Oshawa.

It appears to.

I’m pleased to stand in this House and add what I hope are some thoughtful comments to this debate about the standing orders. For the folks playing along at home, the standing orders are the rules of this space and place. They’re the rules of the game. As we heard the government House leader this morning talk about, the fact that they have been mostly unchanged for a very long time—that this government, this government House leader made a lot of changes in a short period of time, as he put it, to modernize or whatnot, maybe to make it in the image of the government in this space; sometimes to frustrate the opposition.

But here we stand with a series of changes. Some of them are kind of housekeeping and not super relevant, and others are more consequential. I would say that some of them are highly problematic, and others, I’m not exactly what they will mean for this place, but we’ll talk a little bit about that.

The standing orders feel a little bit dry if people are tuning in to debate. It’s not an issue like health care, it isn’t something going on in our communities, but it is how we conduct ourselves in this room. It’s the rules that we play by. How many minutes for this, or how we’re allowed to table a bill, and all of that kind of stuff.

But it does still matter to the outside world in a few different aspects. One of them I’m going to talk about because this is in the sights of the government today. The government is making changes to petitions and how we’re allowed to share petitions in this space. I fundamentally have a problem with this, and I’ll tell you why.

There are only a handful of ways that the public can have their voice heard in this room—their actual voice. We represent their issues, we tell stories, and Lord knows I get lots of letters and I do well to share those letters in this space. But people come to committee and they present, and another way that they have their voices and their issues raised in this space is through petitions.

Petitions have a format. The government is taking away that we don’t have to get them certified. Okay, fine, whatever, but we still want them to be in order in the House. And it is a petition to the Legislative Assembly of Ontario—not to the government, but to the whole Legislative Assembly of Ontario. That’s how it starts. It is to all of us, because regardless of what colour tie you have or what your politics are, we’re all represented to serve the members of our community.

In fact, when a member from your community comes to you and says, “I have a petition I want you to take to the Legislature,” sometimes, individually, we don’t love that petition. I’m sure the government members don’t love a lot of them, because they can be quite critical, or they raise ideas for solutions that may or may not be what the government wants to do or is planning to do.

And sometimes, they come to me as an opposition member and maybe, ideologically, I don’t love it, but we still are obligated and have the responsibility to bring them to this place and table it so that it gets before the government. Some of them, we do agree with as members, and we get up in this room and we read it into the Legislature.

And in that moment, the people who have written a petition in their words—“Whereas this is a problem,” and “Whereas this is happening,” and “Whereas this is a challenge that we’re seeing in our agency, in our community, in our family,” and “Whereas all these things are true, this is what we’re asking for.”

Speaker, to not be allowed to share the reasons for a petition, to not be allowed to share the “whereas-es,” as they’re called, but the rationale for the ask in this room, on the record, is really problematic.

I will admit, I have sat here, and I’ve listened to petitions that I know make the government members squirm. I remember the minister—hold on. The minister that just spoke: the Minister of Economic Development, Job Creation and Trade, the member from Nipissing. I know that he was here as an opposition member for a while, and I’m willing to bet, if I checked Hansard, that there would be petitions that that member read petitioning the then government on specific issues.

It’s interesting, because there are government members in here, and some of them were in this space, kind of standing in this area. I see another member in the under-press who probably remembers taking up space on this side. There are those who served in opposition and are now government and know darn well that those petitions can come from their communities and that they matter to individuals. Then there’s a whole whack of shiny new government members who have never had the pleasure of serving in opposition—and I look forward for you to when you get to, by the way.

But I think, fundamentally, that saying we cannot share the voices of our communities is a problem. The member from Nickel Belt, who reads petitions all the time, collects them from her community, is amazing about that—even she was saying, “Fine, go ahead and shorten it, but don’t make me have to change the words of real people.”

