They’re mad. They’re sad. They’re confused. They thought it was very un-Canadian to displace—some of the most productive farmers in Ontario are in Wilmot township. The farming sector contributes $47.8 billion to the economy of Ontario, and this government wants to pave over those 770 acres.

One of the farmers said, “Listen, I don’t even know what to say to you.” He goes, “I don’t even know if I should plant my seeds this year,” because the organization from the United States that came to do the dirty work, Canacre, said, “We’re going to offer you $29,000 an acre, and if you don’t sell to us, we’re going to take it.”

What does that sound like? Does that sound very democratic to you? I would say no. Are we getting any answers from the various levels of government? I would say no. Although, the Premier said he fully supports it, and they put the call out for these kinds of expropriation, mega industrial sites. You can’t eat an EV battery; I’m telling you right now. This is sort of the greenwashing that we’re seeing, what’s happening in Wilmot township.

And farmers, let’s be honest, vote for the Conservatives, traditionally. They have. But, boy, do you know what? When you break the trust with a farmer and that relationship is compromised and then you are part and parcel of the stealing of his or her land, they’re not going to vote for you anymore. And they have long memories, I’ll tell you this much. I know a farmer. He’s a dairy farmer. He’s our House leader. He’s got a long memory.

So, for some reason, now the Premier needs $6.9 million just to run his office? This is what Jay Goldberg says: “I think that we’re paying a lot more but we’re not necessarily getting more.” Well, isn’t that the truth?

“The increase—136% in five years—also eclipses what Wynne’s Premier’s office spent on staff.” And then they go into what the previous Liberals—and I do remember the outrage, because I was here and so was my colleague from Niagara and so was my colleague from London, is that if the previous Liberal Premier had done this, the Conservatives, who all sat here, would be furious. There are some people who would be—

Interjection.

Interjection.

And then also, this is a government that has given—almost everybody has parliamentary assistant status. A few people have got King’s Counsel status. These are good titles if you can get it.

Just for reference, we as MPPs, our salaries here have been frozen here for 14 years. But we come here every day and we work really hard. But for some reason, the Premier has found a nice little workaround on these salaries.

This is the final line: “At the same time, nearly every member of the Ontario Progressive Conservative caucus has been named as a cabinet minister or parliamentary assistant, topping up their MPP salaries by thousands....

“Goldberg said the ‘runaway spending’ is a sign that costs at Queen’s Park need to be reined in.” Well, I think this is something that we could totally agree with, across party lines. If the Premier wants to reduce his staffing in the Premier’s office, we fully support that. We will work hand in hand with you to help make that happen.

What we will not do is allow the government to say everything is great in education, when we see how many students are being removed from their educational experience, especially special-needs students; when we still have a broken transportation funding model. Kids should not be on buses for an hour and a half one way just to save a few bucks. So if the Premier wants to divert some of that $6.9 million to a breakfast program, we’re 100% in support of making that happen.

It does tell a story, and this is really the important part of having a budget and transparency. I am worried about transparency, I will just say, because a new bill was just dropped today that’s going to be looking at the FOI process. One of the only ways that we as legislators have been able to access information from this government has been through freedom-of-information requests. It takes a long time. We’ve really benefited, I think, from the Canadian Press, when they actually disclosed how many nurses are needed in Ontario and how many doctors are needed. The government wanted to prevent people from knowing that information. If you were on this side, you would be incensed by that, because these are numbers that should direct where funding goes, that should direct resources to ensure that we can stabilize the health care system, for instance. That’s where we are with that, Madam Speaker.

And even though we bring solutions, like the caregiver motion that my colleague from Niagara had brought forward—you don’t want more people going into the emergency room with acute health care needs. You want to make sure that people can stay in their home as long as possible. People need financial resources and support to do that, because the long-term-care system is 100% a mess in Ontario.

For me, whenever I talk about long-term care, I have to talk about Jim MacLeod and his wife, Joan. Jim just called me on Saturday morning, and, you know, your heart breaks—it really does. He said, “I’m really sorry, Catherine, to call you on a Saturday morning, but what’s happening? Why can’t they call Bill 21 at committee?” You’ve said that if it’s not a perfect bill, then let’s find a solution. Let’s find a compassionate solution. If we all agree that separating seniors who have been married for years in the last years of their lives—Joan and Jim MacLeod have been married for over 65 years, but they’ve been separated for the last five and a half. Jim is a tough guy. He comes from the insurance sector. He used to chase money. He’s used to the fights. He’s a strong guy. But let’s be honest: They’re running out of time.

