When we last debated Bill 157, the member for Hamilton Mountain had the floor. She still has time on the clock.

I recognize the member for Hamilton Mountain.

It’s always a pleasure to be able to stand in my space on behalf of the people of Hamilton Mountain and to be able to put some input into the legislation that this government continues to put forward. This one, like many others, has a catchy title, has a lot of gimmicks, but not a lot to really, truly make a difference for the people of the province once again.

This is Bill 162, and wait for the title: Get it Done Act. Wow, have we heard that many times in the last six years. I’m pretty sure the Premier actually had—wasn’t it “get it done” nameplates made up for their desks? Wasn’t that a thing? “Get it done,” right? This has been the Premier’s shtick—

Interjection: For the people.

We hear those stories continue to hit the floor of this Legislature in hopes that the government actually will get it done and actually fund appropriately our services that people desperately need to be able to function. We’re seeing that in mental health and addictions. We’re seeing that in homelessness. We’re seeing that in our health care system. We’re seeing it in our education system. We see it in social services. We see it in the children’s aid society. I meet with them on a regular basis. They are completely underfunded. They have no idea how they’re going to be able to function under the current system. They’re working to keep families together and at home; proactive work to ensure that they’re creating stability in the home and they’re keeping the family unit together. Yet they can’t even manage to do that because they don’t have the funding that it takes. And when a family needs mental health supports, they can’t get them a meeting because it’s wait-lists. In Hamilton, I believe, for a child, it’s an 18-month wait for mental health services.

So what’s happening? We’re seeing parents actually giving their children up to the children’s aid society, praying that they’ll have the supports necessary to be able to help their kid. And what’s the children’s aid society doing? They’re bunking them in hotel rooms because they don’t have foster homes. They don’t have kinship. They have no supports. They don’t have beds or rooms for children’s mental health to be able to support these kids like they need. That would be something the government could get done. That would be something that we could get behind and say, “Yes, kids are our most valuable resource. Let’s get it done.”

The autism services: We’re seeing that we have over 60,000 kids on a wait-list. When this government came into power six years ago, we had 24,000 kids on the wait-list. This government likes to crow that 40,000 kids are getting service—that is so not true, and if they are getting services, it’s very minimal. They’re barely getting speech therapy, maybe a little bit in school if they can. They’re literally languishing on wait-lists.

Then, when they finally get a determination of needs meeting, which is the check box to see what level they’re at and what kind of services they get, to appeal that process is almost a year again. So now you have your next determination of needs meeting every year and you’re not even through your appeal process fighting the small amount of money that you received the year previous. If the government wanted to get that done, we could get behind it and get it done, but they don’t want to do that.

They want to take tolls off of highways that don’t have tolls, and the only toll that actually does exist on the 407, they’re going to keep it there. We tried to give them solutions. We said, “Here, get it done.” No way—they don’t want to hear solutions. We could have taken the trucks off the 403 and 401 and put them on the 407 and freed up some time. I bet you I would be able to drive home in less than three hours, for an hour drive, if we took some of those trucks off the road.

Again, I see members nodding their heads over there because they know these are good solutions. They could get it done if they had the will to actually want to help people in this province, but they don’t.

They’re going to charge them $7.50 for every six-month period for their driver’s licence fee—that’s going to do a lot. Statutory photo card of $3.50—okay.

Talk about fixing messes: Do you know how much time, Speaker, we’ve actually spent in the Legislature fixing messes for bringing forward bills, reversing bills—the whole thing? Listen to this: 27 wasted days here in the House and in committee debating bills and government repeals and reversals. Bill 124—you remember that—unconstitutional wage caps; Bill 28, the “notwithstanding” clause and education workers—boy, that was something that they didn’t get done. They had to get it done. They had to reverse it. They had to reverse their bad decisions. Bill 35, reversing Bill 28—although no time was spent because we let that go for unanimous consent because we were trying to help them get through a mess that they created, without spending a whole bunch of time here in the Legislature because they had already wasted so many days.

Bill 39 repealed the Duffins Rouge Agricultural Preserve Act. Bill 112, dissolving region of Peel; 136, reversing the greenbelt charges and the repeal of the DRAP act; 150, reversing urban boundary changes—and speaking of Bill 150, in this legislation they’re actually putting stuff back that they reversed in Bill 150.

Is this what we call getting it done, when we actually have true crises in this province? People are sleeping in tents in every community in our province. In every community we have people that are homeless, that are struggling with addictions, that can’t make ends meet. We have people who are going to work and they live in tents because they can’t afford the rent. They could have got that done. We’ve put several bills forward. They could have got that done, to actually make rent affordable in our province, and yet they’ve ignored that because they’re wasting time on their own shenanigans and then having to backtrack to repeal the information.

That’s a total of 72 hours in the Legislature, which is 19 days, and a total of eight days in committee—