The question is to the Premier. Speaker, last week the Premier said that the LCBO would distribute alcohol, but it’s the more than 7,000 Beer Store workers that distribute beer in the province. These workers are in the middle of deciding whether or not to accept the latest collective agreement, and they’re voting with the understanding from the Conservative government that beer will continue to be distributed by UFCW members. Before they vote, these workers should know if there’s something the Premier isn’t saying.

My question, Speaker: Will the Premier commit today to include these workers in any future discussion on alcohol distribution and sales in the province?

Thank you to my colleague for his debate. One of the things he said near the end was that every dollar spent comes out of the pockets of hard-working taxpayers, and it’s something I’ve been thinking about recently because—I’m sure we’re all hearing this in our communities, about the money that was spent on Super Bowl ads or, if you’re listening to podcasts, the money that’s spent on podcasting ads talking about the amazing work that is being done or, more recently, the $2.2 million that was spent on a Metrolinx ad basically really disdainfully talking down to people riding the TTC about how long it has taken, more than a decade, for some of the projects to be finished. I don’t think that’s an effective use of our taxpayer dollars. It’s not specific to this bill, but it was just something I thought of recently.

The money that we’re spending—I don’t know what it costs to get a Super Bowl ad, but I’m sure it’s millions of dollars. A billion dollars? I’m not sure what it is for a Super Bowl ad. But I do know it’s one of the most expensive ad spaces you can buy.

I don’t know what it costs to be in podcasts—you’ve got to compete with the mattress factories and everything else. Every single podcast has one or two of these ads, as well. That Metrolinx ad I do know, because I read the article yesterday—$2.2 million.

If we could have taken that money, those millions of dollars, and put it into actually getting work done, put it into investing in people, put it into getting Metrolinx finished, put it into retaining our nurses, put it toward—instead of having Bill 124; not having Bill 124 and allocating that money so that nurses, for example, as public sector workers, wouldn’t be exiting the province and going to other provinces where they’re treated fairly and treated respectfully.

Yesterday, when this was first announced—normally, when we table a bill, and you’d know this, Speaker, you’ll read the name, there’s a bit of formality, and the Speaker will say, “Would you like to explain the bill?” The member said, “It’s pretty self-explanatory,” and I thought, “Not really.” The bill is titled An Act to authorize the expenditure of certain amounts for the fiscal year ending March 31, 2024—point being, it’s not hard to tell what it’s about, but it’s not really, really straightforward.

When I looked at the bill, this number caught my eye: $6,079,277,000. The full quote says, “For the period from April 1, 2023, to March 31, 2024, amounts not exceeding a total of” over $6 billion “may be paid out of the Consolidated Revenue Fund or recognized as non-cash investments to be applied to the investments of the public service....” The reason that caught my eye, that six-billion-plus dollars, is because that’s what we know Bill 124 is costing this province to date.

Bill 124 was a bill put forward that was unconstitutional. It said that, for anyone in the public sector, you could not bargain your wages more than 1%, and it would stay in place for three years. In debate, we said it was unconstitutional. As labour critic, I said, “This is unconstitutional, and you’re going to lose this in court.” In fact, they did lose it in court. The Conservative government decided they would appeal it, and I said, “You’re going to lose the appeal,” because what the Chief Justice had ruled in it—I don’t read a lot of legal text, but I do read a lot of arbitration rulings; it was a pretty embarrassing outcome for the Conservative government. Everyone they put up as a witness contradicted the reasons for having the bill. It was probably a very frustrating day.

Interjection.

So what we know is that when you do something that’s unconstitutional, it basically means it’s illegal. We know from the Liberals that when you do this it’s going to cost you a fortune—not you, because, as the member said earlier, every dollar spent comes out of the pockets of hard-working taxpayers. So you’re writing cheques with taxpayers’ dollars. You’re writing cheques to fight court battles that you’re going to lose because the Liberals proved you’re going to lose. The Liberals did the same thing and wrote cheques with taxpayers’ money to fight these court challenges, and then the penalties and the payouts afterwards for the Liberal Party were hundreds of millions of dollars. But in this case, $6 billion plus and counting—$6 billion plus.

