Point of order, Speaker.

Merit?

Hear, hear.

I’m wondering if the member can confirm that when the Liberals release their plan for post-secondary education, tuition increases will be off the table.

Good morning. Let us pray.

Prayers.

Resuming the debate adjourned on May 7, 2024, on the motion for third reading of the following bill:

Bill 166, An Act to amend the Ministry of Training, Colleges and Universities Act / Projet de loi 166, Loi modifiant la Loi sur le ministère de la Formation et des Collèges et Universités.

The next question?

Further debate?

I want to thank the member for his remarks. I’m wondering if he could elaborate for us—because he and I both share a city where a number of our residents don’t feel safe right now. They’re talking to us through our community offices about not feeling safe on campus. I’m wondering if the member could give this government some advice about what it can do.

I note that the blue-ribbon panel had asked for $2.5 billion in additional funding from this government. Most of the mental health supports on post-secondary campuses in Ottawa Centre are struggling, with wait-lists in excess of six months for mental supports for students. So I’m wondering what the funding message could be to this government to make sure that people do feel supported and safe on campus.

Is that something you think this government should change and is it something you’re committed to change?

As I understand Bill 166, now at third reading before this House, this is about making sure that there is accountability and student supports available to people on our campuses. As I mentioned in the Q&A with the member for Ottawa South, I am being contacted increasingly—our office is—by students, staff and faculty on post-secondary campuses who do not feel safe. So the timing for this bill is fortuitous. But what I want to say in the time I have, Speaker, is that the focus of the bill, in my opinion, is misplaced, and certainly the applications and the resources that I’ve heard the government say will arrive with this bill, I think, at the moment, at least, are not going to the right areas.

Again, just speaking as someone who has taught at post-secondary institutions, I want everybody, if you can, to put your mind in the mind of a 38-year-old university professor, who, on June 28, 2023, was attacked by a 24-year-old student who walked into a hall at the University of Waterloo. The first thing that 24-year-old asked the professor was, “What’s being taught in this class?” And when the professor said to that 24-year-old student, himself a student at the University of Waterloo, that it was a gender studies class, the student pulled out two large knives and proceeded to attack the professor. The only reason the professor wasn’t critically injured is that she resisted, but two other students in that class of 40 got up to try to resolve the matter.

I’ll never forget that day and the reporting that came out of the University of Waterloo, because I have had situations—not violent situations in class, but I have had situations in classes where I’ve taught where tempers have flared and people have jumped to their feet and you thought altercations were going to break out, because, frankly, that is what post-secondary education should be about: It should be about exploring ideas, even when passions flame, even when things can get difficult in the classroom. Because I want to believe that that’s what our colleges and universities should be doing: They should be challenging us to think about our place in the world and how we use the skills that we have. But I have never encountered a situation like that, Speaker.

I wish I could say that in recent years it’s an isolated situation. But we also know that the same pattern that police studies and court evidence has shown was present in the mind of this 24-year-old student, who was asocial, who was troubled, who openly disliked Pride events at the University of Waterloo and who would regularly intervene in campus online groups, spewing hatred against queer and transgender groups on campus. The same pattern repeats itself with a college dropout in London, Ontario, on June 6, 2021, who, on the third occasion, he’d marshalled—he’d tried to marshal the courage twice before, but on the third occasion managed to run down an entire Muslim family. I asked myself in the aftermath of this, as we’ve had so much debate and reflection, given the terrorism charges that were laid against this 20-year-old, what can we do through post-secondary education to make sure that people who have fallen so deep down those rabbit holes of hatred that they would see Muslim neighbours as somehow a threat—what are we not doing on campuses?

And then, again, something that’s less known about the Quebec City mass shooting on June 27, 2017, is that that 27-year-old—and purposely, Speaker, I’m not naming the perpetrators, because I’m not interested in giving them any infamy, because I know that’s one of the reasons why they committed their lethal acts. I’m not going to name them—was a political science student at Université Laval and had been known in his class, on his campus and online to specifically target Muslim neighbours—to specifically target them, to at least a few times walk around the Sainte-Foy mosque. And for the 40 people that he found worshipping on that day and the six fathers and brothers who are dead as a consequence of those lethal actions, I again ask the question for this House posed by this bill: What are we doing on campuses to reach hatred and diminish it before it manifests in a lethal act? I think that’s a very important question.

