It’s always a pleasure to stand in my place and represent the needs of the people of Waterloo, and now, Waterloo region, lately.

It was an interesting budget for this government to bring forward earlier this week, on Tuesday. There was a lot of fanfare, as there always is.

I will say that as the official opposition for the province of Ontario, we were looking for some tangible affordability measures that would meet Ontarians where they are right now. And counter to the commercials that we see constantly in Ontario, funded by the taxpayers of the province of Ontario—the partisan advertising that this government said that they would stop doing, and not follow in the footsteps of the Liberals. They’ve actually doubled down on these commercials, and I feel like it’s a very good metaphor for how insulting this government is to the people of the province that we are elected to serve.

Speaker, you just said a prayer as we started our day here at Queen’s Park. We actually take an oath in this House, when we are first elected, to put the needs of the people of this province first, to dedicate ourselves to public service, which is indeed a calling, I would say, because not a lot of rational people look to come into this space and have 16 hours of nonsense on many, many days.

It’s safe to say that we are disappointed with the budget that was presented, especially given what we heard at pre-budget consultations.

The pre-budget consultation process is actually a really interesting process. It’s a long-standing tradition here in Ontario that the finance committee, of which I’m Vice-Chair, will travel around the province and listen to people, give them time to share their experience, and then we in turn take that information back and we learn from it, we adapt to it, we honour it, I would say, and then, we adapt policies and legislation to address some of those problems.

For many people who came forward—I’m thinking of nurses, I’m thinking of teachers, I’m thinking of people who are committed to building affordable housing, who are in the not-for-profit sector, who are on the front lines of how people are struggling in Ontario. They came to committee in the north and the south, east, west, and they shared their experiences with us. Sometimes, from the government members, they got rhetoric like “Aren’t you happy that we gave you a penny when you asked for a dollar?”

On the whole, the people who came before us actually came to us with solutions. They came to us with solutions because they are at the tipping point on affordability.

I’m going to honour some of those voices today, and I’m going to honour the women of this province, specifically.

Our colleague from Toronto–St. Paul’s often asks us to look at the budget through a gender lens, and so we have. We’ve done some analysis of how this government, since being elected, has treated women. I would say there have been tangible reversals on progress that women were making in Ontario.

I was thinking about this as I was talking to my concierge at the apartment building that I live in here in Toronto. His name is Mohammad, and he’s actually a doctor from Pakistan. He is working security in a building here in Toronto. I’ve been trying to help navigate some concerns that he has on health care and on immigration, ironically. One of the first conversations I had with him, in 2018, was when this government froze the minimum wage.

This government talks a lot about your pockets and getting their hands out of your pockets. When you froze the minimum wage, Mohammad, who has five children—that hurt Mohammad, but it hurt women in this province even more, because we have not made that progress; we are still 78 cents on the dollar to every dollar that a man makes in Ontario, in 2024. Did this government think about how it would negatively impact people like Mohammad, but also racialized and marginalized women across this province? No, they did not. They went right into the pockets of the most vulnerable people in Ontario, and they essentially removed money right out of their pockets. If you are a full-time worker—over a two-year period, that cost Ontarians $7,000. It’s truly shocking.

I raise the minimum wage because even though the government has promised—in October of this upcoming year—to increase the minimum wage, there is no funding in the budget for that.

What we have here is more commercials, essentially. Commercials don’t pay the rent. Those “It’s Happening Here” in Ontario commercials actually cause people some stress, especially if they are a parent waiting in an emergency room for close to 12 to 24 hours. One of my constituents was in the emergency room for almost 30 hours with a mental health concern. That is not the right place—

Ontarians are not seeing themselves reflected in this budget, and that is a serious problem. It’s a serious problem, obviously, for Ontarians who are looking for some leadership, but it’s also a problem for all of us, as legislators, because if you care about the people in your riding—in Sudbury and Hamilton, in Nickel Belt—you fully understand those challenges, if you are truly connected to your community.

The health care system in Ontario has never been this painful. It is literally painful for people. People are waiting in pain in emergency rooms—if they have an emergency room that’s open. This past year, 203 emergency room closures—this has never happened in Ontario before. This is a record. This government likes to use the word “historic.” Well, I’ve never heard a government use the word “historic” so many historic times. They overuse “historic.” These are not records that you should be proud of—203 emergency room closures in Ontario.

We’ve done some analysis, as has the FAO, an independent officer of the Legislature. He has concluded that the direct connection between Bill 124, which was the unconstitutional piece of legislation that this government brought in—it was ruled unconstitutional. It capped workers at 1%—the very workers this government were calling heroes—and for those three years, this pushed health care workers and education workers and public service workers out of the field because they just couldn’t afford it. And so what did the government do, even when the court ruled the legislation to be unconstitutional? They appealed the decision, wasting more money.