We’re going to silence women again, are we?

But I do hope that, and I think the women of Ontario hope that they won’t be silenced because this bill—

It is our intent, and I would hope it would be the government’s intent, to support this petition so that we can keep women safe and so that they can seek justice in this province and in this House. It hasn’t happened, and I’m hoping maybe the government will come to the light that this is not the way we respond and we respect women who are survivors of sexual assault in this province.

Thank you to the member opposite for their remarks. I’m curious: You talked a lot about what’s missing from the bill. I didn’t hear too many comments about what is in the bill, so I was hoping that you could comment about the proposed legislation that aims to support women in the skilled trades and our government’s efforts to provide menstrual products on construction sites to create a more inclusive environment for women who choose to pursue a career in the skilled trades.

I want to talk about women workers in this province. I want to know if you’ve heard the expression “pinkwashing.” Literally what that means is a government or a branding company puts the smallest thing out there, some kind of frivolous thing, but when you look behind it there’s nothing of substance. I would say that this bill is nothing but pinkwashing. Because you know what? Period products and clean washrooms are not going to cut it when women do not earn what men earn in this province.

We had a bill here—Lydia’s Law—that the member from Chatham-Kent–Leamington chose to discharge to committee so we couldn’t debate.

So my question to you is, do you think the women of Ontario are going to be swayed by clean washrooms when they do nothing to support women with real change?

Well, first of all, I want to say that women play an important—

Interjections.

ATU tried to get their women drivers who may have their periods to be able to use washrooms during their route. This Conservative government turned that amendment down. That’s a true story.

Anti-scab legislation is important. Deeming is important. Paying fair wages, treating women with respect and dignity, making sure there’s equality so if you’ve got a job as a teacher—or that might be a bad example. If you’ve got a job as a woman where you’re getting paid 70% of what a man is getting for the exact same work—I’m trying to educate you. I’m trying to help you, because I feel that it’s fair and reasonable that if you’re going to bring bills that say, “Working for Workers,” you should know what you’re talking about and you should know what workers want in this bill. Whether—

I appreciate you raising the point that I’ve been talking about: pinkwashing, where this government just puts a big headline out there that they’re working for women, and when you look at the substance of the bill, it is not there. We see time and time again that this is a government that has not only ignored women’s voices with Lydia’s Law—we see that they’re shutting out their voices from this Legislature—but they’re proactively working against women in the workplace.

Bill 124 froze the wages primarily of women workers. There’s a charter right challenge for women education workers. There were the midwives, for heaven’s sakes; they fought the midwives in court. And now we see gender-based violence and interval/transition workers are the lowest paid in the province. So not only do you shut out the voices of sexual assault survivors with Lydia’s Law; you’re shutting out the voices of women who work in these centres.

Do you see anything in this bill of substance that addresses the real needs of women working in this province?

Thank you to the minister for that presentation. I want to congratulate her, as well, because I think she said in the House a number of times about the 30% increase in women working in the trades.

I’m wondering if she can comment on what she feels the success factors have been in the past and present, and additionally, are included in this bill for that growth.

My question to the associate minister of women’s issues: You said, “Finally, you heard us” to the women you talked about, but believe me, women want more than clean washrooms, and it seems to me that men would like clean washrooms too. I don’t know if that would be a thing, but I think most men I know want a clean washroom.

You talked about keeping women safe and protected—very important. You talked about being struck by the strength of the women as you heard their stories. But women and girls wanted to have their stories heard in this House with Lydia’s Law and your government silenced them.

Why did you turn your back on those women in this House?

I thank the member for his question and I appreciate that you had that many women working in your workplace. So it astounds me that you would have voted in favour to discharge Lydia’s Law to committee, because I can’t imagine that in a workplace of that many women you didn’t see issues of intimate partner violence; you didn’t see issues of gender-based violence or trauma. Because the stats will say that you did, whether you recognized it or not.

While showing up with a big cheque is important, as I said, these organizations are starved for funding. You need to do more. You need to dig deep and have the courage of your convictions to vote what is appropriate and vote what is just, not just what you’re told to do.

I really want to talk particularly about women workers, women who work in precarious jobs, women who work piecework. They’re very often afraid, even if they know what their entitlements are. They’re often afraid to speak up about the wages that are being stolen from them, because they fear reprisals.

