The petition is entitled “Petition: To Raise Social Assistance Rates.”

Yesterday, I had a chance to meet with the Disability Without Poverty coalition, and I’m here to say that people with disabilities in Ontario are struggling. They are starving, and they are feeling left behind.

So I am proud to sign this petition that was given to me by Dr. Sally Palmer. It is calling for raises of the social assistance rates. We need to at least double ODSPoverty and OW so that Ontarians with disabilities have a chance at survival in this climate. I’ve affixed my signature, and I’m handing it over to Farhan.

I’ve affixed my signature, and I will hand it over to Farhan for tabling.

I’ve affixed my signature, and I’m handing it back it to Farhan for tabling.

Mr. McCarthy moved second reading of the following bill:

Bill 200, An Act to amend various Acts with respect to homebuyers and homeowners, properties of cultural heritage value or interest and certain planning matters / Projet de loi 200, Loi modifiant diverses lois en ce qui concerne les acquéreurs de logements et les propriétaires de logements, les biens ayant une valeur ou un caractère sur le plan du patrimoine culturel et d’autres questions liées à l’aménagement du territoire.

I am very grateful to talk about this motion today, and I appreciate the member for putting it forward. I too own a Bolt and am a grateful owner of that Bolt. I spend $12 a month on operating my Bolt through electricity rates—thank you to the energy minister for the low overnight rate, which I charge my car with—and I save 80% a year on maintenance fees.

I know in this House there is great concern about affordability, and I think the more we can do to help people not only afford an EV but also operate one with ease will go a long way to ensure that it’s not just me, with privilege, who can foot that bill at the beginning, but this affordability relief can be appreciated by all Ontarians, which is why we support the member’s bill. We know that it’s so much easier—I know from lived experience—to patch in the electrical capacity when you’re building your home. It saves thousands of dollars. It costs so much more to retrofit a home when you have to do it later on.

Look at the retrofitting we’re trying to do right now when it comes to climate. We look at all our older homes. They’re very leaky. We have to retrofit those homes, and it costs people thousands and thousands and thousands of dollars. We know better, and so we should do better. So I hope that we can do this work of retrofitting the homes from the very beginning. We could save people money on their monthly expenses, and we could save money on their servicing.

We also know that this creates affordability over the lifespan of the car. As a person who graduated from business school, I think we need a revamp on our accounting classes. We need to take operating costs and we need to allow those costs to be used for capital. We know with these cars, yes, they cost more up front, but you will save thousands of dollars over the lifespan of the vehicle, and I have seen this with a lot of the electrification of our fleets. We see this in the city of Kitchener, where we’ve electrified our fleet. When we build new buildings now in the city of Kitchener, we mandate that that charging happens during the development process. So I urge us to do that not just for municipalities and put this on them to figure out on their own.

This is a consistent thing we can do across the province with ease. What I’ve heard from the development sector is that they hate going from city to city to city and trying to figure out everybody else’s way of doing things. The city of Kitchener is moving forward with green development standards. This will be the reality in the city of Kitchener, but we would like it so that developers can find it easy to manoeuvre and build across the province with the same set of standards, so they don’t have to reinvent the rules and understand different rules depending on where they’re building. It adds time. It adds energy. It adds staffing costs. It adds complexity. When we create this norm across the province, we create simplicity for home builders, which saves people money as well. We know these retrofits will have to come if we don’t do that.

I also believe in what the member beside me has shared about the future of the EV sector. What I’ve heard is that you build it where we buy it. We know that, yes, we need to operate EVs cheaply and we need to make it easier for people to use them. This encourages people to buy the very EVs that we are manufacturing in Ontario. So when we make it easier for people to buy EVs in the province of Ontario, we are supporting the very jobs that we’re creating at this moment. These things go hand in hand. Any effort to undermine EV market sales by not having it patched into someone’s home, by not having consistent charging infrastructure across the province, by not making it affordable by using rebates and these price incentives—we will see a dip. This is what I heard from Toyota. Toyota Canada came to me last week. They are near my riding. Most of the auto workers live in my riding—because it’s awesome—but Toyota Canada is in Kitchener. They told us that these are the things they want, as an auto manufacturer. I know that they will be coming to Canada, but they want to make sure that the jobs that they create are sustainable. They don’t want to build a workforce and tell people to go home. They need to see the will of this government for the uptick, for the sales of the EVs, so that they also will come here and invest in the Ontario EV market.