Thank you to the member for Ottawa South for his comments. The member will know that the red tape bill includes a number of schedules that extend the term of a chair of a board of governors at five specific universities in Ontario. It extends that term from six years to eight years.

Given the Liberal government’s record, when they left office, of students paying the highest tuition fees in Ontario compared to the rest of all of Canada, and this government’s record of now the lowest per-student funding for both college and university in all of Canada, does the member think that increasing the term of the chair of a board of governors from six years to eight years is an appropriate response to the crisis in our post-secondary system?

It is a great pleasure to rise today to speak to Bill 149, An Act to amend various statutes with respect to employment and labour and other matters.

I regret that the labour critic for the official opposition, the member for Sudbury, is unable to be here, and that is because the government called this bill at—I think it was close to midnight on Thursday, which is when the member for Sudbury had the opportunity to begin his leadoff remarks on this legislation. He has done extensive consultation with stakeholders in labour, with unions, with worker advocates, to get their feedback on this bill. Unfortunately, he was unable to complete his one-hour remarks, which would have been, I think, very helpful for the government to be able to hear, because he has done the kind of extensive consultation that this government has repeatedly failed to do—if they really want to understand the issues that working people in this province are facing, and if they really want to bring forward legislation that would actually address the issues that workers are struggling with in this province.

Bill 149 amends four separate pieces of legislation. It amends the Digital Platform Workers’ Rights Act, 2022, which, interestingly, is not even in force yet. Once again, we see this government passing legislation—quite recently; that legislation was debated in this House, passed in this House, back in 2022. It’s not even in force, and yet the government is bringing forward amendments to its sloppy legislation that they had drafted initially, that already requires revisions. This bill also amends the Employment Standards Act—and I’ll have quite a bit more to say about the amendments to the Employment Standards Act. It amends the Fair Access to Regulated Professions and Compulsory Trades Act, 2006. And finally, it amends the Workplace Safety and Insurance Act.

I’m going to start with the final schedule, schedule 4, the amendments to the Workplace Safety and Insurance Act. This legislation finally provides the presumptive coverage for esophageal cancer in firefighters. We heard lots of boasting from this government about how they were going to be moving ahead with these changes in their last employment omnibus bill. They made that commitment. We fully support that commitment. Through the efforts of my colleague the member for Niagara Centre, we actually led that initiative to provide that presumptive coverage, and I want to thank and congratulate my colleague for his efforts, for his advocacy on behalf of Captain Craig Bowman, and for the private member’s bill that he brought forward, Bill 127, which had first reading in June 2023. The government could have moved forward with this change several months ago, with that private member’s bill; they could have moved forward with this change when they introduced their previous employment omnibus bill, but they didn’t. But here we are today, and we appreciate that change. It is a long-overdue change that is well past due in this province.

We also want to highlight that this presumptive coverage is not just important for firefighters who work in municipal fire services across this province, but it should be extended to include wildfire fire workers. That category of firefighters is excluded from the definition of firefighters that is covered by presumptive clauses under the WSIA.

That change is not included in this legislation, and I have to question why. We know that with the impact of climate change we are seeing severe weather events on a scale that we haven’t experienced before in this province. We all remember the smoke that was coming from the wildfires in Quebec and northern Ontario and the impact that was having on our air quality here in Ontario and well down into the United States. Wildfire fire workers have been combatting these consequences of climate change to an extent that we haven’t seen before, and yet they are excluded from this ability to access presumptive coverage under WSIA.

Not only did the government exclude wildfire fire workers from this legislation, but they have cut the number of fire crews that we have in this province when they reduced funding for wildfire management programs by 67%. A 67% reduction to funding for wildfire management programs as we are in the midst of—or in the summer, certainly—a wildfire crisis across the province. We are 50 fire crews short because of this government’s decision to cut that funding for wildfire management programs.

Otherwise, Speaker, the changes that are set out in the first three schedules of this bill will have some impact on workers in the province, but they are very much baby steps. They are the kind of incremental changes that workers don’t deserve. Workers deserve a government that is going to listen to the challenges that they are facing and make the kind of changes that would really have an impact on their lives.

I’m going to now go to schedule 1 of the bill, the Digital Platform Workers’ Rights Act, 2022. A new section is added that requires that a pay period as set out in the act not exceed the prescribed number of days. What does this section do, Speaker? What this does is it waters down the already flimsy minimum-wage protections of the Digital Platform Workers’ Rights Act by adding the clause “Unless the regulations provide otherwise” to section 9(2) of the act. That section of the current legislation sets out that employers must pay minimum wage for assignments. In other words, the minimum-wage provisions only apply when a gig worker—a digital platform worker, an Uber driver, a Skip the Dishes delivery person—the minimum wage only applies to when that worker is in the process of delivering. It does not apply to the time between assignments and to the time it takes to get to an assignment or to the next assignment. What that means is that these workers are effectively protected by the minimum wage provisions of this bill just an estimated 60% of the time that they are on the job.

Speaker, I think that you were a member in this House when I brought forward a private member’s bill called the Preventing Worker Misclassification Act, which was also legislation that would protect digital platform workers, the gig workers. We have seen an erosion of the quality of work in this province. We have seen an explosion of the gig economy, with too many workers forced to patchwork together gig jobs, contract jobs, jobs which, until the government introduced its bill, had no protections whatsoever in terms of labour.

This is at a time when we are seeing, internationally, recognition for gig workers to be recognized as the employees they are. We’re seeing decisions in Spain, the UK, New York City, other jurisdictions, where the courts have ruled that digital workers are employees and should be covered by all of the protections and benefits of the Employment Standards Act, and that’s what my bill would have done.

