Sadly, my eyes require a little bit of guidance here today.

I wanted to spend some time today talking about this motion, but mostly not just to repeat a phrase that our Premier has made but to expand on the why. The Premier said last month, “The delivery of every product we have in the province is being affected by the worst tax this country has ever seen—it’s a useless tax—and that’s the carbon tax.” I couldn’t agree with the Premier more on this one, and there are lots of reasons why.

I listened very carefully to the earlier discussion, and there are some things that I appreciated and agreed with, and there are some things that I just patently don’t agree with. I think that when you put a carbon tax in the country, and here in Ontario, you really are putting a tax right from the beginning, right from the farm to the table.

When you put a carbon tax on the fertilizer that’s going in the ground to grow the food that we eat, when you put a tax on the fuel that that farm is going to consume to pick the food and the fruits off the farm—then you put the fuel to transport that food. Then you need to put the fuel to refrigerate that food in the warehouses, who are all adding the carbon tax at every step of the way from in the ground all the way—now we’re at the distribution centre with the refrigerators or freezers in that case that have a carbon tax on top of everything that they are buying. Then you transport that around the province or around the country and you’re consuming gas with a carbon tax on it. Then it gets to the grocery store who have to refrigerate—again, you’re adding a carbon tax on that fuel. Every single step of the way, from the farm to the business to the family’s table, you have taxed. You have put a tax, and you wonder why we have inflation today, why we have the high cost of food.

We stood in this Legislature—I’ve been here 12 years and three weeks, and we’ve talked about lowering the cost on every item. That’s what we on this side stand for: lowering costs. Lower costs create more wealth in the communities. Taxing never—never—creates jobs, never creates any help for families, and I’m going to give some examples about what we did to lower costs and what that resulted in. So it’s a little bit of a storyline that I’ll take you on, but you’ll see that, by lowering costs, we have had huge benefits to families in Ontario.

By putting a carbon tax, you have increased the burden on every single family. Now, the price of gasoline alone is 14 cents per litre—right now, today, at the pump, the carbon tax is costing an extra 14 cents a litre. As the member from Renfrew–Nipissing–Pembroke said earlier, we live in rural Ontario. We don’t have many options. It is a vast land that we have to travel by vehicle, and in many cases, larger vehicles, as well, for our own safety on those back roads.

You have this carbon tax that is adversely affecting especially smaller and rural communities, but it’s 14 cents today. If we think we have pain, it’s on its way to reaching 37 cents a litre. We can see that everything we’re consuming, every single thing we’re consuming, whether it’s the clothes you’re wearing that were shipped to the stores to the food on your table to the shoes, your vehicles themselves—every single thing that you buy has an inflation built into it now because of this carbon tax. It can all be tracked back to this carbon tax. You need to support this bill to scrap that tax to give our hard-working families this needed relief.

I want to talk a little bit about what we’ve done here in our government to illustrate that in order to increase your government’s revenues to be able to do things that we’re doing—like the roads and transportation that we’re building and the subways, our health care system and our education system, all the things that we’ve been adding billions of dollars to—you don’t need to raise taxes to do that. In fact, I’m going to illustrate how lowering taxes actually gives you more revenue. I know that sounds counterintuitive, so let me give you the exact example of what has actually happened here in Ontario in the last five years.

We all have heard our wonderful successes in the electric vehicle business; $27 billion has landed here. That does not happen by accident. That happened because we lowered the cost of doing business. We began by reducing the workplace safety insurance, the WSIB, by 50%—the premiums. The benefits to the workers have not changed; the premiums to the employers have been reduced. There was so much cash in there—stuffed with cash—that it was beyond any financial requirement, beyond any moral requirement. So we have said to the business community, “Enough.” We’ve reduced that by 50%. That is a $2.5-billion annual savings to those businesses that are paying WSIB, especially in the auto sector—129,000 employees, so it really affected them.

You can see, so far, $2.5 billion annually. Then we put in what’s called a capital cost acceleration, where you could write off the cost of your brand new equipment. You could write that off in-year, and that tax savings is $1 billion a year to the businesses. So now we have $2.5 billion and another $1 billion. That’s less revenue for the province.

Then we lowered the cost of industrial and commercial energy by 15%. That’s $1.3 billion. Then, through the great work of our Ministers of Red Tape Reduction, we have seen almost $1 billion in savings. It’s getting close to $1 billion in annual savings.

The Liberal government, before we were elected, had put in a series of tax increases, and one was to come due January 2019, about a half a year after we were elected, but we did not let that go through—$465 million annual savings by not having that tax, and then we stopped any tax increases when we were elected. So not only did we not go ahead with the Liberal $465-million tax; we stopped any tax increases—not even your hunting licence. But then we rolled back the provincial share of local property taxes by $450 million, and that’s a savings to business. Add it all up, and a whole bunch of other savings that we did: We reduced our revenue from the business community by $8 billion annually. So the business community saved $8 billion a year; we had $8 billion a year—temporarily, I’ll say—less revenue.

What did the business community do? They did exactly what we expected them to do: They put 704,000 people to work since we got elected five years ago. Now, those 704,000 people pay income tax. That’s 704,000 more income tax cheques the province had than the day we started. And those companies that hired those 700,000 obviously got bigger. Without increasing the tax rate, our tax revenue increased.

