In April, Premier Ford said, “We’re there to retrain the workers, find them new opportunities, new jobs,” but workers in Terrace Bay have still heard nothing.

Quoting from a letter received this week: “The government has forgotten the north and continues to give money to conglomerates with no accountability. Our families are being torn apart looking for work that doesn’t exist.”

Premier, we need you to answer two questions: Is a deal for the mill imminent? And if not, what training will you provide for those with family responsibilities who cannot leave home for weeks at a time to work?

Thank you to the member from Ottawa Centre for your remarks. I want to go to the beginning of what you were talking about. You were talking about very precarious workers, racialized workers, immigrant workers working in very unsafe conditions that could be prevented.

I want to talk about commercial truck drivers. There are many, many immigrant commercial truck drivers and they are dying on the job. They are dying because they are not receiving any training. I know this because I’ve met with them. They are putting up as much as $40,000 for training they never receive. They have very precarious immigration status, which is why they can be pressured. They’re like indentured servants, really. Wage theft is rampant.

I see that higher fines are in this bill but I also know that those fines are rarely applied. It’s also a complaint-based process, which puts the entire burden on the workers, who are already vulnerable. I think they’re begging for inspections. So I’m just wondering if you see some way that we could be helping those workers in revisions to this bill.

I want to thank the member from Sudbury for really pointing out the many, many ways that this government is actually working against workers, and certainly working against those who have permanent injuries, where we have seen people living in poverty on the one hand and not able to access benefits, and on the other hand we hear a government that brags about how much money they’re giving back to employers.

The question I wanted to ask about is really about misclassification and wage theft. I’m thinking about the trucking industry. We’re seeing this misclassification with Uber drivers and so on, but in the trucking industry, I’m aware of a great deal of wage theft that’s not being addressed. Also, this classification of drivers as “Driver Inc.”, which was supposed to be banned, is still very much taking place. Those workers have no benefits whatsoever if they get into an accident. They’re kind of high and dry.

Thank you. And I’d like to say, the biomass projects have nothing to do with helping the workers in Terrace Bay. There has been no communication with the workers in Terrace Bay whatsoever.

The owners of the mill, the Aditya Birla Group, received nearly $130 million from the province with an expectation that, when they purchased the mill, they were in for the long hail and the community could depend on the jobs. The town, the workers there and all the surrounding communities don’t have two years to wait until maybe another multinational thinks they can get a good deal on a mill that actually produces some of the best pulp in the world.

There has been no communication with the workers and almost no communication with the town leadership, so everybody is waiting to hear something.

So I want to know now, today, with workers who have travelled all the way here from Terrace Bay, what is the government doing, specifically, to bring back jobs for the workers at Terrace Bay, to bring that mill back to life?

Interjections.

I would like to welcome guests from Terrace Bay. They’ve come a long way to be here: the president of United Steelworkers Local 665, Stephen Downey; executive members Warren Sutherland, Michelle Richardson and David Mayry; and USW staff representative Cody Alexander.

Thank you so much for coming. Welcome to your House.

I would like to welcome Janice Folk-Dawson from the Ontario Federation of Labour; Francis Pineda and Jim Zeng from the Injured Workers Community Legal Clinic; Wayne Harris from the Ontario Network of Injured Workers; and from the Industrial Accident Victims’ Group of Ontario, Maryth Yachnin, David Arruda, Aleks Ivovic, Patrick Cowley, Caleb Goff, Jenny Tang, Mohammad Naqvi, Julie Wang, Mark Wang, Alicia Cunningham, Zonia Guerrero and San Hun; and, from United Steelworkers Local 1005, Ron Wells, Jim McColl and Tony McLaughlin. Thank you so much for being here. Welcome to your House.

Thank you for the question. We have about 45,000 people who don’t have access to primary care at this time. I know that the government has opened up some spaces for doctors, but it’s not enough. We really need to increase the spaces to train doctors. We also need to increase incentives to bring doctors to remote regions. I would like to see some of the work that’s being done to incentivize other health care workers to work in remote regions applied to doctors and see those spaces increased.

