It’s always an honour to rise in this esteemed House to speak on behalf of the great people of Toronto Centre.

I’m here, as we all are, to debate government Bill 180, the budget bill. Obviously, it’s a bill that actually sets forward the spending priorities of the government; it also, as in every budget, lays out the priorities and the values of the government of the day.

I think that we have all heard quite a bit of debate now about the things that the government is interested in doing, but I want to dial back, Speaker, to the time of the pre-consultation budgets.

When those pre-consultation sessions were rolling out across Ontario, Speaker, as a Toronto representative, I must note once again in this House that the city of Toronto, the capital of this province, was deliberately excluded from the budget pre-consultations. That means 2.8 million people. The financial heart, the cultural capital of the province was not at the table. We had to go elsewhere in order for our voices to be heard. This is a city that generates over $430 billion of GDP for the province and the country, and it just is absolutely mind-blowing that we didn’t have our own pre-budget consultation date here in the city.

But we did hear from a number of other stakeholders, including Toronto stakeholders that had to leave the city to be heard. We heard from many different communities and stakeholders, and I want to just highlight that some of the concerns that was brought forward to us at the hearings have to be read into the record one more time, Speaker.

We heard that now in Ontario, life is harder than ever before. The cost-of-living crisis that faces us requires real solutions, Speaker. We have a housing crisis that’s gripping every single household and ripping apart their budget. That’s making life extremely difficult for families. So we are looking for solutions in this budget that address the needs of hard-working, struggling Ontarians. That’s what I was looking for when the budget was released. That’s what Ontarians were looking for as well.

Let me tell you, Speaker, what Ontarians told us during the pre-budget consultation. Let’s also think about what Ontarians are asking and speaking about after the budget was released.

They said that the government should invest in proactive solutions to Ontario’s publicly funded and publicly delivered health care system and provide immediate support for community mental health programs and support for community health care coverage. That needs to be expanded under OHIP.

They also said that we need to make meaningful investments in order for us to combat the devastating impact of worker burnout and stress for workers impacted by the understaffing and under-resourcing of many different programs that are government-funded.

We also heard from Ontarians—and this was at every single budget session—that this government needed to directly invest in the creation of affordable and supportive housing. It’s not good enough to just leave it to the free-market forces expecting the for-profit developers to meet our needs when it comes to social as well as rent-geared-to-income housing.

They also told us that we needed to invest in public education at consistent and appropriate levels so that our post-secondary institutions as well as our public institutions would no longer have to come cap in hand every year with a request. Therefore, they wanted a government that was going to partner with them in a respectful manner. They said that this government needed to repair the formula for post-secondary education to ensure that Ontario keeps pace with its counterparts across Canada.

They also said—and this is very important, because we’re going to have a moment very shortly in this House to allow the government to correct the record. They also said that the government of the day needed to adopt the Renfrew county inquest recommendations—86 recommendations directly directed at the Ontario government. The first recommendation, which costs you absolutely nothing, is to declare intimate partner violence an epidemic so that this government would be able to address the problem with the same type of urgency and focused intention.

Speaker, I mentioned that this government would have an opportunity to correct the record because on April 10, in two days, this House will have a chance to debate it. This government will then have their opportunity to go on the record and adopt the Renfrew county inquest recommendation.

We also heard from community members and advocates and Ontarians about the need to double the ODSP rates. Right now, in this moment in time, we are legislating poverty and condemning people to a life of hardship through acts of government. We need to be able to reverse that as soon as possible. You can even say, Speaker, that as people choose medically assisted suicide, that is a form of social murder.

We need to protect and invest in Ontario’s libraries, museums and cultural institutions while recognizing their vital importance as economic drivers—very basic what I would call value propositions that allow us to build this budget.

Budgets, as we know, are going to be confidence bills. As the government likes to taunt, “Is the official opposition going to support us?” Well, you would get support if it was adequate, if there was adequate funding. It’s very difficult to support a bill that says we have confidence in the government when there isn’t enough to work with.

So across the province, we heard from health care providers who shared very practical solutions to the many challenges to our health care system. Speaker, as we all know in this House, it has been said time and time again that 2.3 million Ontarians do not have a family physician. This number is going to swell alarmingly to 4.4 million by 2026, in two short years, unless swift action is taken.

