Yes, they’re doing okay. You know who’s not? The people who are looking for housing, particularly affordable housing, and the people who are getting energy bills. And you’re going to increase their energy bills. Why would this government go down this road, Madam Speaker?

So we question the decision-making. Honestly, the OEB’s decision was based on research by experts. The evidence is clear that the government’s direction around expanding natural gas was not in the best interests of Ontarians. And yet, now we have a piece of legislation, ironically called “keeping your energy bill down,” or something like that—something ridiculous. I don’t know who writes the titles of these bills.

And then you know what? Even when we do come to this House and we propose some solutions, the government is not willing at all to even contemplate them. I’m thinking particularly of our oppo day motion from this week. We came to this House with our oppo day motion to remove the tolls for truckers on the 407. For us, this was a very creative solution; perhaps a stopgap for other highways or other infrastructure projects, but really, an immediate solution to address painful gridlock on the 407.

This would also address the productivity of Ontarians, because people spend too much time on the parking lot called the 401. And this would address the economic development call and potentially save $8 billion by not having to build another highway directly parallel to the 407. And also, quite honestly, there would be significant environmental benefits from ensuring that we make better use of the 407. There was, of course, the forgiveness of the $1 billion in non-compliance fees that were forgiven by this government. So there’s definitely a need to sit down and have this conversation.

I don’t know why they’re so soft on tolls because, ironically, they brought forward a piece of legislation saying that they’re going to take the tolls off roads where there are no tolls, but they refuse to take the tolls or even address or reduce the tolls where there is a toll, on the one highway in Ontario that has a toll, which is the 407 ETR.

Just to give you some sense as to how this would play out, the potential—and this is a report that I will quote in a second. This would move trucks to the 407 and “12,000 to 21,000 trucks a day off Highway 401, reducing daily traffic for passenger vehicle drivers” on that highway. Moving trucks to the 407 “will improve journey times for truckers by approx. 80 minutes”—time is money, Madam Speaker—“which would be less than half the length of time than the equivalent trip on Highway 401.”

Subsidizing the 407 will “cost $6 billion less than constructing” another proposed highway. And that highway isn’t even going to be built for another decade. People who are stuck in traffic and gridlock on the 401 right now, they cannot wait another decade for some kind of relief.

This report from Environmental Defence says this confirms—if they had even been willing to have a conversation, right? “Their findings confirm that the alternative approach of subsidizing the toll for trucks on the 407 would address the key aim of reducing congestion on the 401 while eliminating the risk of negative environmental impacts.”

Was this government willing to have this conversation with us? No, they were not. In fact, for some reason, the Minister of Transportation didn’t even want to talk about the 407. I know why they don’t want to talk about the 407. They don’t want to talk about the 407 because this was the worst deal in the history of the province, and our debate really revealed a lot of issues that are ongoing.

This goes back to contract law. For some reason, the 407 ETR contract with the province of Ontario heavily favours the 407, not the people of this province. Some of the highest tolls in the country—I think “the universe” may have been quoted the other day—but definitely the highest tolls, on the 407, in Ontario, than any other province in this great country.

Going back to that $1 billion: Let’s remember that during the pandemic, obviously, ridership was down on the 407, and the 407 ETR wanted some COVID-related relief. They got relief. They got $1 billion worth of relief.

According to documents obtained through the provincial freedom-of-information act, the government “didn’t pursue ‘potential congestion penalty payments in the order of $1 billion’ for 2020 and could decide not to do so again”—which they did.

This comes at a time when the government was planning to build a parallel highway to the 407. It’s really about priorities.

Even if you go back to the pocket issue, this government is actively choosing to provide relief to the 407 ETR and not to the people of this province, who, in better times, are back on the 407, paying the highest tolls in the country.

Let’s remember that the 407 ETR received that $1 billion in relief even in the year when they made $147.1 million worth of profit. So, yes, they still posted a profit, and yet they still received very, very generous—I would say $1 billion is very generous. This is a very profitable highway. When you’re charging the kind of tolls that they are, of course they’re going to generate a lot of money.

