Speaker, it’s no surprise to anyone, especially the member from Oakville, that the federal Liberal government’s carbon tax is making life more expensive for the people of Ontario and the people of Canada. That’s why we’re taking a different route. We’re procuring clean energy.

Just last week, I was down at the Power of Water Canada conference in Niagara, announcing a new small hydro program, a new northern hydro program, for 10-megawatt facilities and larger. It’s why I was in Cornwall with the great member from Stormont–Dundas–South Glengarry on Friday, announcing that we were refurbishing the Saunders dam, a huge facility connecting Lake Ontario and the Great Lakes system to the Atlantic Ocean and providing clean electricity for over a million homes in our province. That work has started to refurbish that facility. Last week was a busy week when it comes to procuring clean energy for our province.

The one thing that our Powering Ontario’s Growth plan doesn’t include is a carbon tax because we don’t need it. All it does is punish the people of Ontario.

There’s only one party in this Legislature that’s opposed to a carbon tax, and that’s Premier Ford and our team. Instead, we’re doing the kinds of things that I talked about earlier: procuring new clean, non-emitting generation. That includes refurbishing our nuclear facilities that we have across the province, including at Pickering and at Darlington and at Bruce, and building small modular reactors at Darlington.

Last week, we had the largest procurement in Canada’s history for clean energy storage. Another 1,800 megawatts are being added right across our province to ensure that our system remains clean and reliable. Our plan, Powering Ontario’s Growth, which is working—

Interjections.

Thanks very much to the great member from Mississauga Centre for the question today. She’s absolutely right; the federal carbon tax is driving up the price of everything in our province, and the Bank of Canada has confirmed it’s even having an impact on inflation in our province.

The queen of the carbon tax, Bonnie Crombie, the former mayor of Mississauga, supports the federal carbon tax, the NDP want to have the largest carbon tax in the land and the Greens are in full support of a carbon tax as well. We’re not. Premier Ford and our team are making life less expensive by cutting gas taxes, bringing in One Fare for our transit riders in Mississauga and other communities across the GTHA, cutting tolls and cutting taxes. We’re about making life more affordable and making this a friendly business environment.

The carbon tax: The member talked about the impact that it’s having on businesses. There is $1.3 billion owed to small businesses as a result of the carbon tax in our province. That money has yet to flow to them.

We already have one of the cleanest grids in the entire world, but we can continue to clean that grid, grow that grid, so we can grow businesses in our province by investing in nuclear, which we’re doing at Bruce and at Darlington and at Pickering, but also refurbishing our hydroelectric fleets that we have across the province, energy-efficiency programs—a billion dollars in that program—procuring new energy storage. The largest procurement of energy storage happened here in Ontario last week—another 1,800 megawatts there.

We can get the power that we need, and we don’t need a costly carbon—