When I looked at the blue-ribbon panel that the government amassed to give it advice on what to do with colleges and universities, and when I listened to the member for London West, both in this House and at committee, ask questions—worthy questions—we kept coming back to a similar theme: We aren’t putting the faith in the resources in colleges and universities to make sure that students, staff and faculty have access to the resources they need when they’re in a troubled mental health state, when questions and difficult circumstances pop up. We are not providing the resources necessary.

The blue-ribbon panel asked for $2.5 billion; the government has given the post-secondary sector $1.2 billion, so half the ask. I know at Carleton University, as I said earlier in the question to the member from Ottawa South, there is often at least a six-month waiting list when students ask for urgent mental health supports on campus—six months; six months when you’re exhibiting behaviours that suggest that you could harm yourself or perhaps others.

So what we’ve done in the city of Ottawa is, through our community health centres, created a program called Counselling Connect: that, within 48 hours of intake—that’s the goal—it gets people access to three psychotherapy sessions that are culturally appropriate and as fast as possible. The goal is within 48 hours of intake. I know this program right now is helping over 700 people in the greater city of Ottawa. Some of those folks are students. That would make sense. That program, Counselling Connect, costs community health centres in our city, who are strapped for cash, believe me, $600,000. But I want to believe that if Bill 166 wanted to provide the supports to students, staff and faculty on our campuses, it could partner with an organization like Counselling Connect. That would have real impact to make sure that people got the help they needed when they needed it.

Speaker, I’m also mindful of the fact that this bill is before the House at a time when many of our neighbours, many of our citizens, are mobilizing—understandably, given the horrors that we are seeing in the war between Israel and Hamas. I know the members opposite, the minister—the Premier has openly asked for encampments that are cropping up on university campuses to be dismantled, that they believe these encampments to be embodiments of hatred.

What I want to encourage my friends opposite to consider—because I visited the encampment at the University of Ottawa, I visited at the end of the workday here the University of Toronto encampment. While I may not agree with everything I’ve seen and everything that’s written down, I can honestly say that I have never seen better organized, empathetic young people trying to ask decision-makers in this country to do what they can to create more tolerance, peace and understanding. I am amazed. When I walked into the encampment at the University of Toronto, I had to go through almost a 10-minute interview intake. So I was aware, as a politician, that I was not to be photographing or videoing people. If I wanted to conduct media interviews on site, I needed to contact them first. It was their encampment and there were rules around how I behaved and how I treated others. On this site, there was an Indigenous part—I believe it’s still there—with a sacred fire. I was blown away by the level of organization. The consistent message that I heard at least from students saying: “We want to be a voice for peace. We want Canada to be a voice for peace.”

So I am discouraged, I’ll be honest, when my colleagues in this House are asking for these encampments to be dismantled, without reckoning with that message that I hear loud and clear. I heard it at home and I heard it across the street at the University of Toronto. I would like to think that that is exactly the kind of message that should be embodied in our programs on campus: a greater understanding of each other; that we aren’t intimidated by each others’ symbols. We’ve had the debate in this House about the Palestinian kaffiyeh not being permitted in this chamber.

We have to see each other for our whole person. When heinous and horrible acts are committed with cultural symbols or religious symbols, we don’t hold an entire culture accountable for that. We hold the individuals responsible for that. So I actually, earnestly, want my friends in government to hear that message. I want them to think about what is happening on campus across Canada—it’s not a threat; it’s an opportunity.

I look at two stories, and I will end with this from home, from the University of Ottawa. In the first story, I’m going to be protecting the student’s identity because she fears reprisal. We’re going to call her Miriam, for argument’s sake. Miriam is an arts major, a Palestinian student. She recounted to me an instance where a colleague in her class, who had served in the Israeli military—serving in any military is an honourable thing—had said in class that he believed every Gazan needed to be eliminated for the goal of peace to be achieved. She was stunned, absolutely stunned—mouth-dropped-open stunned. The gentlemen identified himself as a professional sniper and talked openly about how he believed that what he was doing was contributing to the cause of peace. She was stunned. She filed a formal complaint, and the response of the human rights office, sadly, at the university was to say, “Do you need counselling?” Do you need counselling?

