I just want to do a point of order. I just wanted to recognize my northern colleague MPP Bourgouin, the MPP from Mushkegowuk–James Bay. It’s his birthday.

“Family caregiver” is a term used for a family member, friend or person of choice who gives care to someone who has care needs due to a disability, a physical, neurological or mental condition, chronic illness, frailty or age.

The bill would proclaim the first Tuesday in April of each year as Family Caregiver Day.

Mr. Mantha moved first reading of the following bill:

Bill 182, An Act to proclaim Waterpower Day / Projet de loi 182, Loi proclamant la Journée de l’énergie hydraulique.

I recognize the government House leader.

I don’t think I have a heck of a lot of time left, so I will continue on.

I want to thank the member for Peterborough for his very lengthy petition, and I thank him for this because it highlights the challenges with petitions and why we are proposing within this package of amendments to change how petitions are accomplished here in the House. If it is the goal of members on both sides of the House to have more opportunity to present petitions in this place so that they can better reflect the views of their constituents, both for and against policy initiatives of the government, then I think it would obviously be well supported by members that the rules, where there is interpretation, do not let it be ambiguous in any way, shape or form.

I also want to talk a bit about something else that was in the standing orders, and it’s a small point, but it highlights some of the other work that we had done with respect to the estimates of the Premier’s office and Cabinet Office and the Lieutenant Governor. As I said, those estimates, in particular, of the Premier’s office and Cabinet Office will be considered jointly—and, obviously, clarifying that Her Honour would not be subject to a call before a legislative committee to defend her estimates; I think that goes without saying.

It also does highlight, I think, some additional work that we had done in this place with respect to committees and estimates, in another, frankly, unprecedented move by a majority government. We insisted that the estimates process be modified so that parliamentarians had the opportunity to review all of the estimates of government as opposed to just a small handful of them. As you would have known—again, because you’re wise beyond your years, Madam Speaker, I just assume automatically that you have been here for so many years, but you will not have known.

In the previous Parliament, when the estimates came, it would come before a committee, and only a few of the estimates would ever be dealt with in this place. The vast majority of them were done on concurrence here in the House. The vast majority of the estimates were never reviewed by parliamentarians.

We didn’t like that process. We thought that one of the most fundamental duties of members of Parliament is to review the spending of the government through the ministries, so we insisted on a change in that process. We broke down the estimates to their component parts. We changed the committees here. I talked about that earlier—how we changed committees; we dissolved some, created other ones. We ensured that members of the opposition had representation on all committees and leadership roles on committees.

At the same time we said, on the estimates process, that we have to ensure that we have a process whereby all of those estimates from the government can be scrutinized by members of provincial Parliament on both sides. And it has worked very well. I think in the last round of estimates—and I’m looking over towards my team, who can correct me if I’m wrong, but I think it was one of the first times that every ministry appeared before the estimates to defend the estimates. To my knowledge, that has never happened in this place before. It happened through the changes that we made. I’m actually quite proud of that change.

To summarize some of the changes that we’re contemplating in this Parliament—as I said earlier today, we already, yesterday, I think, did a historic change with respect to the languages that we are recognizing here in this place. Again, I thank all members for that—just for the benefit of all those colleagues who weren’t here this morning.

Interjections.

In accordance with what we did in the last Parliament, parliamentary assistants will be able to answer what we call the late show.

It is, again, an increasing of the role of the procedure and House affairs committee in this place that we’re proposing. I thank the House leader for the opposition and the opposition whip in particular, both who made impassioned pleas with respect to how committees are created in this place. I listened to them very, very intently, and I had been thinking for weeks how is it that I can better respect the outreach of the members opposite who suggested that parliamentarians should have a better role in deciding who serves on committees. That is why the procedure and House affairs committee will be asked to undertake review of who serves on what committee, and to make those appointments.

