I’m very pleased to be able to stand in my place as the proud member representing Oshawa in this House.

Actually, it’s an important conversation that we’ve been having. We’re discussing Bill 157, the so-called Enhancing Access to Justice Act. This is a significantly sized bill, in that it has 19 schedules, 19 separate areas of focus in this bill. It’s possible to agree with lots of stuff that the government does and still have more to pull—because this is a missed opportunity. When you title a bill the Enhancing Access to Justice Act, I think people might get their hopes up, especially those thousands and thousands of people who are standing in a queue or waiting for their day in court, so to speak, waiting for their tribunal hearing, hoping that they can have legal support or some guidance through our chaotic systems. I say “chaotic” not to undermine them, but I think right now, we’ve seen such a degradation in our systems. And I’ll speak about that later—especially our tribunal system.

We’re at a point that if the government doesn’t really listen to the folks who are giving them good advice on how to make things better, we’re going to see things get really bad, even worse than they are now, and quickly. So, Speaker, what we have here, we have a bill—and I think I’m going to stand here, as a New Democrat, and say hopefully all of us, but certainly those of us on this side believe that everyone in Ontario deserves equal access to justice.

There have been years of this government; the government before, which was the same government; the government before that, which some days I feel like it’s the same government—they have underfunded and cut programs that have left Ontario’s court system in crisis. There are unprecedented delays and a massive court case backlog. We have seen cases, and the member who serves as our justice critic shared some very tough-to-listen-to stories about people whose cases have not had their day in court, and the perpetrators of very violent and terrible acts against them have been allowed to walk free.

That speaks to the problem in our court system because cases, including those involving the sexual assault of a minor, impaired driving and other serious, violent acts, are being thrown out because they’re moving too slowly through the courts. Many courtrooms are closed due to staffing shortages, others due to poor states of repair. Some are actually physically falling apart. There’s a range of challenges.

The Conservatives have dramatically cut legal aid and made it even harder for many Ontarians to access justice.

As I said, there are 19 schedules in this bill. Unfortunately, they fail to address some of the biggest challenges, not to say that they don’t address some of the pieces. There are some—I will say random, and that’s not even to diminish them, but there’s kind of a smattering of changes. I’m curious to know who requested some of them, because when we hear stakeholder groups across the province clamouring for change and support, those big issues are not addressed in this piece of legislation.

I would say the bill is disappointing. It touches on many issues that desperately need improvement, but it doesn’t meet the moment to address and fix those issues that the bill mentions. It recognizes that people are talking about it, but here we don’t see the fixes.

I will say, as I mentioned, that our justice system is in crisis. A case having to do with sexual assault of a minor and, as I said, drunk driving and other violence—they’re moving too slowly through the court system, so they have been thrown out, sometimes due to closed courtrooms.

I will say that the minister responsible for this file—this is not his first day. This is a minister who I will give credit where credit is due—there are some members over there for whom I wouldn’t be so quick to say this, but this particular minister is bright and capable of understanding these challenges. So I do believe that the minister knows how complicated these challenges are. We would hope that by this point in the journey with this government, we were further along to fixing them, especially when many solutions have been offered.

The government has been making some financial investments, for example, in the tribunal system. And yet, it’s so bad. It’s the worst that we’ve seen it. So money isn’t quite enough when we’re dealing with systemic challenges.

Speaker, one of the things that I would like to talk about as we’re standing here debating a bill called Enhancing Access to Justice Act—folks in our community right now have been seized with the story of the Premier now quadrupling down—is it still only quadrupling? Has he quintupled yet?