What’s really important to think about, when a government is making choices or setting priorities—this is what actually happened. The highway, during this time, had the option of reducing tolls to encourage more drivers to use the highway, possibly preventing the congestion clause from being triggered, but they opted not to do so. Do you know why they opted not to do so? Because they were like, “It’s okay. This PC government will take care of us.” They knew where the interests and the priorities of this government fell. It fell with the 407, not with the people who pay the highest tolls.

It goes on to say in the contract—“‘407 ETR is required to use commercially reasonable efforts to minimize the effect and duration of the force majeure,’ ministry officials noted in their April 3 memo. ‘This could include, amongst other things, reducing tolls to encourage traffic.’” It’s right there in the contract. The government has never even tried to pressure or push the 407 corporation to meet their contractual obligations. This meant that the 407 ETR was failing to meet its contractual obligations—I just said that.

CEO Sacristan explained to the ministry and wrote a letter, and in that letter they quoted—“407 ETR has initiated discussions with ministry staff and is seeking comfort that the government will exclude the pandemic period from any congestion penalty payment calculations. Corporate reporting requirements to shareholders, investors, debt holders and public auditing and disclosure requirements are driving the urgency of this matter....”

And the government met them at that urgent place. They met them in that moment in time. Meanwhile, minimum wage workers are actively having the government remove money from their pockets, but the pockets of the shareholders, they’re fine; they’re doing okay.

The Ministry of Transportation, ironically, does not make its traffic data public, despite the open-government legislation. The language that we hear around here around “the historic investments” and “this never happened in the history of the province of Ontario”—I have never heard a government use the word “historic” to such historic measures. I mean, it’s quite something. This is a very clear example of a government showing us who they really are, right? At the end of the day, there were a few ministry staff who really tried to push back a little bit, but not on the political side, I have to say. They said, and this is the quote from one of the FOI documents, “We believe that the congestion relief mechanisms have been rendered inoperative by the lack of congestion.” And then: “Mindful that the 407 managers could reduce tolls to encourage higher traffic levels and avoid billion-dollar penalties, however, the assistant deputy minister, operations division”—at the time, Eric Doidge—“at the Ontario Ministry of Transportation, took issue with the company’s characterization of traffic levels.”

There were people, I’m sure, who were advising the Minister of Transportation at the time that we didn’t have to be so compliant with their request to seek comfort. That is not the job of the government, to comfort corporations. It is the job to put the interests of the people of this great province ahead of those corporations. And the ministry disagreed “with the 407 ETR’s statements regarding the existence or non-existence of congestion in the” GTA. The only reason that we know some of this stuff is really through FOIs—and several people, though, who have been following this debacle of the 407, beginning with the worst deal in the history of Ontario by selling it after we’d already paid for it.

“The government could have pressed them to drop the tolls” after viewing these documents. “They don’t seem to have put any pressure on the operator. They lost that opportunity.” So this government chose the interests of this corporation over the interests of the people that we serve. I have to say, we continue to really just be the people that paid for the original highway and pay the highest tolls. They continue to pay the highest price for a really messy policy decision.

I’m just going to move on a little bit, because the government is not indicating at all that they’re even interested in alleviating congestion on the 401 with a creative option, even though it’s well within their rights, particularly on the provincially owned 407. There’s literally nothing stopping this government from removing tolls on that part, but they do have a piece of legislation that says “get it done”—is it just “get it done”?

I don’t get invited to them. I just got heckled that I don’t pass them up; I don’t get invited to them. I used to show up and crash the party. It was really fun, I have to tell you. But no, we don’t get invited to them, because this government thinks that that money is their money. So sometimes councillors or a community leader will say, “Oh, by the way, the member from Kitchener–Conestoga is going to this place, and you might want to show up.” And sometimes you do; sometimes you don’t. Anyway, in the end it doesn’t—

Interjection.

