It’s always an honour to rise and today debate Bill 162, the “get it done wrong act.” The reason why it’s getting it done wrong is that it’s imposing expensive, unaffordable sprawl onto communities across this province, specifically, schedule 3 imposes expensive sprawl on regions. The last thing we need when we’re in the middle of an unprecedented housing crisis in the province of Ontario is a new law that supports building the wrong types of housing in the wrong places at the wrong, expensive prices, instead of actually building homes that people can afford in the communities they know and love.

This bill flip-flops, on a flip-flop, on a flip-flop, around changing official plans. It is especially destructive for Waterloo and Halton regions.

I want to focus on Waterloo region, in particular, and give a quick shout-out to my colleague from Kitchener Centre, who put forward a number of amendments that unfortunately were voted down in committee around protecting the good, smart planning for building homes that people could afford in Waterloo region.

This bill threatens 6,400 acres of land in Waterloo region alone—threatens a plan that the region spent five years and millions of dollars working on with a variety of stakeholders, and especially local farmers. Talk to somebody like Mark Reusser, the head of Waterloo region OFA, who says that the changes to these urban boundaries in Waterloo region are simply not sustainable and actually threaten agriculture in the region. This was a world-class plan, recognized as a way for Waterloo region to meet their housing supply targets while protecting some of the best farmland—and definitely the best farmers—in the world, while protecting their water recharge areas and protecting the places that people love to spend time in, in Waterloo region. And all of this at a time when we are losing 319 acres of farmland in this province each and every day, at an unsustainable rate that threatens our $50-billion food and farming economy that employs over 800,000 people in this province.

Speaker, I want to especially focus in on the way this bill threatens the water recharge areas for Waterloo region. This bill will pave over one of the key areas for water recharge. When you do that, when you develop over water recharge areas, it threatens the amount of water filtering into the local aquifer, reducing it by 50% to 80%. For a community that primarily relies on groundwater for its drinking water—which, by the way then actually threatens housing in the region, because the last time I heard, when you build homes, you actually need drinking water for those homes. So why would the government overturn smart regional planning when the region actually already had a plan in place to protect that water recharge area, to protect their farmland and to meet their housing targets? The government has yet to explain a rationale of why they’re doing this even though the region clearly had a good plan.

This flawed process, to me, Speaker, smells a lot like the greenbelt scandal: a government more focused on, how do we help wealthy, well-connected, insider land speculators cash in—in the case of the greenbelt, $8.3 billion, which is now under RCMP investigation—instead of actually building homes that ordinary people can afford by legalizing housing?

Make it easy to build four units and four-storey as of right, province-wide. Make it easy to build six- to 11-storey buildings along major transit and transportation corridors, where we already have infrastructure in place. Because by imposing sprawl through schedule 3 of this bill, it actually costs municipalities 2.5 times more to service low-density sprawl than it does to actually build homes where the infrastructure already exists.

Waterloo region planner Kevin Eby clearly has stated that not only has Waterloo region approved enough land for development, but there’s already enough land approved for development in southern Ontario to build two million homes. I believe the government’s target is 1.5 million, though some are saying we probably need more like 1.8 million, and we already have land approved for two million. So why is this government imposing more expensive sprawl on municipalities through the get it done wrong act?

Speaking of sprawl, Speaker, I want to take a moment to talk about schedule 1 of this bill, which further weakens the environmental assessment process and actually makes it easier for the government to expropriate land from people.

And while we’re talking about Waterloo, let’s talk about the farmers in Wilmot in Waterloo region: 770 acres of some of the best farmland I’ve seen, being assembled now and possibly expropriated from farmers for a use that we don’t know—again, at a time we’re losing 319 acres of farmland each and every day.

But we know why—or we suspect why—this government is weakening the environmental assessment process, especially for highways, and making it easier to expropriate land. It’s because they want to build a highway that’s going to pave over 2,000 acres of prime farmland, 400 acres of the greenbelt, and 200 wetlands, threatening 29 species at risk, so drivers can save 30 seconds to a minute. That highway is called Highway 413, and I want to suggest to the members opposite that they actually spend some time in Peel region, go through Caledon, make your way over to Vaughan, and look at one of the fastest-growing crops there: signs saying, “Stop Highway 413. Protect Our Farmland.”

This bill talks about tolls, but the one highway that is tolled that isn’t talked about in this bill is the 407. We can reduce gridlock now—not 10, 15 years in the future; right now—by paying the tolls for truckers on Highway 407 at a fraction of the cost of building Highway 413, and without the destruction of the local farmland and environment that people love along the route of the highway.

In my final minute, Speaker, I just want to take a moment to talk about schedule 5. Schedule 5 is performative politics at its worst—it’s the schedule about the referendum on carbon pricing—because we know that a current government can’t tie the hands of a future government. Ironically enough, it was actually this government that brought in a carbon tax in Ontario when they ripped up the cap-and-trade.

What this government doesn’t talk about when it comes to climate action is that data released last week shows that the province with the fastest-growing, biggest increase in climate pollution is the province of Ontario—of the entire country, the province of Ontario. As a matter of fact, the data shows that this government has made zero progress on reducing climate pollution since they took office. Our emissions now are up as high as they were in 2017, despite the cost of the climate crisis.

So, Speaker, this is a government without a plan, and it’s actually going to take money out of people’s pockets by what they are planning to do. Thank you.