As we are debating the budget, we should be debating the priorities of the government for the province. I would have hoped to have seen tangible health care investment for folks in my neck of the woods.

Specifically, something missing from this budget was what would be about $3 million—the cost of a planning grant to allow Lakeridge Health to begin the advanced planning and design work on a much-needed hospital in the Durham region. An expert panel selected Whitby. The Premier said we’d be getting a planning grant soon.

So my question to the Minister of Finance, who happens to be the MPP for Pickering–Uxbridge: When will the minister let Lakeridge Health get that planning grant, get started with that grant to begin the design work and start the wheels turning for health care in the Durham region?

Speaker, this budget—and you’ve been listening carefully, I know, this afternoon—reflects the government’s commitment to housing, health care, infrastructure and economic development. I’d like the member from Oakville to talk about the effects of the budget in those particular areas, please.

Thank you to the member for Waterloo on her debate. I always enjoy listening to her debate on the budget.

One of the things that stood out to me in this budget is the $1 billion that has been spent on agency nurses. That is a balloon of a massive increase of spending for agency nurses. There is a role for agency nurses, but it is exploding. How it has exploded is that instead of having nurses with a regular income and a 40-hour week, they’re hiring agency nurses that charge about double, and a lot of that money goes to the profit of these private companies. It’s a way for public money—your OHIP card—to be spent on private agencies and to fatten their pockets.

Could the member explain why in the world the Conservative government, if they were for the little guy, wouldn’t put a stop to this and curtail this back down so it wasn’t a balloon of $1 billion?

The budget talks about affordability, but there’s not one word about grocery prices, that’s because the government knows food prices are high because companies like Loblaws, owned by the Weston family, are gouging consumers and they don’t want to provide help to families. At the same time, food banks are dealing with a massive increase in demand for their services.

Project SHARE, a not-for-profit in my community, is now saying one in eight Niagara Falls residents are using food banks, and 25% are children. These not-for-profits receive no funding in this budget, no funding, no new funding in this 2024 budget. Frankly, these food banks need help, and the grocery chains need to be held accountable.

Will your government commit to taking on “greedflation” and supporting food banks with new funding right across the province of Ontario?

Well, of course, this investment in the people of Ontario is about all of the people of Ontario. This budget invests in helping people in maintaining and continuing the gas tax cut and maintaining all of the financial relief. The real issue with grocery prices is the dreaded carbon tax imposed by the federal government, increased on April 1. It raises the cost of everything.

It’s the high interest rates that the government of Canada’s Bank of Canada is not responding soon enough to deal with. So, instead of the catcalling, join us in continuing to support what we can do as a government. As a provincial Parliament, we are doing it all. What we are calling up the federal government to do we will continue to call upon them to do, and that is ending the carbon tax.

Madam Speaker, this budget has a lot of good investments, a lot of good things. Something that the members from Mississauga and Peel region have been asking about is insurance.

I’m just going to quote something from Amanda Dean, the VP of the Ontario and Atlantic insurance bureau. She said, “IBC and its members welcome the government’s auto insurance reforms, which are a good ... step in giving Ontarians more control and choice over their auto insurance coverage. We have long advocated for much-needed reforms that provide consumers with more choice and options when purchasing auto insurance.” This is one of the things which I have seen.

To the Minister of Public and Business Service Delivery, my question is: Minister, for your riding, what do you think in this budget you like the most, which you would like to share with your residents?

I listened to the Minister of Tourism, Culture and Sport talk about the budget, and one of the things he mentioned was that we have to have smart public investment in key public services. That’s what he said. And just now, he talked about how this health care is funded by this government; I’ll remind the member that it’s actually funded by the people, the taxpayers. That’s why this government has the money to fund health care.

But what this government has done is actually not use the money correctly—hasn’t been wise. Because Bill 124 is an unconstitutional bill that you wasted taxpayers’ money—you lost that case. Now you actually have to make up for those wages. That is an oversight of—a far supreme error. The other one that this government has wasted money on is spending $1 billion on agency nurses.

These are not investments in our public system; these are wasteful acts of this government. Can you explain why this happens under your government all the time?