The average family physician spends about 40% of their work week on administrative tasks that pull them away from other patients. The recommendation from the Ontario Medical Association is to provide efficiency initiatives to reduce non-clinical work and to improve access to care for patients. It’s something that this side of the House and the official opposition strongly supports, and we would absolutely put that into play if we were the government of the day. But we actually put that in play by putting the motion before this House so that this House could adopt that and move towards reducing the administrative burden on family physicians so they can do more and actually help the patients that they desperately want to help.

Speaker, we also heard from physicians as well as nurses who work in emergency departments, and what they have shared with us is that they are seeing massive closures in unprecedented manners. And this is largely due to a shortage of nurses, nurses who are leaving the field at unprecedented rates due to burnout and to overcapacity struggles. Closures and long wait times caused by understaffing result in delays or misdiagnoses, leading patients to return to the emergency department in much worse shape. This is shameful. We are a very rich province. We can certainly do better. But we are not going to be able to meet the problem with the actual solutions if the government has its head in the sand.

The Registered Nurses’ Association of Ontario emphasized that in implementing staffing ratios, there has to be a minimum nurse-to-patient ratio. It’s the only way to address retention. If no action is taken, Ontario will suffer a shortage of 30,000 nurses—a staggering 30,000 nurses—by 2028. Also, closing the wage gap that nurses experience and closing the private clinics, which we know that the ONA has claimed and reported is undermining the public health care system. All of this is setting the way for privatization, something that this government is blatantly, intentionally dedicated to, and they’re not even hiding it anymore.

I want to speak about the need to ensure that we can provide funding that is stable and reliable for safe consumption sites. I represent Toronto Centre, known as the downtown east, and I can tell you that my community is hit very hard. We have safe consumption sites, Speaker, that are funded largely, 100%, by private donations. Safe consumption sites are a continuum of care in the health care system and you cannot help people if they keep dying, especially if there is a solution to reverse that horrific trend. The province needs to step up and do it quickly in order for them to save lives. Right now, they are not.

In northern Ontario, there are only three safe consumption sites and only one of them is federally funded. I’m not sure what this government is waiting for, but it’s clear to me that those who are living with addictions are not their priority. But they are family members and I can tell you that that is the priority of the families.

Mental health is a massive concern for Ontarians. We are facing a mental health crisis and the official opposition has been ringing this bell over and over again, saying that we are willing to work with you on solutions to address the problems that are being caught downstream. They are being caught in ER departments. They are being caught by our hard-working police officers. They are being caught in our school system and they do not have the resources and the skill set to address this problem.

Agencies that provide mental health care in Ontario are looking for multi-year funding to stabilize, sustain and build the sector. They are literally at a crisis point and they have been for years, but pretty soon, the runway is going to be gone. They have asked the Associate Minister of Mental Health and Addictions to consider the plight of the families, and this same message would go to the Premier and to everyone sitting on the front bench in cabinet. They have asked them to put themselves into the shoes of those families, to empathize with their pain about what it feels like to surrender a child simply because their community lacked the appropriate mental health supports.

I have a son who is just about five years old. I do everything I can to provide care for him; my partner and I both do. It would break my heart if I couldn’t care for him, and that’s exactly what’s happening to families right across Ontario, because they’re not getting the support from this government. Speaker, we all know about the alarming, damning statistics and the backlog with the Ontario Autism Program. We are not seeing this government do enough, nor are we seeing them coordinate and lead on these files, and we desperately need to.

Cities cannot experience the download of mental health and other social services and that this government asks that cities and neighbourhoods pick up the tab, but that’s exactly what they’re doing when they passed Bill 23 and then promised that they were going to make these cities whole. By on one hand stripping away their ability to actually raise the revenues they need, and then at the same time underfunding and defunding the mental health system, you downloaded it once again. We saw this with the Harris government, we saw this with the McGuinty government, and now it’s happening with this Conservative government.

