Mr. Speaker, to our great member from Orléans: I appreciate his question, but I just have to remind him that his party was the one that bankrupted this province. His party was the one that chased 300,000 jobs out of the province, that destroyed our health care system. When we walked into the office almost six years ago, every single ministry was a disaster.

Move forward to today: There are over 700,000 more people working today, paying taxes.

We’re the only government in the history of this country that has never raised a tax. We’ve actually reduced taxes. We’ve reduced the gas tax by 10.7 cents; we got rid of the tolls on the 412 and 418; we got rid of the car registration stickers, saving millions and millions of dollars for the people of Ontario.

Think of that: raised revenues by $64 billion, never raised a tax, cut and reduced the burden off companies by $8.5 billion each and every year—and we’re seeing tens of billions of dollars of investment in our province.

The member, I want to thank you for your comments today. One of the games that the government plays in this House is they always say, “Oh, the opposition, they voted against this, they voted against this, they voted against this.” We voted against your budget bill, and your budget bill is bankrupting our schools, it’s bankrupting our colleges, our universities—11 out of 23 universities in this province are declaring shortfalls, are running deficits this year. Our hospitals are being bankrupted so that you can privative all of our public services.

How could you possibly ask us to support a bill that is bankrupting the most important public services in this province?

One of the things the government announced when they announced this in their media release—and it got all the headlines—was that it would include a suite of measures to support workers, including requiring menstrual products be provided on larger construction sites. That sounds like a good thing, except it’s not in the bill.

This is one of the things that this government does. They do what my colleague from Hamilton West calls pinkwashing. They put out this headline that, “Oh, we’re doing this wonderful thing for women workers. We’re going to make sure that there are menstrual products available on construction sites,” but it’s not in the legislation. So it means nothing.

When I look at the record of this government with regard to women and women workers, it’s really quite appalling. It starts with the midwives. Midwives were fighting for equal pay for work of equal value. The Human Rights Tribunal decided that, yes, their case was legitimate. What did this government do? They appealed that decision to the courts and then it went all the way to—it took several years, went to the courts. The courts upheld the decision and said that, yes, this government and the previous Liberal government were ripping off midwives; they were not giving them equal pay for work of equal value. They were actually underpaying them because they are women workers.

The next thing they did is they passed Bill 124, which illegally capped public sector workers’ wages at 1%. This primarily impacted women workers, disproportionately women workers. A lot of these workers, health care workers, PSWs and nurses that this government illegally tried to cap their wages—that had to go all the way to the Supreme Court of Canada. It took four years to get there and then it was finally overturned. Now the government’s having to pay them out.

In the meantime, what happened was women workers were so distraught, especially the health care workers, the nurses and the PSWs through the pandemic—they were not getting rewarded for the work that they were doing, not getting rewards for the risk that they were taking to support people and to help patients through the pandemic. So a lot of them left. As another of my colleagues mentioned today, there’s a 25% attrition rate among PSWs per year in this province because this government refuses to pay PSWs a legitimate working and living wage that’s commensurate to the work that they’re doing.

This government passed Bill 28 when they first got into power, and Bill 28 actually stripped the workers of their charter rights using the “notwithstanding” clause. This was charter rights, the fundamental freedoms—freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom of association. It stripped them of their legal rights against arbitrary detention. This meant that if those education workers went on a wildcat strike, they did not have rights against arbitrary detention. They could have just gone and arrested them all.

It also stripped them of their protection under the Human Rights Code. The Human Rights Code protects against discrimination based on gender, based on race, based on ability, disability, gender preference. This government actually stripped those workers, who were primarily—60% of those workers impacted by that bill were women workers.

Yesterday, in the Legislature, my colleague brought forward Lydia’s Law. This law is about compelling the province to provide statistics on sexual assault cases and mandating progress reports. It comes because there have been 1,171 sexual assault cases that have been stayed in 2023. In 2022, the number was 1,326 sexual assault cases stayed.

There’s a case I was just reading about online in the news. There was a student who was sexually assaulted on her campus. The case went, over an almost-two-year period, to court. She had the courage to face her assaulter in court, but just before the case came to conclusion, the case was thrown out. She never got her day of justice. She never got the court to actually hear and make a decision on that sexual assault case. She had the courage to come forward and go through all of the process of making the charge and going through that court case

There are hundreds of women in similar cases. There were 100 women in this Legislature yesterday to hear Lydia’s Law—