Today.

Brazil. I think it’s Brazil.

It’s Thursday afternoon, as we know, and the real title of Bill 162 is An Act to enact the Protecting Against Carbon Taxes Act, 2024 and amend various Acts. That’s the real name of the bill, and it’s six schedules. The layman’s term, or the slogan term, of this bill is “getting it done,” or—I’m going to say “getting it done”; I’m not going to call it the other one. But basically, this bill is strictly a performative bill, because when you look at the schedules that it actually is creating legislation for, a lot of them are really performative. There isn’t a lot of meat behind them.

Specifically, I’m going to look at the first two bills that can impact people to a small degree. The government is going to, of course, exaggerate the type of savings people can have. Under schedule 2, for an example, is the Highway Traffic Act and it sets a statutory driver’s licence fee of $7.50 for each six-month period equal to the existing fee, which is set by regulation. Future fee changes will be required by an amendment to the Highway Traffic Act. It establishes a framework enabling an automatic licence plate renewal system, with details to be determined by regulation.

Again, this is a small piece of affordability. It’s very straightforward and it’s not a complicated schedule. But there are so many pieces of the Highway Traffic Act, Speaker, that we really need to address. When we talk about the slogan name for this bill, “getting it done,” there are things that this government lacks that they didn’t get done and they had to retract. That really took a lot of time up in this Legislature.

One of the things that people have mentioned was the licence plates. The licence plates were introduced by Ford and it was a new blue licence plate, which was part of the 2019 budget—again, putting it in the budget itself. But the government quickly scrapped that rollout after a police officer in Kingston, actually, noted that the plates were barely visible at night. The government is no longer issuing those plates, but as of last year, there are still 170,000 circulating in the province, and the province hasn’t yet articulated a plan to get them off the roads. The member from Timiskaming–Cochrane had mentioned that, I think, they are just going to wait until they fall off. Well, that isn’t really a good plan.

I think the point we want to make on this side of the House is, many times, when small things come to this Legislature and they’re very obviously not going to work, this government doesn’t even listen to that.

The next schedule that’s, again, very simple and is going to be exaggerated as some life-changing affordability piece for Ontarians is the photo card under schedule 4. It sets a statutory photo card fee of $3.50 for each six-month period equal to the existing fee, which is set by the minister’s order, and future fee changes will be required by an amendment to the act.

So, schedules 2 and 4 are somewhat of affordability issues for people—no disputing there; everybody could save a dollar in their pocket. Better a dollar spent on things you don’t need. But those two pieces, again, making this a “get ’er done” act like it’s something that’s going to have a revelation for everybody’s life? The title doesn’t really suit what’s in the act and how it’s going to impact people’s lives to get things done so that we can actually see the great progress this government is talking about.

The other two schedules in this bill are really, again, performative. So we’ve talked about this, where the government has decided that on schedule 5—they call it Protecting Against Carbon Taxes Act. What they’re saying is that they want to have a referendum prior to introducing a bill establishing a new carbon pricing program and establish rules for such a referendum. This schedule does not affect the Ford government’s existing carbon pricing system on industrial emitters, which was established on January 1, 2022—without a referendum, I might add—and the schedule does not affect the federal carbon tax on consumers’ fuels.

So, again, the government has put out something that—they want a referendum on a tax, but they’ve got their own. And they don’t even have a plan for the money, for the compliance fees that they’re going to collect. And if you look up some of these articles—again, why are governments not fully planning and executing their policies so everybody understands that they’ll actually work? So when you throw out an idea, and this government throws out lots of ideas, and when they don’t work, you have to backtrack them. And then, when you throw out ideas, nobody knows what’s really happening with the money. And we want to know what’s happening with the money. The taxpayers want to know, what are you doing with your money—their money? So that’s another schedule, again, that’s kind of performative. Having a referendum—has anybody priced out the cost of a referendum? Did you have a referendum on Ontario Place when you leased 95 years, the spa? Did we have a referendum for that? How much is that going to cost us? How much is 95 years of leasing out that spa space going to cost? We don’t know that.

