I’m standing to speak to Bill 165, right on the heels of the member from Chatham-Kent–Leamington, who finished his debate by saying that anyone impacted should be able to make their case.

We have an example right here in this House. Lydia’s Law was discharged to committee. Those survivors of sexual assault were not able to make their case in this House. So your words “transparency” and “accountability” ring hollow.

This government does not hesitate in any way to interfere whenever it suits them. This is not a government that’s transparent and accountable. We only have to look to the RCMP investigation to understand how they’ve conducted themselves in the past. So while this government—

It is disappointing to hear the member from Eglinton–Lawrence say that transparency and accountability is not germane to this debate, because what we’re talking about is the decision this government made to big-foot, to overturn, to politicize a very important energy decision in this province.

Make no mistake: You acted swiftly to overturn the Ontario energy decision ruling. I would like to see you act more swiftly when it comes to other important things in this province, like sexual assault survivors. But you acted so swiftly when it came to the OEB ruling.

The Ontario Energy Board is an independent regulator—a regulator. They oversee Enbridge. Enbridge is an energy monopoly. They should be a regulated monopoly. But when you kneecap the regulator, what you are left with is a monopoly.

Let’s be clear: Your decision and this bill—it’s bad for new home owners. It’s bad for existing customers. And certainly, it’s bad for the environment. That’s just straight-up a no-brainer.

My question always remains: Who does this government listen to, and who does this government work for?

When it comes to the people of this province, this is a government that has sided with a huge corporation, Enbridge—against making sure that you could protect costs for them in an affordability crisis. This bill is called Keeping Energy Costs Down Act, but my question is, who is this keeping energy costs down for? Do you know who it’s keeping energy costs down for? Enbridge. It’s keeping energy costs down for developers. But who is stuck holding the bag? Four million consumers of methane—also known as natural gas—in this province. That’s who is left holding the bag, because this government doesn’t work for the people of the province.

Quite clearly, your actions, your policies, your bills and your lobbying registry shows who you work for, and that’s big corporations; it is connected individuals.

When it comes to the Premier’s office, this place is crawling with lobbyists who either did work for the Premier or are now working for the Premier or are working for corporations like Enbridge.

So you can stand up all you want and talk about transparency and accountability, but nobody is buying it. Remember Mel Lastman? “Nobody!” Nobody is buying it at all.

What I would like to say is that if you were truly concerned with the people of the province of Ontario, you would have listened to the Ontario Energy Board, whose job is to protect consumers. It should be what your job is—to protect consumers. Instead, what we saw is unprecedented political interference in order to help a powerful gas monopoly at the expense of consumers.

Again, this bill does exactly the opposite of keeping energy costs down for people in the province. It will only exacerbate their bills and make their bills go up higher, to the tune of $600 per customer. This bill would allow the government to add over $1 billion in costs to the gas bills of nearly four million consumers. How is this keeping costs down? It’s not. And what you are doing is, you’re taking away people’s choice—especially vulnerable and low-income people—their ability to make choices when it comes to their energy choices.

This government had, possibly, a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, with an OEB decision that was clearly on the side of people who had to pay these energy bills: consumers.

You had an option of putting money back into people’s pockets. You had an option to finally start addressing the realities of climate change. Instead, you chose to stick with the same old. Instead of sticking with people who are going to be mostly impacted by climate change—the costs are going to be borne by homeowners, of climate change; we’re going to see people with basements flooding, people denied insurance costs—you have stuck with billion-dollar corporations. You have sided with them, as usual. You’re lining the pockets of billion-dollar corporations instead of looking out for the people you should be looking out for. I suppose I could say that I’m surprised, but I am not.

The government likes to stand up in here and say that, at the Ontario Energy Board hearings, they didn’t consult with people; nobody was involved. That is straight-up malarkey—134 pages of documents. I think it was over a hundred testimonies.

The Ontario Energy Board took one and a half, possibly two years, to come up with this ruling, and your government tabled this bill to overturn the ruling in a New York minute—I think it was the very afternoon that this decision was tabled.

What I want to be clear about is that you sided with Enbridge over consumers in this province. And who is Enbridge? Can we just talk about Enbridge? Enbridge is a huge international energy company in the province of Ontario. They have a monopoly. They’re not regulated anymore because you keep overturning any regulations. Enbridge made $45 billion last year—$45 billion. That’s who you’re sticking with, that’s who you’re trying to help: a corporation that made $45 billion.

The CEO of Enbridge earns $19 million—$19 million—and that’s for one year, not 19 years. That’s a lot of coin. At $19 million, the CEO, certainly, is not going to be concerned about the $600 that it’s going to cost them on their energy bill.

So that’s who you are siding with.

What I would also say is that people now are not given a choice, and what you’re doing—you say you’re overriding the regulator to support people, but evidence shows otherwise.

More and more, people want to look at more efficient heating options for their homes, because it’s expensive, and we know it’s only going to get more expensive. What you are doing is making sure that people are tied into new gas hookups rather than giving people affordable options, and rather than moving forward with subsidies to help people insulate their homes, to help people be more energy-efficient, to help people afford a high-efficiency heat pump, which heats and cools their homes. This is the direction that the world is going in, but this government is still going to side with a dinosaur fossil fuel strategy that is going to cost—not developers, not Enbridge, but it’s going to cost consumers a lot of money.

