I spoke very briefly, maybe about five minutes or a little less, before question period yesterday on this bill. Mainly, I was able to mention to the Minister of Labour that, while at FONOM, I was able to speak with two wildland firefighters about the bill, and they were very excited about the presumptive coverage. It was actually during question period that I was able to go over and show the Minister of Labour the photo we took together. I’m glad that we were able to work on all sides to have that pass. I think that’s a wonderful thing to be able to have.

There are six schedules to this bill. I’m going to try to touch on all of them, but some of them are a little lighter, so I’ll skim over them.

For example, in schedule 1, there’s a section that just corrects French language. As long as my colleague is happy with the translation, I’m not going to overrule him; his French is obviously much better than mine.

There’s a subsection in schedule 1 about high school apprenticeships, and I think there’s potential with this, and I know there is some legislation that has to be built in around this. I think it’s really important.

As a high school student, I was steered away from shop classes. My best friend really loved auto shop; I wanted to take auto shop just so I could have a small conversation with him. My guidance counsellor said, “Well, you’ve got good grades; you don’t need shop,” and steered me away from it. And then after I graduated from college and graduated from university, I started taking an apprenticeship as an electrician.

So I think there is a missed opportunity for a lot of our students. Also, I have some concerns about this—because, as you can tell, Speaker, I’m not an electrician today. It wasn’t a good fit for me to be an electrician. I realized during my apprenticeship that many of my colleagues loved doing their job, and I just was going to work and getting a paycheque. So my concern for these students is that, when you pick a career path early on in your life, maybe it isn’t what you want to do; it doesn’t mean it’s a bad career, but it’s not a good fit for you. I want to ensure that our students are set up for success so that they are not pigeonholed into one career, so they don’t have to backtrack and upgrade if they want to switch careers. I’m also concerned that it could limit their possibility to move forward. Before starting here, I was hired at Vale, and one of the requirements to work at Vale was to have post-secondary education or to be a tradesperson. Many, many workplaces have functions in place where you’re unable to climb the ladder if you don’t have a post-secondary degree. There’s an expectation. So it may limit you in terms of being a foreman or moving on in your career, past that.

I think these are things that we can resolve, but I think this is the time, during debate, where we could talk about, what are things that we want to do and will this pathway allow people, if they decide trades isn’t for them, to move into different career paths?

I’m also concerned when it comes to trades. I’ve been hearing more and more conversations about unscrupulous employers—not the largest employers, but there are smaller employers that are using a black market economy, where the journeyman is going out with helpers or people who are apprentices but who are not registered to be apprentices, and then they find out after working for two or three years that they have no hours, even though they’ve worked thousands of hours. This is something we have to focus on as well—these workplace helpers, these undocumented apprentices.

Yesterday I was meeting with the carpenters union and we talked about the black market that has arisen on the trades side. We have to focus on that, not just because it’s exploitive of those workers, but because there’s a lot of tax theft that happens through the black market, where people are paying with cash. I know people are trying to cut corners and save money, but the reality is that when you are paying with cash, if someone gets hurt, there isn’t WSIB for them; when you are paying with cash, you may or may not have a qualified tradesperson.

When I was an electrician, we went to a house where they did renovations and someone unqualified had wired it with speaker wire. Speaker wire is not designed for 120 volts to run through it, and pretty much you’ve created a fire hazard in your newly renovated rec room.

There are things that we can do when we ensure that these trade jobs—and as the minister often says and we all say, these are good-paying trades jobs, but they’re not good-paying if you’re paid under the table; they’re not good-paying if you’re not recognized as a real apprentice; and they’re not good-paying if you never have that pathway to becoming a Red Seal tradesperson or journeyperson. In order to do this, we have to increase inspections and enforcement. In 2018-19, there were 2,345 proactive workplace inspections; by 2022-23, the number had dropped down to 788. We went from more than 2,000 inspections to less than 1,000. That is a really precarious drop, and I think this is why these workplace helpers are rising up and this underground economy is rising up. We really have to have people going out into workplaces and talking to people and checking for their apprentice card and making sure the documents are there. If we’re promising people this pathway to a better future with these good-paying jobs—as the carpenters union tells me all the time, they always get their apprentices to go back and show the guidance counsellors their first paycheque. If we’re trying to get people into these good-paying jobs, but they’re being exploited by bad bosses, it’s our responsibility as legislators, as the people who make the laws of the land, to ensure these laws are enforced.

Schedule 2 has to do with advertising job postings. If you publicly advertise a job, you have to declare that it’s for an existing vacancy or not. I’m not aware of issues when people are putting out jobs that don’t exist, but I suppose it’s happening. Then it requires the employer to respond to applicants who have applied for the job and who have had the interview and just let them know they weren’t successful. I think that makes sense. I know it’s a standard that we have as New Democrats. Our workers are unionized. We have OPSEU and we have COPE workers—OPSEU workers here at Queen’s Park and COPE workers in our constituency offices. When we have job postings, it’s all very regulated because we work very closely with our unions about the job postings and procedures, and one of those things that HR ensures they always do is respond to the people who have applied to let them know if they’ve been selected or not. It also requires the employer to retain copies of all the prescribed information for three years, I guess so they can prove—or if they’re audited they can show it. I think this sounds good; I’m just not sure how many employees out there are putting this at the top of their job hunt wish list in terms of what they want. It’s great that if you applied for a job, someone is going to phone you and say, “Hey, you didn’t get it,” but the reality is that a lot of people would figure that out when weeks go by and they didn’t get a response. It’s a nice, polite thing; you can’t really argue against it, but I don’t know how much it helps people at the end of the day.

For example, something that would help people is enforcing wage theft—in 2018, it was about $10 million, and that wasn’t collected.

The Workers Action Centre sent a quote to me: “There’s an epidemic of wage theft in this province. Increasing fines will not, by itself, address the crisis....

“We need effective collection of stolen wages when the Ministry of Labour has ordered an employer to pay back workers’ wages.”

I thought this was fascinating, because I’ve always had this number of $10 million of wage theft in my head, because that was the number in 2018: The Toronto Star did an investigation on wage theft, and between 2020 and 2022, in those two years, there were more than 8,000—almost 8,500—successful claims for workplace violations for wage theft. If you calculate all those together, workers in our province are owed more than $36 million by employers who have stolen money from them, the wage theft employers. And by the end of 2022, the government was able to recover less than half, less than 40% of that. So if you’re into the numbers, $36 million was owed to Ontario workers, and the Ontario government was only able to collect $13 million, so these bad actors who are ripping people off, these bad bosses we hear about when the Conservatives speak about being tough on bad bosses, got to keep $23 million of stolen wages from employees—$23 million in wage theft they got to keep in their pockets, that they stole out of the pockets of workers. That’s something we need to resolve.