So when you’re talking about legislation, when you’re talking about policy, we want to have that information. I hope it’s us who’s going to be the government the next time around. The NDP is going to have a majority government in this Legislature; that’s my prediction. And when we do things like that, we’re going to have numbers, and we’re going to tell people what things cost, because NDP governments actually balance budgets when they’re in government. So you don’t just throw ideas out, you don’t know what they’re going to cost. You don’t just throw ideas out. You know the money you’re going to bring in, what you’re going to do with that money. That’s important.

The next schedule on the bill, again, that’s not really doing a lot—it’s a lot of performative—is schedule 6. Schedule 6, we’ve talked about that too. What it’s going to do: It’s going to prohibit tolls on highways, quite frankly, that already have no tolls, and it won’t prohibit tolls on Highway 407. And that’s the highway that needs to be examined. We talked about how congestion is an issue on the 400 series. And right now, we can do something to alleviate that congestion. And I think the minister mentioned about mental stress when you’re in traffic congestion on the 400. That’s absolutely true, but there’s also a safety issue. There are so many accidents that happen on that highway involving congestion and transport trucks.

One of the things the NDP proposed was to alleviate the tolls on transport trucks using the 407. And that is a really good idea, because then you alleviate the imminent traffic congestion that we have today. We’re not going to wait 20 years for you to build your highways before we actually worry about people’s safety. And then, if you’re talking about building Highway 413 to curb the transportation time people have between work and home, well, if you took the transport trucks and put them on the 407 without a toll, you’re going to have better time to get home for everyone, not just people using Highway 413.

So I have to say, with regard to the 407, it’s very important that we note this government really gave the 407 a lottery ticket, $1 billion you waived in fees. What kind of business sense is that when you can collect fees from a 99-year-lease highway that the Conservative government gave away and Ontarians are paying for? Now, they’re able to get a billion dollars back from a business. It’s a business. Do you think that business would waive a toll fee for anybody in this chamber or in this province? No. Quite frankly, it’s a very abusive system. Let’s say you moved and they’re giving you the bills to your home. They keep adding exorbitant amounts of interest to those toll fees. So for us, for this Conservative government to let the 407 off the hook for a billion-dollar price tag, it’s shameful, quite frankly.

And because it’s so underused, you can actually land a plane. A plane actually landed on the Highway 407. So there are ways we can alleviate congestion currently, and if you take off that toll off transport trucks, that’s going to make a huge difference now, until you build your highways that you’re planning to take an undertaking for.

So we talked about schedule 2, schedule 4 and schedule 6. Now, the schedule that is actually very, very crucial in this bill is schedule 1. What schedule 1 does is it amends the Environmental Assessment Act with the effect of confirming that expropriation may proceed prior to the completion of an EA.

During committee, we asked the government to put that back in, because again, you’re creating these policies in such a rush, under the guise of building highways and building homes, and if you make terrible errors, you’re going to have somebody’s highway or somebody’s home built on environmentally sensitive lands that end up, perhaps, with building problems. So we need to make sure that we have environmental assessments put back in. And when we mentioned this at committee, of course that was voted down. The Conservatives didn’t even comment on it.

But one of the things that we have talked about—and the member from Timiskaming–Cochrane touched on it—was Wilmot. That is something that we do have to address because, right now, there is the example of expropriation in that area.

I’m going to read, just quickly, from the news article that was written by the Christian Farmers Federation of Ontario. They wrote an open letter condemning the expropriation threats to Wilmot farmers and the farmland. These are long-time farmers, so they have some credibility when they write letters about issues. They said:

“The magnitude of this proposed development project not only poses a direct threat to the farming community but also raises concerns about the irreversible loss of fertile farmland....

“‘As president of CFFO, I stand in solidarity with the farmers of Wilmot facing expropriation.... It’s shameful that our farmers, stewards of our land, are left vulnerable to such injustice. Our government systems should protect them, not put them at risk....

“‘All levels of government should be ashamed that these farmers are even in this position.... They have been failed by the very system meant to protect them and our farmland.’”