As I say, that forms a double role. It allows parliamentarians, through one of its standing committees, to make decisions, for them to discuss and to make those appointments. Madam Speaker, as you know, that’s a newer committee, from the last Parliament, chaired by an opposition member of the House. So they will have that opportunity at that committee to debate, make recommendations and bring that to the House to establish committees.

As you know, the process right now is that I, as the House leader, bring forward a motion. I, as the House leader, can decide who serves on what committee. I, as the House leader, can remove people from committee. Madam Speaker, as you know me, knowing me as well as you do you, Madam Speaker, you know the responsibility has weighed on me tremendously. And I thought, as part of a continued democratic renewal of this place, that we should allow members to have that say.

The member for—

You’re a benevolent guy, Paul.

She knew it was coming. The member for Oshawa knew it was coming. The opposition member for Oshawa, who is the Chair of the Standing Committee on Procedure and House Affairs, I will tell you, Madam Speaker, is a fiercely independent and very qualified Chair—

Interjections.

Again, I know that colleagues sometimes get concerned with the bipartisan nature by which I handle this job. I thank the opposition whip for truly highlighting that bipartisan nature and the frustration that she had working with me sometimes because I was too good to the opposition, and I reached out too much—

Having said that, despite all of that, I am quite proud, and I’ve said this on a number of occasions, that we have created the best province and the best country in the world in which to live, work, invest. Regardless of who has been in office, I think we’ve always moved things forward, and I think we should actually be quite proud of that.

But at the same time, the standing orders, as I have said earlier today, are a living, breathing document. When they are stuck in the 20th century, when you have rules that don’t allow you to use your iPad or your computer in a place, which we know is so fundamental to the work that is being done, those things have to be updated. We know that that didn’t happen for a long period of time in this place.

Again, as I say, some of the members opposite—“Well, you know, standing orders just never change. They never change.” That’s not actually a good thing that the standing orders don’t change. I think we always have to be reflecting on how we can make this place better. I think that is the job of a House leader. I think it’s the job of all parliamentarians, frankly, and there are not many parliamentarians who don’t come to me with suggestions on how we can make this place work better for them and their constituents. We reflect on that and bring those changes forward, Madam Speaker.

Just in closing, again, I want to reiterate how important it has been—the massive steps that we have made in order to ensure that our independents have an opportunity to participate in this place. I think we have gone, as a Parliament—certainly not unilaterally, myself, but as a Parliament—we have gone over and above to ensure that all members have the opportunity.

You know, when I was in the federal place, Madam Speaker, I served with a couple of independents who you would’ve never even known were actually there because they didn’t have the opportunity to speak in the House. They were certainly not on front benches of the House. They weren’t able to petition to be on a committee at all. Through the democratic reforms of the Liberal government there, that hasn’t changed. In a minority Parliament, that hasn’t changed.

But we are doing what the federal Parliament led by a Liberal government is afraid to do. We are making sure that this place is more democratic, more representative, that members have the opportunity to participate in debate. They have the opportunity to judge and reflect on the policies that the government brings forward in a way that is frankly unmatched by any other parliamentary democracy anywhere in the world. I think we should all be very proud of that, Madam Speaker.

All that to say, I appreciate the opportunity. I hope members will reflect on these changes and, at the very least, if they’re not supportive of some of these changes, will highlight not only the ones that they’re not supportive of but what their suggested changes are and which of those standing order changes that they have voted against in previous versions they would be changing back to the original format. I think that is also a very, very important part of all of this, Madam Speaker.

And I’ll just finish off by saying these aren’t the last standing order changes that we’ll bring forward. I’m sure there will be more in order to make this place even better than it is. Thank you very much, Madam Speaker, for your time and your ear this afternoon.

Oshawa.

Further debate?

There’s no such thing as a bad petition; there are ones that are way too long—and the incredibly long one from the member from Peterborough are going to be, if this motion passes today or tomorrow morning, the last two petitions heard in this House—a good example and a not-so-good example.