Interjection.

So this one final piece on the infrastructure bank—but, goodness, you gave me a lot of material to work with with this fall economic statement.

Why is the Premier’s government creating a bank to finance public projects? “Questions swirl” around this whole idea. I think that the general point is that here we have a government that’s on the ropes, that’s quite worried about the narrative that’s actually happening about what is driving your decisions around the budget, especially six months in, when you drop $2.5 billion in an unallocated contingency fund when you know—if your eyes are open, if you are paying attention, if you’re spending time in your community, you know the needs are there.

We even saw a reduction in Meals on Wheels. That’s eyes on seniors addressing the issue of isolation and loneliness—which, actually, the LG mentioned this morning—and we know after the pandemic that loneliness kills. We know that we have a minister responsible for seniors who says we have to do more. Well, you can do more by actually resourcing those amazing not-for-profits in the communities. You show up for the photo ops with them, and sometimes you go on a ride-along with Meals on Wheels. But when they see a 30% cut, they’re making very hard decisions about who they can see and who they can deliver food to. That is a big thing. It’s a big thing for a government to say, “I see you. I see you, and I’m going to work towards”—imagine having the money, which they do, that you have the legal authority because you have a majority government. Imagine making the choice to not help, to not invest and to sock away, or squirrel away, $5.4 billion in an unallocated contingency fund. It really defies a lot of common sense.

The last point on the infrastructure bank, because I’m just fascinated with the fact that it’s not really contained in Bill 146 but it’s in the fall economic statement, is that when the minister was questioned about this—CBC News had asked “if establishing the bank opens the door to big investors profiting off public infrastructure projects.” It’s a very good question for the minister. He went back, and he said, “I don’t think profiting is the right way to think about it. Think about it in terms of revenue streams.” But who are the revenue streams for, Madam Speaker? Because if it’s interrupting and if the investor becomes the primary person of concern, organization of concern, how dedicated really is the government of the day to the infrastructure project?

We’ve seen this carving out of responsibility, really an abdication of public responsibility by this government. Even this weekend, I’m sure my colleagues must have seen that Shoppers Drug Mart, which is also a favourite of the Premier—for some reason, they have the distribution contract for vaccinations. So these small mom-and-pop pharmacies across the province, they’re supposed to get 200 flu shots or they’re supposed to get 200 COVID vaccinations, and they’re getting 20 and 50. When we see 2.1 million people in Ontario not have a family doctor, they become very reliant on pharmacies. Pharmacies and pharmacists perform a very crucial role in the health care system, and for them not to be able to get access to basic and, I would say, essential health care resources because you have, essentially, a monopoly with a private distributor—and this was the best part. The news article that I read—I don’t have it here—said that the Ministry of Health is going to meet with Shoppers to see if they can do their job. Can you imagine? This is 2023. Have we learned no lessons on the privatization and outsourcing of basic health care needs? Apparently, we have not.

So that’s how we feel about the infrastructure bank. And this is something that has rarely happened in this House: I’m just going to quote the Canadian Taxpayers Federation. This is Jay Goldberg. He says the Canadian Infrastructure Bank was “‘a complete failure,’ and says it’s concerning that the province would follow suit.” Just one for the Hansard: We definitely agree with the Canadian Taxpayers Federation.

Moving on, though, especially as it relates to where the money in this last fall economic statement is not going. One of the issues, and I want to get this on the record because this is certainly a disturbing trend, particularly on the justice file—we’ve seen it’s down over 2%, funding in justice. And if you’ve ever actually had to deal with a case in your riding of someone who is navigating the court system, you will see how completely broken the court system is in Ontario.

One story that caught my attention this week—and this will appeal, I think, this story, to the strong law-and-order group of Conservatives who often are complaining to the federal government about bail reform and about appropriate justice resources. Well, in Ontario, on November 7, an alleged rapist was released from custody because the court system took so long, Madam Speaker. And this is an important part, that—this is a CTV article, and this was done by Abby O’Brien and it’s very comprehensive.