There was an example where, again, this government had to backtrack when they talked about severing farmland. I can’t even say, “to the government’s credit,” because if you talked to the farmers, I’m sure they would’ve told you that’s not a good idea. If you would’ve done your testing on your licence plates—you know, we drive cars at nighttime, snow, rain, at daytime. Who would have designed these plates without the right procedural testing?

The other piece when we talk about plates: There’s such a high number of auto thefts right now. One of the things that I had seen in the paper recently was on a gentleman named Derek Crocker. He bought a truck from a dealership, and he ended up having an accident. They ordered parts for his truck based on the VIN number. When the parts came back, they didn’t fit. And so, what’s happening is vehicles are being stolen and they’re getting re-VINned and nobody knows, not even the dealership.

So what has happened is there is not a Canadian or a US national vehicle registry, and so police agencies are asking and urging the federal and provincial governments to create one. Because if we’re going to have all this work done of preventing crime for auto theft—and it’s becoming quite violent, and we all agree that that should be curbed. No one should be worried about a car they drive and being attacked. But if we’re going to do that, again, look at the policy and look at the results and go a step further so that they don’t just thwart the system.

The fact that we don’t have to register our licence plates is also an opening. It’s a loophole as such for these vehicles to be stolen and then re-registered.

The last schedule of this bill is schedule 3. The new municipal affairs minister, in a quote—there was a big scandal, as we all know. It’s called the greenbelt. When he was asked about the greenbelt, and you guys were reversing all that terrible legislation, the minister said—it was in the Star. He said he was taken aback by the mess he had inherited. He also said that “reviewing how decisions were made regarding official plans, it is ... clear that they failed to meet this test.”

But then, when you look in schedule 3, there are all kinds of changes to municipalities’ official plans. It’s very difficult, actually, to match the numbers in schedule 3, and they list so many of them. There are so many municipalities that are getting their official plans changed. It leads to the question: Who requested these things?

Because the other piece of this is what I find is a lot of legislation that the government creates, there’s an indemnity clause: “You can’t sue me. You can’t sue the consultants. You can’t sue everybody with good intentions.” There isn’t that in here. So I often wonder, if I’m looking at schedule 3, the official plan adjustment, which is basically a work around the greenbelt and the farmland expropriation pieces, who asked for these official plan changes? You have to ask that question because it’s very important that when we have—allowing schedule 3 to go beyond urban boundaries when we don’t need to build housing beyond that. We know that there’s infill. Your own report, your own housing committee, your own housing commission said that. There are ways to build housing inside the urban boundaries.

One of the ways that we want to build more housing in urban boundaries is having multiplex homes. The government has a triplex already; I think it’s in Bill 23. I was out in my riding over the weekend, and we have fourplexes in neighbourhoods with single-family homes. They’re very beautifully designed, quite frankly. They look like they’re semis, and so one half has two units, front and back, and then the other half has another unit, front and back. So I don’t know what the adversity of this government is to not say, “Let’s do triplexes. Let’s add fourplexes to that.”

But when we’re encouraging people to be small landlords, I also encourage this government to make sure they fix the Landlord and Tenant Board, because small landlords really have a difficult time when things go wrong. They cannot subsidize people’s rents when a tenant goes off the wrong path. Then, there are also tenants who are in big corporation apartment buildings, and they are being mistreated. They can’t get to the Landlord and Tenant Board quick enough to stay in their homes.

So there are lots of ways we can clamp down on—people who have homes right now, let them stay there by having rent controls, by eliminating renovictions, by making sure we build non-profit, non-market homes like homes geared to income, like co-operative housing, like inclusionary zoning. We can keep people housed where they are; then, we can build the stock as well. No one is against building homes where people who are hard-working and need affordable homes—that’s not a problem. We agree with that. But there are people who are in precarious housing situations right now, and if they are kicked out of their home, they can’t afford the new rent. They are not in the market to purchase. So we’re going to create another effect of people who are homeless or couch surfing.