But the problem that they’re trying to fix, the loophole that the government identified, is their own. They’re creating their own problem. I don’t understand what the purpose of that is. For the life of me, Speaker, I don’t.

Another one: private members’ bills. The government House leader raised points about private members’ bills that I agree with in a way but also that I disagree with in a way. Private members’ bills: So each member in this House who’s not a minister has the ability—there is a draw, and during the session each member has the ability to bring one piece of private legislation forward in the House, one time per session. It’s a pretty big deal, right? Once again, you pick issues that are relevant to the people you represent, relevant to your area, relevant to a cause that’s really important. Sometimes that’s something that is not really a government priority, but it’s something that could be, should be made into legislation.

The latest one—I’m trying to think—is Orthodox Christian Week, presented by the member from Humber River–Black Creek. It had universal approval.

So now we have one private member’s bill a day, except on Mondays, but Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays at 6 o’clock until 6:45. We’ve been battling each other all day, and from 6 to 6:45 sometimes we’re not at our best. We’re not at our friendliest sometimes, Speaker, and sometimes it slips through.

It used to be it was on Thursdays. The House leader has a point that not everyone got to vote on that bill because if the vote was deferred till Monday—or if it wasn’t deferred, not everybody got to vote on it. That’s a fair point. But when all the private members’ bills were held in one session, the actual tone of the chamber was different.

I loved Thursday afternoons. I was here all the time because, often, it was less partisan. People spoke more often like I’m speaking now, without notes, just from the heart. And although sometimes the issues weren’t earth-shattering to the general population, we had some of the best debates—sometimes oppositional, but some of the best debates that we ever had in this Legislature. It wasn’t just people in the backrooms writing notes; it was people actually sharing opinions and opposing opinions, and sometimes changing each other’s minds. We lost that. We lost that when it was moved from Thursdays. That we disagree—is it something that is actually really going to change how the system works for the people of Ontario? No. We’ll work with what we have, but it is an example of what is on paper sometimes doesn’t work as well in reality.

The government just made another change in this standing order. So there is something, ministerial statements—sometimes when a bill is introduced, a minister makes a statement, but more often on a special day like International Women’s Day. The government has 20 minutes, recognized opposition parties have five and the independents had to ask for unanimous consent. It’s important for people to realize that any rule here can be superseded by something called a unanimous consent motion. If someone asks for something and everyone agrees, it happens. A unanimous consent motion trumps everything. But for whatever reason, the government said no to International Women’s Day for the independents to speak. In the end, they changed their mind, and I commend them for that.

Now they’re going to change the standing orders so that the opposition and the independents share eight minutes, and the opposition speaks first. I don’t think that’s an improvement necessarily, but I just want to make it clear: When these standing orders pass—they’re going to pass. The government has a huge majority, so they’re going to pass.

Which is a great one.

I understand how majorities work. They’re going to pass.

I just want to put it for the record here that in a ministerial statement, we will maintain our five minutes and we will pass the three minutes along to the independents. We’re not going to battle that every time. We believe that everyone in this House should have a right to speak. We also believe that this House is built on the party system and there are certain decisions that should be made by parties, not necessarily by independent members, but we do believe that people should be allowed to speak, so that’s how we’re going to handle that. Just to make it clear, we do not want to prevent people from speaking.

There’s another change that the government is making with—this committee is so new that I don’t even—the procedure and House affairs committee, correct?

Interjection: Yes.

So a few standing order changes ago—the government House leader says this was to improve the democratic process. We disagree. It used to be—and I’m not going to be very technical in this. I’m not a lawyer; I’m a farmer. It used to be the parties advised or recommended who from their party should go on the various committees, and we picked that by who had interest in the committee and who we thought would be the best on the committee. We submitted the names and, in the vast majority of cases, that’s who got on the committee. Then the committee decided who was Chair and Vice-Chair, but that was also in consultation with the House leaders of the various parties. Now there are two House leaders, two parties, but that’s how it used to be done.

