I just want to thank my constituent Judy Noonan, who brought this petition last week when they came to Queen’s Park for Community Living Day.

The petition notes that social assistance rates in Ontario are far below the rising cost of food and rent: $733 for individuals on OW and $1,308 for those on ODSP. It also notes that the CERB provided $2,000 a month. So the petition calls on the Legislative Assembly of Ontario to double social assistance rates for Ontario Works and Ontario disability support payments.

I fully support this petition, will sign it and ask the page to bring it to the table.

It’s always an honour to rise, today to debate Bill 180, the government’s budget bill. It’s interesting that we’re debating this bill on the same day the Financial Accountability Officer released their economic and budget outlook for Ontario.

When the FAO compared the 2016-17 to the 2022-23 period versus the current and projected periods for 2022-23 to 2028-29, they only found one area of spending where we’re seeing a significant increase in government spending. Do you know what that area was, Speaker? Interest on debt.

Health care, going down; education, going down; community and social services, slight, slight increase. The one area we saw a significant increase? Interest on debt, which to me just shows a government—maybe we haven’t had a government in Ontario’s history that has spent so much, increased the debt by so much, and actually gotten so little out of it. If we weren’t experiencing the various crises in the province of Ontario, you might understand the decrease and the increase in spending in all the other major categories.

Speaker, I want to talk about five areas of the budget where the government falls short, and I’m going to start with housing. Right now, in Ontario, tonight—on average, any night in this province—16,000 people will be unhoused in Ontario. The average market rent in the province of Ontario for a one-bedroom apartment is now $2,200. It takes the average young person 22 years to save for a down payment on a new home. We have a whole generation of young people wondering if they will ever own a home.

The government had an opportunity in the budget to actually legalize housing, legalize fourplexes, four storeys, as of right. They had a chance to legalize six- to 11-storey buildings along major transit and transit corridors, something builders tell me will cut their building time in half, just those two measures, key recommendations from the government’s own task force.

They had an opportunity to legalize commercial to residential transitions. They had an opportunity to legalize making it easy to build on underutilized strip malls and parking lots so we can quickly increase housing supply in places where we already have infrastructure built. But unfortunately, the government said, “Not in my backyard. We’re not going to legalize housing,” at a time when we’re in a housing crisis.

The government also had an opportunity to invest more in non-profit, co-op and permanent supportive housing. As a matter of fact, the Bank of Nova Scotia says that we need 250,000 additional non-profit and co-op deeply affordable homes built over the next decade. Do you know how many the government has built since they’ve taken office? Around 1,100—only 6% of the commitment they made to the federal government in 2018.

The reason this is so important—and I’ve seen this in my own community, and I am going to compliment the government on this one. We actually have succeeded in building permanent supportive housing in Guelph. We got to yes, and I want to take a moment, because this was highlighted in the budget, to thank the Associate Minister of Housing and the Minister of Health for saying yes to building and funding permanent supportive housing in Guelph. I was happy to see it highlighted in the budget. But why aren’t we seeing that across communities all across Ontario, where so many people are desperate for housing?

I want to turn for a moment to health care. I wanted to address health care because, right now, 2.3 million Ontarians do not have access to a family doctor. Hallway medicine is the norm in Ontario—even though this government said they were going to eliminate it when they first ran for election—and we have emergency departments closing across the province of Ontario.

I’ve been listening to the members in debate, and they’re saying, “Hey, we’re going to build more hospitals and long-term-care homes.” What I haven’t heard them talking about is who’s actually going to staff any of these hospitals, long-term-care homes and primary care offices, especially at a time when the projection is that over the next decade, we’re going to be short 33,200 nurses and 50,853 personal support workers. There wasn’t anything in the budget about addressing these staffing shortages that will be critical to making sure that health care services are available to the people of Ontario when and where they need it.

I want to shift to education now. You know what the biggest cut in the budget was? Post-secondary education—critical to our economic well-being, to educating the workers of the future. What’s so surprising about seeing that cut in the budget was, prior to the budget, the government said, “Hey, we’re going to invest $1.3 billion in post-secondary education,” which was less than half of what their own blue-ribbon panel said. The government failed to address the fact that we’re going to have less international students coming, which is going to cost our post-secondary education sector $1.8 billion, which actually led to a real cut in the government’s budget on post-secondary education.

On top of that, we’re dealing with a teachers’ shortage in our elementary and secondary education. As a matter of fact, just yesterday, the Elementary Teachers’ Federation of Ontario released a report on the alarming increase in violence in our schools due to the shortage of adults in the schools teaching our children. As a matter of fact, a third of secondary schools in Ontario face daily teacher shortages—not addressed in the budget.

The next area I want to talk about in the budget is poverty. There are 16,000 people unhoused on any given night in Ontario and 717,000 people living in legislated poverty in the province of Ontario, many of those people with disabilities. It’s shameful in a province that is as wealthy as Ontario, especially when we know that poverty costs this province $33 billion a year. The government had an opportunity to increase ODSP and OW rates to a level that would bring people above the poverty line. That was not addressed in the budget.

I want to close by talking about the climate crisis, because the government had an opportunity in this budget to bring forward a climate affordability plan to help us reduce climate pollution and make life more affordable for the people of Ontario. One way they could have done that was to make heat pumps affordable for people. We know that heat pumps save people 13% on their heating and cooling bills versus folks with gas furnaces, though today, unfortunately, the government passed a bill imposing those expensive gas furnaces onto new homebuyers. PEI offers free heat pumps for people who make under $100,000 a year to help them be able to afford increases in energy costs in their homes.

The government could have also had money in this budget to expand EV charging stations across the province and to bring back EV rebates so people in this province can afford to drive the electric vehicles we want to build in Ontario. I will say, yes, we’re making some progress on building electric vehicles in this province, and we should all celebrate that, but you know what? It would be nice if Ontarians could actually afford to drive those electric vehicles.

It would also be nice if we would open up investment opportunities in renewable energy, low-cost wind and solar, because the $1.88 trillion invested in the green energy transition, half of it to wind and solar—

I’ll just say that regardless of what the third parties said, the Financial Accountability Officer, an independent officer of this Legislature, showed that the biggest percentage area of growth in spending over the next few years versus the last few years is interest on debt.

The member talked about some of the things I would prioritize spending on. I want to tell the member the things that I think they’re mis-prioritizing spending on, because we could meet the objectives I’ve talked about within our existing fiscal framework. Did you know that we’re the only jurisdiction in all of North America that spends over $7 billion subsidizing electricity prices in the province of Ontario? And people who earn over $100,000 are getting that subsidy. So why not means-test it for low- and middle-income households, not wealthy households, so we can actually invest in health care, education and housing affordability?

I want to talk about affordable housing for a second, because 93% of the deeply affordable homes in the province of Ontario were built before 1995. What happened in 1995? The provincial and federal governments got out of supporting deeply affordable housing. It’s time for them to get back in, like the Scotiabank report says, so we can actually make our communities and our homes affordable for people.