I’d like to introduce folks from the Lake Simcoe area who have travelled here to recognize World Water Day: Ann Truyens, from AWARE Simcoe; Linda Wells, from Barilla Park Residents Association; Penny Trumble, Chippewas of Georgina Island First Nation; Rostyslaw Pityk from Innisfil District Association; Jean Ucar, Innisfree cottagers; Jack Gibbons, Lake Simcoe Watch; and Katharine Harries, Midland field naturalists. Welcome to Queen’s Park.

Speaker, tomorrow is World Water Day, March 22, and we have many people here in the gallery who have travelled from the Lake Simcoe area. They, along with the Chippewas of Georgina Island, are very concerned with the health of this beloved lake. We have a majority government. There are five Lake Simcoe area Conservative MPPs, including the Minister of the Environment, in this area. There’s existing legislation dating back to 2008, and yet, we have seen no action in cleaning up the phosphorus issues in Lake Simcoe.

This budget, the Conservative budget, is coming next week. Will the Premier finally adequately—adequately—fund the Lake Simcoe Protection Plan, yes or no?

Interjections.

Point of order, Speaker.

So, from me and all your family, Lilly, we want to wish you a very happy champagne birthday. Thank you.

I would thank the member from Guelph, particularly for bringing up the importance of the work that’s done at the University of Guelph, not only the veterinarian college, but the Ontario agriculture centre.

As you mentioned, we had the folks here from OCUFA yesterday, the Ontario Confederation of University Faculty Associations. I was lucky enough to have met with a woman that works at the Ontario Agricultural College who said that Guelph is running a deficit, and it’s having a direct impact on faculty members at our institution. She works in the plant agriculture lab, and they’re losing three plant-breeding faculty, which means that important crops for Ontario agriculture will have no public breeding and research, including corn, which is a predominant row crop grown in Ontario, and the research that they do to identify resistant strains.

So they were here saying that the universities need to be properly funded, that we are losing our edge that we have had in research and training, because our universities are all running a deficit. Can you speak to how this directly speaks to being able to implement and act on the intention of this bill, which is to have enough veterinarians and vet technicians to serve our animal friends?

My question is to the Solicitor General.

I know that we share our love of animals. I’ve talked to you about Hal, and I’ve talked about my dog, Nellie, and all the animals we’ve known and loved through our life.

I also want to commend you for the work that we did together. In Hamilton, there was a disturbing incident where a dog named Merlin was maltreated. I received so many calls in my constituency office about that, and you were in touch with me, keeping me posted on what the progress was, and I appreciate that, and my community appreciates that. Thanks for that.

I would just support what the member from Timiskaming–Cochrane was saying. You say the PAWS Act is new, but we just want to make sure that the money that we’re dedicating to this is being spent well and that we are continuing to improve, for enforcement and to protect our animals.

Without putting you on the spot, I do want to ask you a little bit about some of the maltreatment and the deaths we’ve seen at Marineland, and if there’s anything that you want to add to the enforcement around that and what we’re going to do to make sure that people don’t see deaths of these beloved marine animals, like our whales. So if you wanted to comment on that, I would certainly appreciate it.

I would like to begin by saying how disappointing it is to hear that this Conservative government will not be supporting the sensible piece of legislation. It’s sensible, practical. It’s a disappointment to hear the government not supporting this again, but are we surprised? How could we possibly be surprised? This is a government that has not once, in the almost six years that they’ve been in power, taken climate change seriously, taken the impact on our infrastructure—

Interjections.

Interjection.

I just have to say that I think it’s timely that the member is bringing this forward, because this year is the 70th anniversary of Hurricane Hazel. And what did that teach us? This was back in 1954. Hurricane Hazel at the time was a real tragedy for the city of Toronto. I remember my mother talking about it. She was a young girl at the time. Eighty-one people lost their life during Hurricane Hazel and the ensuing floods. Over 1,900 people were homeless. And it incurred about a billion dollars in damage in today’s standards. So this was a huge, huge disaster in the province. At the time, the province of the day worked in co-operation with local municipalities to come up with ways that they could make sure that they were protecting and preventing this kind of loss of life and loss of property from happening again.

I do think this is an important bill, but I have to say, and I think that you will agree, that good stormwater regulations, which this bill represents, will not replace the loss and the damage that we’re seeing to natural heritage land, farmland, wetlands, green lands, the kinds of important properties that we need that are going to protect us from the impact of severe weather and the flooding that we can only expect to happen more and more.

In fact, my colleague here referenced the report from the—let’s see what the report was called. It was the provincial climate impact assessment report. This painted a grim picture. This report painted a grim enough picture that the government commissioned this report and it was released but hidden. The government hid this report because the impacts were so severe, it would seem to me that they didn’t want the people of the province to know that we are in trouble when it comes to climate change and flooding and severe weather on the way. And so the cost of flooding—the member from Kanata–Carleton did explain that it’s not just the loss of life; it’s the impact to our properties and our municipal infrastructures, which we all pay for.

I have a report here from the University of Waterloo Intact Centre on Climate Adaptation. It’s called Treading Water: Impact of Catastrophic Flooding on Canada’s Housing Market. They identify that “the most costly impact of climate change affecting Canadians is residential basement flooding, that is often made worse through poor land-use planning and management.”