You can see where I’m going with this, Speaker. When we got elected, our tax revenue was $154 billion annually. We rolled back our revenue. We let the business community keep that to hire those 700,000 people. We had a short-term rollback of $8 billion every year, but today our revenue is $194 billion. We started with $154 billion in revenue; by lowering taxes, our revenue went to $194 billion. That is economics 101. That is a very conservative platform, a very conservative way of looking at things.

The other side will say, “You need higher revenue? Raise taxes,” not understanding at all that a carbon tax or other taxes—when you raise those, you punish the families, you punish the business community, you stifle investment, you stop everything, you don’t grow and you just keep increasing taxes, because your revenue keeps falling by increasing taxes.

It works the other way: When you lower taxes, your revenue goes up. That is exactly what happened in Ontario. It is an absolute fact. It is inarguable. You cannot argue against the fact that we rolled back $8 billion in revenue to make $40 billion a year higher revenue, a $22-billion-a-year increase from corporate taxes. That’s where that money came from. That’s the money that we put into health care and education, the $200 billion that we’re investing in infrastructure, buildings, roads and bridges; and 50 hospitals and schools that we’re building. All of that comes from that new revenue, because we lowered taxes.

Somebody has to give that lesson to the Liberal government in Ottawa, that lower taxes create higher revenue. When we’re out selling Ontario, it becomes so much more difficult in the US, because they do not have this punishing carbon tax in the US. It comes up at every meeting: “Yes, but what about that tax you have in Canada?” That’s what they ask; they ask us specifically about that carbon tax, because they know that the fuel they’re going to consume is not a choice.

It’s not a choice for the construction worker who has to get to their worksite in the morning, or the parents who have to drive the kids to the hockey rink. It’s not a choice; it’s a necessity. The federal government has put this burden, and that’s why cutting the gas and fuel tax that we’re doing—we’ve reduced that by—I think the Premier uses the number 10.7 cents. That’s our plan. We reduced the tax of gasoline. The federal government increases the tax by 14 cents on gasoline. We can continue to do things like reduce the licence plate sticker renewal fees, all of these kinds of things. Everything that we’re doing is to put money back in the pockets of families, back in the pockets of that farmer, the business community, the end-users, so they have more money. Everything that that Liberal government in Ottawa is doing with the carbon tax is taking money out of your pockets. It’s just really simple: The more money that you put in the pockets of the families, drivers, the better off our economy is.

Speaker, we’re doing everything that we can in our government to continue to reduce costs for families. The Minister of Energy had a great announcement last week. As of November 1, we’re going to increase the electricity rebate. For the average residential customer, it will decrease their bills by $26 a month. That is the kind of relief that the people of Ontario need to grapple with the increased costs they’re getting from the federal government.

So earlier we talked about this $27 billion in auto EV. The member from Guelph certainly was right: that in itself is going to lower our carbon emissions. The fact that we are seeing this EV revolution, and it’s being led, by the way, in Ontario. It was 2019 that Reuters announced that there would be $300 billion spent on EV production in the next five years and zero of it—zero—was coming to Canada, zero was coming to Ontario. The fact that we turned that ship around—that sinking ship that the Liberals, supported by the NDP, left us in 2018 when we won our first majority—we were able to have an announcement by Bloomberg only a short while ago that from zero to $27 billion in EV investment. We are the number two global supplier of EV parts in all of the world. We are only behind China. We are number one in North America, ahead of all of the US.

Ontario is leading this EV revolution and the fight to get to zero carbon. That is being led here in Ontario and a big part of that is the fact that we are making green steel, not only in Algoma, in Sault Ste. Marie, but at Dofasco in Hamilton. And that green steel—when we make an EV in Ontario, you are buying a car that is assembled with 94% clean energy, you’re buying a battery that is assembled with 100% clean energy and a car that has green steel all around you. You are driving a true, clean electric vehicle. That changed at Dofasco.

To go to an electric arc furnace from burning coal is equivalent to taking one million cars off the road. The same thing can be said for Algoma in northern Ontario. By converting from coal to an electric arc furnace, that’s what we have done. That is part of this EV revolution that we have created—green steel. We’ve created clean energy assembly of vehicles; 100% clean energy batteries. You buy a battery made in Kentucky, it’s 6% clean energy. You buy a battery made in Indiana, it’s 7% clean energy. You buy a battery made in Ontario, and it’s 100% clean energy. You have a true zero-emission goal when you buy products that are made here in Ontario. So we will continue to be laser-focused.

Each and every one of these investments that we see these companies making, they’re all geared here not only because we have this clean energy and not only because we have the mega sites—we have the talent. We have that talent, and that talent in Ontario deserves to be able to get to and from their place of business without having to be punished by this carbon tax that the federal government has continued to place here.

Despite this carbon tax, we have been able to be successful in Ontario. Even though the Liberals and the NDP continue to vote against measures we’ve introduced to make life more affordable, we continue—but now we encourage the federal government to reconsider their approach. Scrap the carbon tax. Give the people the much-needed relief at a time they’re already struggling with the increased cost of living.

Speaker, our government will always work to put more money in the pockets of hard-working people of the province. We encourage the federal government to see what we’ve done here in Ontario. See what lower taxes has done. See the revenue that has been increased because we lowered the taxes. Lower taxes equal higher revenue.