There is no new money for increased mental health supports for students. I want to just repeat that very clearly, because this government has talked about mental health supports. There is no new money in this budget for mental health supports for students.

I’ll tell you what I’m hearing from parents are tears and calls of rage. They have reached their wits’ end. Why, Speaker? I’ll tell you. Because the $18 million that’s allocated in this budget doesn’t even come close to the actual need that our communities are looking for.

The TDSB, in 2022, spent $67 million more on special education than they received—$67 million more. More than half of the secondary school principals and nearly two thirds of the elementary principals have reported that they’ve asked their parents to keep their children with special needs at home. Don’t even bother sending them to school, because they don’t have the capacity to support them and there’s nothing in this budget to actually change that.

I really appreciate this government’s persistence. They love to re-announce announcements. So once again, we hear about the York University medical school, which is great, but they’ve announced that before. What they forget to tell us is that there’s no associated funding attached to it.

We are also hearing that post-secondary institutions are running deficits. They were very loud and clear in their pre-budget consultation. They’re running deficits; they’ve raided their reserves; they’ve sold off their assets. The well is dry and they need a partner that is going to step up, and multi-year funding that’s sustainable and predictable, and that’s not here in this budget.

I’m grateful for the opportunity to speak to the budget bill, Bill 180. As we know, this government is not fond of hearing feedback from the opposition Liberals, so I don’t take this time for granted. But it is an opportunity for me to share the concerns of my Don Valley West constituents with this budget and this government, Speaker—and believe you me, they had a lot to say.

The finance minister talked about this budget as one that sticks to their plan. It certainly does stick to their plan of fiscal irresponsibility. So my constituents were not surprised to see this budget continue the government’s plan to divert money away from public services to private businesses. By the way, they’re still upset about the ServiceOntario location operated by an independent service operator that serves my Thorncliffe constituents and those in Don Valley East, that’s going to be closed down and their business given to Staples under a sole-source contract. I do wonder if the Premier would advise his business friends to do business that way.

Anyway, Speaker, they’re not surprised that a government that added $93 billion in debt—15% more debt than the Liberals did in their last six years, when they spend hour after hour talking about that Liberal government here in this House—is going to add another $60 billion—$60 billion—in the next few years.

I’d like to say I’m surprised by the lack of new measures to address urgent problems in our province, whether it’s skyrocketing rents, ER closures, family doctor shortages, student mental health crises, overburdened food banks, bankrupt post-secondary institutions—the list goes on. It’s really just a continuation, though, of the reckless spending of this government that gives money to their rich friends while telling people they are putting more money into the pockets of Ontarians.

The government does indeed like to make reference to the former Liberal government, but Conservatives will not be able to grow their way out of the debt problems they are giving to this province. GDP growth under this government is lower—1.5% on average—than it was under Kathleen Wynne’s government, which was 2.5% on average, all while government spending is higher than Kathleen Wynne, and services are worse.

When Liberals spent money, they did things like give us all-day kindergarten and free education for low-income post-secondary students, which improved their chances of success and improved their quality of life.

When this government spends billions more of our taxpayer money, it’s only their rich friends who benefit, so I’m not surprised. Overspending on initiatives that help their friends, big budget deficits, and inaction on key files have all become hallmarks of this Conservative government. Nonetheless, I am still disappointed and, frankly, shocked that in the days leading up to the release of the budget, the government labelled it as one of a cost-of-living budget. When I heard that I thought, “Wow, they’re finally hearing the message that there are people struggling. Maybe there will finally be some help for those households. But instead, it was a real shame that there was not one new measure to help people dealing with the cost of living.

There’s a long list of this government’s broken promises, policy flip-flops, and failures. In fact, it seems that they think that by moving quickly from one mess to another, they hope to confuse the public and make it hard for us all to keep track.

But Speaker, we are here to hold them to account and make sure that their record, such as the scandal of Bill 124, the most damaging piece of legislation to our publicly funded health care system—let’s not forget the RCMP criminal investigation into their $8.3-billion greenbelt giveaway; their sole-sourcing of contracts to American companies while putting independent Ontario operators out of business; giving away the park at Ontario Place to a foreign-owned spa, and then giving that spa a half-billion-dollar parking lot to boot. Then, there’s the broken promise to middle income families for a tax cut, now broken for over 2,000 days.