I’m not going to read all of the disturbing details in it because it could be triggering for a lot of people: “In hindsight,” it says, “Emily recalled doing everything she’d been taught to do in the wake of an attack—she reported it to the police, took herself to the hospital, gave an interview to a detective, and, months later, testified in court.”

But on November 7, “a sexual assault charge laid by the Toronto police against the man Emily reported raped her in January 2022 was stayed and the case against him thrown out, court documents show.”

This is what she said: “It took so much to even do that first step”—right? This takes so much courage. It’s one of the worst kinds of violence you can ever experience, sexual assault. And then a year and a half later, she gets to face the alleged rapist in court, and it was a very—it takes a lot of courage to do this.

The court system is not kind to sexual assault victims. It’s a very harsh place. We need a better system, and we’re going to be working on a better system for sure, Madam Speaker. But it goes on to say that “Emily’s experience is no anomaly. Under the Criminal Code of Canada, anyone charged with an offence has the right to a trial within a reasonable time frame.” In Ontario, “barring exceptional circumstances, that time frame is 18 months in the provincial courts of Ontario”—18 months, a year and a half. Our court system is so underfunded and understaffed that we can’t get a victim and a perpetrator in the same court in 18 months in Ontario.

I think it adds insult to injury, given that this is the newest court, making my point that you can have a good building, you can build a bed, you can build a classroom, but boy, if you don’t have the human resources, you don’t have the people to help navigate that space, then you really are failing—failing. I have to say, if we had the opportunity, having a $5.4-billion contingency fund that is just sitting there, that you squirrelled away by not investing in certain areas—I would say that we could find some alignment here, with your “tough on crime” and more cops and more resources. We want more people. We want more people in the court system to make sure that people have access to justice, and that is what Emily deserved in the province of Ontario.

So in the end, Emily said a crown attorney told her that they believed she had been sexually assaulted, but that the charge had been stayed, and that they suggested that she move on with her life and try to put the event behind her. And she said, “What about my rights? Why are the rights of this man held with more importance?”

And then the judge of this particular court said, “This case should serve as a chilling reminder that this inexcusable state of affairs must never be allowed to happen again.

“The emotional trauma associated with never knowing the outcome of a case on the merits will often be long-lasting and severe for both victims and accused persons.”

“The judge identified the staffing shortages as the reason for the delays in the trial.”

So we have over a 2% cut in justice. We have a $5.4-billion contingency fund. If the minister responsible brought forward a motion to this House and said, “I need more money to staff these courtrooms,” you would have no objection from the NDP.

He goes on to say, “There is no reason this case could not have been completed....

“What happened in this case was entirely predictable, and avoidable. Yet it was allowed to occur, despite all the warning signs....”

He said this case serves “as yet one more example of how the government’s failure to ensure this courthouse could function at full capacity [has] produced tragic results.”

When charges are stayed, both parties in the case are failed by the system.

“That will now never occur. That alone is regrettable,” adding that the people of Ontario “deserve a justice system they can be proud of.”

Trust in the system is long gone, and Emily said, “I’ve lost faith in our province’s ability to keep me, us, safe.”

And I can tell you, Madam Speaker—I don’t know Emily; I’m just completely impressed by her courage. But this is an issue for everyone, and it should be a non-partisan issue. We should care about justice. We should care about timely justice, because we often hear in this House that justice delayed is justice denied and, certainly, that happened in that courtroom.

I want to move on to education, because education has seen a year-over-year reduction. I think our critic has done an amazing job on this file and pointing out inflationary cost pressures on the system as a whole. As I said before, this used to be a government—Conservatives used to acknowledge inflationary cost pressures as real, and plan for those cost pressures.

This, again, is from the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives’s Ricardo Tranjan, who is an excellent researcher and very well-spoken on these issues. But they have been tracking the pattern of this government and how they view public services. In this, Ricardo actually goes all the way back to the Better Schools and Student Outcomes Act, which was recently tabled, as the “clearest display to date of the Ford government’s ideological agenda against public education. The writing was on the wall from the start.”