What we need is a way to protect workers from reprisals, as well, because that wage theft number that I spoke about earlier—the $36 million that was stolen from workers—that’s only from workers who were able to report this and tell people what happened. That number is probably a lot higher, because a lot of employees are afraid to report anything because they will be fired, and it’s better to at least have some money in your pocket to pay your bills, especially with the cost of everything going up. Many people, because of the high cost of living, because of the rent going through the roof, can’t afford to report it or say anything. And there are a lot of newcomers to our province who are waiting for their Canadian citizenship to come through, and they are not going to say a word to wreck any of that.

So what we need are those proactive inspections. We need to get those workplace inspectors back into the workplaces. We need real protection from wrongful dismissal, not two or three years from now, when we make it up to you but—that real strong protection for those workers.

And honestly, we need to start collecting the money. There’s an incentive. If you’re a bad boss out there and you know that less than half, less than 40% of that—$23 million is what they got to keep—of the $36 million was taken back, that incentivizes you to continue doing what you’re doing because they’re probably not going to catch you, and if they do, you don’t have to pay it back anyway.

We have to be united on this, and I think the Conservative government would be—but I’ve been saying this for a long time. I’ve been saying this for six years. I’ve been asking about estimates on this. Instead of that $10 million going down, it’s increasing. We cannot have the amount of wage theft climbing on a regular basis.

I’m skipping over section 3, but I’ll go back to it. Section 3 is about sick notes.

Section 4 has to do with fines. Section 4 is about these higher maximum fines for individuals who are convicted of an offence. If you were convicted of an offence, your maximum fine used to be $50,000, and it’s now going up to $100,000. Again, this is an example of the Conservative government saying that we’re being tough on bad bosses, we’re sticking it to the bad bosses.

But I’ve asked in the past, during estimates and other meetings: How many times has the maximum penalty been filed? How many employers have gotten this maximum penalty? Surely, if you’re raising it from $50,000, it must have been handed out time and time again, and these bad bosses are continuing to do it, so you’ve got to raise it to $100,000. The reality, though, is that fines of the previous maximum of $50,000 are almost never levied. I tried looking for data, and the highest fine I could find, from 2022, was $31,250. For individuals, we’ve increased their maximum fine, from $50,000 to $100,000, but we’ve only ever had them pay about $33,000, so we never hit that maximum of $50,000 in the first place. And corporations—their fines start at $100,000 and go up to $500,000, but the maximum fine that anyone in Ontario, in 2022, was ever given was $31,000. So why are we raising the maximum fines—my gut is so that during press conferences and headlines, they can say how tough they’re being on these bad bosses, but the reality is, it doesn’t look like they are at all. This is meaningless if you’re not enforcing. It’s meaningless if you’re not doing the maximum. If the highest fine is almost $20,000 less than the previous maximum, what’s the point? How is that going to hold anyone accountable, and what’s the point of raising this?

So there’s this theme of being tough on bad bosses, but if you look into that—I mentioned wage theft earlier. The last bill had a section on wage theft. I’m not going down the path of how it was already a law and they added another law to duplicate it. But it was already a law. Ontario workers had to come together and prove that $36 million was stolen from them, but the bad bosses got to keep $23 million of that, of wage theft. This bill is increasing the maximum bad-boss fine to $100,000, but the highest fine levied before was $20,000 less than the previous max of $50,000. That doesn’t make sense.

It’s not in this bill, but there’s a section on penalties in the Employment Standards Act that says if you’re a bad boss, you get a penalty like a fine, like a ticket. In 2018, the Conservative government decreased those administrative penalties, if you violate the Employment Standards Act. It used to be $350, but that was dropped down to $250, and the $700 penalty was dropped to $500, and the $1,500 penalty was dropped down to $1,000. In reality, it’s an incentive to be worse, because the higher the penalty was in the past, the more that these bad bosses will save under the Conservative government. You would save a hundred bucks if it was a small penalty of $350, but you’ll save 500 bucks for the $1,500 penalty. So I don’t buy into this. It’s a smokescreen.

I’ve said this before on these bills—that these are headline bills. They sound good at a press conference, but if you scratch beneath the surface, there’s not much there about what’s happening.

So, section 3—I said I’d come back to section 3, about sick notes. This is an example of that. It sounds great in a statement. You get to come forward and say, “We’re ending sick notes”—something we’ve been calling for for a very long time. But when you read the section, it says the new subsections 6 and 6.1 would allow employers to retain the right to require evidence reasonable in the circumstances of entitlement to sick leave, but they would prohibit employers from requiring a certificate from a qualified health practitioner as evidence. So you can ask people why they’re sick and how they’re sick and to prove that they’re sick—but technically, they can’t ask you that, because you can’t ask for the health requirements of it. It feels very murky to me, and maybe, through committee, this will be straightened out and clarified. But when I read this, it sounds like you technically can but you technically can’t—so, ultimately, what you’ll have is people asking for sick notes because the law isn’t clear. If it was just, “You can’t do this anymore. You can’t ask for sick notes,” that would be very clear for people, and people would understand. It would help employers, who need that clarity. The Minister of Red Tape Reduction was always talking about how there are too many rules and people are getting confused. Don’t write a complicated rule that you can ask what you can’t ask; just make it clear. Sick notes are a waste of time. Just get rid of it.

The thing, too, with sick notes is that in 2018, when the Conservative government was first elected, one of the things they did was table Bill 47. It removed a ton of worker rights and workers’ abilities. It turned back the clock on a lot of things that employers were able to do, and one of those things was about paid protection leave—it used to be paid sick days, and they had 10 of them; they peeled that back to three PEL days. And so now we’re at a point where Ontario is the third-worst when it comes to job-protected sick leave days. We’re behind Nova Scotia and Nunavut, but we’re the third-lowest when it comes to protective job leave. That alone is a little bit embarrassing, but on top of that, we’ve just come through a pandemic, where we all recognized that if you isolate yourself when you’re sick, it’s going to be better off for your family and community; it’s actually going to be better off for your workplace. We have all been in that meeting where the person comes in the room and they’re like, “I’ve got a bit of a cold.” The first thing you think is, “Thanks. Now I’ll have a bit of a cold.” I’d much rather the person stay home and get well and not share the cold with me, so I don’t share it with the family, so I don’t share it with my co-workers, so I don’t share it with a person when I’m going to pick up groceries. We know it’s better to stay home.

The other thing with sick notes is that there’s this mythology that the sick note is magically going to root out people who are lying about being sick. But that isn’t what happens with a sick note. When you need a sick note, you go to your doctor, and they write a note that says, “The patient claims they were sick. They’re not sick anymore.” They don’t diagnose you. They don’t prove it to anybody. It’s just a formality. So if you’re somebody who’s lying about being sick that day, the sick note is just an obstacle; it’s a formality. I don’t know what it is now—it used to be 15 bucks—but you pay a couple of bucks, you come in and you give it to them. It doesn’t prove anything. And that’s for people who are breaking those rules and using it unscrupulously. There are some people who would do that. But the majority of people, when they’re sick, they’re sick—legitimately sick.

