I don’t have a lot of time, so I’m going to try and get out as much as I can.

I want to talk about the government’s record on accountability and on their record of limiting dissent and muzzling the voices of the opposition and the people of Ontario. These latest changes to the standing orders represent the latest in a long line of undemocratic changes this government, under this Premier, has made to our system.

First, I want to talk about the government’s changes to our committees. I’ve had the opportunity for the last 10 years, over the course of four terms, to sit on committees. I was also a Vice-Chair. Unfortunately, the current minister decided to take me off that, and then when I got on other committees, he did the same thing. It just happened in the last standing order changes. Then when I sat on committee as an appointee, because one of our members couldn’t go on government agencies, I enjoyed my time researching, making sure I asked very good questions, not embarrassing myself, because it’s part of my role quite frankly. I believe every single MPP should sit on committees and it shouldn’t be up to one individual to take people off. But do you know what happened at that committee? That afternoon, we had another one of these changes to the standing orders, and you know what they did? They took three women off the committees—three women off the committees. It didn’t make any sense to me.

I just want to say to them, I think that all people should have the opportunity to sit on committee and it shouldn’t be up to one person. I listened to him for his hour this morning and he talked about our member who’s going to be the Chair of the new committee once these standing orders are done, and our House leader even mentioned it. The reality is, when you go to committee, it doesn’t matter if you include the independents and a Liberal or the NDP; they have the majority. So every single vote you go to, they are going to win. That’s the way it is. It doesn’t matter whether it’s a bill that you talk about on the greenbelt—as we all know what happened with the greenbelt. It doesn’t matter if it’s Bill 124 or Bill 23, when it comes down to the vote, they always have more than what the Liberals have, the NDP and the independents.

I can relate to it kind of like a hockey game, right. I’m a big sports guy. I love baseball, I love hockey, and I can relate to that. So you to go the hockey game and say, “Oh, the Leafs lost a tough one last night, 1-0.” You go, “Yeah, a good game,” blah, blah. The reality is, they lost.

So it doesn’t matter if you’ve got eight Conservative MPPs on a committee and you decide to have three from the NDP, one from the Liberals and one from the independents; you’re going to lose eight to five. But the moral of that story is what? You still lose, no matter what you do. So changing that isn’t going to change anything.

But what should change is that we should make sure that the way it was before—and I don’t support the Liberals on a lot of things, but the one thing the Liberals never did was take the opposition, meaning the NDP, off committees. They never did it—because I was on governance; I was on estimates. The Liberals never took us off. They said, “What does the NDP want? Who do they want to sit on this committee?” And the reason why you would do that is, some people—I’ll use our financial critic. She’s very good at it. She does a great job. I watched her on TV last night; I was very, very impressed. I’m very proud that she’s part of my caucus. She’s got some talent around that. And there are other people who have different talents. So you try to line the talent up to the committees—who are going to go to the committee, present themselves well, make sure we’re asking fair and just questions.

But no, do you know what they did? The minister decided who sits on committees—it wasn’t the NDP, it wasn’t our leader; it was a Conservative. I want people at home to understand this, because I think it’s very, very important to understand this.

When they say that they’re trying to make sure it’s democratic—it isn’t, when our leader says we want the member from St. Catharines or the member from Niagara Falls on the committee, and then the minister says, “Oh, no, we don’t want them on that committee. They might do the job. They might ask tough questions. They might not agree with the government. So what we’ll do is, we’ll take them off.”

Well, I hate to break it to this party over here, the Conservatives, but in the last election—they talk about a majority government, which they got. We can’t deny that. But the reality is—do you know what they got? They got 18% of the votes that were cast.

Well, this little guy over here from Niagara Falls, who’s five foot nothing—I got 50% of the vote. Do you know why I got that? Because I do my job, and I do it well. And the people who vote for me want me to sit on committees. They want me to come to Queen’s Park and talk about things that are important to us, whether that be the greenbelt—because we saw the fiasco with the greenbelt, where they’re telling us they want to build 1.5 million homes on the greenbelt. We all knew that wasn’t what it was about. The RCMP is going to prove it at some point in time. Or how about Bill 124, where you took away wages and benefits? They want me to go to that committee and talk about the bill and say, “Why are you attacking nurses? Why are you attacking health care workers?” They want me to come here.

