My question is for the parliamentary assistant. One of the things I always look for in the budget is the four-laning of Highway 69 to Sudbury. It took till page 56 to find this phrase—here’s one sentence: “Continue to widen Highway 69 from two to four lanes, from Parry Sound to Sudbury.”

Interjection.

So are you doubling, tripling, quadrupling the amount of work you’ve done in the past? Zero times anything is zero. When are you going to get this done?

My question for the member is about highways. In my riding of Essex, we’re expanding Highway 3 from two to four lanes, and I think that’s a very important investment to be made. I think it kind of exemplifies the approach to highways and infrastructure investment that this government has. We believe in infrastructure investment. We believe in the expansion of highways.

On the other side, I would say that there’s an example that the Liberals actually are opposed to expanding highways, and that is probably exemplified by the statement of the federal Liberal environment minister, Steven Guilbeault, who says he doesn’t want to build any more highways. So I ask this member: Where does she stand? Does she stand in favour of investment in infrastructure and highways like Highway 3, or does she stand with Steven Guilbeault?

Well, I stand in favour of building things that benefit Ontarians. The highway in the member’s riding I’m not familiar with; it may benefit Ontarians, and certainly I would encourage that. Highway 413, we know from this government’s own ministry, does not benefit Ontarians, Speaker. It saves 30 seconds. It will certainly, though, benefit the rich developers who own land around that area. That is not the kind of thing we should be prioritizing. We need to be prioritizing spending money on investing in things like our post-secondary institutions, who are feeling the pain right now, who have deficits. That will only cause the future of Ontario to grow dimmer, just like our solar eclipse today.

Certainly, public transportation has been proven to be a driver of economic growth, so I’m absolutely in support of public transit. We cannot allow the death spiral that is happening, as the member referenced, in Ottawa happen here in Toronto. When ridership goes down, revenues go down, service goes down—it’s a death spiral.

In Ontario, we have one of the lowest-funded public transportation systems in the world and we need to make sure that we get that back as a priority for not just Toronto—for Ottawa and for other cities that are growing and need to have public transit to make sure that workers across the province can get to work in an energy-efficient way. And that helps our environment too, so absolutely, we need more public transit.

Speaker, again, it really does just show the priorities of this government. They didn’t take out an ad talking about the increases in the Premier’s staff budget. I wonder why. It’s because it’s nothing to be proud of—doubling the budget is not a good use of taxpayer money and it’s not a good use of this government’s resources.

When you think about adding people to the sunshine list when families are suffering, when we’ve got families who are, in record numbers, going to food banks—we’ve got people with full-time jobs going to food banks because they can’t afford the cost of living in this province. We have a Premier who took away rent control so that rent is now an even bigger portion of people’s take-home income.

So, Speaker, I think this government has its priorities all mixed up and this is a perfect example of that.

Speaker, certainly, there are programs that we’re spending on that do benefit workers. But this budget did not brag about the billions of dollars that came out of the public purse to fix a wrong done by this government to workers who really do matter, our health care workers. Bill 124—this government has had to pay $6 billion so far for reparations on that. There’s probably another $7 billion more to come, so while I appreciate the $100 million spent on skilled trades, this government certainly has not prioritized workers across our province.