You mentioned the flood that you experienced in the Ottawa area. There was a flood in Burlington, Ontario, in 2014; I think something like two years’ worth of rain fell in an hour or so, and it cost millions upon millions of dollars for the municipality of Burlington. Also Toronto in 2019: We were in this House at the time when that happened. Downtown Toronto flooded. People were trapped in their cars. A GO train had to be evacuated because of the sudden flooding. So these things are real, and they’re increasing.

From this report: 3.3 million Canadians live in a 100-year flood plain and 3.9 million Canadians live in a 200-year flood plain, so people are already living in flood plains, and these flood plains will only continue to be expand and be made more vulnerable by the decisions that this government takes when it comes to protecting our natural heritage and our natural lands, like the greenbelt and like wetlands.

I would just like to add that after Hurricane Hazel, the province of the day worked in co-operation with local municipalities and conservation authorities to allow conservation authorities to acquire lands and to regulate the vulnerable lands. Why did they do this? They did this because they recognized that, for example, stripping the Humber River drainage system at the time amplified the impacts of the damage. The flood plains couldn’t support the rain. That was what happened then, and that’s what’s going to be happening now if we build in the wrong place, if we continue to impinge on the greenbelt, if we continue to expand urban boundaries in areas where we shouldn’t, and if we continue to disregard and disrespect important tributaries, wetlands and waterways in the province.

I would say that in Hamilton—the Speaker will know this full well—we saw the damaging impact of flooding. It wasn’t flooding particularly, but it was Cootes Paradise where this beautiful natural area—it is actually a provincially significant wetland—was flooded by 24 billion litres of raw sewage that spilled into this area.

This spill was the result of a failure of oversight. It was a failure of aging infrastructure—the signals to show that this system wasn’t working failed—but it also is a lesson to show us that we have aging infrastructure across the province in municipalities, and that these severe storm weather events impact our ability to treat sewage in our municipalities.

And so, the city of Hamilton is continuing to monitor bypass events, where our sewage water and waste water treatment system can’t support the flood of water that’s coming into these systems and they have to bypass. Rather than going through the treatment facility, they have to bypass. In the case of Hamilton, it bypasses into the Hamilton bay, and in the case of, for example, Burlington, that happens as well.

So these have serious implications not just for people and for property, but for our important waterways, and it is shocking to me to say in the context of this, in the context of climate change and in the context of aging infrastructure and wanting to protect people, that this government continues its assault on our protected land. This government now has passed—or will pass on April 1, which is kind of ironic; April Fool’s Day—new regulations that will come into effect that, again, kneecap our conservation authorities’ ability to do their job and their ability to protect us from climate change flooding impacts. These regulations that come into effect will affect the 36 conservation authorities that we have across the province. Those are 31 in southern Ontario and five in populated areas in northern Ontario. Over 90% of Ontarians live within the jurisdiction of a conservation authority. So when conservation authorities are undermined and they longer have the ability to protect us, this impacts 90% of Ontarians in those areas.

And so I would like to say that these regulations, they’re shocking. They came along with Bill 23, which required conservation authorities to identify surplus lands that could be sold for housing. So this government has got the conservation authorities going through lands that were meant to be protected in perpetuity, lands that were there to protect us from flooding—this government has tasked, charged conservation authorities and their boards of directors to find surplus lands that could be sold.

I would say, if there is a mass sell-off of conservation lands, the outrage that we saw in the province of Ontario when it came to the greenbelt grab will be nothing compared to people’s outrage when their protected areas, when their trail areas, when their protected species like woodpeckers and owls and butterflies and just natural areas that people love are now going to be sold off.

These regulations not only change the buffer zone for development from 120 metres from a protected land to 30 metres, they also allow the minister of the day to force conservation authorities to issue development permits whether they want to or not.

They’ve also changed the definition—which is insane, that they have changed the definition—of what a headwater is. A headwater, really, if you think of the ground, is essentially a depression in the ground, because in Ontario, all of our tributaries and our lakes and rivers come from a headwater that’s under the ground. That’s how it works here. And so this government is saying now that they can’t protect headwaters and said what they will be doing is, if it has a defined bank or running water, that can be protected.

But I would like to remind this House that the Grand River starts from, essentially, a depression, a hole in the ground, north of Kitchener. Is this government saying that we cannot protect the headwaters of something such as the Grand River? This weakening of the powers of the conservation authorities is part and parcel of this government’s problem when it comes to understanding the importance of our conservation authorities.

And I would like to just end in the minute that I have left to say that I would like to remind all of us that we have a duty to protect the water. We are all treaty people through being Canadian citizens. We’re subject to the Between the Lakes Treaty between the British crown and the Mississaugas of the First Nations, and also the Fort Albany Treaty with the Haudenosaunee. And these treaties, they’re not just important treaties that we have an obligation to, to First Nations; they teach us and provide guidance on how we should treat water and how we should respond based on cultural practices, not just now but for generations to come.

I think this is a very good bill and we will be supporting it. But I appreciate the opportunity to show that this government not only is supporting this bill, but they have done—they’re going further and further to put our properties, our people and our lives at risk with their undermining of protecting important areas in our province. I think that’s disastrous, and I think that we’re going to pay the price one way or another.