I want to be clear about this. This isn’t a surcharge. This isn’t a penalty. This isn’t like when you watch Matlock or something and there’s victim fees and stuff. What you did—the Conservative government did—is basically equal to wage theft. You took money out of people’s pockets that they deserved, they fairly could have got the money for, and they never got the interest on.

I’m allowed to say you broke the law. It was unconstitutional, so it was a violation of law. It was ruled that way.

It was wage theft. For the last six years as the labour critic, I have been wondering, why isn’t the Conservative government, if they care so much for workers, going after the $10 million they know that unscrupulous employers have stolen from workers—actual wage theft that’s been reported, proven? They’ve been found guilty, but the Conservative government has refused to collect it. I can’t wrap my head around it, because it seems like an easy win. I would like to think that some of these businesses, if they’re unscrupulous and not taking care of their employees, perhaps they didn’t survive, so you couldn’t get some of that money. But why not go after even a dime of that money?

It hit me, when I saw this announcement about the $6 billion of wage theft, that the Conservative government is the biggest wage-theft employer in the entire province—$6 billion at this point. It could be more than $13 billion, according to the Financial Accountability Officer. It’s wage theft. You took money out of workers’ pockets.

And the Premier—the gall the Premier had is that, “I had to do this to save jobs—to save jobs.” That’s a ridiculous statement. Number one, we have lost more nursing jobs than probably any other time of our lifetimes—nurses walking out the door.

Well, the member opposite said no. You probably could conclude the time when Mike Harris laid off a whole bunch of nurses, but I’m talking about nurses just exiting, nurses who don’t want to be here anymore.

I went to a graduation ceremony at Laurentian University. I met a wonderful young woman who was studying nursing. I was on the stage, got to shake her hand and everything, as many of us get invited to. I saw her at the reception afterwards. I said, “Congratulations. We really need nurses.” And she said, “I’m never working in this field. I had my placements. It is a terrible working condition. Nursing today is not like it was when I started the course. I’ll never work in this field ever. I just paid my tuition, so I thought I should graduate my final year.” That’s the reality for people. The reason the Conservative government counts the number of people signing up to be nurses is because they don’t want to pay attention to the number who are exiting, who are taking their pensions early, who are graduating and saying, “No, not for me, man.”

We have to address this. I’m here to help you. It sounds like I’m insulting you, but I’m here to help you, because this is a crisis that is affecting all of us. We cannot have a health care system where people don’t want to be there and working. I don’t want to work in health care. That’s a specialized job where you care about people and you take care of people in vulnerable moments. It’s critical. I’ve been in the hospital. I had vertigo a couple of years ago and had no idea what was wrong with me. I just felt nauseous. I was concerned about all kinds of stuff. The people who work in health care—amazing, amazing. When you’re at your most vulnerable, that’s who you put your faith in.

But with Bill 124, for 53 months, we treated these workers—not just in health care but all public sector—like dirt. I’m going to take that back. Not “we”—the Conservative government chose to treat them like dirt. You’ve got to wear that. And there was a pandemic and in the worst conditions of time, you treated them terribly.

The outcome of this: When Bill 124 was ruled unconstitutional, I started getting phone calls from hospitals, from school boards, asking, “Is there going to be additional funding? Because now we have these payouts.” All these unions that have these clauses allowing them to renegotiate—when they renegotiate what’s happening is, when they go to arbitration, the arbitrator says, “Yes. You were entitled to this. You should have got this.” They’re getting these payouts, and it creates this additional crunch on hospitals that are already underfunded. They’re feeling this crunch and saying, “Now we’ve got this giant price tag, courtesy of the Conservative government, but there is no extra funding to date or announcements or promise of funding to date from the Conservative government.” So I look forward on Tuesday in the budget for the relief that the school boards, the schools, the hospitals and other organizations like that are desperately looking for when it comes to that sort of money.

The other thing, when I was thinking about cost of living and expenses, was the minimum wage, because Bill 124 was one of the first things the Conservative government did, but freezing minimum wage was probably the first thing. There was an expectation that minimum wage was going to climb, but before it could, the Conservative government passed a law to freeze it at $14 an hour, and they froze it for two years at $14 an hour.