Then it was changed—and the government House leader said that; he was very plain about that—that the government House leader decided who was on the committees. That’s kind of the same as if I, as opposition House leader, decided who was the minister of certain ministries. It doesn’t make practical sense. And it’s not needed, either, because they have a majority in the House and they have a majority on all the committees, so nothing is actually going to happen at committee if the government doesn’t want it to happen.

With the new standing order changes, the government has moved the decision of who goes on what committee from the government House leader to the committee of procedure and House affairs. But that committee is constructed exactly the same way as all the other committees, so whoever the government wants to put on the committee from the opposition—that is what’s going to happen, because they have a majority. So it takes it one step away from the House leader—

I said this the last time we talked about standing order changes: We have a good working relationship, and I hope that we can continue to build on that by actually taking suggestions from the opposition seriously, about who we feel would be the best on committees.

At the end of the day, the government has the control of the procedure and House affairs committee. I agree that the member from Oshawa is a fierce, independent Chair, but as the Chair, she shouldn’t—and I don’t think the other Chairs should, either—influence how the committee votes. She’s the referee. The committee members should do that. But the majority of the committee members are of the government side. So, at the end of the day, as long as the process continues that the government picks all the committee members, it doesn’t really matter if it’s done at procedure and House affairs or if it’s done by the House leader as a motion here. In fact, it’s a bit less transparent when it’s done at the committee of procedure and House affairs. It sounds better, but it actually isn’t any better, and it won’t work any better, either.

The standing orders shouldn’t make things work better for one party or another party; they should make the system work better for everyone.

I’ll give you an example. We’re about to change petitions. Years ago, there was no time limit on petitions at all. One of the few tools that the opposition has to change the government’s mind on an issue is to slow things down. When a bill is widely consulted and it’s non-contentious and we all agree, it should sail through the House—first, second, third reading and committee. And when they are like that, they do. The Veterinarians Act, the ARIO Act—which that long petition was read about—we all agree with that bill. There is nothing holding that bill back. It’s going to sail through the House.

But on bills that are highly contentious, like the greenbelt bill that had to be rescinded—years ago, with the standing orders, we could have read petitions for days. We could have done all kinds of things and hopefully protected the government from itself. Because the fact that this government has had to rescind legislation—not change it but rescind it—on several occasions, it means, well, it’s bad governance, but it’s also that the government hasn’t allowed the House to do its job to slow down legislation that has obviously got a lot of public opposition.

These standing order changes they’ve made today aren’t going to improve that. Are they going to damage it beyond repair? No. There are several standing order changes here that are housekeeping. It is a living document. There are things that are going to go smoother, as the government House leader said, when they made a standing order change that we could use computers. We all used computers. We were all breaking the rules, so they changed the rules. Great.

But these aren’t the kind of standing order changes that actually strengthen our democratic system and make the legislation that comes out of this place stronger. We could make changes in the standing orders that would improve the legislation coming out of this place. The government has a right to put forward and to pass their agenda. They won the election. We’re not arguing that. But if they made some changes that actually would give the opposition the time, give the public the time to actually make their views known before the legislation was passed, it might have saved them massive embarrassment, massive amounts of money—and it would have served the people so much better.

I’ll give you an example, Speaker. We just had the budget yesterday. In the budget, they’re talking about what we all know: There’s a housing crisis in this province. We all know this. In the budget is, “Oh, yeah, we’ve listened to municipalities, and they need infrastructure. They need water, sewer, roads.” And you know what? They do. But last year, they weren’t talking about water, sewer and infrastructure. They were talking about, “We need land for houses. We need the greenbelt.” So they wasted a whole year talking about land when, instead of taking development fees away from municipalities, they could have been going a year ago already on what municipalities needed. They wasted a whole year. That’s an example of bad consultation and of having rules in this place that actually sometimes don’t benefit Ontarians.

