Good morning, Speaker. My question is for the Premier. The government’s own Housing Affordability Task Force strongly recommended the legalization of fourplexes across the province over two years ago, but now the Premier is saying not in his backyard.

So my question is, why is the Premier blocking people who can’t afford a single-family detached home from the communities they want to live in and work in?

Interjections.

Even the housing minister doesn’t seem to understand the difference between a fourplex and four-storey—it’s mind-boggling.

Look, every housing expert in this province, in this country is saying we need more housing options, not less. That is what Ontarians want too. They want leadership from their government to provide more options so that we can actually find homes for our children, for the next generation, for the people that right now are at risk of losing their homes.

It is unbelievable that the Premier and this housing minister would rule out some straightforward options like legalizing fourplexes. And do you know what? They’re playing into the same kind of fears that have held back density for generations.

So I’m going to ask one more time: Why does the Premier think that people who can’t afford a single-family detached home don’t deserve options like fourplexes?

Interjections.

My question to the Premier is, does the Premier still agree that we need to end government funding of partisan advertising?

Interjections.

I want to ask the Premier, does he still agree, again, that we need to end government funding of this government’s partisan advertising?

We are giving this government a chance to show Ontarians who they truly are. Enough is enough. We need to close the loopholes and stop spending Ontarians’ hard-earned dollars on these purely partisan ads.

So my question, again, to the Premier is: This afternoon, when we retable the bill that Deputy Premier herself tabled under the previous Liberal government, is this government going to support that bill?

Interjections.

I move the following motion:

Whereas in 2017 the Auditor General found that the Liberal government spent $17.4 million on partisan ads with the primary goal of fostering a better impression of the governing party; and

Whereas this is the result of loopholes created under the Liberal government that watered down advertising rules and weakened the Auditor General’s oversight of government advertising; and

Whereas the Auditor General found that, in 2023, the current government used the same loopholes to spend $24.89 million on partisan ad campaigns, including $20 million to promote the Ministry of Health; and

Whereas the current Minister of Health introduced a bill in 2018 entitled End the Public Funding of Partisan Government Advertising Act, and that bill has been reintroduced by a member of the official opposition;

Therefore, the Legislative Assembly calls on the Ontario government to pass the official opposition’s Bill 176, End the Public Funding of Partisan Government Advertising Act, 2024, to close the loopholes and ensure that taxpayer dollars are not spent on ads intended to foster a positive impression of the government.

After six years of this Conservative government, life is only getting harder and more expensive. Instead of rising to the challenge, fixing what they’ve broken and taking on the big issues our province is facing, this Conservative government is spending millions of taxpayer dollars on partisan ads telling people just how good they have it. They are blasting the airwaves with expensive, highly produced ads that have only one purpose: to promote the Conservative Party. But Ontarians aren’t buying it, and neither are we.

That’s why today, the official opposition NDP is seeking to put an end to taxpayer-funded partisan ads and to put that money to work hiring health care workers, building homes and making life more affordable for the people of this province.

Before we go any further, Speaker, I’d like to take us back a few years, to 2017. You’ll remember this as the dying days of the previous Liberal government—a government that was mired in scandal and deeply unpopular after having privatized Hydro One, cut hospital funding and overseen the expansion of hallway medicine. It was not a good time for Ontario; that’s for sure. In fact, the failures and misguided priorities of the Liberal government were what drove me to seek office—certainly, what I was seeing in our schools and in health care.

As their popularity was plummeting and the polls started to look really bleak, they spent big on massive ad campaigns that sought to turn the tide of public opinion. They promoted programs that didn’t even exist yet in some cases. And they did it all not with money from the Ontario Liberal Party, but with taxpayer funds—government funds.

How did they get away with it? Well, guess what? They changed the law to allow them to get away with that. In 2015, they removed the Auditor General’s authority to review all government advertising and to stop ads that were deemed too partisan; that is, ads that don’t inform or share information about government services but instead just seek to create this positive impression of the governing party.

New Democrats took up the issue, and we called out the Liberals. We called them out for rigging the ad review system so that it would help them out. And we had an unlikely ally, I would say, in the Conservatives, who, at the time, were the official opposition.

Leading the charge, in fact, was none other than the current Deputy Premier, the MPP for Dufferin–Caledon. Here’s what she had to say at the time: “The government is spending taxpayer dollars on an advertising campaign on their latest hydro scheme in an attempt to save their electoral fortunes....

“The Auditor General has said that these recent hydro advertisements would not have been approved under old legislation.

“In the past two years, the government has spent nearly six million taxpayer dollars on a series of advertising campaigns the Auditor General said ‘provided viewers with no useful information’ and ‘could be seen as self-congratulatory and in some cases, misleading.’

“It is shameful that this government refuses to respect taxpayer dollars and restore the Auditor General’s authority to review and approve government advertising.”

Strong words.

I will continue. Those were some strong words—wouldn’t you say, everybody—from the Deputy Premier. I mean, my goodness.

The member from Dufferin–Caledon even tabled a bill to reverse those changes and restore the auditor’s authority to act in the public interest.