With sick notes, what we’re doing is, we’re telling people who are sick, “Don’t stay home and take care of yourself. Bring yourself somewhere where other people are sick and vulnerable. Share your cold or whatever you have with those people. Go in that waiting room where everyone is right beside each other and coughing on each other. Go there, where moms are with their babies, and spread whatever cold you have that you’d normally get over in a day or two. Spread it around and share it with everybody else, and maybe get part of their colds too, so that you can get a piece of paper that says you were sick—“I saw the doctor. I showed him my runny nose, and he said ‘Yep, you’re sick. Go home. Have an Aspirin. Get some sleep. Have some soup.’” This is nonsense. Or, you can’t go because you’re so sick you can’t make it—if it’s anything gastro and you’ve got to be minutes to the washroom because you’re going to be physically sick, you’ll wait till you’re well, and you’ll miss another day of work because you’ve got to sit around in a busy walk-in clinic or doctor’s office or emergency room, which are clogging up for people who are actually sick that day, who were in emergency, while you’re waiting there, flipping through your phone and killing time, saying, “I used to be sick, but I’m not anymore. But my boss said I’ve got to be here. So, sorry, everybody else, I’m in the queue.” It makes no sense. It’s bad business, and it’s costly.

Section 5, I’ll just briefly skim over, just because—it will allow the Lieutenant Governor in Council to make regulations. I’m not really sure what the intent of that is, but LGIC tends to be thrown in a lot of Conservative bills, and so I just thought, “Ah, another thing for the LGIC to do.”

Interjection.

Good morning. Let us pray.

Prières.

Resuming the debate adjourned on May 8, 2024, on the motion for second reading of the following bill:

Bill 190, An Act to amend various statutes with respect to employment and labour and other matters / Projet de loi 190, Loi modifiant diverses lois relatives à l’emploi et au travail et à d’autres questions.

Cabinet; sorry. Yes. It’s fine. I’m making a note of it. I just don’t want to be skipping over stuff.

In schedule 3, they’re making changes in the Fair Access to Regulated Professions and Compulsory Trades Act. I sort of like this. It’s not completely clear to me, but I think it’s a step in the right direction. My colleague from Scarborough Southwest has been doing a lot of work about recognizing qualifications from people who are coming from other countries and living in Canada and becoming new Canadian citizens. We all know these stories. You go in a taxi or an Uber or something and the person driving the cab has all these qualifications, but they’re not recognized here. The wording is “to set out requirements for ‘reasonable alternatives’ to documented proof of qualifications.” I think this is a way for people to prove that they could be tradespeople or doctors or dentists. I shared a story a while ago about a dentist from India going to school at Cambrian College and taking the dental hygienist program because their qualifications aren’t being recognized locally.

We need to fix this stuff, and if this helps fix it, I think it’s a really good step in the right direction. It’s just not as clear in here—this is probably something we’ll be able to work on in committee and get some clarity in committee. But if that is the intent, I think that’s a very promising thing, and I think that’s going to help people in Ontario, and people will be more successful. Hopefully, that’s the intent, because if it is, I think that’s wonderful.

Schedule 4 goes into the Occupational Health and Safety Act. I’m a bit of a safety nerd, so I apologize if I bore everyone with this. I’ve always been passionate about health and safety. I got involved, when I was working at Vale, back when it was Inco, in health and safety when I first got hired and I kind of fell in love with it. One of the reasons I’m not an electrician is because I wasn’t super-passionate about being an electrician. My colleagues all loved being journeypeople, and I knew it wasn’t for me. I enjoyed the work, but I wasn’t as passionate as they were. But when I got involved with health and safety, I understood what they saw in the work they were doing—it has always been something with me. I’ve had a lot of time to instruct others. I’ve done safety investigations. Unfortunately, I’ve been involved with fatalities, as well. Before I got elected, I taught health and safety to second- and third-year students at Laurentian University, which I always enjoyed.

Section 1 of this schedule is going to update the definition for “industrial establishment” and clarify that it refers to an office. I think that helps people and office workers, because the way health and safety legislation works is, there’s the Occupational Health and Safety Act, which is the basic ground rules for everybody, and then there are regulations for all different workplaces, and this one clarifies for office workers that the regulation you should be following is industrial. I don’t know if office workers see themselves as an industrial place, but at least there’s a place they can point to. It helps clarify for them, and also for Ministry of Labour inspectors, what regulation to follow.

So you’d have the Occupational Health and Safety Act—and then, in my workplace, we were a mining site, and so we would be regulation 854, which is mines and mining plants. It gets even more confusing because, if there’s a construction project at my work site, then we follow the Occupational Health and Safety Act, we follow regulation 854 for mining and mining sites, and then we have to follow regulation 213/91, which is construction regulations. That gets a little weedy, but it scratches that safety nerd itch of mine, to be able to explain all that. I think the idea of that is really, at the core, to help workers in an office when looking at regulations, so that they can open up the industrial regulations and see what applies specifically to them, because it can be confusing if you’re looking at the wrong regulations.

Another section is going to update the definitions for “workplace harassment” and “workplace sexual harassment” to include certain virtual activities. I think this is important, as well. There’s a lot in here where it talks about moving things online-only, and I’m not a fan of moving stuff online-only, but I think we need to recognize that the world of work has changed and a lot of stuff is happening virtually. We know this in this room, but all over the place things are changing, and I think you need to be clear about this.

Many of us—maybe all of us—have spoken with representatives from the Women of Ontario Say No. It has to do with workplace harassment for Legislatures and the accountability for them at all levels of government and how, for some reason, if you’re in a normal, regular workplace, there are very clear rules about harassment, and it doesn’t seem to be as clear if you’re an elected official—federal, municipal or provincial—and so this isn’t a thing that has been addressed just because workplace harassment and sexual harassment were introduced in the act maybe 10 years, probably 15 years ago. It needs to be resolved.

Just a few weeks ago, all of us were united in recognizing that intimate partner violence was an epidemic. It has gone on to committee, and I want to thank our colleague from Windsor West for the work, and all of our colleagues who moved that. I also want to recognize the Conservative government, the independent Liberals, the Greens and independents for the unanimous recognition of the importance of this—intimate partner violence and concern for it. I really want it to come back quickly but stronger than ever to ensure we start holding people accountable and making life better for these—primarily women who are being hurt.

It’s also going to provide a new definition for “washroom facility.” I don’t know what the definition is going to be. It’s weird; every Working for Workers bill seems to have something about a bathroom in it. I think it’s important. You can’t really argue about, you should have a clean bathroom, whatever else—but a lot of workplaces already do, and if they’re not, you could actually complain under the general duty clause, which I’ll get into later. There’s a requirement to keep your stuff in working order already.

