a lot of complaints from the other side—the Rae government was building a subway and the Harris government came and filled it with concrete, capped it off. So like the greenbelt—get ’er done—wanting to pave it over and then having to back off. Challenging the Constitution—getting ’er done—and having to back away. That’s emblematic of getting ’er done.

Boy, I can’t resist the opportunity to debate the “get it done wrong” act. And let me tell you why it’s getting it done wrong, Speaker: This act is going to make the affordability crisis worse and it’s going to make the climate crisis worse.

Let’s start with the way this bill is imposing expensive sprawl onto communities in this province. Speaker, it takes two and a half times more money to service sprawl and to build the infrastructure for sprawl than it does to actually get it done building homes that people can afford in the communities they know and love. So this government, first of all, imposed sprawl on municipalities. Then they said, “No, we’re going to backtrack on that and not impose sprawl on municipalities.” Now they’re going to backtrack on the backtrack to impose sprawl on municipalities once again through enforced boundary expansions in this act.

Now, it would be so much cheaper for people, for municipalities, for government, for all of us if the government would just simply legalize housing, say yes to fourplexes and four-storey as of right across the province, so we can build homes that people can afford in the communities they love. If they would legalize building missing middle housing, six to 11 storeys, along major transit and transportation corridors, we could actually build homes that people can afford, and municipalities could actually afford to build the servicing for those homes. But instead, the government has been focusing their time, money and attention on sprawl that is there to benefit speculators and not people. So we’re going to be looking at property tax increases all across the province. We’re seeing municipalities everywhere in Ontario having to jack up property taxes to primarily line the pockets of speculators who are going to be the primary beneficiaries of the sprawl agenda.

So why is that going to make the climate crisis worse? Well, it’s going to pave over our farms, forests and wetlands—the very lands that feed us, the lands that protect us from the escalating costs of climate-fuelled extreme weather events.

So then, the government, in this “get it done wrong” act, basically did something I didn’t think the government could do: They’re actually going to even make the Environmental Assessment Act worse. Why are they going to make the Environmental Assessment Act worse? So they can speed up the construction of Highway 413, the $10-billion boondoggle that will save people 60 seconds when we have a highway just a few kilometres south of there that’s underutilized, underused, that we could actually divert truck traffic onto, again saving taxpayers money.

Interjection.

So the government had an opportunity to avoid all these costs, all this destruction, and actually say, “We’ll get rid of tolls on the one highway there are actually tolls on,” instead of talking about some mythical highway somewhere in the future.

Speaker, where else is it going to make the climate and affordability crisis worse? Well, if the government was serious about actually having a plan to address the climate crisis and set Ontario up for success in the emerging climate economy, they could actually take over the federal carbon pricing mechanism and up the rebate, and the Premier could write cheques to people as part of their rebate. But instead, the government wants to take our rebate away from us and disincentivize economic activity to lead to decarbonization, where $1.8 trillion was invested last year globally. We could be attracting that investment in Ontario, reducing climate pollution, creating jobs and putting more money in people’s pockets by raising rebate cheques.

I want to conclude with this whole licence plate scheme. I was the only MPP in the House—I’ll proudly say this—who got up and made it clear that I voted against this whole licence plate scheme. It passed on a voice vote. I got up and said, “Hey, I’m the one person opposed to it.” Do you know why I’m opposed to it, Speaker? It cost us $2 billion in the first year, $1.5 billion each and every year. So when people talk about not having money for health care, not having money for education, not having money for housing affordability, there’s where we could find money. The government is taking it away from us.

The government has a role to play in making life better and more affordable for people to ensure that people have access to the care and services they need. We can do that if we say things like, “Yes, I’ll pay $120 for my licence sticker, because I know it’s going to raise $1.5 billion to make my community a better, more caring place.”

I’m going to say something as an electric vehicle driver: One of the things I oftentimes hear from Conservatives is, “How are we going to pay for roads when all you folks start driving EVs and we no longer collect the gas tax from you because we’re in EVs?” Well, one of the ways that we can collect money to actually support the maintenance, safety, upkeep of our roads is to actually have a licence sticker fee that even electric vehicle drivers would pay for, that I would be happy to pay for, because we know that fuel taxes are going to go down as people switch to electric vehicles. We know that, so I just want to be honest with people about how we can pay for things in this province—

I want to thank the member for his always-eloquent speech. I wanted to ask a question of him: When this was first debated at second reading, a government member got up and spoke that tolls weren’t the way to go; that it was actually gas tax that was the way to go, that it was sensible, that it was smart. A PC Conservative Ford government member said that the gas tax was the way to go. In fact, he sits way over on that side. I just wanted to ask what the member thought about this Conservative government member talking about gas tax being the way to go.