It is big money. It really, genuinely is.

When you think about our energy rates and the kind of energy we produce—we’ve all talked about this in the Legislature before—in Ontario, we have 94% clean energy. If you are making a battery in Ontario, you can also buy the clean energy credits and have your battery with 100% clean energy here in Ontario. It’s one of the few jurisdictions where you can do that.

If you’re in the States making a battery in Kentucky—I’m going to go back a step here. You’re buying an electric vehicle. You believe that you have made your contribution to society because you’re buying an electric vehicle in the US. You’re buying a green vehicle. Well, you’ve done one of those but not two. Yes, you bought an electric vehicle, it runs on a battery, but you have not bought a green vehicle. In Kentucky, a battery is made with 6% clean energy. They burn coal to make power to make a battery. How is that helping? In Indiana, you’re at 7% clean energy. Again, you’re burning coal to make power to make a battery. If you’re assembling vehicles in the US in a state that burns coal, you are not making a very green vehicle. Even though that vehicle is an electric vehicle and you think you’re driving a green vehicle, you are not driving a green vehicle. In Ontario, when our vehicles come off the line, you will be driving a green vehicle.

Here’s another reason why: Dofasco, which was burning coal to make steel, is now converting. With a half-a-billion-dollar investment by the province of Ontario, by the people of Ontario, Dofasco will be moving off of coal. That facility for making steel from an electric arc furnace is under conversion right this moment. Premier Ford and myself were down there only a few weeks ago looking at the conversion that’s happening. That means, with our half-a-billion-dollar investment, they are going to be making green steel.

So your car, bought in Ontario and made in Ontario, will have green steel, will have a 100% clean battery and 94% clean energy assembling that vehicle. You go back down to the States, you are nowhere near, not even remotely near, the same kinds of metrics.

Dofasco alone, by the way, converting coal to an electric arc furnace—that’s the equivalent down there of taking a million cars a year off the road.

So, obviously, Ontario is one of the very few jurisdictions that is indeed on track to meet the 2030 target of reducing emissions by 30%. In fact, greenhouse gas emissions are down 27% and counting.

We talked a little bit earlier about critical minerals and that now, for the very first time in the 120-year history of auto, northern Ontario will be included in the auto sector, because you need those minerals to make a battery. You need that lithium hydroxide, which could be made in northern Ontario from the lithium mined in northern Ontario—you could be making that. But for the very first time, the north is now part of the auto sector.

In fact, at a speech that I was giving in Sudbury a few weeks ago, I sat with the principals from Glencore and Vale and they were talking about battery-grade nickel. It was interesting. There was a nickel mine in Sudbury that had been shut down years ago because they couldn’t go any deeper; they couldn’t ventilate any deeper. But now, today—Onaping Depth it’s called—they’re spending $1.3 billion to open that mine up again because now they will run electric vehicles down there. They won’t have diesel. They won’t have any diesel down there so they don’t need that massive ventilation that couldn’t go any deeper. They will now use electric vehicles with lithium ion batteries to mine nickel to make electric vehicles with lithium ion. Talk about a closed loop here in Ontario. It’s absolutely amazing.

Remember I said $300 billion of electric vehicles, before our government got elected, had all gone to other jurisdictions in North America; zero in Canada. Just recently Bloomberg ranked Canada second in their annual global battery supply chain. Imagine: We’ve gone from zero; now we’re second globally in the supply chain. In fact, we are first in North America. We are ahead of the US, according to Bloomberg. That confirms that everything the Premier said that he wanted done is done. We have created the right conditions to attract investments, to create jobs and to remain competitive.

As a result of all of this activity, Site Selection magazine—it’s a very popular magazine that those in economic development follow. That magazine follows all of us as well. Ontario just recently earned Site Selection magazine’s number one ranking as the most competitive province in the nation. That is absolute news, and very exciting news. Companies around the globe are looking to Ontario for their future.

That award from Site Selection magazine—number one in the nation—is a very huge vote of confidence in the province of Ontario’s economy. But it focuses the light on our shortage of mega-sites that are prepared. We have lots of land in Ontario. We’re one of the largest jurisdictions in North America, size-wise. There’s lots of land here. Let’s be clear about that. Anything can be converted. But there’s a critical shortage of shovel-ready industrial mega-sites. That’s what we need in Ontario, and that places Ontario at a very significant disadvantage when we’re competing for high-value projects. That’s why we want to take immediate action so that we don’t risk losing any opportunities. We want all those cards on the table.

We talked about all the things before: the minerals, the people, the tariff-free. We talked about the STEM grads. We talked about the ecosystem. We talked about lowering the costs. All of those are in place, but we want to make sure that we have a fulsome inventory of serviced land. It’s really important not just to have it in the bank; we want it to be able to provide jobs for thousands and thousands and thousands more people.

We’ve seen the business community create 600,000 jobs. By the way, that’s 300,000 pre-pandemic, 300,000 since the pandemic. With 600,000 jobs already created in Ontario, can you imagine where we’re going to go in the future? We’ll have some serviced land. It will show that we’re not just open for business, as the Premier likes to say, but ready for business.