With that, Speaker, I would like to share my time with the member from Nickel Belt and the member from Niagara Falls.

It appears to.

No, they won’t.

I will be speaking against the changes to petitions. I want to give you an example as to why it is important to read, word for word, a petition. Do I agree with a petition that lasts for 15 minutes? No. Would I agree to a change that says, “You have no more than 90 seconds. You have no more than 60 seconds to present a petition”? Absolutely. But that you cannot read word for word, I don’t agree with that.

I want to give an example that happened in this House on February 20, so the day that we were coming back. That day, a hip hop artist called Bishop Brigante was at Queen’s Park. He had come to Queen’s Park because he is a 45-year-old man that was diagnosed with colorectal cancer in stage 4 and is going through therapy. He had decided that what happened to him should not happen to anybody else. It took him two years before he was able to gain access to the colonoscopy, and he wants rules for access to colonoscopies to change.

There are bodies of evidence that show that it should start earlier than 50 years old, which is the benchmark in Ontario for where you get the colonoscopy. So he took from his experience, and he wrote a petition himself. Is he an expert in health care? Absolutely not, but he is someone with lived experience who now knows full well that, had he had access to a colonoscopy when his symptoms first started and he started to go to the doctor, he would not have waited until stage 4 to start his treatment. His prognosis would be different, and things should change. So he wrote this petition.

The petition is quite simple. It asks for the age limit to be dropped from 50 to 30 if you have symptoms that you have problems with your colon. That’s all that the petition said. It was a normal petition.

But I want to read to you what he said about coming in here. I introduced him, Bishop Brigante. I introduced his wife, Melanie McVey; his dad, Oscar Parra; his friend Atiba Roach, who all came because they wanted to be there when I read his petition. And here’s what he had to say:

“We had been put into this balcony and I had seen this room on the news before, never paid” any attention to it “because I was never into politics, but I remember seeing it and I remember being in there. I was like, oh my goodness, what, where are we? This is like some secret stuff or something, it’s the government, you know what I mean? You just don’t know.

“If you don’t know, it’s very surreal. But again, eye on the prize: What is going to happen here? Let’s wait” and see.

And then I introduced his family.

He says, “People stood up” and clapped and then “France ... read the petition”—and this is where it becomes really meaningful, Speaker. At that moment, “I literally left my body. And I started thinking about the nightmare again, the moment that I was diagnosed with cancer, the fear, the terror, the sadness, the disbelief, the grip that I had on my girl’s hand, holding on for dear life.

“As France was reading the petition, I thought of millions of other people after me that are going to experience that nightmare and I said, ‘Change has to come.’ And every word that France said in that petition reading was so powerful that I started seeing in my mind, the millions dropped down to hundreds of thousands, dropped down to thousands.” It “just kept decreasing, victims of this horrible disease. I envisioned it, it happened in my mind, and then I came back into my body and I sat there, just like, I looked at France and, you know, she thanked me and everything and I was just like, God bless you. And I so believe ... that out-of-body experience of seeing all of those casualties become people who just got to live their lives and the number just dropped so drastically.

“It was the most powerful thing that I’ve ever experienced in my body and it just gave me more purpose.”

I wanted to share that because this is what happens when you read the words of somebody who has really put in a lot of time, effort and energy. When I read his petition, he and his wife had collected over 17,000 signatures on that petition. That petition now stands at over 35,000 signatures.

You have to realize that this man is still going through cancer treatment. He is on his 10th round of chemotherapy—chemotherapy that is just brutally hard when you’re diagnosed with stage 4 colorectal cancer, chemotherapy that lasts for three days in a row, 24 hours. You come out of there with no strength, no ability to do anything, but you keep fighting because your life depends on it. And even in that state of—he could have taken off. He doesn’t. He wanted to fight for other people so that what happened to him does not happen to other people.