Then there’s a bunch of sections about having things in accessible electronic formats. I am fine with having that, but I want it to be a “yes, and” conversation. I think that if we’re telling people that it only has to be online—we saw this, for example, when they changed updating your health card and your driver’s licence to online-only and not mailing out the records. Now people are getting tickets, or people are going for health care and they can’t get health care because their health card is expired, but they didn’t get a letter reminding them; or being pulled over—and not just a ticket for maybe running a red light or speeding or whatever your traffic infraction is; you also get a ticket because your licence expired, but you didn’t know because the online version is there now.

We all know people who are not tech-savvy. We all know people who are not good on their phones. There are people in the Legislature who are not really great on their phones or computers—the Premier, for example. I can’t remember when it was, but I remember they were rushing to get him a laptop—and I guess he has a stash of BlackBerrys because he prefers the BlackBerry and moving over to a new type of phone is difficult.

In my workplace, we used Apple phones forever, and I wanted to get an Android phone when I got here, and I couldn’t make that connection; it was too steep of a learning curve. I could figure it out eventually, but life is busy, and so I went back to Apple on it.

So saying things are online and it will be okay—it becomes sort of that point of view where it works for you but it may not work for others. Workplaces are comprised of people from all different backgrounds. I’m not against having things in electronic format, but I am concerned if we’re not going to have the paper versions.

I really think a way to get around this and a way to resolve this is if we amend this section to say that the committee can make this decision—the joint health and safety committee. I think that’s a smart way of addressing this, because the Occupational Health and Safety Act—the core of it is what’s known as the IRS, the internal responsibility system. Not to go too far back, but the idea after the Ham Commission was that they had recognized that it’s the workers, the employers and the supervisors in the workplace who know the work best. So instead of the government Legislatures and the government agencies coming out and telling people, “This is what’s best,” they do a framework with the Occupational Health and Safety Act and the regulations, but they allow the committees to work together through the internal responsibility system to spell out what works best for them.

So if you have a workplace where it’s all digital, where everyone is working digitally all the time, it doesn’t make sense to have a paper copy in an office if everyone is working from home anyway. But in other workplaces where your workforce wouldn’t be successful on a computer or you don’t have access to computers in the workplace, which could be just not set up for it or because there isn’t the connectivity, especially in northern and rural areas; or maybe, for security reasons, you’re not able to access computers or anything like that—those committees can make the recommendation that the paper copies continue to be in place. That’s how you resolve this issue, depending on what committee it is.

I’ll give you a simple example about this. Section 3 repeals the requirement to have the names and work locations of the joint health and safety committee members posted in the workplace as a paper copy. Workplaces are supposed to have a bulletin board somewhere, and there’s a bunch of stuff that will be posted there that workers can easily access. They could pull the minutes down. They can look at who the committees are and who represents them. this act would remove that requirement to have that billboard in place and to know who represents you. The reality is, most people aren’t safety nerds like me. Most people don’t know what JHSC stands for, and when you tell them that’s the joint health and safety committee, they don’t know what that means either, because they just don’t know. So if we are removing even saying, “Here’s who your safety people are. You could talk to them if you have questions,” in a visible spot, they won’t even know to look online for it because they don’t know what a joint heath and safety committee is. They don’t even know there are meetings. I know this from a workplace that takes health and safety really seriously—that some people, they just don’t know, and they aren’t aware, so as we remove things from their line of sight, we make it more difficult for them.

Two weeks ago, we had the Day of Mourning, April 28, and one of the things I’ve noticed about the Day of Mourning is that we’ve sort of flatlined when it comes to workplace injuries across Canada—it has plateaued at about a thousand; it goes up and down a little bit, but it sort of floats at around a thousand. If we want to bring that number down, we have to have improved communication, more effective communication. If we want fewer workplace injuries and deaths, we need workers, supervisors and employees to have easy access to that information.

That’s why I was suggesting that a good way to get around this is to have the joint health and safety committee decide what the best format is, and then you tweak, through committee, the wording of this, so instead of “shall,” it will be “may”—“may” be provided electronically. Those committees can decide; the workers, the employers, the supervisors can decide what works best for them—paper only, online only, a mixture of both. I think that would make a lot better sense to me.

The other thing about when you remove these paper documents—for example, one subsection would remove the reference to “in a workplace” so people can have virtual meetings. I think that’s fine, but I think the committee should be able to choose if they’re going to do them virtually or in the workplace. More and more workplaces are becoming virtual, but my concern is that if you start having only virtual meetings, you don’t get to have that sidebar conversation and you don’t get to see the confusion on someone’s face on a Zoom screen. We’ve all been there with people in a meeting and you don’t get the reference that’s happening in there. In in-person meetings, someone can say, “It looks like you’re not aligned with us. Do you have any concerns?” It’s easier to pick up in a room.

The other part of it is that there’s this term in health and safety that’s known as the “imbalance of power.” It recognizes that employees are not on the same power level; they don’t have the same ability as the supervisor does or as the employer does or as the instructor does. The employees, basically, can be fired. I know that management can be fired, as well, but it’s difficult to be on a one-to-one footing when you’re arguing about the solution to control a hazard in the workplace. It can be intimidating for people, if your job could be on the line. Section 50 of the Occupational Health and Safety Act is supposed to protect you from that, but there are a lot of people who still get fired, and a lot of people don’t know about section 50. Even when it’s filed, it’s not always enforced.

As we talk about moving things more virtually and moving things online, my first-hand concern from people who are being hurt in the workplace and who are being killed in the workplace is that the less information that people have, the more likely we’re going to have repeat incidents. There’s an expression in health and safety that you become safer because something bad happens to you or because someone tells you about something bad that happened to them. I want to ensure that people have more safety awareness and more health and safety training as they go out there.

In fact, before I got elected, at Vale, Bryson Gray, who was the safety supervisor, and I would go in the plant and do these virtual walks with supervisors. I want to compliment Bryson for doing this. It was his idea. We would go out and Bryson would be a Ministry of Labour inspector, I would be the worker rep—it wasn’t hard for me because I was already the worker rep—and we would walk around as if he was visiting with a Ministry of Labour inspector. This was helpful for these supervisors to understand what that experience was like and what to do. Through that, Bryson was able to provide a lot of education. Previously, we would do a safety inspection with a supervisor, and the inspection basically was us saying, “Oh, this is wrong and this is wrong and this is wrong.” Basically, we were just saying, “We’re smarter than you, we’re smarter than you, we’re smarter than you, we’re smarter than you.”

But when Bryson took on that role as Ministry of Labour inspector, it was more educational and informative. He would randomly ask questions about stuff, and he’d ask questions about things that weren’t unsafe—just randomly, “How much does that weigh?” The supervisor would get all stressed out, and then we’d explain to him it’s just that sometimes they have questions about the structure of the building. There’s nothing wrong with answering the questions. You’re not always in trouble. That creates a dialogue where people become safer because the supervisor has a better understanding of the rules and why the rules exist and what they mean. They don’t feel like someone is talking down to them. They feel like someone is helping them get better in their career—because if you’re good at health and safety, you have a better chance of climbing that ladder; because as you climb the ladder, you become more involved with health and safety and you become more responsible for more people in your workplace not getting hurt.