It goes back to 2019, when there was a plan to eliminate 10,054 teaching positions by 2024 through increased class sizes and mandatory online learning. There was, obviously, a disruption around that plan by parents and organizations who fought back. Education is always worth fighting for. It’s one of the reasons why I’m standing in this House today.

But I do want to say, in tracking of the funding and this trust issue that I’ve referenced before, we have to remember that most of the COVID funding that came into the education system came from Ottawa or school board reserves, Madam Speaker. This is why it’s so ironic, really, that the Premier is bemoaning the fact that the federal government isn’t giving him the housing money so that he can then in turn pass it along to municipalities. I think the federal government learned their lesson in that regard and don’t trust the middle man here in the province of Ontario.

Also, after that, the government began sending money directly to parents, instead of into classrooms. We all remember this. It also expanded the scope of online education, justifying cuts to brick-and-mortar schools, and last year, when funding became available for tutoring, it had to be partially spent on third-party providers. This is directly, intentionally, with purpose moving education dollars out of the education system.

Now, I’m sure that the government of the day and the minister, perhaps, has his own rationale for doing this, but at the end of the day, when you factor in inflationary costs, in this year students are seeing $1,200 less per student around the GSN funding, so $1,200 less per student in the 2023-24 school year than they received in 2018-19. That has a real impact. If you’re going to invest in the future economy, in the health and communities that we’re all elected to serve, education is one of those key places, as is child care.

Toronto last week just saw 12 infant spaces close down because they can’t find staff. You know why they can’t find staff? They can’t find staff because this government does not respect early childhood educators. They deserve a fair wage. You cannot roll out a $10-a-day child care strategy in Ontario without child care workers, right?

This has an impact on the economy. If you’re not going to do it for the right reason, if you’re not going to say, “I value those first five years of a child’s life, one to five”—the impact that an educator, in collaboration with a parent, has can be life-changing. We’ve seen some real success stories across Ontario, and the research is sound. For every $1 invested in child care, you have a $7 return on that investment—$7. That’s actually 2019 numbers. I’m sure today it must be higher.

Also, there’s a new funding line that the government has in education. It’s on unallocated amounts. This appeared in the GSN for the first time with amounts between $30 million and $40 million. In this year’s document, that line was replaced with “planning provision,” which has $317 million sitting inside it, which is 10 times as much as was originally said. A footnote explains that the money is for possible in-year funding changes, and more unallocated funding has been included with the totals of specific grants.

This government is actively shuffling money away from the classroom. The amount is similar to the cost of the direct payments to parents, which is $365 million. Some parents really appreciate those two tutorial lessons that they get for their child with the money that they are allocated, but at the end of the day, $365 million invested specifically in special education resources in a classroom benefits the entire classroom. It benefits the entire school. It benefits the entire community.

Finally, Ricardo goes on to say, “Stashing cash away and using it to pay for populist measures—like cash transfers and tax cuts—has become a common practice of this government,” which they have been monitoring.

This is another trend of this government—shuffling the money around. I look forward to the new FAO’s analysis of where the funding is going. I was proud to be on the hiring committee. Jeffrey Novak is going to be the new FAO. He was the Acting FAO prior to that. I think that this government has given him a lot of material to work with as well—including the whole staff there at the FAO office.

We are down in justice, down in education, and then you have health care.

Madam Speaker, I just have to say: When I am reading these investigations—and thank goodness for the media, because they really are tracking the pattern of governance of this government, and I think that’s an important distinction to be made, because it’s not just about where this government is not investing or where they are investing; it’s about who gets control over that money.

Last year, as I mentioned, when the Minister of Health was not using her government-issued phone to talk to stakeholders, a major change was happening in Ontario. The government was creating another parallel system to alleviate the pressure on the public system, but they were very intentionally underfunding the public system, which is why we have had now over 5,672 hours of emergency closures in Ontario.