They came here to listen to the words that he had written. He could not read it for himself because it’s only MPPs. I read it for him, and it was really powerful for him, for his family. And I can tell you, the minute that it got read in the House, it went from 17,000 to 35,000 signatures. It had meaning. But it also had meaning that I did not have to summarize what he had said. Those were his words—the words of a person who has gone through really tough times because he did not get access to diagnostic tests, a colonoscopy, in time.

Let’s be frank: Nobody gets in line for a colonoscopy. It’s not something—on a scale of zero to 10, how much fun is it to get a colonoscopy? It rates a zero. It’s no fun at all. People don’t volunteer. Ontarians are not going to throw down the doors: “I want a colonoscopy.” No, no, no—none of that. He knows that. He also knows that a lot of people, and I would say a lot of BIPOC—Black, Indigenous, people of colour—are seeing a high rate of colorectal cancer diagnosed at stage 4 because they do not have access.

What this man is trying to do is change this. And what I read into record is basically his words. That I was able to read the words that he had put on a petition, word for word for him, onto the record, in a place that he had never come before—he had never been here before. He did not even know what the “NDP” stood for. He’s not a political activist or anything like this, but somebody who believed that having his words read in the Legislative Assembly had meaning, and now, we are about to take that away.

Had he come to me tomorrow, I would not be able to read his words into the record; I would have to summarize his words into the record. This is wrong. People are allowed to be heard. If some of the petitions are too long, put a time limit on it. We put a time limit on members’ statements, and everybody respects that more or less—90, 92, 93 seconds, and then end of story. Your microphone goes off and it’s finished. If petitions are too long, do the same thing, but don’t change it so that the people who take the time to write down a petition that is meaningful to them, that we would not be able to read their words into the record.

There are not very many chances for people to speak in this House. We have to speak for them. Let us read words that they want us to speak for them. I give the example of Bishop Brigante, a 45-year-old man diagnosed with stage 4 cancer, but I could go through most of the petitions that I read and the same.

I want to talk about Helena Shepherd-Snider. She is the woman who picked up the phone while her husband was having a heart attack and discovered that 911 was not available. She lives in my riding. In a big part of my riding 911 is not available. She is one who wrote the petition that I read into the record many times to make 911 available everywhere. It is meaningful to her that I read her words into the record. She goes out and gets—this petition, same thing—thousands and thousands of names of people who live mainly in northern Ontario where we don’t have access to 911.

Another petition, “Make Highway 144 Safe at Marina Road.” That came from Chantal—I’m not sure I’m allowed to say her last name. That came from Chantal. Same thing—she lives in Onaping Falls. She has seen many accidents. We have had multiple deaths every single year on Highway 144 at Marina Road, where there’s two great big S turns followed by a train track going across. When I read that petition, “Make Highway 144 Safe at Marina Road,” I read the words of the constituents who want to make things better.

To take away that little opportunity for people to have their voices heard at Queen’s Park is wrong. To limit the time, I fully agree. Put a limit of 60 seconds, put a limit of 45 seconds, if you want, on petitions. Put a limit of 90 seconds. Like, I don’t care. But what the member from Peterborough–Kawartha has been doing to read petitions signed by one person that last 17 minutes is disrespectful to all of the people who have written their own petitions, have gone out and gathered signatures from people they know, from their families, their friends, their co-workers and then want to hear their words read at Queen’s Park. Don’t take that away from the people of Ontario. They deserve to be heard.

I recognize the member from Nickel Belt.

Further debate?

I don’t have a lot of time, so I’m going to try and get out as much as I can.

I want to talk about the government’s record on accountability and on their record of limiting dissent and muzzling the voices of the opposition and the people of Ontario. These latest changes to the standing orders represent the latest in a long line of undemocratic changes this government, under this Premier, has made to our system.