We’re also facing a demographic tsunami. This is where individuals who are 65 and older are going to become, at some point in time, a sizable portion of the population. Right now, it sits at 20%. By 2031 it will be 25% and by 2040 the population of individuals who are 80 years old and over is going to double. There is no planning in this budget, or anywhere else in this government’s priorities, that says that they acknowledge that this problem is here and that they’re ready to work with the sector and to hear from families to come up with the solution. Things are only going to get worse if the investments and, just as importantly, the leadership coordination and the partnership with the sectors are absent.

Seniors can live safely in their communities—many of them can. They also want to live productively in their homes, but they will need to have those supports. Whether it’s home care or other types of care that allow someone to continue to live independently for as long as they can, all of that takes time and all of that takes resources. But most importantly, Speaker, it takes workers and it takes coordination.

It’s important for us to address the wage and benefits gap when it comes to workers who are paid in community support services. What we’re seeing is that that sector in particular—dominated by women; dominated by racialized women—is grossly, grossly underpaid. And that’s not unintentional. I believe that is intentional, and they know it as well.

I have to talk about housing, because it is not possible for us to have an opportunity to pass the budget in Ontario in the grips of a housing and affordability crisis and not talk about what this government is doing to address the housing crisis. They should be using every legislative lever in their portfolio, in their hands, to address the housing crisis. Whether it’s vacancy decontrol, whether it’s rent control, whether it’s the building of new RGI units, whether it’s new subsidies, whether it’s new legislation to prevent rental demovictions, all of that is just a snapshot of some of the arsenal that they can use, and they are using none of it.

So they’re not serious about addressing the housing crisis. There’s really nothing in here that says that they’re serious about meeting the needs of low-income and moderate-income individuals in Ontario, because if they were, some of those tools I talked about, the policy changes that are within the power of this government—they could do that, but they’re choosing not to.

The housing sector, especially the non-profit housing sector, sees that, and they know they do not have a partner in this government. Regrettably, they know that they’re in this all on their own. So who are they turning to? They’re turning to the federal government, they’re turning to their municipalities, and both of those government partners are saying, “Where’s the province?”

What we’ve seen, Speaker, is that every single year, we have the association of interval and transition houses who make a request to have a $60-million investment to offset the services to ensure that their workforce is stable. They do this every single year. And what we also heard during the pre-budget consultation is that other housing sector partners come to the province with the same request every single year. It’s astounding that we have a government that’s not willing to work with the non-profit sector, to actually support them to expand deeply affordable housing for Ontarians to meet them where they are needed.

Education is a very important topic that this House has direct purview over, and since 2018-19 funding for education has fallen to an alarming $1,200 per student—peanuts—leaving us a laggard in Canada. Chronic underfunding creates a significant impact on the quality of education—the ability of hard-working teachers, education workers, administrators and trustees to deliver the resources and supports that students need.

Speaker, I was recently at the Toronto District School Board. I was outside of their building as the trustees were grappling with a massive budget deficit. They were put into a most impossible situation: Cut services to balance their budget or run a deficit—a symbolic deficit in this case—to send a message to the government that they will not play their game anymore.

That’s not the only school board in Ontario that’s struggling to make ends meet. Every school board is struggling. We’re hearing this from every union and association that represents educators. We’re hearing this loudly from parents—loudly from parents—when they are telling us that class sizes are too large, that their children cannot be successful, and if their children have special needs, God help them, because this government is not going to, and it’s heartbreaking. I sit in this House, and I have the privilege of being able to work in this House, so close to the solution, and I can’t reach it, but our members across can do something about it. I know they’ve heard from their constituents about the same problem because their constituents have reached out to me, telling me that they tried to talk to their MPP or the Minister of Education without much success.

Speaker, in the 30 seconds I have, I just want to say that for Ontarians who are looking for a budget that will work for them, this budget clearly does not. If you’re looking for a family doctor or better access to one, it’s not going to help you. If you’re a young person looking for housing, you’re not going to see anything in this budget for you. If you’re struggling with the cost of living, which most Ontarians are, there isn’t enough in this budget to make it work for you either.

I’ll tell you, Speaker, that we have resources and we have ideas. We need to work together, but we can’t do it if the government’s not willing to step forward. Thank you.

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.

Speak to the Chair.