This question is to the Premier.

Young people are particularly vulnerable to permanent brain damage due to diesel fuel exposure. With young people beginning skilled trades training as early as grade 11, can the Premier explain to parents why the government has not reduced the diesel exposure limits to the level long recommended by health and safety experts?

Mine workers have been lobbying this for years. In fact, members of the United Steelworkers have stickers on their hard hats recommending it be much reduced from the level that the government has recently moved to. For me, particularly knowing how badly WSIB is serving the interests of injured workers, I can’t imagine how parents will feel.

My question is: Why has the ministry not moved the rate down to the recommended level?

It’s getting late. Thank you, Speaker.

My question is, what is there in the bill or in the government’s plans to protect young workers? We know the WSIB is not there for workers, and so I’m very worried about the lives of young workers. I’m hoping you can tell me how the government will be protecting them.

Deeming is an incredible thing because you can deem that somebody is able to do a job and you can deem that the job exists, but it doesn’t have to, nor does a worker have to be capable of doing it. I’ve used this example before: You deem that such and such a worker can work as a parking lot attendant in Thunder Bay. Okay? We don’t have parking lot attendants, but if the WSIB deems that you can be a parking lot attendant in Thunder Bay, they will deduct that amount—whatever amount they decided is the amount you would get paid—from your meagre whatever support you are getting.

It’s a fantasy. These are phantom jobs. There are many, many examples of this. It’s part of the dishonesty that has been built into the system.

Was there anything else in that question that I missed?

If they can’t take a day off, if they can’t take a few days off if they’re sick, then they’re going to work and they’re making other people sick. They’re working under duress—

Oh, yes, you have to start on Ontario Works.

And I can also tell you that if you talk to people who are homeless, find out how many of those homeless people had workplace injuries and were not able to get any support to go on. They’re homeless, and that’s what we do to people.

So I’m extremely worried about what is going to happen to those young workers who are going to enter the skilled trades with so much enthusiasm and life force and energy, and we know that some of those workers will experience serious injuries—statistically, we know that—and we know that they are going to be thrown under the bus, because that’s what happens to all other workers in this province.

There is also another piece that we don’t talk about here very much, and that is the fact that there are these incentives for employers to hide the fact that an accident has taken place. They bribe the other employees with fancy leather jackets, or whatever it is, so that they don’t report the accident. That means that the injured worker, again, is left on their own, his or her own, with no support and no ability to verify what has actually happened to them. It’s become a very dirty business. This government sent employers—what was it?—over $2 billion returned to employers while denying workers the money that they have paid, that they are legally entitled to. They are entitled to that support, but it was given back to employers, and I can tell you workers are so angry about that, so hurt, and the hurt is real because it affects their—

I would like to point out again that the Meredith Principles from over a hundred years ago “rest on the historic compromise in which employers fund the compensation system and share the liability”—

Interjection.

Interjection.

Interjection.

“Employers would be protected from lawsuits by injured workers and be able to calculate payments as a cost of doing business.

“Injured workers would receive prompt benefits for as long as the disability lasted in a non-adversarial system.”

Isn’t that amazing? It’s so far from what is happening now. I implore the government to look seriously at turning WSIB back to what it was intended to do.

I see this bill as tinkering around the edges but really leaving workers extremely vulnerable in many, many respects. First of all, Bill 124—we know that it is repressing wages, that it is harming workers, that it has resulted in the crisis in our health care system. I can tell you, for example, about Steve, who works at the Thunder Bay regional hospital. His coordinator received a 6% raise on his $106,000 pay. Steve, who’s an electrician, takes home $51,000 and, of course, his wage has been capped at 1% for the last five years.

At this point, there are only two electricians left because they’ve all left for better pay and working conditions outside the public service. When he started work, 15 people in trades were working in the hospital: electrical, painters, building operators and maintenance. These days, at most, there will be five permanent employees and they are vastly outnumbered by private contractors.