The damaging impact of Bill 124—I’m sure somebody somewhere is reviewing it and exploring it, but, boy, you absolutely were running health care workers right out of the province, and it’s going to take us years to rebuild. I will say this is one of the issues that keeps me up at night, because we have an aging demographic, so the health care needs of Ontarians are only growing, expanding and becoming—quite honestly, because of COVID and post-COVID impact—even more complex.

So when I read this morning that the Ford government is paying for-profit clinics more than hospitals for OHIP-covered surgeries, this is what we always suspected was happening, but thankfully CBC filed another FOI—it’s the theme. We should just have an FOI banner outside of the Legislature: “If you want information, FOI it”. They’ve never made it public—the rates it pays private clinics to perform thousands of outpatient day surgeries each year. So this is why I posted it this morning. Ontario, quite honestly, cannot afford Doug Ford, because he is paying these surgeons in these private clinics exorbitant rates, which, again, is so insulting to the surgeons, doctors and nurses who are just down the way on University Avenue performing life-saving surgeries, who are answering the call.

Just before I forget to get this into the record, because I see that time has gone very quickly, the Ontario Medical Association—when they came here earlier in the fall, we had an amazing conversation with them, because they were proposing solutions. We even heard from a doctor last year in Windsor who proposed solutions. This is what’s happening to family doctors: They are spending 19.1 hours every week on paperwork. So they have proposed to the government—you have a doctor shortage; 2.1 million Ontarians don’t have a doctor. In two years, it’s going to be three million Ontarians with no family doctor. Unless you’re going to completely privatize the entire system, family doctors are the gateway to diagnostic tests and to really accessing acute care.

The Ontario Medical Association has said, “Having family doctors spend 19.1 hours a week doing paperwork is not a good use of our resources. If you funded a scribe, if you funded these family practices so that a nurse practitioner or a professional person who has medical knowledge could do the paperwork, at the end of the day you would have the equivalent of 2,000 more doctors available for patients.” That’s a good solution. Is that money here in the fall economic statement? No, it’s not.

This is another thing I don’t understand. Imagine having the privilege—and it is a privilege, I think, to be a minister of the crown. It’s a duty. It’s a responsibility. But if you have that power within the scope of practice, you should absolutely be using that power for good and making these decisions that actually make a difference.

This article very clearly outlines how much more these private clinics are costing. This money is absolutely coming at the expense of the Ontario Hospital Association, and this discrepancy, it goes on to say, “raises questions about the government’s imminent plans to expand the volume and scope of surgeries performed outside of hospitals, including the potentially lucrative field of hip and knee replacements.”

I just want to remind my colleagues on the other side of the House that when something goes wrong in these private clinics—you know where those patients end up? They end up in a publicly funded hospital. So, you’re throwing good money after bad. It is so short-sighted.

So the fall economic statement, for us—and none of these measures, for some reason, are contained within the technical bill which operationalizes the fall economic statement, including this new bank. I really feel somebody in cabinet should have said, “Let’s read the room here. We have a serious trust issue. Why are we creating a new fancy bauble of a bank when we should just do what we’re elected to do—invest in public services, support the people of this province and actually do our job.”

Thank you very much, Madam Speaker. I am talking about money, and money is in the budget. I’m going to keep going back to the money—

Interjection: Not all of it.

Just going back to the trust issue and connecting it to the infrastructure bank, which obviously is highlighted in the fall economic statement: This is all happening as the government lawyers who—I just want to say the lawyers are doing very well in Ontario. This government has given them lots of business.

“As the government lawyers attempt to shield” the Ontario Premier’s “personal cellphone records from being publicly released, new documents show several prominent ministers in his cabinet also have large stretches of inactivity on their official devices when critical government decisions were being made.