First, I want to talk about the government’s changes to our committees. I’ve had the opportunity for the last 10 years, over the course of four terms, to sit on committees. I was also a Vice-Chair. Unfortunately, the current minister decided to take me off that, and then when I got on other committees, he did the same thing. It just happened in the last standing order changes. Then when I sat on committee as an appointee, because one of our members couldn’t go on government agencies, I enjoyed my time researching, making sure I asked very good questions, not embarrassing myself, because it’s part of my role quite frankly. I believe every single MPP should sit on committees and it shouldn’t be up to one individual to take people off. But do you know what happened at that committee? That afternoon, we had another one of these changes to the standing orders, and you know what they did? They took three women off the committees—three women off the committees. It didn’t make any sense to me.

I just want to say to them, I think that all people should have the opportunity to sit on committee and it shouldn’t be up to one person. I listened to him for his hour this morning and he talked about our member who’s going to be the Chair of the new committee once these standing orders are done, and our House leader even mentioned it. The reality is, when you go to committee, it doesn’t matter if you include the independents and a Liberal or the NDP; they have the majority. So every single vote you go to, they are going to win. That’s the way it is. It doesn’t matter whether it’s a bill that you talk about on the greenbelt—as we all know what happened with the greenbelt. It doesn’t matter if it’s Bill 124 or Bill 23, when it comes down to the vote, they always have more than what the Liberals have, the NDP and the independents.

I can relate to it kind of like a hockey game, right. I’m a big sports guy. I love baseball, I love hockey, and I can relate to that. So you to go the hockey game and say, “Oh, the Leafs lost a tough one last night, 1-0.” You go, “Yeah, a good game,” blah, blah. The reality is, they lost.

So it doesn’t matter if you’ve got eight Conservative MPPs on a committee and you decide to have three from the NDP, one from the Liberals and one from the independents; you’re going to lose eight to five. But the moral of that story is what? You still lose, no matter what you do. So changing that isn’t going to change anything.

But what should change is that we should make sure that the way it was before—and I don’t support the Liberals on a lot of things, but the one thing the Liberals never did was take the opposition, meaning the NDP, off committees. They never did it—because I was on governance; I was on estimates. The Liberals never took us off. They said, “What does the NDP want? Who do they want to sit on this committee?” And the reason why you would do that is, some people—I’ll use our financial critic. She’s very good at it. She does a great job. I watched her on TV last night; I was very, very impressed. I’m very proud that she’s part of my caucus. She’s got some talent around that. And there are other people who have different talents. So you try to line the talent up to the committees—who are going to go to the committee, present themselves well, make sure we’re asking fair and just questions.

But no, do you know what they did? The minister decided who sits on committees—it wasn’t the NDP, it wasn’t our leader; it was a Conservative. I want people at home to understand this, because I think it’s very, very important to understand this.

When they say that they’re trying to make sure it’s democratic—it isn’t, when our leader says we want the member from St. Catharines or the member from Niagara Falls on the committee, and then the minister says, “Oh, no, we don’t want them on that committee. They might do the job. They might ask tough questions. They might not agree with the government. So what we’ll do is, we’ll take them off.”

Well, I hate to break it to this party over here, the Conservatives, but in the last election—they talk about a majority government, which they got. We can’t deny that. But the reality is—do you know what they got? They got 18% of the votes that were cast.

Well, this little guy over here from Niagara Falls, who’s five foot nothing—I got 50% of the vote. Do you know why I got that? Because I do my job, and I do it well. And the people who vote for me want me to sit on committees. They want me to come to Queen’s Park and talk about things that are important to us, whether that be the greenbelt—because we saw the fiasco with the greenbelt, where they’re telling us they want to build 1.5 million homes on the greenbelt. We all knew that wasn’t what it was about. The RCMP is going to prove it at some point in time. Or how about Bill 124, where you took away wages and benefits? They want me to go to that committee and talk about the bill and say, “Why are you attacking nurses? Why are you attacking health care workers?” They want me to come here.

