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.