Section 5 talks about washroom facilities. It’s weird, because the Occupational Health and Safety Act is going to have a section about washrooms for construction projects, but the construction regulations already have a really thorough section about washrooms. It’s amazing how detailed it is. The previous bill had a whole section I called “this is already a law,” and this is one of those areas where this is already a law. The construction projects regulation 213/91 has a whole section about bathrooms. It’s a little weird to put this into the Occupational Health and Safety Act. You can make the argument that, well, it’s better to be there twice because then people would be even more aware of it. It’s under the duties, but the duty of the constructor, the duty of the employer and duty of a supervisor, duty of an employee—there are all these sorts of requirements. You have a duty to follow the act. You have a duty to report hazards. You have a duty to ensure that the procedures are followed. You have a duty to post your harassment policy in the workplace. It’s not really where this should be in the act. You can make the argument because we wrote “duty” beside it, but it’s not the same thing. So it’s a little confusing, a little bit of a bizarre thing for people who write regulations and legislation to do, to sort of muddy the water. Also, like I said before, it’s already a law. This already exists, and it’s spelled out a lot more clearly than this add-on would be. It goes back again to the sort of headline section—“Look what we’re doing. We’re ensuring that construction projects have washrooms.” But there’s already legislation that does that.

And then they have—I’m just going to go through a couple of these “this is already a law.”

Section 5 will have a requirement that a constructor shall ensure that, on a project, washroom facilities provided to workers by the constructor are maintained in a clean and sanitary condition. I know I keep saying this a lot, but I just want to prove it. In the construction regulations: “The facilities shall be serviced, cleaned and sanitized as frequently as necessary to maintain them in a clean and sanitary condition”—already a law.

This bill is going to ensure that we “keep, maintain and make available records of the cleaning of washroom facilities.”

Construction regulations:

“The constructor shall keep at the project for the duration of the project,

“(a) a record of the servicing, cleaning and sanitizing of the facilities; and

“(b) a copy of the document required under subsection”—23.1 of the act.

It’s weird to keep tabling legislation duplicating existing legislation—and the existing legislation is actually written better than this.

Subsection 23.1(3) of this act will add “may establish new or modified requirements with respect to washroom facilities.”

I couldn’t find the exact wording to spell it out and I didn’t want to read the whole section—there are a couple of pages about washrooms—but in the construction regulations, it spells out all the different types of washrooms requirements. It spells out, for the number of employees, the number of toilets you need, the number of urinals that are required, the number of sinks. It spells out how much hot water you need, wash facilities, soap and water, hand sanitizer—all of that is spelled out in way more detail than I could—I bet you I could fill the hour just reading that section of the construction projects.

Why are we doing this? Why are we writing legislation that already exists and duplicating it? My two thoughts are, one, it’s about headlines, so when you have a press conference for people who are uninformed, you can say, “We’re ensuring that you have the right amount of washrooms in construction projects,” and most people who don’t work in construction projects wouldn’t know, and they’ll say, “That sounds good.” But they don’t say, “Oh, we’re holding a press conference to let you know we’re tabling legislation that already exists—just as a duplicate of what’s already there. It’s actually a little weaker than what’s already there, but hopefully we’re going to get in the news on this. We don’t have any other ideas, so we’re just duplicating what already exists out there.”

I’m starting to wonder if this is a make-work project for the minister of red tape reduction. The Ministry of Labour duplicates legislation, and then that ensures the minister of red tape reduction is never out of a job because then he gets to look unhappy and say, “Oh, my God, there’s all this duplicate legislation. I’m so busy.” It’s a little sarcastic, but how can you have a minister talking about reducing red tape and saying, “There’s too much legislation. There’s too much duplication,” and then at the same time, you have another minister going—and every single one of these bills—tabling legislation that’s already law. It boggles the mind.

Speaking of “already law,” I had a whole section, last time I debated the bill, that was called “this is already a law.” I have a section in this one—and I went through the parts that were already a law, but I have a section in this part that—I just want to clarify to people who are watching this and maybe my colleagues, when they ask me questions afterwards, that this is not in the bill.

At the press event that led off the kickoff of this bill, there was a lot of conversation about the requirement that sanitary products will be available on all construction job sites. That was in the press conference, but it’s not in this bill. Two bills ago, it was about firefighter coverage, and people kept asking me—my colleagues were asking me during the Q&A portion of the debate, “Will you support firefighter presumptive cancer coverage?” It was two bills ago. They didn’t exist in that bill; it came in the following one. So if there are questions about sanitary products available on construction sites—I think it’s an amazing idea; I think it’s a wonderful idea. We have tabled legislation about having free access to sanitary products on a regular basis. We will pass them in a heartbeat any time you want. But it’s not in this bill.

At a different press event, the Minister of Labour said that this bill would bring in job-protected leave that’s in line with federal levels. The minister, I think, actually spoke about this yesterday during his debate, but it’s not in this bill. It’s a good idea; it’s not in this bill.

At another Bill 190 press event, the minister announced that there will be a new secondary-school-to-trades program, but I don’t see that in this bill. There is some stuff about changing ways for people to graduate and get into trades school, but it’s not in this bill. And so, schedule 1, I think, can move towards that. This could be the first step of that happening.

I also want to be clear that the firefighters—I talked about two bills ago, that the firefighter presumptive cancer coverage wasn’t in the bill; it was in the next bill.

I’m not saying these are bad ideas. In fact, I agree with most of these ideas. But when you’re having your press conferences, maybe talk about what’s in that actual bill—not on the to-do list at some point, because that’s confusing for people.

If you’re very excited about sanitary products being available on construction job sites, and we’re trying to attract more and more women to construction, and you’re thinking this is going to happen—we’re all busy. It’s only us in this room and maybe the people who work with us who know, day to day, what legislation is going on and talk about it. Everyone else is busy with their job, and they’re busy with getting their kids to practice and everything else, so they’re just hearing the headlines. So if you heard this and you show up at work and they don’t have it and then you’re frustrated and upset—one, you’re upset at all of us, because they don’t know it’s a Conservative bill, and they think it’s all of us; we’re all “government.” Secondly, you’re upset with your employer or supervisor because they’re not following the law—the law that doesn’t exist. So we have to get this right. Hopefully, it will come in the next bill and we could be supportive of it then.

I’m going to skip over the electronic format because I’ve talked about that already and why I’m against it.