The real shame is that there are no new measures to deal with the many crises that this government has orchestrated, no measures to relieve the administrative burden on family doctors—a 10% reduction in that could free up time for an additional two million patients a year—no new money to ensure hospitals don’t have to spend another billion dollars next year on private nursing and staffing agencies; no new money to ensure that teachers get the support staff in classrooms that they need to help those students who need extra help and help reduce the rising violence in our classrooms.

Ontarians are tired of this government and the crises they created in our public services. They’re tired of stagnant growth. They’re tired of hearing about how they’re building homes when they are way off their plan. Instead of owning up or stepping up on their housing record, they fudged the numbers by adding in long-term-care beds in the hopes that the people of Ontario will not notice.

A number of my constituents and others across Ontario who reach out to me as the Liberal finance critic wonder how we have the largest spending budget in Ontario history, under a Conservative government no less, yet the province is experiencing crises after crises. Never has a government spent so much to deliver so little. But the answer has to do with priorities. The government prioritizes their friends and insiders rather than the people of Ontario. I’ve been hearing from constituents about how the TDSB is having to choose between cutting education programs for seniors to prioritize their main mission, of course, which is serving kids, and those seniors are worried about those programs being cut.

I would have thought this government could have found a few million dollars in their budget to make sure that that school board was able to keep delivering services to their seniors without jeopardizing the success of their educational curriculum.

This government is indeed spending more than any government in Ontario’s history, yet, despite this, real spending on the things that matter to Ontarians—health care, education, child care, long-term care and post-secondary institution—remains stagnant in real dollars or have even declined.

According to the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives, real spending on education has declined $1,200 per student under this government. Similarly, compared to every other province, Ontario continues to spend the least per capita on both health care and post-secondary education. That is not the path to a successful future, Speaker. Ontario’s universities and colleges, the backbone of our economy, have actually been allocated less funding in this budget than they were last year. This is before accounting for inflation and it’s just not sustainable. The blue panel’s recommendations were crystal clear: Ontario’s colleges and universities need an additional $2.5 billion to remain financially stable. This government has committed less than half of that funding, so it’s not a surprise that one third of our institutions are still projected to be in the red this year.

We’ve known for some time now that this government and the Premier are fond of helping their friends: for example, developers who own land near the greenbelt; they own land near Highway 413; they own private nursing agencies; they are long-term-care developers. We have former staff members and American-owned companies. And yet with this budget, they have taken helping their friends to a new level.

Let’s be clear, helping their friends does come at the expense of taxpayers and the people of Ontario. This Premier is spending more than double what Premier Wynne spent to staff his office—double, Speaker. That’s taking money away from the services that they could be providing to our citizens, our residents, and instead they’re putting it into the pockets of the Premier’s staffers.

Furthermore, despite grandstanding about how they’re helping “the little guy,” this government has also decided to give every member but one of its own caucus a promotion and therefore a pay bump. I don’t hear them bragging about that in their “sunny day” ad campaign. But I could almost hear it now. Here it goes: “What if you lived in a place where every member but one of your government’s MPPs earned more than every other MPP? Well, you do. It’s happening right here in Ontario.”

Speaker, let’s be clear: It’s just another one of the ways this government changes the rules or gets around its own rules to make their friends richer. Let me remind the government that they put in place a law where MPPs across the board could not get a raise while there was a deficit. So what do they do instead? They have a $9.8-billion deficit, then give raises to their MPPs by making sure that all but one are ministers or parliamentary assistants: 77 out of 78 MPPs in caucus. Shameful. Unfortunately, this is the kind of special treatment for insider friends that we’ve come to expect from this Conservative government.

But let’s get back to the numbers in the budget. This government has added over $90 billion in debt since coming to power in 2018 and are projected to add another $60 billion, and for what? What are we getting for the record amount of money being spent by this government? Speaker, I’ll tell you what we’re getting: We’re getting a record number of crises in every sector.

In health care, we have record ER closures. Under this government and this Minister of Health, we had three more rural ERs close just this past weekend. We have a wait-list for family doctors that’s record high and growing; 2.3 million Ontarians do not have access to a primary care provider. That number will skyrocket to 4.4 million as soon as 2026. And, Speaker, who benefits when people don’t have a family doctor they can access through the public system with their OHIP card? It’s the for-profit clinics that provide care you pay for with your credit card.