Again, our classrooms should be places of vigorous debate where people of different perspectives should be able to hold forth, but the kind of open anti-Palestinian racism—like open anti-Semitism, open Islamophobia—open forms of hatred that I am seeing on our campuses, where so many neighbours are falling down these wells of hatred, we have to provide the mental health resources and training to the campuses so they can respond. If we don’t do that, what we don’t respond to—which seems uncomfortable in a class on one day—could be a lethal event that we respond to later, and, frankly, we saddle the first responders who are there with the trauma of having to witness that, not only the people who live through it.

I also want to talk about Dr. Yipeng Ge, who has been a public advocate, who is a medical resident at the University of Ottawa who is suspended for his social media posting on Palestinian human rights—suspended. He was not given the grounds for his suspension for a week and a half, he was just told that he was not to go to the medical school anymore. This is a medical professional who has travelled the world, worked in refugee camps, seen horrible things, helped people in incredibly difficult circumstances, given an arbitrary suspension.

When Dr. Ge approached us, I simply listened, I tried to get a sense of how the university was dealing with the matter and I said to him, “What do you want from me?” He said, “Joel, I would love it if you would engage the university, love it if you would talk to them.” I said, “Sure. The University of Ottawa are my friends. We work together all the time.” I’m sad to say that there has been no public apology offered to Dr. Ge. There has been no public comprehensive investigation. He has decided—and this is really one of the more shameful things I can remember in recent history, at a very difficult time—not to go back to the University of Ottawa, even though his suspension has been lifted and he’s allowed to, because he feels like his integrity has been questioned and he feels like the people responsible for castigating him for his beliefs have not been held accountable.

I would welcome the government’s interest in making sure that there are student supports, that we do hold campuses accountable. I think it’s worthy. I do see the rise of hatred on our campuses and I want to be part of the solution to deal with it, but we can’t do this in an arbitrary manner and we have to make sure that the resources are available at a local level that people can seek help.

Again, I just want to be as clear as I end: I am not saying that the way we deal with this is that we label people as being hateful and we segregate them and we marginalize them. No—I am actually encouraging a strategy of dialogue and conflict resolution here, modelling what we want to see between countries in the world at a local level through the campuses. The most skilled conflict resolvers, mediators, that I’ve met at a campus level do precisely this all the time, but we ask them to do a lot with very little budget. I’ll end with that.

I’ll say that the bill is coming to the House at a very opportune time, fortuitous time, but I think its focus needs to be ensuring that you at least meet the demands of the blue-ribbon panel—the $2.5 billion—and that we have some trust and collaboration with our campus partners. When we feel they have misstepped and they haven’t done their due diligence, as I think is the case with Dr. Ge, then we make sure that the province does insist that due process is followed at the campus level. I thank you for your attention.

Good morning, everyone. I’ll be brief. I know you don’t believe me—

There are three things that this bill does. The one that I can see that has—

You have the tools available already, but you’re putting more demands and giving yourself more power in relation to universities and colleges. All of us in this building are against all forms of hate: anti-Semitism, Islamophobia, transphobia. We’re all there. We did have tools inside government in 2018 in the Anti-Racism Directorate to address all of those things, but this government cut them all.

This doesn’t happen very often. It’s not very often that I agree with the Premier of this province, but I want to tell you why or tell you the thing that the Premier said with regard to this bill: “It’s really up to the dean to govern his own university. I think we shouldn’t get involved in that, that’s my personal opinion. Like I said, there’s a lot of tools ministers have that they don’t use. It’s up to the people, that’s what we believe in.” And I agree.

To actually make programs and then not provide the support that is needed to make those programs that you say are important work is not really doing a heck of a lot. That’s why this bill is hard to support.

I was part of a government—I worked for a Premier who put a focus on post-secondary education. Campuses expanded. We made sure more people had access to post-secondary education, like first generation, and then programs later to add grants and supports for people of very low income to be able to get an opportunity.

I’m not going take any lessons from you. So your demand of knowing what I’m going to say or what I’m going to do, I’m not going to buy that. You guys haven’t done what you’re supposed to do.

Post-secondary education is not just fun and good, it’s actually about the economy. It’s actually about having the most highly trained, highly skilled workforce. It’s the best thing for our economy. To not actually ensure that we can keep our workforce stable, that we have enough people to teach our young people the things that they need to learn, the skills that they need to build, it just doesn’t make economic sense.