There’s going to be a change to the Occupational Health and Safety Act that requires the employer to ensure that the washroom facilities provided to the workers by the employer are maintained in a clean and sanitary condition. Like I said before on the constructors, it’s a weird thing to put in the Occupational Health and Safety Act and not in regulation, but because it’s all-encompassing, I think it’s fine to do this. You spell it out. It becomes a weird thing to do, as well, because there’s already a section—it’s called the general duty clause. Anyone who has taken any health and safety knows clause 25(2)(h). Not everyone knows all the sections, and they might look through the book and flip around, or they probably scroll on their phone now, but everyone tends to know clause 25(2)(h). It’s known as the general duty clause, and it basically says that the employer must take every precaution reasonable in the protection of the worker, and it lists a bunch of things that they have to do.

Under “Duties of employers” under section 25, it says—and this will get a little bit dry:

“An employer shall ensure that...

“the equipment, materials and protective devices as prescribed are provided;

“the equipment, materials and protective devices provided by the employer are maintained in good condition;

“the measures and procedures prescribed are carried out in the workplace....”

If you translate that just to human English, it basically says that the building infrastructure—that includes your washroom—has to be there and it has to be provided and maintained in good condition. That means it has to be cleaned and it has to be taken care of. It also says that the employer is responsible for creating measures and procedures to ensure they’re kept in good condition, which means that it’s the employer’s responsibility to ensure that they’re cleaned and that there is toilet paper and soap and all the things you expect in a washroom. It’s not magic that this happens in workplaces. There’s not a dying need for this to be out as new legislation—because there’s a washroom just down the hall here; if we go there, it’s going to have all these things in good condition, and if it’s not, you let someone know and they get it cleaned. And this applies to all workplaces. It’s already there. It’s not spelled out specifically, and I guess, how can you argue that it would help to have it spelled out?

But again, if you compare this—spelling out that the bathroom has to be cleaned and maintained in good condition—to $36 million of wage theft, and you ask the employees of Ontario which one they’d put at the top of their priority list, I think they would want their money back. Speaker, 36 million bucks—that’s a lot of cabbage that has been taken from their pockets. And the focus for the Conservative government? Cleaning bathrooms.

The general duty clause, 25(2)(h), I talked about: If an inspector were to come into a workplace—and there are not enough inspectors going into workplaces. But if they came into a workplace and they saw a washroom that wasn’t maintained, or someone had made a complaint—which you can do anonymously; there’s a complaints line, a 1-888 number. If you look it up online, you can find the number and you can make an anonymous complaint about your workplace. If the inspector came in and saw a washroom that wasn’t clean, that was filthy and wasn’t maintained in good condition and didn’t have the services in place and the paper products and the sanitary systems in place, they would write an order under 25(2)(h). Whenever there’s not a specific rule, they write it here. So it’s not like these bad bosses could get away with this if the legislation didn’t exist. If they were doing it before, they’re going to continue to do it.

Questions?

Health units address it too.

When I was a millwright and I was a crew leader—there’s maturity that becomes involved when bringing students and co-op students in the workplace. I’ve lost friends; they were just cleaning in sawmills. They died because the maturity was not there.

You talked a lot about safety. That’s why I’m asking the question. We want to promote trades. That’s not even the issue. I think we need to promote trades, and trades are a good pathway, but how do we protect that so that—because with kids, the maturity may not be there and it could put them in serious, dangerous positions.

And your health unit would address it.

In terms of every other complaint—I’m not against this. It’s kind of like putting salt on something; I guess it will help a little bit. But I’d be interested to know how many people have called that 1-888 number for a Ministry of Labour inspector, complaining about their washroom facilities, as compared with other health and safety concerns.

My colleague from Kiiwetinoong was talking about a town that he represents where there was a carcinogen being emitted from a workplace, that was affecting workplaces next door. I’m sure they would like that addressed long before ensuring that we’ve clarified that the general duty clause also applies to bathrooms.

Keeping on this theme, it also requires them to make records of this. It’s fine—the records of the washrooms being cleaned. You see this in a lot of places. You see this in department stores and gas stations—the last time it was checked, and there’s a little record of it. This is clarifying it, I guess, to be in the legislation. There are some regulations that have this already, but it just says “as prescribed in regulation.” It has to be done as prescribed. Earlier, I talked about how, if you’re in an office workplace, now you’re part of the industrial regulations that provide that clarity. The industrial regulations don’t really prescribe this checklist from happening. So it’s not really that great of a new legislation to put in place, because what you’re saying basically is—it sounds really good that you have to have this checklist and keep paper records of it, which is helpful, but only as prescribed. And in your case—office workers—it’s not prescribed, so it doesn’t really make sense.

I promised I wasn’t going to talk too much about electronic copies of things, but I want to emphasize: Workplace violence and workplace harassment policies—we need to have those more visible and more readily available to people. If you’re being harassed or something physically violent is happening to you in your workplace, you need to know who to report that to; you need to know how to get it resolved. Sometimes harassment is happening and the people doing it aren’t aware, because it’s how we’ve always done things or how we always spoke. There is an opportunity to make your workplace better, and having less information about how to make a better workplace is not helpful to anybody and really is something we should reconsider ensuring.

Similarly, with inspection orders, you can learn when the inspector writes orders if they’re posted in the workplace. People will grab the orders and read them while they’re having their lunch. If it’s online, it’s out of sight and out of mind, and there’s no opportunity for you to learn from what the inspector has written down.

I’m running out of time. I did want to get to the wildland firefighters. One of the things that we said when we were applauding the good work that was done by members of our party and the Conservatives, about helping these firefighters who have presumptive cancers—the family was in the gallery, and I actually went up, because I had just started my debate, and then we ran out of time for question period, very similar to what happened here. Just before question period, I went up and talked to the family and said, “I want you to know that we’re going to be passing this, because this is very important.” There are parts of this bill that are broken in the previous bill. The digital workers’ rights protection act is a perfect example, where it’s actually removing rights from workers who are Uber drivers—and Lyft and SkipTheDishes; it’s actually making them make less money. But I wanted that family to know before they left that we’d find a way to ensure that their family members would have that presumptive coverage. While we spoke about the firefighter presumptive coverage, we also said we need to include these wildland firefighters, as well, and so I’m really happy that this bill, which is only—I think the previous one just passed a month ago, a month and a bit; the time slips together when you’re busy. In this bill that we’re going to be passing, the wildland presumptive coverage and PTSD coverage—I think that’s really important for those workers.

I had shared with the Minister of Labour—I had the opportunity to go over and talk to him just before question period, when debate had ended, and I showed him the photo of Gabrielle Ayres and Shayne McCool, who are wildland firefighters. They were at FONOM, and I was talking to them about the bill. They knew about the bill. They knew the work that New Democrats had done, and they knew the work that the Conservatives had done, and that we were going to work together to ensure this was happening. That doesn’t happen a lot in the Legislature, and so I think it’s good to share with people, and to encourage the Conservative government to work with us on more things, because I think it’s a wonderful thing for them.

Also, on a bit of a tangent, I think that Shayne may have the coolest last name I’ve ever heard—Shayne McCool.