But instead of solving that problem, this budget only makes provisions to provide an additional 600,000 Ontarians access to a family doctor, and only by 2027. That means we will hear more and more in the years to come about Ontarians who are accessing care via for-profit clinics. I hear about that every week in my constituency office. In fact, hospitals in my riding are trying to find solutions for this because they know that 80% of people living in assisted living in my riding don’t have family doctors, and so they end up in the ER. That’s not good government.

This government hasn’t had the courage yet to say it, but they are defunding our public services—basically privatizing our public services—because we have a Premier who doesn’t actually believe in public services. That’s why he says the worst place you can give your money is to the government. In our public schools, we have growing staff shortages. According the recent Annual Ontario School Survey, 24% of elementary schools and 35% of secondary schools report facing staff shortages on a daily basis—record high staff shortages—under this government. Teachers and principals have cited several reasons, like mental health. Students are suffering from mental health. Young people are not doing well in this province, and it’s having an impact on our schools to function as safe places where kids can learn.

Yet this budget barely even touches on this issue, proposing only to spend a paltry $8.3 million over five years on youth mental health hubs. With about two million students in Ontario, that’s about 83 cents a year per student. That’s not going very far. There is no plan to expand access to mental health services in schools, where they are needed most.

So again, Speaker, where is all this record spending going, if not towards education and health care? It’s going to things like moving the science centre; to building Highway 413, a highway that will cut through more valuable farmland and only benefit private developers who are looking to build more car-dependent suburbs. The budget did find half a billion dollars to build an underwater parking garage for a foreign-owned spa. Those are the kinds of priorities of this government, not education and health care.

We shouldn’t forget about the hundreds of millions in federal dollars that this government has turned down because they won’t allow fourplexes as of right across this province. They wasted millions on fighting public sector workers in court and millions wasted on partisan Super Bowl ads. There is a pattern, Speaker, and it’s not a good one. The government is spending billions, costing Ontarians billions with their mistakes, and they’re mortgaging our future to pay for it all.

Last week, while answering questions about the budget, the Minister of Long-Term Care referenced my advocacy for a not-for-profit care home in my riding, and I did not have time to answer it, so let me summarize here. It seems the minister was upset I’d asked for help from his office to meet with that home, to provide clarity regarding their current contract, so they can have certainty to build new beds. But it seems that the not-for-profit sector, despite providing better care at a lower cost, always seems to be last in line.

Speaker, Ontario does have a bright future, but it’s not with a budget like this that adds billions to our debt and puts the future of Ontario at risk.

I want to thank the member for Don Valley West for her presentation. I’m wondering, because I know the member has expertise in financial management and a financial background, and you’ve commented a lot on what you believe to be the deficiencies from a financial perspective in the government’s budget—spending a whole lot, as the member from Ottawa South often likes to say, for not a lot.

Transit: I’m looking at a government that—unless you look at the city of Toronto, thanks to Mayor Olivia Chow—we don’t have a lot of money for operating the buses that we operate in many of our municipalities. Certainly in Ottawa, we’re 74,000 service hours short for OC Transpo this year because of government cutbacks. But meanwhile, the cost of building transit under the Conservative government has climbed to a billion dollars per kilometre for the Ontario Line, that I know you care about in this city. The Eglinton West Crosstown: 3 years overdue—a billion dollars over budget.

Can the member talk about the financial mismanagement of transit projects under this government and, from your perspective in Don Valley West, how much would putting more money into transit operating funds all over the province matter to you?

The budget makes mention of a few announcements that are being recycled, so the government is reannouncing the Ontario Made Manufacturing Investment Tax Credit. They’ve reannounced the advanced manufacturing and innovation competitiveness stream. They’ve reannounced the target benefit framework, but I couldn’t find anything in the budget that actually targets support for businesses who are still struggling through COVID recovery; nor did I find anything that would actually boost wages to increase and build new jobs so we can transition to a low-carbon economy. Did you find anything in the budget that speaks to those concerns and needs for Ontarians?