Deena Ladd said, “What he did”—talking about the Premier—“was basically take away a dollar increase, then take away the adjustments for two years, and then start to adjust it again in 2021.” So 2018, nothing; 2019 nothing; 2020, nothing; 2021, it started to readjust. So, if you cost that out, each minimum wage worker would since have earned between $3,000 and $6,000 more between 2018 and 2021.

I’m starting to think that the reason they don’t want to go after the wage theft is because they are helping people with wage theft. Between $3,000 and $6,000 from minimum wage workers was stolen from their pockets that they were entitled to.

The authors of the estimate write, “Many minimum wage workers put their own health at risk to keep working on the front lines of our economy throughout the pandemic. The three-year delay in raising the minimum wage to $15 cost them dearly.” That’s a sad thing.

Minimum wage used to be a whole different thing. Whenever I hear minimum wage, I always think of Chris Rock saying minimum wage means if they could pay you less, they would. And do you know what? The Conservative government is allowing multi-billion-dollar companies to pay workers less. They’re finding a loophole in the digital worker rights protections act, which is a fantastically fictional name because it doesn’t offer any protections for these workers. What it does is protect these large gig companies—Uber, the food delivery companies, the driver services—to pay workers less than minimum wage.

What it does is it says that you have to pay at least minimum wage, but only for the amount of time you’re actually doing work, only while you’re doing work. So if you work it out per hour, while the person is working, they make less than seven bucks. It’s like $6.36, but let’s just say less than seven bucks—way below minimum wage. Then you take out the expenses, and it’s less than three bucks.

You think, if you have insurance and a car, you’re paying for your brakes, you’re paying for your gas, you’re paying for tires over time, and you’re making less than seven bucks an hour—and so instead of rushing to the aid of these workers to ensure that, “Hey, the Employment Standards Act says, ‘You have to pay minimum wage. It’s here; you’re only way down here. PS, you’re a multi-billion-dollar company. You’re not a struggling mom-and-pop. You’ve got billions of dollars, so you can at least pay minimum wage.’” Instead of doing that, what they said is, “No, no, we’ll write legislation. Did someone say billionaires? We’re running over. We’re right there for you because we’re going to write legislation to ensure that you can continue to pay these workers less than minimum wage.”

And so they started off the last session freezing minimum wage so that the lowest-paid workers wouldn’t get a raise, could barely make ends meet. They continued in this session by saying, “Is there a way we can pay workers even less? Oh, yes. Yes, there is a Conservative way to do that, absolutely. Let me tell you how I can help you out, Mr. Billionaire-Company-Owner and your shareholders.” Because there is nothing more important for the Conservative government than jumping for wealthy and well-connected friends over the top of just regular working-class people.

And the shortage of this—I was thinking—I was talking to my son, actually, who is going to graduate this year. When I was going to school, I had my own apartment. I had a job that paid just slightly over minimum wage, but I only worked on weekends. Any other day I worked was for other expenses, if I wanted to get new clothes or treat myself or something, but my core expenses—food, rent, hydro and all that—was by working on the weekend.

And when I wanted to find an apartment, it was based on where I wanted to live. Do I want to be near the beach—because Sudbury is fortunate to have a couple of beaches that are right downtown—or in the core city? Do I want to be near my school? Do I want to be downtown where the nightlife is? And all of that was a range of about 50 bucks. All of that was affordable. All of those places were places that you would bring your parents to and not feel embarrassed of the conditions.

Do you know what I see lately? I see people renting out their garages as if it’s an apartment, and for a rent that seems unbelievably high. A garage where you use the local restaurant’s bathroom is being rented as an apartment. That’s shameful. When you look at rents in Toronto where people are making minimum wage, because many people here represent downtown Toronto, I don’t know how you’d make ends meet. And in even my riding, looking for an apartment, it starts at about a grand. You’re not going to be able to afford that with minimum wage—not even close.