My bill addressed worker misclassification. It addressed the reality that too many gig workers are doing work that should be legitimately covered by the Employment Standards Act but are completely excluded. It created a new test for how you identify an employee under the Employment Standards Act, so that those gig workers would not be misclassified as independent contractors; those gig workers would be recognized as the employees that they are, and therefore entitled to minimum wage protections—fancy that, Speaker. They would be entitled to vacation pay. They would be entitled to scheduled breaks in the days that they work. They would be entitled to protections around hours worked.

And so that legislation that I introduced was debated in this chamber, and the government refused to support that direction. The government refused to acknowledge the rights that digital workers should have and that the courts, as I said, are recognizing in other jurisdictions. Instead, they went ahead with their own Digital Platform Workers’ Rights Act.

So let’s talk some more about digital platform workers. They spend, on average, as I said, about 40% of their work time waiting for deliveries or rides, and that is the 40% of their workday that is not going to be covered, now, by any of the protections of the government’s Digital Platform Workers’ Rights Act. It would also allow large international companies like Uber and Lyft to avoid paying workers, as I mentioned, for the time that they are not actually on assignment.

The amendments to this act do not protect platform worker wages from being further reduced below minimum wage, because when 40% of your workday is not covered by any minimum wage protections, you can imagine that, over the course of a workweek, a digital platform worker, when it’s all averaged out, will actually be earning much less than is required by Ontario’s minimum wage laws.

In the short time I have left—it’s surprising how quickly 20 minutes go—I want to talk about the schedule of the bill that the government claims is going to provide some pay transparency. Speaker, I don’t think you were elected at the time, but when the Liberal government, just prior to its ouster by the people of this province in 2018—just prior to that election, the Liberal government of the time introduced a Pay Transparency Act.

I have to commend and acknowledge the hard work and the efforts of the Equal Pay Coalition, and in particular, the two lawyers who have been driving forces behind the Equal Pay Coalition and driving forces behind advocacy to get the government to move forward with pay transparency legislation. Those two lawyers, that I’ve had the great privilege of working closely with, are Fay Faraday and Jan Borowy. They have been formidable champions of equal pay and pay equity and pay transparency.

Again, we have seen in other jurisdictions, other countries, that pay transparency is a critical tool to help close the gender wage gap in Ontario. It is a critical tool to ensure that women are no longer earning 75% of what a man earns.

Every year, Equal Pay Day is recognized in Ontario—not by this government, of course; they don’t want to draw any attention to the fact they have failed to do anything effective to help close that gender wage gap, but on this side of the House, we certainly highlight Equal Pay Day each year, which marks how much further into the next year a woman has to work in order to earn the same amount that her male counterpart would have earned in the previous year. And, Speaker, typically, that day falls somewhere at the end of March or early April, because that is the reality for women in this province—in particular, it is the reality for racialized women, women who are living with a disability, Indigenous women. Equal Pay Day for some women actually falls much closer into the middle of the year, or even the following autumn. That is how underpaid certain groups of women are in this province. So pay transparency is, as I said, a critical tool to help close the gender wage gap.

So what this bill does is it requires employers to post information about expected compensation levels for any position that they are hiring for. Does this address the goal of the previous legislation, the Pay Transparency Act, Speaker? Not in the slightest. This very modest, simple requirement will not go anywhere as far as we need to go, which was set out in the previous Pay Transparency Act.

In fact, Speaker, instead, we could have saved the government some time. Instead of working on a schedule—a change that’s included in the bill—the government could have enacted the Pay Transparency Act because that legislation was introduced, as I said, just prior to the 2018 election. It was debated in this House for second reading, went to committee, it was debated in this House for third reading—it was passed, Speaker. It got royal assent, Speaker. Has it been enacted, Speaker? No, it has not. This government pulled that legislation and has been sitting on that legislation while they claimed to be doing a consultation with employers about that bill.

Now, that would have been something that would have really made a difference for women workers in this province—had the government announced that they were going to actually enact the Pay Transparency Act. It’s the provisions in that Pay Transparency Act which—again, I want to credit Jan Borowy and her efforts for helping improve that legislation at committee and ensuring that those measures that were included in that bill would actually start to close that gender wage gap that has been so damaging for women in Ontario.

There’s so much I can say in response to that question and the kinds of protections that hospitality workers in this province deserve, but I certainly agree with the member that hospitality workers should not have to pay when there is a so-called dine-and-dash situation. That is already prohibited in the Employment Standards Act.

One of the ongoing challenges, of course, with the Employment Standards Act is that it requires complaints to be made, and that has always been a real barrier to ensuring that the protections of the act are available to all workers in this province, because too often employees don’t know their rights and are exploited by unscrupulous employers.

Yes, I totally agree; it is beyond insulting for the government to leave wildfire firefighters so poorly compensated and poorly supported and excluded from legislation like this. As a result, as the member points out, we are unable to retain those essential workers, who are going to be even more important as the impacts of climate change continue to be felt.

Certainly, I have heard a lot since 2019, in fact, about Bill 124, and that is the government’s infamous legislation that capped the wages of public sector workers. Of course, a big part of our public sector workforce is health care workers. The government did this, they implemented this legislation, just prior to a global pandemic. In a global pandemic, the last people you want to see leaving their professions because they are not compensated appropriately are health care workers. What we would have liked to have seen is the government drop its challenge of the court decision on Bill 124 that found that legislation unconstitutional and do something to increase the wages of health care workers.

I just referenced Bill 124 in a previous question. You know who else has been impacted by Bill 124? I talked about the impact on health care workers, who are leaving the profession in droves—

Interjection: Firefighters.

We are seeing, across the globe, a growing recognition of gig workers as employees, as workers who deserve to be covered by employment standards legislation so that they have access to minimum wage, so that they have vacation pay, so that they have severance, so that they have everything that workers in this—