“Freedom-of-information requests submitted by Global News”—actually, this is how we have to get most of our information these days, which is not ideal—"show that then-ministers of education, finance, health, housing and transportation made either no phone calls or used very few minutes on their government-issued devices during crucial moments in their ministries.” This is problematic, obviously, on a number of levels, and one is that this was all within the context of the government starting their own bank.

“The phone records requested by Global News covered a one-month period for each minister....

“One minister made zero phone calls on their government-issued device during that one-month period”—which is very strange, because when we’re here, everybody’s on their phones; they’re on somebody’s phone; they’re texting their family, maybe looking at their dog videos. I don’t know what’s going on, but I know that everybody has their phones. This is an acceptable way to do our jobs. We have legislative-issued phones that we use to do our jobs.

So it is surprising that the Minister of Health, who also serves as the Deputy Premier, “had the least activity on her phone, according to the government records. During January 2023”—and why is this significant? I’m totally going to pull it back. The minister did not make a single call from her government cellphone. At the time, though, this was when they were making sweeping changes to how health care is delivered in Ontario and tapped private, for-profit clinics to take on an expanded role.

This is a problem, because if we don’t have a clear idea of how a minister of the crown, whose level of accountability and transparency—that bar is very high for these individuals. And when you are talking about a $70.1-billion item in the budget, that’s a lot of money, and when the money is not getting to where it’s supposed to go, like paramedics and emergency room doctors and nurses—we just read out a petition on behalf of the Registered Nurses’ Association of Ontario. The out-migration of nurses in Ontario is real, and Bill 124 has a lot to do with that. So if the Minister of Health is, as you know, during these crucial times not recognizing the health human resources crisis that the province of Ontario is in—you can build all the beds. Building beds is one thing; staffing beds is a complete other thing.

Also, it’s worth noting that the education minister had less than 20 minutes on his phone during November 2022—I think that was around Bill 28, wasn’t it?

And the cellphone bill shows that there was just a total of one minute in phone calls. I don’t know what to say about this exactly. I’m sure we’ll get to the bottom of it, but it is a disturbing pattern.

All of this is happening as the Premier and the finance minister decide to start a bank—the infrastructure bank of Ontario. There are more questions than there is any information on this, although I’ve been told that the minister did extensive consultation, but it’s not on his phone—but just not on the phone. There were no phone calls made. Also, it’s not contained in Bill 146, the actual budget measures act, which is the technical bill which operationalizes the fall economic statement, which leads me only to conclude that somewhere on a napkin this idea came up—this shiny little prize called an infrastructure bank. I feel that it should just stay on the napkin, Madam Speaker, and I’m going to tell you why.

This is one article from Thomas Marois from McMaster University: “Whose Interests Will New Ontario Infrastructure Bank Serve? Not the Public’s, It Seems.

“With the launch of the Ontario Infrastructure Bank, the province has just become home to the world’s newest public bank. As part of the provincial budget”—they’re going to invest $3 billion of public, taxpayer dollars into this bank. Why? Because the government says that it doesn’t necessarily have the money to invest in long-term-care homes, energy infrastructure, affordable housing, municipal and community infrastructure and transportation. But the question is, will the OIB—the Ontario Infrastructure Bank—serve the public or the private interest?

So far, what we know about this infrastructure bank is that it’s very much modelled under the federal infrastructure bank. You can see where I’m going with this, obviously.

Just recently, a press release came out from the federal Conservatives—our distant, distant, distant cousins. This is the press release around the infrastructure bank. This is what your federal cousins think about the infrastructure bank at the federal level, which your provincial infrastructure bank is modelled under. The Conservative shadow Minister of Infrastructure and Communities released the following statement after it was discovered that a $1.7-billion Canada Infrastructure Bank project had failed: “Trudeau’s bank invested $655 million in a $1.7-billion project to build an underwater electricity cable that is now dead in the water due to financial volatility and inflation. The Lake Erie Connector Project is yet another failure for the Canada Infrastructure Bank,” which is “a $35-billion taxpayer-funded bank that has not completed one project in almost six years.”