For a government that talks about expanding the economy and about growing, I cannot believe the lack of support this government has for post-secondary education.

I want to thank the member opposite for his remarks. Listening to them, I was thinking of some of the students that I’ve met back home who have really found it tough to make ends meet. Under the leadership of Premier Ford, we’ve seen the government cut and freeze tuition by 10%, a policy that has saved students more than $760 million annually. I know the government proposes to build on this historic action by regulating ancillary fees to make sure that tuition remains affordable for students. So I just want to see if the member opposite will support the bill regarding textbook costs to help students make informed financial decisions.

Absolutely. And something I used to say when I was a union rep representing sessionals—and the member for Thunder Bay–Superior North has been a sessional professor; the member for Spadina–Fort York has; you have a lot of experience in this House, Speaker—is that there’s an alarming amount of people that are living hand to mouth actually doing the work of working with students directly, and it’s not correct. If we’re doing that also with our counselling support services, we’re really selling ourselves short.

So again, I mentioned in my remarks a program called Counselling Connect that we’ve initiated in Ottawa, which I think could be grown across the province of Ontario and that could help our campuses deal with the wait-lists and the backlogs, because we don’t want someone suffering on a wait-list when we could be helping them.

I agree with my colleague that ministerial directives are being contemplated when we aren’t properly funding the campus programs. But I also think the minister does—and she has said so—have a responsibility to ensure that the province wants people to feel safe at work and at school, for sure. I noted in my comments instances where I do believe the campus has fallen short. Dr. Yipeng Ge’s case, I think, is a real travesty, that that incredibly talented mind is not going be part of the University of Ottawa community anymore.

So again, I would like a more collaborative approach. I do think the minister has an important responsibility, but we can’t do it on the cheap. We have to make sure it’s well resourced.

I want to thank the member from Ottawa Centre for your words.

There are a few things: We know that the resources aren’t there to support the mental health of students when they’re in crisis. We also know that campuses are places of very lively debate, and sometimes very intense debate. You spoke a bit about creating opportunities for dialogue.

What I see in this bill is that the minister is actually going to have unilateral powers to intervene, which makes me very uncomfortable. But there is a real need to have fora where students and professors can talk about really difficult issues and bring the temperature down at the same time. Can you speak to that, please?

To the member from Ottawa Centre: This government believes that all students in Ontario deserve to learn in a healthy, safe and respectful environment. Our post-secondary institutions have a responsibility to provide a safe and supportive learning environment. When they fail to protect students, we end up with scenarios the likes of which we heard about first-hand in the standing committee—situations where students no longer feel safe to return to campus and finish their studies.

Will the member opposite support measures in Bill 166 to ensure institutions are inclusive and safe environments where students can complete their studies?

Thank you to my colleague the member for Ottawa Centre for his remarks. He spoke about the financial crisis that is facing our post-secondary sector and the consequences for teaching faculty. Many of those faculty positions are filled by contract faculty who have very precarious job security—no job security, actually—very precarious employment, lack of benefits etc.

One of the things that we heard in committee is the same thing is happening in the mental health services offices on campus, the same thing is happening in the equity and diversity and inclusion offices on campus. They are terribly understaffed because universities and colleges don’t have the resources. Has the member been hearing that in his community as well?

It is now time for questions.

I guess what I would say to the member is, I think tuition reductions and freezes are fine, but, if on the other hand, the funding envelope coming into the university intensifies the financial crisis on campus, that ultimately doesn’t serve anybody.

If you can’t afford to have an educator in front of a classroom of 20 for a small seminar—instead, it has to be 42—what is that educator likely to do? Are they going to be testing people’s writing skills, deliberative skills, debating skills, or are they going to be doing multiple-choice tests? Because, ultimately, that’s all you manage when the school’s funding is being cut because of the tuition revenue coming down.

I look at other countries around the world. I look at a great country like Germany. This is country where, if you meet the standards, you can study as an international student there for free at over 200 universities, paying modest ancillary fees. What do they get from that, one would ask, if you were a German citizen paying taxes? They get the benefit of people coming from all over the world to enrich the debate at that campus.

