It’s an honour to rise today to speak to Bill 180, the government’s budget measures act. Speaker, I think it’s important when you talk about the budget to contextualize the challenges that people of Ontario are facing right now.

What if I told you that in Ontario right now 16,000 people were sleeping rough and unhoused, where a one-bedroom apartment costs $2,200 a month on average, and it takes the average person 22 years to save up for a down payment to buy a home? And yet in the budget, housing starts go down, not up.

What if I told you that the wait-list for social housing is longer than the number of social housing spaces available?

What if I told you, Speaker, that last year, 700 forest fires destroyed one million acres of forest and the health care costs associated with the toxic air that that produced cost our health care system $1.28 billion in just four days due to increased hospital admissions?

What if I told you that our electricity sector grid has gone from being 90% clean to 80% clean, getting dirtier each and every year, and the government plans to make it dirtier?

What if I told you that 2.3 million people right now in the province of Ontario do not have access to a family doctor, where last year we had an unprecedented number of emergency department closures, where hallway medicine is the norm in hospitals across this province, and we have hospitals actually taking out lines of credit to be able to keep the doors open?

What if I told you, Speaker, that a third of secondary schools in the province right now are experiencing teacher shortages and a difficulty educating students, where the repair backlog in our education system is $16.8 billion?

What if I told you that 60,000 young people are on a wait-list to access autism services, and 30,000 children were on a wait-list to access mental health services that can be as long as two years, where organizations who provide services for people with developmental disabilities have told me their budgets have been frozen and they’re struggling to not have to cut programs for people in need? What if I told you that 717,000 people in Ontario right now are forced to live in legislated poverty?

That’s the Ontario we live in today. So then the question we have to ask the people of Ontario and the government is: Did the budget meet the moment? Did it meet the moment to address the real challenges that so many people in this province are facing? And Speaker, I would say no.

I want to start with housing. We have a government that has housing starts going down, not up. And the Premier, instead of saying, “Let’s legalize housing. Let’s make fourplexes legal across the province, so we can quickly build homes in a fast and low-cost way that people can actually afford in the communities they know and love without having to pave over our farmlands, our forests and our wetlands”—the government said no to that.

What if we had a government that actually sat down and read the Scotiabank report? Scotiabank—nothing too radical here: Over the next decade, Ontario needs to build 250,000 deeply affordable, non-profit and co-op housing spaces just to keep up—just to keep up, Speaker. And yet the government has built 1,188 of those spaces in the six years they’ve been in government.

There was nothing in the budget that talked about actually putting some money on the table so that Ontario once again could start building homes that people can afford so we can address chronic homelessness. The government had an opportunity with this budget—and I will, again, later today, when my colleague the MPP for Kitchener Centre brings forward a private member’s bill to actually bring in protections for renters in this budget, at a time when there is no city in Ontario where a minimum wage worker working full time can afford the average rent of a one-bedroom apartment.

The housing crisis is getting worse, the dream of home ownership is getting further and further away, and thousands of people are struggling to pay the rent. And while I appreciate the government providing some funding for permanent supportive housing in my riding of Guelph, which was highlighted in the budget, the budget fails to meet the moment of the housing crisis we’re facing, which is the number one driver of the affordability crisis. The Premier has been talking about bags at the LCBO, but let’s talk about what’s really driving up costs for people, and that is the housing crisis.

Speaker, I want to move to the climate crisis, because we’re already seeing an early start to the fire season in western Canada, and we have numerous experts predicting that we could have a historic fire season here in Ontario after the historic season that we experienced last year. So what I was hoping to see in the budget were two things: one, a firefighter protection preparedness plan that actually takes and gives wildland firefighters the dignity they need to be able to be treated as firefighters and the resources they need to ensure that we are prepared in Ontario after what we went through last year. The other thing I wanted to see was an actual, dedicated funding stream for municipalities to ensure that they can be climate ready.

According to the Financial Accountability Officer, the additional cost to public infrastructure in the next seven years will be $26.2 billion in the province of Ontario due to the impact of the increasing frequency and severity of climate-fuelled extreme weather events: floods, droughts, fires, extreme heat. It costs our economy when communities don’t have access to electricity for two, three weeks or longer due to a climate-fuelled extreme weather event, which we had last year in Ontario—nothing in the budget that actually prepares our communities or our economy for that.

As a matter of fact, I stepped out of committee. Right now, the government is going to ask people to pay more on their gas bills to subsidize Enbridge to expand gas services in the province. Instead, they could have brought in a climate affordability plan in this budget, making access to heat pumps, which reduce climate pollution, operate more efficiently, and save people money—save people money—rather than having people pay more money to expand gas infrastructure in the province. They could have brought in a climate affordability plan that helped people completely disconnect from the pumps and give them rebates to be able to afford the electric vehicles that we want to build in this province, or a rebate to buy an electric bike for those who live in urban areas so we can actually lower our cost of transportation in this province.

Speaker, my time is limited, so I want to close with health care and poverty. The budget could have brought in funding to address the fact that 2.3 million people don’t have access to a doctor. The budget failed to do that. And they could have taken pressure off the health care system by ending legislated poverty by more than doubling social assistance rates, because we know that poverty costs the province $33 billion a year, primarily putting additional pressure on our health care system, and the budget failed to do that.