Here’s the reality of what’s going on with the investments, and I listened to the last hour about the investments and how great this is for the economy, but I have to tell you, I live in a reality in Ontario that seems different than the Conservative government’s. I live in a reality where more and more people come to me and tell me it has never been this bad. Affluent people tell me this, people struggling to make ends meet. Middle-class people tell me this. Definitely not-for-profit industries tell me this on a regular basis. They have never seen it this bad, this critical, this need for help.

The stats from Feed Ontario reflect this. This is from Feed Ontario, “Ontario’s food banks were visited more than 4,353,000 times throughout the year”—this is their last stat—“an increase of 42% over the last three years.” This is the startling one that hits me, especially as labour critic: There has been “a 47% increase in people with employment accessing food banks since 2018.” I think the stat is up to 2022, but every year, that number increases—47% increase in people working, going to food banks.

I shared stories about Charity, back when Bill 28 was attacking education workers, and Charity allowed me to share her story so many times. I really thank her, because there is a position where you wouldn’t want people to know this about you when you are working full-time at a government job, working for the province, being paid by the province and making so little money that you go to the food bank with your children. You don’t even have enough money to leave your children with somebody else to go to the food bank so they don’t have to know. You have to bring your kids with you. You have to tell them, “As a mom, I work full-time, but I don’t make enough from the government of Ontario, my employer, to make ends meet. I have to go to the food bank to feed you.” That’s disgraceful. And this trend keeps getting worse.

This isn’t me. I know sometimes people think in opposition we just say stuff, because we want to hurt your feelings. This is Feed Ontario’s stats. I’m just amplifying it so you’re aware of it. You can’t look the other way. This data is not working for you. If more and more people every year are using food banks, well: (1) it’s the wrong direction; but (2) fewer and fewer people can afford to donate to food banks. I think if we’re going to do an oath or something we want to do substantially, that if you’re sitting on the government’s side, then you don’t get to stand outside of food banks and do photo ops, because they’re an earmark of the failure of the government. I don’t care if the government is Liberal or Conservative, Green Party or NDP, that you no longer get to stand around and brag about how much money was collected under your watch as government, when you can do something about it.

“The proportion of food bank clients with full-time employment doubled in the past year to 33% in 2022.” The following year up to 47%. This doesn’t make sense. This isn’t a success story.

Let me go on to other issues. Ontario Works—this also comes from Daily Bread Food Bank. A lot of people on Ontario Works, who are receiving it, are going to food banks. So Ontario Works is the money you would get if you can’t find employment or are unable to work—it used to be called welfare in the old days. It is below the poverty line. It is $733 a month. That’s the same amount it was in 2018. Since the Conservative government was elected, they didn’t increase Ontario Works at all. As inflation goes up every year, typically 2% to 3%—last year, I think it was between 6% and 7%—this has never gone up. You can’t find housing for $733 a month.

The slap in the face is there’s a portion of that that they say is for housing. I can’t remember off the top of my head what it is. But imagine them saying—let’s say 400 bucks is housing—“Don’t spend anything else because that’s for housing.” That’s a joke. You can’t get housing for $733. Basically, what you’ve done to these people is you’ve said, “Look, we know the poverty line is up here. We’re going to hold your head under the water here.”

They did the same thing for people who are disabled on ODSP, Ontario disability support. “Despite inflation having risen by 16.68%”—this is from Daily Bread—“a single individual on disability is receiving $1,229 per month to survive on,” which is, “$900 below the poverty line.” So you’re living with a disability; somehow, to make ends meet, you’ve got to come up with $900 a month.

For many of these people, it is their parents, typically seniors, who are helping to compensate for this. Many of these seniors I end up talking with are worried that they’re coming to the end of their lives and don’t know what’s going to happen to their children and are terrified for what’s going to happen to their children. I’m talking about adult children.

This is a broken system. Feed Ontario points out that, “Two out of three people who access food banks are social assistance recipients”—32.5% from ODSP, 26% from OW—“as their primary source of income.” We have a broken system that we all know is broken. No one is naive here. None of my colleagues from the other parties are naive. We just, as New Democrats, say it as loud as we can because we care about people who are starving to death. We care about people who can’t pay their bills. We think it’s important.