I actually see Ontario going in the opposite direction. We are using international students, often, as revenue sources, as cash cows—what many of them tell me—at a time when the funding to our campuses is cut off.

I salute the member’s interest in keeping the costs for students low, but we can’t do that at the expense of finances for the campus, which is what’s happening now.

Let me just be a lot more specific. Saint Paul University, which is an independent campus at the University of Ottawa, which is in Ottawa Centre, they do what they can with what they have. One of the programs they have, which helps our mental health strategy for the city, their psychotherapy students participate in offering people in need of free or pay-what-you-can counselling sessions overseen by a trained professional. That’s them maximizing their budget, collaboratively, doing whatever they can to help people in distress.

So when people come through our constituency, we have areas of referral: Counselling Connect, which I’ve already talked about; workplace sites, if there is one; an employee wellness program, where there is one; or the Saint Paul campus, playing a huge role for the city. That’s collaborative. I would invite the minister to be as collaborative in this bill.

There was a moment a little over a decade ago—if I have my calendar in my mind correct—when Ontario decided to phase out coal-fired electricity. That was critically important. That was a decision that made the air cleaner for our kids, that made huge strides for Ontario in its climate responsibilities. I salute it, even though it was done by a government that has a different political shade than mine. It was the right move. Was it easy? According to people I know who served at that time, no, it wasn’t easy. Did it involve a lot of discussion, planning, industrial policy, thinking through the impact on businesses and consumers? Absolutely it did, but it was a decision that was taken.

And now, when we’re faced with the really important responsibility of deciding how the energy needs for Ontario are going to be met in the next 10, 20 or 30 years, what are we doing with this bill in this House? We are passing a specific piece of legislation to overturn a decision made by an independent regulator of this House, the Ontario Energy Board. Not a partisan organization, a research-based, adjunct entity of this House that is obliged to give us the right advice—and the energy partners in the sector—on what we do to make sure we do right by the energy needs of the province. And when we’re living in a time of such climate chaos, that advice could not be more important.

I’m sure everybody did the same this morning when you got up and you checked the news on your phones. You saw the news from the west end of this country, the wildfires that are blazing. The member from Thunder Bay–Superior North has talked about the woodland firefighters who are putting themselves in harm’s way. They did it last summer and—are they already doing it now? They are in the middle of prepping for it right now.

My wife’s family lives in Calgary, Speaker. We are planning—we hope—a family reunion this summer where we can finally get together with some of her cousins from interior BC and from Calgary. But we’re booking cancellation insurance on those plane tickets, believe me, because it’s highly possible that by the time later July comes around, the air will be so thick with smoke that it will be impossible, particularly for the elders in our family, to safely have this family meeting. And we’re just one anecdote in a larger scenario here, Speaker, but we’re living in a time where climate chaos has real impact on people’s lives.

So the decision the Ontario Energy Board made—for the record, it’s been stated a number of times; I’ll just repeat it here: The Ontario Energy Board told Enbridge, which holds the monopoly on the distribution of gas in the province of Ontario, that they needed to pay for the costs of all the infrastructure for new home developments up front. They gave that advice because they believed the gas sector was being unduly subsidized at a time when more climate-friendly options—heat pump and geothermal installations—were making huge inroads. The costs of these technologies are coming down, and the Ontario Energy Board looked at the evidence—10,000 pages of documents, extensive consultations, including housing providers, subject-matter experts—and they rendered the opinion, two of the three adjudicators on that board rendered the opinion that it was not feasible to tell Enbridge that they could continue to expect a subsidy from the province of Ontario for a particular kind of home heating fuel. If people wanted to choose gas for their homes, they could. If the developer community wanted to install it in those homes, they could. But the province of Ontario would not be on the hook for a significant subsidy to a highly profitable energy company whose CEO made $19 million last year at a time of climate chaos.

My friend the Minister of Energy over there has installed, as I understood it from debate, a heat pump in his home. The PA, my neighbour from Glengarry–Prescott–Russell, a great riding where I grew up, has done the same thing for his home. I would like to see every single Ontarian, whether they live as a renter in an apartment building or whether they have their own home of any type, have the same options that the members of the government have shown through their own leadership. And we do have—we’re groping towards it; we’re inching towards it—the Independent Electricity System Operator of Ontario is offering some subsidies, modest as they are, to low-income Ontarians so they can start disconnecting from fossil fuel-based heating and cooling systems to electrical or geothermal systems.