There are 18 new beds added to the hospital—great, new beds, but no people to look after the people in the beds—which adds to the workload. Contractor labourers are earning $20 more an hour than Steve as a permanent skilled trades employee.

Now, it seems to be very clear that the position this government has taken on workers, governed by Bill 124, is a deliberate attempt to break the health care system, to break education, in order to privatize. I see this bill doing nothing to help those workers to remediate those situations.

There are other workers also affected by this. For example, corrections. Well, things are not good for workers in corrections. It’s interesting to me, though, because the majority of workers are in female-dominated professions and they’re not being well treated and they’re not being respected. But there are also male workers who are not being respected, including the electricians like Steve. People in corrections, well, they’ve been experiencing wage repression for five years—no right to bargain collectively.

And then there are the conservation officers. Conservation officers protect us and they protect our wilderness. It’s interesting to me because the conservation officers will be the first people to discover whether glyphosate, for example, is being sprayed illegally in our forests. But the conservation officers have actually been misclassified for many years, so not only are they suffering under Bill 124, they have a lower classification, and the skills and responsibilities that they have are not acknowledged.

Now, I worry a great deal—you know, I find it interesting; I’m excited. I was at the Fleming College display yesterday and I thought, “Wow, I’d love to go back to school. This looks really interesting. Some very interesting things are going on.” But I really worry very deeply about young people who may be in grade 10 or 11 being moved quickly into trades when young people on their first jobs are the most likely to experience a serious injury. I know this has happened in my own family. My niece’s partner and his father went to their very first job roofing. They were electrocuted; her partner died. They had a young baby. That’s changed her life forever.

When people are young, they think that they’re invincible. They haven’t got a concept of their own mortality, so that worries me. I truly hope that health and safety will be front of mind for everyone training those young workers, but what I also know is that WSIB has changed enormously from when it was first created 100 ago—by the way, it was a Conservative member who created that, William Meredith—and it does not do what it was intended to do.

Let me give you some stories—also young people. Eugene was a young worker: fit, on top of the world. He had a serious accident in forestry. He’s been in pain ever since, so that’s another 30 or 40 years that he’s been suffering in pain, and he’s been fighting the WSIB ever since.

Then there’s Janet who had something fall on her at work and then was later assaulted at work. Well, her back is so sore she hasn’t been able to engage in anything with her own family for many, many years. WSIB, where are they? She’s still fighting for compensation.

Did you know that WSIB shortchanged all workers who are receiving some level of compensation by cutting their cost-of-living allowance in half? Now they have to go to court to fight the WSIB to get what they are legally entitled to. It’s not fair. They’re not doing what they need to be doing.

Then there’s Jim who worked at the Weyerhaeuser mill in Dryden. This was years ago. Many of those workers were poisoned because the owners of the mill made a decision to not install a particular smokestack cleaner thing—I couldn’t tell you exactly what it is. But what I do know is many, many of those workers were poisoned, and the outcome has been neurological problems as well as breathing problems.

Now, that was in 2002—between 2002 and 2004. We are now in 2023. The WSIB still refuses to recognize these workplace injuries that have changed their lives utterly. The strategy that I see is that they wait and wait and wait until most of the workers have died off, and then they don’t have to pay out so much. That’s exactly what happened with the people who used McIntyre Powder. We had a very important memorial acknowledgement and apology to those workers and their families, and it was the same story there: Many, many of those people had already died by the time that apology came.

I fear that it’s going to be the same story, because I know there are clusters of industrial disease all over the province that are being denied right now. And while they are denied, workers have no income. What do they do? They apply for ODSP. Well, we know how much ODSP is: 1,200 bucks, what is it, a month? It’s around that, yes. We know it’s not enough to live on.

Imagine that you’ve been a full-time skilled worker, you’ve got good pay, you have a mortgage, you felt secure enough to have a family, and then you’re poisoned by your work. You can’t work anymore. Okay, there’s no money for you. WSIB is going to fight you year after year after year, and you’re going to have to apply for ODSP. Okay, now you’ve got $1,200 a month or so.