That’s why at the moment we are obviously in fierce competition with other jurisdictions for all kinds of investments. We’ve talked about this for days and weeks and months, that we are out there. You’ve seen us around the world trying to lure businesses here. There are 40 US jurisdictions right now who offer a certified mega-site program. That’s what we are contending with out there. Our key US competitors—Ohio, Iowa, North Carolina, Missouri, Tennessee—all have anywhere from 19 to 51 certified sites. These are shovel-ready sites. That says we’re ready for any potential investor. We need more certified, shovel-ready sites.

We’ve got to have those ready for when we’re travelling and luring prospects here. We can not only give the pitch that I’ve just outlined for you, but we can also tell them, “By the way, here is your suite of sites that are ready for you to choose.” That’s why, back in November 2019, we launched the Job Site Challenge program. It was Canada’s first challenge where municipalities, economic development agencies, industrial property owners—we asked them to put forward large tracts of land, anywhere from 500 to 1,500 acres, that could support a large-scale manufacturer. That’s what we asked for. Just for context, 500 acres—that’s almost 400 football fields, by the way. You can imagine what size 1,500 acres would be. We want to build an inventory of mega-sites that are investment-ready—take a look at the site and know we can go.

As a result of all of our economic development, travelling and some of the successes we brought in, we still have about $20 billion in the pipeline. We’re not going to win it all, but wouldn’t it be nice if we sure had a fair shot at every single penny of that? We’ve won $17 billion, and we’ve got more than that still in the pipeline. But again, many of those require a large-scale site. Companies are confident in the future of Ontario. That’s why we have that big pipeline. They’re confident in the future of Ontario; they want to be part of that future of Ontario. They want to be that future.

That St. Thomas site that we’re talking about is considered a highly attractive mega-site. It has been identified as one of the few potential mega-sites across the province. Why? Because it has large acreage; it’s in close proximity to transit routes and highways; it’s fully serviceable with electric gas, water, waste water; and it has been deemed to have a very high probability to sell to an investor.

The site that we’ve picked currently straddles two municipalities: the city of St. Thomas and the municipality of Central Elgin, which is in Elgin county. These two municipalities have different steps to permit. They have different permitting requirements. They have different timelines. It creates confusion and complexity for any potential investor, especially if they decided to build the building right smack dab in the middle of the property line. There’s a lot of unnecessary and burdensome red tape for investors, and it can also mean delays in timelines. Timelines cost money.

To unlock the full potential of this mega-site, we’re introducing legislation that would change the municipal boundary so that the site would be fully located in St. Thomas. That reduces the red tape, and it ensures that what we call the St. Thomas site truly is shovel-ready in the very near term for any potential investments. It would allow the city themselves and the province to proceed quickly with permitting, preparing the site to meet any potential investor timelines. It will allow Ontario to remain competitive as an attractive place to invest and grow. Those changes have the potential to bring significant economic benefits to the people of St. Thomas, Central Elgin and the surrounding communities. Of course, we’ll work closely with the affected communities with respect to any proposed legislative change, should they be passed.

Again, we’re going to continue to look for additional large-scale industrial sites around the province, because we are the ideal destination for any kind of manufacturers. We talked about $17 billion in the auto sector, but there’s also $3 billion in the life sciences sector that we’ve won in Ontario in the last two years. Billions in the tech sector—I used this example the other day: Telus alone is investing $23 billion in hiring 9,500 people in Ontario. Think about Nokia—the Premier was there to make the announcement of Nokia’s $340-million investment in Ottawa. Tech, life sciences, auto—we’re firing on all cylinders here, while we still have cylinders to fire on, in Ontario. Clean energy, critical minerals, world-class workforce, and now we need the last piece of the puzzle: mega-sites built throughout Ontario.

The window of opportunity to secure transformational EV sites is only open for a short time. Right now, all around the world, everybody is jockeying for position to make sure they’re near critical minerals or to make sure they’re near a workforce, to make sure they can go into a low-cost jurisdiction, to make sure they can go into a jurisdiction that has an auto ecosystem. All of those are in Ontario.

I’ve said this to many of our prospects around the world—I don’t know if I’ve ever said it in the Legislature, but I’ll tell you how I close when I’m speaking with an auto company around the world: It’s like a carousel going around. When that carousel stops, there won’t be a horse for everybody. That is my message to all of the EV automakers, battery makers, parts suppliers: The carousel is still spinning. We have all of the things that you need here in Ontario. We’ve got the critical minerals, but they’re going to be spoken for sooner than later.

All of these companies—battery companies, EV makers, parts makers—they’re looking today, right now, around the world. They’ve got to get located somewhere. They’ve got to get a plant built. They’ve got to get producing their parts and their products and their batteries and their vehicles to meet all of the deadlines that are out there. There’s not much more time for them to pick a site. They’re all doing it now. That window is open now, and it won’t stay open for long. That’s why Ontario has been so aggressive in looking to land all of these pieces of the EV revolution. We want them here now, because the time is now.

Speaker, thank you very much for the opportunity to speak. I’ll turn it over to MPP Dowie.