I know very often the Conservative government will say things like, “The best solution is a job.” It’s hard to get a job if you cannot find food, if you can’t buy clothing to go for job interviews, if you cannot get on your feet. There’s that old expression: “It’s hard to pull yourself up by your bootstraps if you don’t own boots.” It’s hard to get a job if you don’t have clean clothes or new clothes or if you can’t afford to take the bus somewhere to apply for a job.

Poverty creates horrible conditions. Poverty is one of those systems that creates the social determinants of health, that creates people with lower immune systems who are more sick and a larger burden on our health care system. Solving poverty would save us money in so many other ways, but we’re not interested in solving poverty. What we are interested—not us. What the Conservative government is interested in is investing in $2.2-million ads for Metrolinx saying that the people of Toronto who are complaining that the project has taken more than 12 years to get finished are kind of whiny and don’t really understand what’s going really on.

If you haven’t seen this ad, you can’t find it because Metrolinx has pulled it, so you’ve got to go and look up a CBC article. But you’ve got to watch this ad. It is unbelievable. I can only imagine Phil Verster wrote this ad while riding in his limousine, and this is how he imagines the people who ride the TTC look like and speak like. It is absolutely insulting and out of touch, and I think it’s a reflection of how the Conservative government feels about the working-class people of Ontario.

Speaking of ODSP, WSIB is somewhere we can invest money into. I talked the other day—yesterday, in fact—about how just raising it 5%, restoring that original 5% cut that was taken, I think, by Mike Harris back in the old days—it was promised prior to the election. Like a lot of election promises, it has kind of fallen apart because it has been almost two years since the last election. But people who are on WSIB are desperate for this 5% increase. If you restored that, it would make all the difference in the world.

I was surprised when I heard that. I thought they would be asking for a 10% or 20% increase. But they said, “Just restore the 5%.” Obviously, they would like anything, but that 5% would make a world of difference.

The thing with the WSIB is, if you’re never hurt, you think it works. If you work with people who are on WSIB, you realize how terrible it is, how broken it is. Recent government studies show that only around 170 of the approximately 3,000 annual fatal occupational cancer cases in Ontario are compensated. Imagine that: 3,000 people die from occupational cancers; about 170 of them are compensated, and I’m going to guess that those 170 are probably unionized workers who have full-time workers’ compensation officers—WSIB officers, I guess, now they would be called—and they have to fight.

I come out of a union, Local 6500. The Steelworkers have three full-time compensation officers, and I have met—because I was in health and safety, and our office that we would meet in regularly was across the hall from theirs. I have met so many retirees or people who had to retire early or people who have gone off on sick because of occupational disease. I have met so many of them who are desperate—desperate that they will hear that they had a reward before they die, so they know that their life meant something, so they know that their spouse and their kids will have something when they leave, their lives stolen from them. Speaker, 170 of the 3,000 every year get that phone call. They get into financial ruin when they’re on WSIB, and most of them end up on ODSP.

We have a limited amount of time because my colleague from Nickel Belt is going to be speaking soon.

I want to talk about supervised consumption sites.

Friday was a dark day in Sudbury. Friday, Heidi from Réseau Access—which was taking care of our supervised consumption site, The Spot—had to go and meet with her employees at The Spot. There is only one full-time employee left. She gave them their notice that they would have to close their doors. The supervised consumption site in Sudbury has been waiting just over three years for a response from the Conservative government. That cheque has never showed up. The city of Sudbury, recognizing the need, recognizing the costs to our EMS services, the cost to the people, the financial and also the emotional costs for people when their family members are dying and suffering from opioid overdose, invested for an entire year, waiting for the Premier to get off his wallet and cut a cheque for a provincial responsibility for health care—a cheque that never showed up. They saved lives for over a year. At Christmas, their funding ran out. People tried to stick around, but you’re not going to stick around very long in health care, so there’s only one employee left. The rest of the people are shuffling around from other organizations in Réseau to keep it going. On Friday, they heard it was closing.