It was great to see the two of them there. It was great that they knew already—because a lot of times people don’t know what we’re doing here. We know, because we’re immersed in it, but to see people who are being directly impacted and to work with people who are directly impacted—that’s really meaningful to all of us.

I have less than a minute, and I want to get into my recommendations for what we should be focusing on in the next workers bill.

Speaker, 40% of occupational lung cancers are related to mining, and 11% of occupational bladder cancers are connected to mining. These occupational cancers are 100% preventable. We should be looking at occupational cancers; we’re doing it for firefighters and wildland firefighters, and we’ve got to tackle mining. When you see a number like 40% of occupational lung cancers happening in mining—these are workers who are part of that Critical Minerals Strategy, and we have to ensure that they’re going home safe to their families, as well.

I think we need more pathways. We need more shops in our schools, with updated equipment. We need more shop teachers who are qualified to teach shop. We need all of these things in place, and I think this is a good first step for that.

At the same time, I want to ensure that students who decide that they want to become an apprentice and get involved with the trades—if they decide that’s not the career for them, we don’t limit their potential in the future if they choose another career path.

I think this is a good first step, for sure.

Thank you to the member opposite for his comments and remarks this morning.

We all agree that our province is facing a shortage of skilled trades workers, so alongside our partners in education, this legislation, if passed, will help students get on a fast track for a career in the skilled trades. Under the Focused Apprenticeship Skills Training program, students can focus their senior-level co-op placements in areas that will accelerate entrance into apprenticeships in the skilled trades.

Does the member opposite think that we should help facilitate pathways for students to get into these types of careers?

It doesn’t get any cooler than that.

Thank you to my colleague from Sudbury.

With the increase in fines for ESA violations being a stand-out feature for this bill, and given our historical reluctance to collect even a fraction of what’s due, could the member from Sudbury highlight why it is so important that laws reflect a genuine effort to enforce—or merely a case of increasing numbers on paper for optics?

The reason I’m asking this question is because I recalled, during the pandemic, the surges of inspectors that would fine and did fine a 16-year-old worker in a grocery store over not wearing the proper PPE during a weekend blitz, if we recall—more show than substance, may I say.

How important is trust and funding for rules in order to ensure they are enforced in Ontario?

I want to start by thanking the Minister of Labour, Immigration, Training and Skills Development, because this is the fifth bill that has been brought forward from that ministry with hard work by himself and staff to bring these forward. We always hear from the opposition about what’s not in the bill—and I think it’s a great strategy of moving forward one at a time and really doing a deep dive into things that we want to address. So I thank him for that.

It’s certainly an honour for me to rise today to discuss the Working for Workers Five Act. If passed, this bill would assist in making the workplace safer, introduce more young people to careers in the skilled trades, help new Canadians access jobs in their chosen fields, and support women working in the construction industry, among other sectors. This bill will expand on the progress made from the previous four Working for Workers acts by introducing amendments to further protect front-line workers, remove barriers to employment for new Canadians, open new pathways into the skilled trades, and support women at work. It would contribute to additional regulatory, legislative and policy actions designed to improve workplaces for employees and help employers fill vacant positions.

We know that we need more people working in the skilled trades. To help attract more young people into careers in the skilled trades, this bill proposes to create a new educational stream called Focused Apprenticeship Skills Training, as part of our government’s plan to ensure all students learn about the opportunities in well-paying careers found in the trades. The new stream will give students the opportunity to receive instruction on technical skills and be given the opportunity for hands-on learning experiences in secondary school systems.

Further, this bill provides a new online job-matching portal in order to help students find apprenticeship opportunities and network with employers; it’s also a great opportunity for employers to connect and do recruitment. This new online job-matching portal streamlines the process of finding opportunities faster, which will be important as they transition from education to the workforce. This government wants to put hard-working youth on the fast track to a well-paying career. Not only is this an endeavour our government wants to encourage, but it’s what the youth of Ontario want, as well.

Schools in my riding of Lanark–Frontenac–Kingston are already recognizing the value of this government’s vision. Smiths Falls District Collegiate Institute is incorporating a Specialist High Skills Major program that works in company with the requirements stipulated by the Ontario secondary school diploma. The program will let students focus on a career path that matches their skills by earning valuable industry certification in co-operative educational placements. The program has received positive commentary and demonstrates how our ministries are working together.

The Ministry of Education, the Ministry of Colleges and Universities, and the ministry of women’s and social economic opportunity are all working together to increase our sources for human resources in the trades.

Former Smiths Falls District Collegiate Institute principal Terry Gardiner said, “The Dual Credit Program represents an outstanding opportunity for students, whether entering trades, or trying a college course in their area of interest. It allows students the opportunity to ‘try on’ college and many students see that they can be successful.”

Speaker, students are inspired and excited about their education and future. Janet Sanderson, former principal of Granite Ridge Education Centre in Sharbot Lake, said, “It gives our students a chance to make informed decisions about their future. They get a taste of the college life. It gives them a chance to explore their post-secondary options and test the waters....” One Granite Ridge student said the Dual Credit Program gives him a reason to like school again.

Students will have the ability to make informed decisions about their future, through the introduction of a variety of careers—be that skills, trades, colleges or universities. Our government is ending the stigma of working in the trades. We hear the voices of Ontarians telling us there is a need for more skilled trades workers, as Minister Piccini mentioned yesterday. We hear them, we value them, and we are creating new paths for youth to become them. This stigma existed when I was in high school and trying to decide what to do. My parents said, “You need that university degree”—and I’m guilty of the same stigma with my kids. But there are now so many pathways to success, and the students need to explore that when they’re in their high school years. Through the Working for Workers Five Act, alternative pathways for people interested in the skilled trades would be opened up.

In addition to getting young people into the skilled trades, this government wants to help mature workers leverage their existing skills, education and work experience to land a position in the skilled trades sector. We want to give Canadians who are looking for a second career in the skilled trades a chance at a better job with a bigger paycheque. Through this bill, our government will work on removing barriers to entry into the skilled trades as a second career and providing avenues for a career transition. By doing this, our government will address labour shortages and drive economic growth through those seeking a second career in the skilled trades, regardless of their educational background—new opportunities, a brighter future.

Recent immigrants and international—

Thank you to the member for his comments this morning. It’s interesting—his background in labour as an electrician and direct experience in the sector.

If we look at the objectives of what this bill is trying to achieve with putting in new supports and stronger protections that would safeguard health and safety and dignity of workers, addressing online harassment at work, ensuring workers are protected; changes to regulations to address women’s needs on construction sites, conduct a comprehensive review of the facilities in the construction sector—a large number of major objectives here, which I would have thought were very practical and supportable.

Does the member not see these as objectives that are worth supporting?

Further questions?

Further questions?