I also talked about—we need to make sure that people who are homeless right now have a yearly shelter bed, because there’s not enough transitional housing right now. Just having people who are homeless only having a shelter bed in the winter months, the cold months—that’s not humane. We need to make sure shelter beds are year-round, so that we can actually get people off the streets and in shelters, so they can actually access health care resources, as well, that they need.

Speaker, there are things in this bill, obviously, that the government wants to push, and housing is one of them. We have different philosophies on how to create that housing and how to keep people in their homes right now. So I look forward to the questions.

The Get It Done Act doesn’t get much done. This government has a record of creating legislation and having to backtrack legislation—and that was the wage cap bill, Bill 124; they had that put in and reversed. The dissolution of Peel—that was a colossal failure; and the greenbelt. The “notwithstanding” clause, with the education workers—if you remember that, that had to be reversed. There are so many things. So I hope this government listens to this part of the Legislature and maybe rethinks that this should not be pushed through. Go back and rethink the expropriation and go back and think about schedule 3, where you’re actually expanding urban boundaries beyond the city limits.

Bob Rae was decades ago; the Conservative Harris government was also decades ago, but one of the things, I know, with the Conservative Harris government piece is, they cut ODSP and they cut OW, and we’re still seeing the effects of that. There are people living in apartments that right now are low rents, and there are landlords pushing them out of those units because of renovictions. They want to get them out so that they can charge more. But where are people going to live when they’re on that fixed income? Building housing is so important, and keeping people housed, who have limited resources and income, is so important, or you’re going to end up with more homeless people who don’t have access to affordable homes.

So the government should be building—and under Bob Rae, we did that. We built housing geared to income, under Bob Rae. We built co-operative housing. And every government should always have that built into a future housing plan—the present and the future—so we accommodate the socio-economic differences and demographics for everyone, whether you—

I’ll use an example: We lost the Via service from London to Toronto years ago. And then, this government put in the GO train, but they’ve cut it back to the point where you can’t even use it; it’s very limited.

Having transit when it comes to trains, from southwestern Ontario—it’s a hub, and people want to come to Toronto. Making sure that we build transit inside urban boundaries, as well, and having buses—we lost Greyhound during the pandemic. That was another piece. The Northlander—that was another one, under the Liberal government, that we lost.

So there are a lot of projects where we have let things go to the point where now we’re looking at building mega highways and taking our bulldozers and using good, fertile land that really doesn’t need to be used.

The other thing is the 407—we can improve transit rather than building highways by having no tolls on the 407 for transport trucks.

I think that it’s not a one-size-fits-all. But having that and saying, “Yes, we should be”—Bill 23 says, “Build triplexes.” Why don’t we say, “Build fourplexes,” and give people the incentive to do that?

So, yes, absolutely, if one city doesn’t want to use it, that’s their loss, but they can be very well designed and they’re good investments. There are actually a lot of multi-generational families who actually want to live close by, and that is a very popular piece right now that I have seen. If you want to build granny flats, then there are the working parents who need help with the mortgage. So if everybody can pitch in—that multi-generational piece—then it’s affordable. But fourplexes, I think, are something that are not a scary piece and they’re not going to work everywhere, but they should be built into legislation so that people have that option to be counted in the 1.5 million housing stock.

Quite frankly, if a government decides to utilize a tax, they need to explain it. The carbon tax that the Conservatives have, they haven’t explained what they’re going to use that compliance tax money for. They’re supposed to collect it, yet nobody knows how it’s going to be used. You should have had a referendum on that, and then maybe this would have some teeth in this schedule, but, right now, no, it doesn’t have any teeth. You can’t impose it on a new government.

The other piece of the 407, to actually make it stronger, is waive the tolls for transport trucks on the 407. Saying that you’re never going to charge tolls on highways that don’t have tolls is really tongue-in-cheek. Quite frankly, the member from Oshawa, who had bills to remove tolls from the 412 and the 418, deserves the credit for pushing this government to do the right thing, so thank you for doing that. But the 407 piece, that they’re never going to put tolls on highways that don’t have tolls—again, take the tolls off the transport trucks and that will actually make it worthwhile having that schedule in here.