Later on, they went even further: They made it a part of their platform in 2018. In their platform, they said they were going to change things. But something happened. They got into power. That’s right. They got into power, and then they got into trouble. That’s what happened. A dismal record on housing, court battles with nurses and education workers, stag-and-doe deals, RCMP criminal investigations—suddenly, those partisan ads don’t look like such a bad idea, do they?

A freedom-of-information request by CBC that was just released today found that this Conservative government spent nearly $8 million of public money—your dollars—on a glitzy ad campaign. That’s the one that’s called It’s Happening Here. And I remind everybody: That aired during the Super Bowl, during the Grammy Awards, during an NHL All-Star Game. Was it paid for by the Conservative Party? No, it was not; it was paid for by you—by you. The people of Ontario paid for that. And just for context, people should know that the Canadian Super Bowl ads cost about $250,000 to $400,000 per spot. That’s what this government is spending your hard-earned dollars on. The Conservatives want you to think that they’re—and we heard it this morning when I asked the Premier questions. The Conservative government wants you to think that they’re spending it on ads to attract investment. Really? Nothing in those ads says that, first of all. Nothing in that ad actually speaks to, “Come to Ontario. Live in Ontario.”

More importantly, they don’t talk about any of the services. That’s really a critical piece of what a government ad should be doing. It should be improving people’s lives by providing information that they need—not a partisan puff piece, not a vanity ad to serve the interests of the Premier.

These ads don’t inform the public of new programs. They don’t inform you of new services. They simply sell an idea that things are going just fine—no need to worry about inconvenient facts, like the 2.3 million Ontarians who don’t have a family doctor. By the way, that’s a number that is just increasing and increasing, along with wait times and wait-lists.

But the ad buys are increasing too.

The Auditor General’s 2023 annual report found that the Conservative government spent $20.8 million, 72% of their total ad budget for 2023, on a health care campaign—many of us will recall this—called Building a Better Health Care System. I remember the Auditor General’s report, where they looked at that ad campaign and they said this: “The ads we took issue with included statements such as ‘we’re reducing wait times for surgeries,’ ‘we’re building 3,000 more hospital beds’ and ‘we’re adding and upgrading nearly 60,000 long-term care beds’”—it defies belief, but, more importantly, “without context or evidence to back up these claims.”

At a time when people are losing their access to primary care, when people are experiencing dangerous wait times for treatments and diagnostic checkups, when rural emergency rooms are shutting down and nurses are leaving the profession in droves—and I will point out, as well, we are spending more than $1 billion now on private agency nurses in both long-term care and hospitals; we are hemorrhaging our health care dollars—what does this government decide to do? They don’t try to solve the problem. No. They just put out some fancy ads to tell people, “Guess what? That’s not what’s really happening. Everything is okay.”

So when you’re sitting there in the emergency room waiting room with your sick child, for six hours, for eight hours, don’t worry, because you can look up at the screen above you and see an ad telling you, “Do you know what? You’re wrong. It’s okay.” Well, it’s not okay, and the government opposite knows it.

We’ve gone ahead and we’ve tabled the exact same bill that the Deputy Premier tabled back in 2017—

—word for word, yes. And with today’s motion, we are asking the House to not only vote in favour of it but to fast-track it.

Let’s get something done for the people of Ontario. Let’s spend their tax dollars responsibly.

Well, today, we are debating and we tabled a motion asking the government to fast-track a bill that their own Deputy Premier actually wrote, and it’s simply to ensure that Ontario’s public dollars don’t get spent on partisan advertising, but go to actually helping Ontarians.

Being elected is not a free pass to waste the taxpayers’ money, Speaker. It’s just not. Ontarians need a government that’s going to put every single dollar to use on things that matter. They don’t need propaganda. They don’t need that kind of puff piece. They don’t need vanity ads that serve the purposes of this Premier. They need a helping hand. That’s what the people of this province need.

And I want to say, I listened to the debate and the members opposite, the Conservative government members, talking, and I’ve got to tell them, they’re not fooling anyone here. If their advertising and these campaigns that we’ve been talking about this afternoon weren’t partisan, if they didn’t have to worry about any of that, if they were to pass the smell test, they would pass this motion. Why wouldn’t they? But no, they won’t, because they know exactly what’s going on. They know that those ads do not pass the smell test for Ontarians. Ontarians don’t need an advertisement trying to sell them a vision of a province that they don’t have, that’s unreachable for them. My colleague the member from London North Centre said it’s like they’re showing us nice things that we just can’t have. It’s kind of cruel.

We in the NDP really do believe in responsible government, in transparency, in integrity. The government can be done differently, and it can be done well. That’s why I’m hoping that the members opposite will actually join us in supporting this motion, a motion their own Deputy Premier drafted. Support us in ending this wasteful spending on propaganda and puff pieces, and actually help us get some things done that are really good for the people of this province. Ontarians deserve that, and I can assure you that if this government won’t support this motion, an NDP government will bring that transparency, will bring that integrity and will bring back responsible government in the province of Ontario.