In the last shuffle, the member from, I think, Mississauga has now been transferred over to that file. Listen, whenever you want to talk about it, whenever you want to try to fix it, we’ll come to social policy. The bill needs to be called, though, because spousal reunification is good for the health care system, first and foremost. If you want to make the economic argument, keeping spouses together, having them care for each other in long-term care, is good for both those people, but it’s also good for the entire system.

But also, we take this oath when we get elected. We say a prayer every morning. We talk about using our power wisely. We talk about putting the people who we’re elected to serve at the centre of that conversation.

We can fix this. We can fix and design a long-term-care system with care campuses, so that Jim doesn’t have to drive all the way to Hilltop, which takes about half an hour every day, to see his wife Joan. He should just be able to walk down the hallway, where she has different needs, because he’s more independent, because people don’t age at the same time. This is not new information.

But it does come down to priorities, I would say. And I personally will be reaching out to the new committee member from Mississauga Centre, MPP Kusendova, who now is on that committee. Maybe two women can get this done; I don’t know. But I am just urging the Minister of Long-Term Care to call the bill, to find a solution. If you want to rewrite it, call it a different name, I don’t care. I just want the government members on that side of the House to understand that this is an urgent issue because they are running out of time to be together. And it’s time.

From the Pink Floyd album Dogs, there is this quote that says, “You have to be trusted by the people that you lie to.” It is a very powerful quote for a song lyric, because I feel—and I don’t know if you feel this way—that people are starting to lose faith in this place.

Oh, the other reversal was the Hazel McCallion Act, where they were going to make Mississauga stand-alone, and now they’ve just sent the bill for efficiencies and I think it’s at about $6.9 million right now. You can’t even make this up. The story was very interesting, because this was all happening in the Premier’s Office, and the transition committee that is earning six figures—all of them—could not get a call back from the Premier’s Office. So I would say the $6.9-million budget you’ve got going on there, you’re not getting good value for; let’s be honest. So that was one of the other reversals.

But this line is very powerful, because I am genuinely concerned about our democracy in Ontario. Moving to make the freedom-of-information process less accessible is problematic. Think about all of the times we have had to go to court to get mandate letters or fight unconstitutional legislation like Bill 124. You didn’t even just lose one time in court on Bill 124, when it was deemed unconstitutional; you did it twice. You doubled down on an unconstitutional piece of legislation, which really—I think the impact of this Bill 124 is going to be felt in this province for a long time, because trust was compromised.

And there are some people who, I think, have become comfortably numb—also another Pink Floyd lyric—but we are not that. We’re coming here each and every day to propose some solutions, be they on housing, in the face of the epic failure on the housing file, I would have to say—I mean, even on housing, one of the first steps that should happen is that at least those people who are renters—give them some consistency. Give them some surety, if you will. But when we’re seeing these above-guideline rents just become the norm, then that destabilizes even the renters.

On health care: As we pointed out, the fact that the Minister of Health is on the record saying that there is no concern around the lack of doctors—I mean, is it intentionally starting a fire? I remember back in the 1990s, in 1995, when Snobelen said, “I want to create a crisis,” because, boy, when you create a crisis, you can get away with a lot of things, Madam Speaker. You don’t have to create the crisis, though, anymore, because the crisis is real. The crisis is successful years of underfunding and policy inconsistencies, which has destabilized both health care and education.

And then when I go back and I look at the advertising money that this province is spending, including—very good connector piece—with ACTRA today, where the government is employing non-unionized advertisers in the face of a two-year lockout for ACTRA. How can anybody in this very expensive Premier’s office think that this is a good idea? How can you defend that expenditure when you are intentionally undermining the very people that are a part of that creative economy, which is also very undervalued by this government?

Finally, I just want to say, on the post-secondary education file, I have two universities in my riding, the University of Waterloo and Wilfrid Laurier. I also have Conestoga College. That sector was looking for real leadership from budget 2024. They were pretty clear that there are no vast reserves, as has been suggested by the minister. This is what they said: “The budget is a death knell for the post-secondary institutions, and so many are at risk of going under, under this government’s watch.”

So if you step back and you look at how this government has made very specific and targeted funding announcements for specific communities and projects which benefit the very prominent people of the development sector, for instance—you are prioritizing that work in the face of the fact that we are seeing breakfast programs cancelled, for instance.

The mental health piece: When I met with the Associate Minister of Mental Health on the need for more alternative destination clinics so that people are not going to emergency rooms when they are in crisis—I hope that we can agree that a hospital room, a busy, chaotic hospital room, is not the best place to go when you are in crisis. Alternative destination clinics—your own minister supports them, but the money is not there.