The Conservative government arbitrarily said that 21 supervised consumption sites would be funded in the province. They took everybody who had their applications and said, “Jump through the hoops again and rewrite your applications.” Sudbury jumped through those hoops and rewrote them. To date, out of those 21, only 17 have been opened; the only one in northern Ontario is in Thunder Bay.

I want you to picture northern Ontario—the size of France. Sudbury would be at one corner, at the south end of France, and Thunder Bay would be up in the northwest corner. It would take you between 12 and 14 hours to drive there. It’s probably not going to work out too well for a supervised consumption site. It’s probably not going to be effective there—and it’s probably why Sudbury is the leader by proportion of the number of people who die by opioid overdose.

I called for help for this many, many times. I asked for a private member’s motion to declare a medical emergency. The Conservative government never answered those calls. The Conservative government voted against my motion.

We’re floating, in Ontario, around 20,000 deaths from opioid overdose. The Premier has his fingers in his ears—doesn’t care about those people; doesn’t care about their families; doesn’t care about their friends; doesn’t care about the deaths. They’re having a magical, wraparound service—that 20,000 people continue to die, and many more will continue to die.

I don’t know what this bill is, but it’s nothing to brag about. I only had a little bit of time to talk about the things that were wrong with it—but there was a lot wrong in Sudbury. And I’ll echo what I’ve been hearing time and time again from people across the province: It has never been this bad.

Speaker, I want to begin by thanking my colleague the MPP for Humber River–Black Creek, as everyone else has, for bringing forth this bill to recognize Orthodox Christian Week in Ontario. This bill serves to recognize the meaningful contributions that the Orthodox Church and Orthodox Christians have made to the province of Ontario, and it’s wonderful to look across and see so many members of the Orthodox Christian clergy and community joining us here this evening.

Both the member from Brampton North and the member from Ottawa South said that we’re fortunate in this country to be able to practise our faith. It made an impression on me, because while they were saying that, I was looking at the members in the gallery and thinking about what it would be like in other countries to be able to know that not only could you practise your faith, but you could come to the assembly where politicians speak, and they’d speak about having Orthodox Christian Week in the province where you live, and what that means.

I want to thank, as well—unable to come here in person—the Orthodox Christians who come from my riding of Sudbury and call Sudbury home. I want to take the opportunity to thank Orthodox churches that strengthen, support and contribute meaningfully to my riding: St. Nicholas Greek Orthodox Church, St. Mary and St. Mark’s Coptic Orthodox Church, and St. Volodymyr Orthodox Church, which is now 85 years young—that was a church I used to walk past on the way to school.

This bill is a wonderful opportunity to formally provide an annual recognition of the distinct faiths and cultures of Orthodox Christians. This bill means a time to learn about and recognize the history of Orthodox Christians, both around the world and here in Ontario; a time to acknowledge that Orthodox Christians in certain parts of the world still face threats and persecution today; a time to celebrate and recognize the contributions that have been made over the past century; a time to hear the stories, to share the stories. It’s a time to engage with members of the Orthodox Christian community.

Here in Ontario, as well as all of Canada, our diversity is our strength, and our province rightfully honours many diverse cultures and faiths, ethnicities and languages. Orthodox Christians are an important part of this wonderful diversity. It’s time to formally acknowledge the distinct faith and culture of Orthodox Christians, this year and every year.

I’d like, again, to thank the MPP for Humber River–Black Creek for his outreach and for his passion in bringing this bill forward. I think most of us saw his son running through the building. I think it’s a proud moment for both the son and the father in this, in seeing it.

Most especially, I want to thank the many members here with us today in the chamber, and the thousands of Orthodox Christians across Ontario.

I spoke with the member earlier about the bill and why he brought it forward, and he was humble about it. He said, “It’s not about me; it’s about the people we represent, the people we see here.” All of us on the floor are public servants, and I think that’s a good reflection of who he is. This bill isn’t about him or any of us who are speaking today. The bill is about you—your history, your stories and your faith.

So we hope—or in a room like this, we have faith—that with the collective support of all of our members, Orthodox Christian Week can be proclaimed here in Ontario.