The associate minister for women’s issues said that in the skilled trades sector, women feel that they are treated differently. Well, that’s no different from all women across all sectors. If they really wanted to help women in the workplace, as she has said in her speech here, you need to look at women having their wages stolen—the most low-income women in our province, pieceworkers, garment workers. You need to address that. The government’s job is to make sure that women get the wages that they deserve.

I would also remind you that intimate partner violence and the issue of sexual assault perpetrators, rapists, going free is not the same issue. This is a problem with the courts, and this is a problem with your government’s failure to declare intimate partner violence an epidemic.

You pass bills here in a day, in two days, and we have all kinds of time here to debate your bills and debate bills that you’ve made mistakes on. Why did you not want to hear from the voices of women in this House that were prepared to come here? Instead, you dispatched it to committee where you know—

I met with a child care organization called Today’s Family in my community, and they shared with me that they are completely committed to the Canada-wide Early Learning and Child Care program, but that they’re struggling to implement it because they can’t afford to pay the workers what they deserve and they can’t continue to retain workers who cannot work on starvation wages, and I will just say that I had a question in the House the other day about women and families that can’t afford baby formula.

So this is a government that’s completely tone-deaf, is in their own bubble when it comes to the impact that women are facing, the economic difficulties that women are facing in this province under your government’s watch.

I thank the member for her presentation. There’s been quite a bit of discussion this afternoon around working for workers, particularly women, and so I think that one of the things, when you look at what the Conservative government says versus what they do, you see that a lot of times the actions actually hurt women. When you look at Bill 124 and the attack on health care workers, when you look at the child care sector, these are sectors that are predominantly women—actually predominantly low-wage, racialized, immigrant women.

So my question to the member is, particularly when you look at child care, the wage enhancement that was promised by this government back in January has still not arrived. Workers still are not receiving that wage enhancement, and that wage enhancement only applies to a very small percentage of workers, not all child care workers. Do you think that this is the right way forward, and does that help all women who are in the child care sector?

Women in the trades is important. This is a nut that many governments have been trying to crack. This is not the first government that’s attempted to make sure that women in the trades feel comfortable in non-traditional work for women. It’s not new. But you can’t go right to that without addressing the conditions all around for all working women in this province. You can’t just cherry-pick and say, “We just want to focus on the well-being of women in the trades sector.” You need to look at the broader economic sector as well. It’s important; I agree. But this bill is so narrowly focused I don’t see how it will succeed in accomplishing what you’re saying.

This government has said that this is a bill about improving the working conditions of women, and it’s called Working for Workers. When they announced it, they said, “Hey, we’re going to have menstrual products available on construction sites.” That’s not even in the legislation.

So when the government is trying to pretend that they are working for women workers, they should actually step up and work for women workers. There are a lot of women workers who work in sexual assault agencies, supporting survivors of sexual assault. They are dealing with the trauma. They are dealing with underpayment and with a lack of funding for the important work that they are doing.

Many of them were here in the Legislature yesterday, and many of the survivors were here in the Legislature yesterday. All they wanted to do was to hear the debate on Lydia’s Law, and this government cancelled the debate. The members opposite in the Conservative Party stood and voted not to hear that debate, even though there were 100 survivors of sexual assault in this Legislature yesterday.

It’s not just this example that this government is working against women workers. This government has shown incredible disrespect for women workers. Women still make 32% less for the same work of equal value than men. If you’re going to have a Working for Workers bill, and you’re going to pretend that it’s for women workers, you should be addressing that gender pay gap, because it’s just incredibly unfair that women are still, in 2024, not getting paid equally for work of equal value. You’ve shown with the midwife case that you are willing to take women to court to fight against their right for equal pay.

I’ll just go to another Working for Workers bill. This government always announces, and they have a really good, catchy byline. This time, it was menstrual products. In a previous Working for Workers bill, they said they were going to give gig workers the right to use the washroom—

That was a great diversion from what the actual bill was about because what that bill was about is, there was a tribunal hearing that said gig workers had been misclassified as contractors, but they were actually employees, so they were entitled to protections under the Employment Standards Act. What that bill—that “working for workers” bill—did is, it stripped those workers of their protections under the Employment Standards Act, so they are not entitled to minimum wage for all of the work hours that they had worked.

For example, a lot of the gig workers, a lot of the drivers—there was a report in the Toronto Star recently that said that after expenses they are making $6.37 an hour. And this government’s response to the abuse and the exploitation of gig workers was to strip them of their rights under the Employment Standards Act to create a separate subclass of workers that are called “gig workers,” who do not have the protections that other employees do in the province of Ontario.