Now, there’s a member who has been here three days and reading a petition that looks like a Santa list. As he read it, he said, “I want to thank Sally in my office for the work on this.” We’re not supposed to have our staff or ourselves write those petitions. It happens that we help people, we guide them. We might offer thoughtful suggestions. Let’s be real, there are issues that we all want to bring up in this House. But to take up that kind of time and block people from participating—if I’m only allowed to summarize petitions, then careful what you wish for, because I may get up and say, “Here’s a petition brought forward by this group and it’s called this,” and my summary may be, “And they think that what you’re doing is garbage and problematic and harmful.” That may be what you get because it didn’t explicitly say that I can’t.

My point is that silencing people in the province of Ontario is wrong.

Interjection: It’s kind of undemocratic.

It is kind of undemocratic. It is more than “kind of.”

So I would say that we should retain the voices of Ontarians in this Legislature, no matter how uncomfortable it makes individual government members. When I get up and I read the 413 petition, I know you’re mad at me and it gives you something to work with, but still, it has come to me as the critic for transportation from folks who have opinions. Why are they not allowed to share it?

If the government House leader and the government wants to modernize the petitions process—Ottawa. Some of them have heard of Ottawa. Some of them have been to Ottawa. Some of them think that they do things well there. In Ottawa, they have an online petition submission route as well, and here, we don’t. And I have no problem with having an in-paper, original-signature petition, but we’re not modern, kids.

There are opportunities, and we can talk about that, but this one, it just seems kind of that autocratic “this is how it will be,” and there’s no discussion, which is a problem.

Speaker, I also want to take the opportunity and raise that in these standing order changes, there are a lot of changes being put before the Standing Committee on Procedure and House Affairs. I have personal interest in that because I have the privilege of serving in that role as the committee Chair. And so I guess I have a lot of questions that—when this comes before the Standing Committee on Procedure and House Affairs, all of those changes, I’m wondering, logistically, what that will mean in terms of workload, in terms of responsibility, in terms of process. Because now we’ve got things like deciding a fee structure for private bills, whether $150, which I think it is currently, is too much, too little—I have no idea. I’m looking at this and I have no idea where this has come from. Has someone said it’s too much money, too little money?

So I don’t know where these changes are coming from, because certainly this is the first time I’ve seen it. The committee will have to figure out that sort of thing, and I would say that that’s a little bit in the weeds. That’s not necessarily a contentious thing; it’s just new.

But the committee deciding the membership of other committees, with the exception of its own committee—I think it’s interesting. The member from Timiskaming–Cochrane raised that it appears to move the responsibility for that to the committee. But, Speaker, as Chair—it’s a weird thing. It’s this non-partisan, kind of nebulous role that you’re maybe a referee sometimes. You’re not a member of the committee. You’re counted as a member of the committee, though. If there are seven government members and two NDP members, and one of them is the committee Chair, like in public accounts, that member is not allowed to vote, that member is not allowed to have a dissenting opinion, but they count as a member. There’s lots of stuff I’d like to talk about with committee structure, but I don’t believe for a second that, in reality, our committee is going to necessarily be able to make those decisions.

So I’m interested in the process, to know how people can be assured that the committee is able to work separate and apart from the Premier’s office. The PA to the Minister of Legislative Affairs sits on our committee. He’s a nice guy, and everything’s working well and we’re all getting along, but personally—and since the government House leader pointed out that I am “fiercely independent”—my mother used to say that I was so fierce. I think she was mocking me. Then the government House leader calls me fiercely independent. I don’t know if he’s mocking me or it’s just his assessment of me.

But I’m not convinced that I’m fiercely independent as a committee Chair. I’m pretty sure that I serve at the pleasure of the committee, and the committee serves at the pleasure of the government House leader, or the Premier or whoever else is making the decisions that get passed into any committee—not just this committee, all of them. The decisions that come in on a Post-it Note—all government members just nod and then vote that way, and turn back to their cellphones; that’s what it looks like. Not so much in our committee, so I’m hopeful. I’m hopeful that maybe there will be a process that can better reflect the skills and expertise of folks in this room in terms of the committee makeup.

Speaker, I will leave it there. I think it will be some interesting work to talk about what else in this building might require improvement. But I don’t think for a second that I actually get to be fiercely independent—though I’ll try. I’ll try.

With that, thank you, Speaker.

Procedure and House affairs.