As has been said again by the member from Chatham-Kent–Leamington, that this government is all about transparency—and honestly, absolutely nobody believes that. Do you know what? You don’t even have to listen to their words. Just look at their actions.

I will say that, at committee, we moved a number of amendments that would have, in fact, taken this bill—and it would have made some amendments to make sure that we put into place protections for consumers. If the government was hell-bent and twisting themselves in knots to support Enbridge, we thought the very least that they could do is to support some amendments.

What amendments did we put in there? We thought it was very important that the government understood that you were allowing Enbridge to determine the cost future for how long that they can cost out the return on the investments that they’re making. Let’s again be clear: What we’re talking about is assets that belong to Enbridge. These are assets that belong to Enbridge, but who is paying for them? The people of the province who are relying on gas. That’s who is paying for these assets that Enbridge will owe.

We made a number of amendments, really, to help what is essentially an indefensible bill be a little more palatable—not much. You can’t polish everything. Do you know what I mean, Speaker?

We wanted to, number one, talk about the workers who work on these fossil fuel lines. It was something that I learned, that I didn’t know until I sat in committee and heard from the workers—that Enbridge has no requirement to provide reporting on methane leakage. They have no requirement to report on how they are going to repair these leakages. that’s really about the consumer interest, because not only is it a significant contributor to greenhouse gases and to carbon emissions; it also is an unsafe situation for workers. So we wanted the government to accept this amendment that would require Enbridge to report on these leaks, and they turned that down. Why wouldn’t they want to prevent and report on methane leaks? I don’t understand why the government used their supermajority to vote it down.

We also moved an amendment that would require the OEB to keep track of private contractors. I think this is really important, because this is a government that likes to talk about jobs, which are really important to the province, but they don’t ensure that workers are kept safe. This is the perfect example—when we talk about methane leakages. Also, despite ruling on the side of Enbridge, they don’t like to talk about the fact that Enbridge laid off a thousand workers in this province. Let’s recap, shall we? They’ve got a $19-million CEO. They made $45 billion in profits. They were going to make sure that every consumer—I grew up in Toronto wit—every methane gas user in the province is going to pay another $600 on their bill. But they didn’t say one single thing when Enbridge laid off a thousand workers in this province. So we moved that motion, and the government turned it down.

We also wanted to make sure that we had the notion of procedural fairness in there. A girl can only hope and dream, but given a government that we see just discharges the private members’ bill Lydia’s Law directly to committee so no one can have their day in court, if you will—this government voted against our amendment that would reaffirm procedural fairness. It actually says in the bill that procedural fairness doesn’t apply. The member from Chatham-Kent–Leamington can stand and talk about transparency, accountability, but the bill he’s defending says right in it that procedural fairness does not apply.

We moved an amendment that says the government cannot direct the OEB to approve a new gas pipeline if this harms consumer interests, because what we’re seeing is the politicization of the energy file. There’s no regulator left because you just overrule them. So is it going to be that all of these energy decisions are going to be made in the minister’s office, with Enbridge executives sitting around? I think it’s really important, if you’re not going to allow the OEB to protect consumers’ interests, that there’s a bill—in the bill, there’s the notion that we are going to protect consumers’ interests in that bill.

We did move—I guess it was a tongue-in-cheek amendment, but we wanted to change the name of the bill to “make Enbridge customers pay more act,” because this is the net effect of this bill. That’s what it’s all about. It’s about forcing existing gas consumers to pay the costs the Ontario Energy Board would otherwise have disallowed. It will increase costs for a typical household consumer by $600—a cost that the Ontario Energy Board said consumers shouldn’t have to pay. The government says consumers should pay it. They used their supermajority to make sure that your gas bills are going up. This is about making consumers pay more so who can make more profit? Enbridge. Because a $19-million CEO, $45 billion—not enough. We need to have a bill that ensures that they continue to be profitable.

A government that talks about working to keep costs down, making life affordable, is kind of ludicrous in the face of their actual bills that just drive up the cost of things that people have to pay. They cannot choose to not have heat in their homes. They may not have heat in their homes, not by choice, but because they’ve been cut off because they can’t pay their high energy bills. This is something that this government should really be concerned with.

Who are you protecting? Clearly, it’s not the people of the province of Ontario.

I could talk a little bit about stranded assets. Really, what that means is, as we move to decarbonize, to get off fossil fuels—which is happening all over the world, which we are supposed to do in this province—these pipelines will be obsolete. They’ll be stranded. But guess what? Someone is still going to have to pay for them. So the more consumers who get off gas, the fewer and fewer consumers who are going to be forced to shoulder the costs of these stranded assets. What that means is—for example, the hardest-to-decarbonize industries will be left holding the bag with these obsolete pipelines, assets. Low-income people who cannot afford to transition, who cannot afford a heat pump or other options, are going to be stuck with higher and higher and higher bills, as fewer people and fewer industries are going to be paying the same amount. So this problem is really only going to get worse.

I could talk a lot about this government’s climate denial and that this is a bill that will ensure that we continue to be hooked on methane gas longer than we should; that this is a government that has no programs in place to help people transition.

Let’s be absolutely clear: In the face of forest fires that we are seeing in BC; a forest fire season that started extraordinarily early in the province of Ontario; wildland forest firefighter teams who are short—