It’s a real honour today to welcome members from Community Living Ontario and Community Living Toronto for your advocacy day, and a special shout-out to my friend and constituent Judy Noonan, from Guelph.

I also want to extend my personal and warm welcome to Community Living Toronto—I look forward to your reception this evening.

And a very special welcome to Winston Lee, who is my new intern. I hope you’ve made it into the chamber. I want to say thank you for all you’re doing so far.

My question is for the Premier. Thousands in Toronto’s west end rely on the UP Express for their daily commutes. Airport workers, families and many others are stuck paying higher fares because UP Express riders don’t get to benefit from the One Fare program.

Can the minister tell us why UP Express riders and west-end commuters have been excluded from One Fare? Will he commit today to including them?

This petition is titled “Bring Back Rent Control.” Rent control existed for all units occupied by tenants regardless of what year they were built until this government came into power in 2018 and rent control for buildings built after 2018 was removed. As such, many renters in Toronto and across Ontario who are living in these units built after 2018 do not have protections of rent control. When you don’t have any cap on rent increases, it puts tenants in precarious housing. Massive, unpredictable rent increases also take away stability and predictability to build a life and to plan a life.

As such, this petition is calling on the Legislative Assembly of Ontario to pass my bill Rent Control for All Tenants Act so that we can ensure all tenants can live with rent control protections in safe, affordable homes.

I first want to thank my colleague from Toronto–Danforth for his presentation—I would say, an hour of good, solid argument as to why this legislation should not move forward, and if the government wanted to do the responsible thing for Ontarians, they should not proceed with this bill.

The member reminded the House that when the Liberals were in power, the Conservatives criticized the politicization of electricity planning and the Liberal disregard for evidence and professional, independent analysis. The Liberal government directed IESO to write blank cheques for new gas plants and sign hundreds of overpriced, private contracts with no OEB hearing to find out if these were a good deal for consumers, and what happened? Hydro bills skyrocketed.

So my question to the member is, are we seeing history repeat itself, and what is going to happen to consumers with this legislation moving forward?

Thank you to my colleague and neighbour in the east end of Toronto. That was a fantastic, informative speech.

My question to you is, since the Minister of Energy actually has a heat pump—which is a huge revelation to me. Like, wow, wonder of all wonders, he actually believes in it. He must believe in climate change and climate action to do that. Would you like a tour of his house and a field trip there with me some time, if he would invite us?

I thank the member from Mississauga–Lakeshore for his presentation. I will ask a question similar to the question I asked my colleague from Toronto–Danforth.

When the Liberals were in power, the Conservatives used to criticize their politicization of electricity planning, and the Liberals’ disregard for evidence and professional, independent analysis. The Liberals directed the IESO to write blank cheques, renew gas plants and sign hundreds of overpriced private contracts, with no OEB hearing to find out if these were a good deal for consumers, and hydro bills skyrocketed.

So my question to the member is: Why is your government doing exactly the same thing with natural gas systems and driving energy costs up?

I want to thank the member for that question. As you know, there are stakeholders that agree with Bill 165, because at the end of the day, we have to make homes much cheaper in the province of Ontario—when it would cost an individual house $4,400 here in Mississauga or in Toronto, or $8,000 to $10,000 to hook up gas in northern Ontario.

I know that we are going to transition to electric moving forward, but at this time, we still need natural gas because if everybody today were driving an electric car, with the investments that we are attracting here to the province of Ontario, we would have blackouts here in the province of Ontario. We have to have a combination of natural gas and electricity to move forward in this province and create the jobs that we are attracting here in Ontario for the future.

With all the investment that the Minister of Economic Development is bringing to Ontario—$43 billion of automotive investment with electric vehicles—we are going to need electricity, and right now, if we just kept the electricity that we do have in the system, we would not be able to end up driving electric cars.

So this is what this will do moving forward. This will help us to stabilize the system as we’re moving forward to the next 20 to 30 years down the road. I wish we could get rid of natural gas by 2030, but that will be impossible with what is going on right now across Canada and across Ontario.

We need our nuclear fleet to help, as well as using natural gas to heat our homes at this present time, but we have to do it to combine this together, to move forward as we do move off natural gas moving forward.

I still have a natural gas furnace. I have a natural gas water heater. I have a natural gas barbecue and a natural gas fireplace, and I know that moving forward, we are going to be moving off all this—and a natural gas stove, too, in the kitchen; I forgot about that one. I know, moving forward, we are going to be changing that, but right now is not the time to put this extra cost on the consumers and the new homes that we’re building in a housing crisis that we are having right now in the province of Ontario. This will only cost people more money at the present time, so Bill 165—