So the way that you actually demonstrate that you understand these issues and that you actually care about these issues is that you have targeted resources allocated, and I would even say enveloped, in this budget for mental health.

I didn’t get a chance to talk at length about municipalities, but there was nothing in this budget to make them whole. Right now, we are seeing councils hire former staffers out of the Premier’s office so that they can gain access to the Premier’s office. This is today’s story, where people are making money by selling—opening the door to the Premier’s office, a little seat at the table.

Everybody in this province should have a seat in this House and access to their government representatives. They should not have to buy access, Madam Speaker. They should not have to, especially municipalities, because there’s a lot of rhetoric around how they are our partners and we’re working with them; meanwhile, you undermine their planning decisions at every single turn.

I think I will just leave you with one of the greatest quotes from Pink Floyd, which says, “Did you exchange a walk-on part in the war for a lead role in a cage?”

The silence that we hear from the government members on some of these truly, I would say, unethical funding decisions, around funding priorities around where the money is going, really tells the true story of what’s happening in that Premier’s office, even as the staffing allocation explodes.

We, on this side of the House, truly believe that the province of Ontario is worth fighting for. That is why we show up here every single day. Our goal is to hold the government to account, especially through this budget process, to make sure that you know that you are missing key areas to make the lives of Ontarians better in this province. And I have to say, it shouldn’t surprise you at all: There is no way that we will ever be supporting a budget that misses the mark so profoundly.

I am honoured to rise today to speak about a very important issue that is setting a dangerous precedent here in Ontario: the expropriation of prime farmland in Wilmot township.

Back in March, Wilmot farmers were told of the region’s plans to purchase 770 acres of their land. If the landowners refused to sell, they were told that their land would be expropriated.

Remember that Waterloo region’s official plan accommodated all anticipated growth in the region until 2051 without significant farmland loss.

This government’s current legislation makes it possible for what is happening in Wilmot to happen anywhere in Ontario, with no transparency and no community consultation.

The region is actually, right now, operating under an NDA. There are no answers, no information coming from the regional level of government.

Stewart Snyder, a landowner and farmer says, “Something’s not right. We’re not just being mistreated as farmers and landowners, but the whole community is being left in the dark about what’s going on.”

On Friday, the NDP leader and other NDP MPPs, including myself, held a town hall in Wilmot, and almost 500 people attended.

This is very clearly greenbelt 2.0. We the official opposition will get to the bottom of this, just like we did with the greenbelt, and we will continue to fight for farmers in Wilmot.

Thanks to the member from Guelph for coming to Wilmot township last week. We met with farmers who are being expropriated from their prime agricultural land, 770 acres. Developers have already gone to this land, back in January, and offered $58,000 an acre, based on rumours that it would be rezoned for industrial land.

We can’t study soil and the farming sector if the farmers aren’t there. So I ask the member, what do you make of the fact that regional politicians have signed NDAs? It’s silence on our democracy. This land is clearly being set for a large industrial project, and we have before us a piece of legislation which claims that we should be studying and thriving in the farming sector, and yet the Get It Done Act, schedule 1, fast-tracks expropriation and makes it more difficult for farmers to exist in Ontario.

It’s my pleasure to welcome farmers from Wilmot township here in the House today: Mark Reusser, Alfred Lowrick and Steve Bottoms. Welcome to your House.

My question is for the Premier.

Municipalities are reeling from the alarming passage of Bill 23 on Monday. The lack of consultation and the absence of respect and facts have resulted in a deeply flawed piece of legislation that will undermine housing affordability, increase homelessness, and compromise the integrity of the greenbelt ecosystem.

Last week, the member for Kitchener–Conestoga claimed that seven Waterloo region municipalities were “sitting on over $200 million ... of reserve funds from development charges that have already been collected.” Specifically, he went on to say that the township of Woolwich was sitting on $6.5 million of DC charges that they didn’t know about. In fact, all of the DC reserve funds are allocated and are in the municipal five-year economic forecast. You just have to learn how to read, I guess.

The drastic reduction in development charges will—

Interjections.

The drastic reduction—

Interjection.

Why is the government implying that these funds are not being used and that municipalities are negligent in their duties?

Woolwich Mayor Shantz set the record straight:

“Based on the pace of our growth ... we will actually require additional funding to be able to do all of the forecasted work. We are staying with the best practice approach that, as much as possible, growth should pay for itself.

“We do not want existing taxpayers to pay that heavy burden. That’s neither fair or appropriate.”

Mayor Crombie herself said that Mississauga will lose $885 million over 10 years in development charges because of Bill 23. She said that it’s equal to losing 20% of their capital budget.

Why is this government undermining municipalities and their ability to facilitate affordable housing?