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.

Thank you very much to the member from St. Catharines.

It does speak to priorities.

I was very shocked when we brought forward our opposition day motion to the government to discuss and to plan, to work together, for a human resources health care strategy—because as I said, you can build a bed, you can build a hospital, you can build a long-term-care home, but without the people, it’s not open, and it certainly isn’t serving the people that we are elected to actually make their lives better.

Housekeeping bills are one thing, but for me, when I read Bill 46, especially on the Indigenous communities issue—not consulting Indigenous communities for Bill 23; having them write an open letter to the minister and to the Premier saying, “You have a duty to consult.” This is the pattern of this government—they put out a press release, but then they do something else entirely.

My recommendation is to go back to the Auditor General’s report, because her recommendations will help you. The question is, do you want to be helped? You seem to be very focused on helping some people—but not the people of this province, I’ll tell you that much.