This is really important and near to me—when it comes to workplace health and safety. As I get older, everyone seems younger when they’re starting at the workplace. We know that when high school students have injuries in the workplace, they tend to be pretty bad. These are the people who are working at fast-food places who get grease burns.

When you’re putting power tools in people’s hands and when you’re working with heavy equipment and stuff, there are a lot of hazards. We have to ensure that in that program for high school people—taking on apprentices and getting into the trades—health and safety comes first. That first year of an apprentice, for most people, is mostly—you carry tools, and you watch. We have to ensure this happens. We know there are some bad bosses out there, and we have to ensure that they’re not getting people to do stuff when they’re unqualified. We don’t want people who aren’t electricians working on live power, for example.

So health and safety has to be at the core of this, because we want the trades to grow, and we don’t want—any tragedy is going to have parents telling their kids, “No, no, don’t do this.” So we have to ensure they’re very safe.

Penalties are one way. I think if you can incentivize people, it’s a better way of changing behaviour, but sometimes you need the negative enforcement of a penalty.

If you’re having a press conference to talk about raising the minimum penalty from $50,000 to $100,000, but you have never charged any employer with the $50,000, what’s the point? If you’re hitting that ceiling and you’re not seeing the behaviour change, then for sure raise it. But if you’ve never hit that ceiling at $50,000, saying you’re going to double it to $100,000 is meaningless to those workers who are being affected by these bad bosses. You really have to use the tools that are available and not just pretend that raising them is going to make a difference if you’re not using the minimum as it is, or the maximum as—

As I said in the debate, sanitary products on construction sites aren’t in this bill—it was in the question that was asked, it was in the press conferences, but it’s not in the bill, so it’s not going to become a law. Maybe it will come in the next bill. I said very clearly I’m in favour of that happening. I think it’s a good step forward. I think we should include that at all workplaces, to ensure they’re there.

The other ones in terms of health and safety are actually duplicates of existing legislation.

My frustration with these bills, although we do great stuff when it comes to WSIB for firefighters and wildland firefighters—there are, a lot of times in these bills, things that are headline bills, where it sounds like you’re doing something, but all you’re doing is duplicating existing legislation.

We need anti-scab legislation—it is extending the length of strikes. It’s important to have. It’s a value of New Democrats. We’re hoping the Liberals and Conservatives will finally join us and pass that legislation—like they did at the federal level, it’s time to do it provincially, as well.

I’m glad to be able to ask a question of the member from Sudbury, who has been doing an excellent job across the province as our critic for labour.

There’s not too much of substance to criticize in this bill; it’s tinkering around the edges, as he talked about. Because this is the fifth Working for Workers act or whatever, I was hoping to see something protecting workers on strike, something about anti-scab legislation—I was pleased to co-sponsor that bill, and I wondered if there was any signal in here that we would put workers at the fore.

I want to thank the member for his participation in debate this morning.

One of the pieces in this legislation that I believe is very beneficial is that this act will direct Ontario’s Chief Prevention Officer to conduct a comprehensive review of the causal factors in traumatic workplace injuries—a construction fatality, specifically—drawing on stakeholder evidence and jurisdictional research. We know that this is important for the development of prevention strategies and future regulatory proposals to strengthen our current safety standards and also do more to prevent fatalities and workplace injuries.

I’m wondering if the member opposite supports this particular piece of the legislation and if there’s anything he wanted to say about the way that work should unfold.

My apologies to the member from Lanark–Frontenac–Kingston.

Second reading debate deemed adjourned.

Earlier, I had mispronounced George Gritziotis’s name. I was trying to be formal and use his last name. I was calling him “George” all the time. I was guessing at his last name, but it’s George Gritziotis. Hansard has the correct spelling.

Today I rise to honour Lois Hunter, a giant in my riding, who passed away in her 100th year, on April 27.

To quote Judy Drummond, a friend of Lois’s and the president of the Lombardy Agricultural Society: “Lois was a lady of grace, respect and a great friend to many. Her interest in the Lombardy Agricultural Society continued over the years and was a part of her life even into her 100th year. We certainly appreciated her work and advice in the district and provincial level of the Ontario agricultural societies. We will miss her guidance and support, but her legacy will live on into the future.”

Her granddaughter Shannon Miller used the word supporter—“whether it was of her family in their business or personal endeavours; of the many local organizations she belonged to; of her husband as he served his many years in municipal politics; or of any and all friends, neighbours or members of the farming community in whatever situation they may have been facing at a given time.”

My predecessor, Bob Runciman, summed it up best about Lois when he told me, “Lois, with all her family and community commitments, her energy and enthusiasm ... well into her nineties was a never-ending inspiration to me and many others. And with her unbridled love for and devotion to her family, she was the epitome of the wife, mother, grandmother and great-grandmother we should all have in our lives. Her passing is an enormous loss; she did so much, so well and for so many. Rest in peace, my friend.”

The agri-food industry is one of the premier industries in this province—some $45 billion, $50 billion to the provincial economy, and 800,000, 900,000 people work in it. This is one of the most important times of the year because regardless of what you grow, regardless of where it’s processed, this is the time of the year when the seeds go into the ground. Of the 200 crops that we grow in Ontario, the vast majority go in now; there are different times across the province.

On behalf of the entire Legislature, I just want to give a shout-out to the farmers who are making those decisions right now. This is an incredibly stressful time of the year because sometimes planting conditions aren’t right; in many parts of the province, they’re not right right now, and that farmer, whether he has 10 acres or 1,000, has to make that decision when he puts that soil in his hand to see if it’s dry enough. He or she has got thousands of dollars on the line. On behalf of all of us, farmers take the risks so that we can eat. That’s something that we can never, ever forget. And farmers who make those decisions need to have control of their own land—the land that they have built and conditioned so that they can grow the food for us. They should control their land.

I am pleased to announce Birchmount Green, a significant partner in Scarborough Centre’s innovative affordable and supportive housing at 1236 Birchmount Road in my riding of Scarborough Centre. After my visit to Birchmount Green, I realized that our government is getting it done with its action call for affordable housing.

Birchmount Green Inc. and Chamberlain Architects designed the 15-storey residential building with 220 mixed affordable and supportive rental units. This thoughtful and inclusive state-of-the-art design philosophy meets aesthetic and functional needs with 45 fully accessible homes, outdoor greenery, a rooftop garden, library, accessible shareable workspaces, indoor and outdoor children’s play areas, bicycle storage, dedicated offices for support service organizations, a social enterprise, and many other amenities.

They deserve praise for their collaboration with many partners seated in the gallery here today: Tim Neeb, president, Birchmount Green, and project developer; Maureen Houlihan, city of Toronto; Michelle Nanton-Whyte, Community Living Toronto; Heather McDonald, LOFT Community Services; Jessica Whelan, Fred Victor; Abi Ajibolade, the Redwood; Abi and Rima Goldshmidt, Birchmount Green property managers.

Please continue the wonderful work you’re doing in Scarborough Centre and across Ontario.