That doesn’t mean that I’m going to stand up, when I go to committee, and say, “Hey, thanks for doing Bill 124” or “Thanks for doing Bill 23 and hurting our municipalities right across the province of Ontario.” I’m not going to do that. My job, as opposition, is to question exactly what this government is doing, whether it’s on the budget that was presented yesterday or whether it’s on bills.

And what we have here is a majority government that is not doing that. So what they’re doing is extremely undemocratic. It’s certainly not right for any MPP be taken off of committee.

What really got me going on this, the reason why I wanted to speak today was, the last committee I went to was government agencies—and I think the finance critic was there as well, and I think another member was there as well. That very day, after we did that committee, we had question period, then we all went for lunch; we were having a good time with our colleagues, having a sandwich or whatever. We come with new standing orders by that minister—and what did he do? The person that I replaced for that committee—because the individual was sick that day—was taken off the committee. But he didn’t stop there. It wasn’t good enough. He attacked two more women and took them off their committees. That’s wrong.

That same minister, over and over and over again, stood up in the last Parliament and said, “Do you know that member over there from the NDP? They don’t want to sit on committees. They don’t want to do their job. They don’t care about you.” That was the same thing they said—

I know, and I actually appreciate his comment because I would certainly never do that in the House, even though that same minister wouldn’t allow them to talk on International Women’s Day. But that was not my intention. My intention was to show that three people were taken off the committee. They just happened to be women, I suppose. At the end of the day, that’s a problem.

Or you want to talk about other bills? And I’ve had the privilege of doing this when I sat on the committees before they decided they didn’t want me as a Vice-Chair. They didn’t want me as a Chair. They didn’t want me to sit on committees. And I understand why. I actually take it as a compliment, because I’m doing my job—maybe something that we all should do, quite frankly. You don’t have to agree with how I do it. You don’t have to like how I do it, but that’s the way it is.

But I’ve had the privilege of standing and talking about Working for Workers. I’ve gone to those committees. And in fairness, I listened to it, because there are some things in some of the Working for Workers bills the NDP has supported.

Matter of fact, we’ve supported some of those bills. I supported my colleague Jeff Burch from Niagara Centre when he brought in a bill to make sure that firefighters were covered for cancer, when a captain died in Welland with the firefighters. I supported that. There are other things in the bill that I think they could do a better job on in Working for Workers. And in fairness, guess what I did? I raised those issues.

And some of you say, “Well, what issues did you raise that you got the government so upset?” I talked about deeming. “Well, what’s deeming?” That’s where an injured worker gets deemed as if he could do a job even though the job’s not there, and then they take that money—say he was making $20 an hour; he can now, they say, be a parking attendant for $17 and now his benefit is $3 an hour and it forces him to live in poverty.

Now, I think it’s fair and reasonable for somebody with a labour background to raise that issue during that bill. But if I’m not at committee, because the government doesn’t want me there, I can’t raise that on behalf of injured workers in the province of Ontario who basically have lost everything in some cases. They’ve lost their marriage. They’ve lost their home. They’ve lost their family. It’s one of the biggest injustices that I’ve seen here since I’ve been here for 10 years—and continues to be. Working for Workers would be one way to correct that, I believe.

I talked about when I went there to workers for workers. I talked about Bill 124. Think about that. Bill 23—I talk about all those bills, standing up for workers.

Those poor guys that are delivering our food there that work for Uber Eats. You know they’re working some hours in this province of Ontario for nothing? They’re not getting paid while they’re sitting there waiting for the next call. I’ve been here for only an hour, hour and a half. There’s only been one or two people speak, but we’re all getting paid. Is that right, that somebody’s doing that, when they’re using their own car, they have to pay insurance or risk their lives when they’re driving their bicycles?

I know I have to sit down, so thank you very much.