It makes no sense whatsoever. We should learn from other jurisdictions not to follow down that path. Ontario, and this government in particular—you have enough issues, I think, on your plate. If one could get lost and sort of lose track of the scandals, one could be forgiven for doing so, because they are so prevalent.

It goes on to say, “At a time when Canadians are struggling to put food on the table, this government keeps wasting taxpayer dollars. $655 million was promised to a multi-billion dollar company for an electricity project that ironically seems to have failed due to inflation....

“One and a half years ago, the Liberals were gushing about their new partnership with Fortis Inc., a private company that rakes in billions in revenue every year, promising tons of low-carbon energy, billions in GDP and hundreds of Canadian jobs.” It almost sounds too good to be true. Conservatives warned from the beginning—because they’re very good at that—that this was risky, although they do a fair number of risky things themselves.

It was “an inappropriate use of taxpayer dollars.” This is your federal cousins telling you that this infrastructure bank is an “inappropriate use of taxpayer dollars.” They were ignored by the federal Liberals. It’s a very sad story.

“What’s worse is that there has been no transparency.” Transparency—I should get the dictionary out for this one. Transparency matters in government, in public service. “Only when Conservatives demanded answers last week in Parliament did the government or the bank provide any update on a massive project that was quietly cancelled back in July. We also still don’t know the details of the Fortis agreement or where the cost overruns were. That’s unacceptable for a taxpayer-funded bank.

“Conservatives will continue to call on this government to respect the only recommendation from the Standing Committee on Transport, Infrastructure and Communities—that this $35-billion boondoggle be abolished. It has failed to attract the promised private investment, it lacks transparency and it can’t get a project built.”

But where does this government go? This government is going down this road. Why? Why are you doing this? It’s really concerning.

There are a number of issues here that lead us to be very concerned. One is that the finance minister and the Premier are pitching this as a silver bullet for funding the province’s infrastructure needs. I know that this government, just like the Liberals, is very fond of these arm’s-length organizations. You try holding Metrolinx to account. We do know that this is going to be an arm’s-length organization. It’s going to take up to a year to create—as if we can wait for affordable housing for another year—and it’s going to have a board of directors anywhere between three and 11, so we expect to see that list and track these people back to various weddings and birthday parties. The strategy is cut and pasted from the Canadian Infrastructure Bank’s initial promise to leverage private funds many times over, but it is important for my colleagues to know that this never happened. It’s built on this cascade model in finance. The approach is: “To maximize the impact of scarce public resources, the cascade first seeks to mobilize commercial finance, enabled by upstream reforms where necessary....” However, this government, the PC government of Ontario, has chosen to step away from that model. There are public banks around the world that are quite successful, but they have a different structure than what is being proposed by this government.

Further, the government sees the OIB as a way to attract trusted Canadian institutional investors to help build essential infrastructure.

“Trust is indeed important,” says this article. “How are we to trust and hold accountable this new public institution with control over allocating $3 billion in public money?” I hope some of my colleagues on that side of the House are asking this kind of question.

These checks and balances that need to serve—that need to be put in place to serve the public, not foreign investors.

According to the website, the infrastructure bank’s affairs will be composed of at least three or at most 11 board members, who are going to be chosen by the Minister of Finance and will need to have significant financial and infrastructure-related project expertise.

“These policies need advancing with government and society, not through opaque nominations and appointments.” We could not agree more. We have seen the appointments process in this House. It’s like a who’s who of PC donors. It’s very problematic for trust.

So if you don’t have trust and you have a track record right now which is incredibly problematic, why in the world would you introduce a brand new little bauble of a bank? This shiny little thing over here is not necessary for this government to build infrastructure, to build SMRs, to build energy projects, to build affordable housing. Ontario has never really had a problem with financing of the projects. It certainly has had an issue with public-private partnerships and getting those jobs done on time. Just look at the Eglinton Crosstown. Are we at $1 billion per kilometre—

Interjections.

We’re going to move to the member from Sudbury for questions.