I’m pleased to see that there will be fines there for people who take away people’s passports and so on, but it does worry me, about enforcement. I also worry that perhaps people from the other side haven’t actually visited many of these places where foreign workers are employed. The living situations are often very crowded, unsanitary, and we know that COVID broke out in those places and that workers died, and yet OHIP is being denied to those workers. They also pay into WSIB, and they’re not eligible to collect.

What I would like to know is, what will be there in terms of health care for these workers from this government?

Thank you for your presentation. I want to ask about—I’m very glad to see that some cancers are now being recognized as affecting firefighters. That’s terrific; it’s an important change. But I worry very much about the workers I know—I’ve been involved with the Thunder Bay injured workers support group for many years. There are workers who worked at the mill in Dryden. For many, many years, they’ve been waiting to have the neurological damage and lung damage recognized, but WSIB is still refusing to do that.

I’m wondering if you anticipate changing the direction of WSIB so that it’s really there for workers when they need it.

In the Thunder Bay regional hospital, because of Bill 124, the wages of people who sterilize medical equipment have fallen so far below inflation that these workers have to take on additional part-time jobs just to survive. In their words, “We sure went from heroes to zeros in a hurry.”

Will the government ensure that these workers earn a wage that reflects their important contributions to our public health care?

We have a profound staffing shortage in health care, and we know that for-profit health corporations will poach those health care workers from the public system. We also know that large corporate interests will set up shop where they can make the most money, where there is a critical mass of people, like in Toronto, London, or perhaps Ottawa.

We already have a drastic shortage of health care workers in northwestern Ontario, and I’m hearing from these workers daily about how burnt out they are from overwork and that their wages are not enough to keep up with the cost of living. I really wonder where the members opposite think we will be finding nurses and health care workers for remote regions. Yes, you’re offering some scholarships; that’s great. That will help for a while. But basically those nurses are going to be drawn to the easier places in southern Ontario where they have an easier workload. They are not going to be staying in remote communities.

So my question is, where do you think those health care workers are going to come from after they’ve been poached from the public system?

To the member from Guelph, thank you for your comments.

I’ve heard a lot of concern about the mental health of students, but I’m wondering if the member from Guelph would like to speak to the mental health of the workers. I wonder about what their mental health will be like when they have their human rights overridden, when they have their charter rights overridden, when they are taking second and third jobs to survive, when they are accessing food banks, when they don’t have the money to look after their own children. I wonder what kind of mental health we can expect from them when they are working with the most vulnerable of our students.

While in Thunder Bay this weekend, I learned that our hospital is already overflowing with COVID and flu cases and that RSV, the virus that threatens young children, is spreading rapidly. This is concerning.

Between the deliberate underfunding of health care and the calculated imposition of Bill 124, our hospitals and clinics are losing staff in droves and, as a result, we are losing the experience of those most qualified to mentor the next generation of health care workers. The health care crisis will continue until the Ford government decides to value those already working in the system.

Sadly, today, we are again seeing this government’s callous disregard for workers. For months, our lowest-paid education workers have been trying to negotiate a living wage, and now, rather than negotiating in good faith, the Ford government is set to crush education workers by again taking away their bargaining rights and imposing an unfair settlement.

To health care workers, education workers and all workers keeping our province operating: Thank you for your care, compassion and dogged persistence. We see you, we appreciate you and we stand with you.

Thank you to the member from Mississauga–Malton. I am also very happy to be hearing about skilled-trades opportunities for young people, and for international people interested in becoming permanent residents.

I do worry about worker health and safety, however. We know that workers keep dying at Fiera Foods, we know that young truck drivers are dying on the highways—many of these come here as temporary foreign workers—and we also know that WSIB is not there when workers receive a permanent injury. So what I’m wondering is, what is in the plans? What will this government do to protect the health and well-being—in other words, the safety—of workers, whether Canadian-born or here hoping to become permanent residents, when businesses are warned of inspections before they take place?