I think this government is trying to get away with something. This government is trying to convince people that they are supportive of workers, but your record shows exactly the opposite. As far as women workers go and as far as women, and particularly survivors of sexual assault go, what this government did yesterday was absolutely shameful.

I actually got involved in politics when my kids were in elementary school because the Mike Harris government of that day was underfunding our schools. I actually had a newsletter that I was putting out to parents. Every week, I would put out another edition and it would highlight the two things that the government was cutting—that this government, through their supervisors at the Toronto District School Board, was cutting from our schools. Sometimes it would be the daytime custodian at my kids’ school or it would be the gym classes for kindergarten students or it would be the art program.

This government wants all of our public services and all of our public assets to go to their corporate friends so that they can generate profit, rather than provide services to the people of Ontario.

I come from a trades background. My father is a tool and die maker. All of my family members were working in different trades. I was a forest firefighter in northern Ontario with some of the first women crew members in the 1980s. So I appreciate any effort to get women into trades, to open up doors for women, because there are often too many barriers to get them into different jobs.

Clean washrooms: They should be mandatory on any work site. The thing that this government announced, though, when they announced this bill is that they were going to have free menstrual products available on construction sites. That was the announcement and it’s not in the bill.

So you’re pretending that you’re supporting women workers. You make an announcement that you’re supporting women workers. You say that it’s going to be in the legislation, but it isn’t there. So what are women workers supposed to think of that? Are they supposed to think that, “Oh, well, maybe they will fulfill their promise”?

For the survivors of sexual assault who came here yesterday, many of whom had had their cases thrown out of court because this government is underfunding our court system—there aren’t enough staff in our courts, and those cases are getting thrown out. Sexual assault cases are getting thrown out. So they came here to have a day in the Legislature where they could actually hear their cases brought forward. They could hear their stories brought forward. Yet this government silenced it.

I think that’s got to be traumatizing to the women who came here, the 100 women. There was one woman who flew from Los Angeles to hear that debate, and this government silenced that debate, silenced those women’s stories. I think that’s absolutely shameful.

Thank you very much to the MPP for Burlington. While we agree with you that women in the trades are very important, there have been many, many governments that have been trying to encourage women in non-traditional trades, so we support that.

While we think it’s very important that women have clean washrooms, that any worker has clean washrooms is what we he need in this province. Making period products available is great. I think that’s really important.

But you talked a lot about hearing the stories of women. Your government and you voted to discharge Lydia’s Law directly to committee and silence the voices of women who wanted to talk about their experience of sexual assault and having their cases thrown out of court. Sexual assault perpetrators, rapists, went free: 1,300 last year; over 1,000 the year before.

Why did you vote to discharge that bail and not support workers and women workers in this province who want to have their stories heard?

As the member opposite mentioned earlier in her comments, this legislation has been referred and sent to committee, where we’ll deal with it faster and hear from women’s voices directly.

I will now return to messaging that’s on the bill, about women, and would just like to read a quote, perhaps, that speaks to women who are working in the trades and their input. We heard from Karen Pullen, chair of Ontario Building and Construction Tradeswomen:

“Today’s Working for Workers Five bill includes welcome measures that will improve conditions on job sites across the construction industry in Ontario. Clean, functioning washrooms should be the right of every worker, male or female. Providing menstrual products on every job site is a tangible way to level the playing field for women on site.”

Thank you so much to my colleague. I will share that in my constituency office in the riding of Burlington, I have met with a number of different stakeholders, including the West End Home Builders’ Association, who has a group called Women in Industry. I have heard from women in the skilled trades who work at the Centre for Skills Development, also in my riding of Burlington, and I have also met with the women boilermakers in Burlington. What I continue to hear from women is they may go through and that they may pursue a career in the skilled trades, but one issue that came up time and time and time again was accessibility to washrooms that were lit and that were within a reasonable proximity to the job site, that they were clean and that there was an availability of menstrual products.

It’s a little disheartening to hear the rather flippant comments that are coming from the other side—the opposition—here today, almost as if we haven’t taken the time or the thought to consult with many different stakeholders on this bill, including women.

I just wanted to get your take, to the member from Burlington, as a woman. I think it’s very important that we recognize we have a very diverse caucus made up of folks from all across the province, all different creeds, races and a very large representation of women who have input into these bills as well. As a woman, I just wanted to get your comments on how you think that we’re able to move forward and we’re pushing the envelope. No matter what the NDP say, we are going to do what is right and what is best, and I want to get your take on that.