That doesn’t mean that I’m going to stand up, when I go to committee, and say, “Hey, thanks for doing Bill 124” or “Thanks for doing Bill 23 and hurting our municipalities right across the province of Ontario.” I’m not going to do that. My job, as opposition, is to question exactly what this government is doing, whether it’s on the budget that was presented yesterday or whether it’s on bills.

And what we have here is a majority government that is not doing that. So what they’re doing is extremely undemocratic. It’s certainly not right for any MPP be taken off of committee.

What really got me going on this, the reason why I wanted to speak today was, the last committee I went to was government agencies—and I think the finance critic was there as well, and I think another member was there as well. That very day, after we did that committee, we had question period, then we all went for lunch; we were having a good time with our colleagues, having a sandwich or whatever. We come with new standing orders by that minister—and what did he do? The person that I replaced for that committee—because the individual was sick that day—was taken off the committee. But he didn’t stop there. It wasn’t good enough. He attacked two more women and took them off their committees. That’s wrong.

That same minister, over and over and over again, stood up in the last Parliament and said, “Do you know that member over there from the NDP? They don’t want to sit on committees. They don’t want to do their job. They don’t care about you.” That was the same thing they said—

One second. Point of order: I recognize the member for Chatham-Kent–Leamington.

I know, and I actually appreciate his comment because I would certainly never do that in the House, even though that same minister wouldn’t allow them to talk on International Women’s Day. But that was not my intention. My intention was to show that three people were taken off the committee. They just happened to be women, I suppose. At the end of the day, that’s a problem.

Or you want to talk about other bills? And I’ve had the privilege of doing this when I sat on the committees before they decided they didn’t want me as a Vice-Chair. They didn’t want me as a Chair. They didn’t want me to sit on committees. And I understand why. I actually take it as a compliment, because I’m doing my job—maybe something that we all should do, quite frankly. You don’t have to agree with how I do it. You don’t have to like how I do it, but that’s the way it is.

But I’ve had the privilege of standing and talking about Working for Workers. I’ve gone to those committees. And in fairness, I listened to it, because there are some things in some of the Working for Workers bills the NDP has supported.

Matter of fact, we’ve supported some of those bills. I supported my colleague Jeff Burch from Niagara Centre when he brought in a bill to make sure that firefighters were covered for cancer, when a captain died in Welland with the firefighters. I supported that. There are other things in the bill that I think they could do a better job on in Working for Workers. And in fairness, guess what I did? I raised those issues.

And some of you say, “Well, what issues did you raise that you got the government so upset?” I talked about deeming. “Well, what’s deeming?” That’s where an injured worker gets deemed as if he could do a job even though the job’s not there, and then they take that money—say he was making $20 an hour; he can now, they say, be a parking attendant for $17 and now his benefit is $3 an hour and it forces him to live in poverty.

Now, I think it’s fair and reasonable for somebody with a labour background to raise that issue during that bill. But if I’m not at committee, because the government doesn’t want me there, I can’t raise that on behalf of injured workers in the province of Ontario who basically have lost everything in some cases. They’ve lost their marriage. They’ve lost their home. They’ve lost their family. It’s one of the biggest injustices that I’ve seen here since I’ve been here for 10 years—and continues to be. Working for Workers would be one way to correct that, I believe.

I talked about when I went there to workers for workers. I talked about Bill 124. Think about that. Bill 23—I talk about all those bills, standing up for workers.

Those poor guys that are delivering our food there that work for Uber Eats. You know they’re working some hours in this province of Ontario for nothing? They’re not getting paid while they’re sitting there waiting for the next call. I’ve been here for only an hour, hour and a half. There’s only been one or two people speak, but we’re all getting paid. Is that right, that somebody’s doing that, when they’re using their own car, they have to pay insurance or risk their lives when they’re driving their bicycles?

I know I have to sit down, so thank you very much.