In honour of Mental Health Week, I’m pleased to welcome some of the champions of mental health care here in Ontario: Dr. Sean Kidd, chief of psychology at CAMH; Dr. Nadiya Sunderji, president and CEO of Waypoint Centre for Mental Health Care; Kristin Kerr from Addictions and Mental Health Ontario; Michael Anhorn, CEO of CMHA Toronto; Karim Mamdani, president and CEO of Ontario Shores; and Tatum Wilson, CEO of Children’s Mental Health Ontario.

Thank you, all of you, for your inspiring work here in the province of Ontario and for continuing to keep the province healthy and safe.

On the same point of order, the Minister of Health mistakenly identified that the question came from Toronto Centre; rather, the question came from the honourable member—

It’s my honour to present this petition entitled “Bring Back Rent Control,” and it says to the Legislative Assembly of Ontario that they want to bring back rent control on all units, after this government removed it from any building built after 2018, because the cost of a home in Ontario has never been higher. The average rent in Toronto is now $3,000 a month, and most people cannot afford that, and so people are leaving the province. We have a net out-migration of 50,000 people per year in Ontario because of the cost of rent and the cost of housing in this province.

This government is not achieving its objective of building either affordable homes or building homes themselves—just building homes. They set this target of 1.5 million homes; in order to reach that target, they should be having 15,000 home starts per month and they’re at 5,000, so they’re only achieving one third of the housing starts that are needed to achieve their supply targets.

This petition asks for people to support and for this Legislature to support the Rent Control for All Tenants Act, 2022, which was brought forward by my colleague from Parkdale–High Park, and it says that we need to pass this legislation because the people of Ontario need protection. The tenants of Ontario need protection from predatory rent increases, and they need us to pass the NDP’s Rent Control for All Tenants Act today, to ensure that renters can live in safe and affordable homes.

I fully support this petition, will affix my signature and pass it to page Victoria to take to the table.

Questions? I recognized member from Toronto–Danforth—no, no, no.

Further debate?

Okay, time for questions. We have the member from Toronto Centre.

Thank you to the member from Toronto Centre. As I say, we made sure that we covered things on bad actors—sorry, just now, I thought that was the question you were asking me. But this bill here does not apply to something specifically, like what you just asked about the wages. And we are protecting the workers. If the bad actors are not doing their part, we will be fining them in all sorts of ways. So we are on top of this.

As I say, even little things like sanitary washrooms are being taken care of in the construction sites, all these other things we have been working on—but it’s not specifically listed in this bill.

By the numbers that we have received and the increase in the number of female skilled workers, we can see the difference. And little things—I don’t mean to highlight just the sanitary part of this bill, but just that information itself, by providing the menstrual products for women, already tells them the kind of support that we are going to give them. They are welcome and we want to encourage them to be part of the skilled trades.

I really want to say join us to be happy and let us, together, work on this. Yes, there is still a lot of work to be done. This part, as you mentioned, is being done, but may not have specifically been mentioned in this bill.

There are a lot of things still yet to be done, and if the direction is correct, I would ask and invite the member to join me to support this bill. Together, let’s make this bill something that will work the best for everybody, and everything that we see that has not been covered, mention it so that we can focus on it and improve on it.