But we’re nowhere near the ambition of the province of Prince Edward Island, which is at the moment run by Conservatives. In that House, in Prince Edward Island, they set the objective much larger than we have here. They have, if I understood the Premier’s latest comments correctly—35% of the homeowners and residents in that province had made the switch to heat pumps, because if you make less than $100,000 a year and if your home is worth less than $400,000, the province will buy you a heat pump. And I believe it’s a similar strategy for the multi-level apartment buildings in the bigger communities like Charlottetown. I mean, that’s an ambitious strategy.

I look at the city of Vancouver. The city of Vancouver decided to take the choice that for new hookups for new apartment buildings they were going to require that it not be automatically going to their monopoly natural gas holder, Fortis, in that province. They were going to say, “No. We see our climate obligations for what they are. We are going to insist that new hookups be electrical. You’re not going to have a subsidy.”

But for some reason, here in Ontario, we are absolutely determined to do Enbridge a favour, and I don’t understand why. Over the last four years, profits for the fossil fuel industry, oil and gas, are up 1,000%. And have those companies done anything to help consumers at the pump or at their homes for their heating costs, their transportation costs? Have they paid any of that forward? Absolutely not. The only instances where they have been compelled to pay that forward are in countries that have made conscious policy decisions.

Let me just cite another one: A Conservative government in England brought in a windfall profits tax, and with that windfall profits tax, they are generating billions in revenue to make life more affordable in England—a Conservative government. But what are we doing with this bill before the House here? Will Enbridge be required to make energy costs more affordable? No. Will Enbridge be required, as they say they are, by law to hit certain targets in the transition to cleaner heating and cooling options in Ontario? No. We’re essentially saying we’re going to continue the regime we have.

The primary reason I got into this job, Speaker, when my family and I decided to make the leap back in 2017, of all the issues—they are all important, but ensuring that there was a viable future for our children was the first one. When I look at independent research organizations that look at the decisions made by this government on this particular matter with Enbridge and reversing the OEB decision, or the decision to embrace gas-fired electrical as we refurbish nuclear stock, this is going to absolutely impact our ability to deliver on our climate obligations in the province of Ontario.

I honestly don’t understand why we’re making that decision, except for the fact that Enbridge likes it; except for the fact that the lobbyists who circulate in this building for Enbridge are well paid, I’m sure articulate and make all the right short-term calls to help this minister deal with the problem, the problem being that people need heating and cooling options. They have an affordability crisis, and half the people in our country—that was the last comment I remember hearing from my federal leader, Jagmeet Singh: Half the people in this country are living from paycheque to paycheque. One in seven kids are still going to school hungry in Canada. We do have a huge problem. In that reality, I don’t understand why we are making life easier for Enbridge.

I’ve also noticed that for months, my friends in government are very interested in having a debate about the federal price on carbon. That has been a big focus for them as they deal with the affordability crisis. But what I honestly don’t understand—and I had to seek out a consultation with environmental experts at home—is how it becomes the only thing in the environmental policy file to talk about. It takes up all the space: the federal levy on carbon, the provincial carbon tax that we have because we decided to get rid of the cap-and-trade initiatives of the previous government. This has taken up all the space.

I went back home and had a specific consultation with environmental leaders back home who do a number of different things I’ll talk about in a minute. I asked them, “Help me out. Is this the only thing worth talking about with environmental policy right now, given the obligations we have?” We talked specifically about the Ontario Energy Board’s December 21, 2023, decision. They said, “No. Absolutely, Joel, it’s not.” That OEB decision was the first that they had seen that actually reckoned with the evidence of saying, “This is where we have to get to by 2030 in our climate emissions; this is where we’re going, now that we’re embracing gas-fired electrical,” and the two didn’t square.

I talked to my landlord back home, the Centretown Citizens Ottawa Corp. The biggest non-profit houser in Ontario is in Ottawa, my landlord at 109 Catherine Street. Sarah Button, who’s their ED, said to me, “Joel, one thing we could do is bring back advantageous financing options for co-ops like ourselves, for non-profits like ourselves, for housing.” With that advantageous financing—which Ontario could do, because we regulate credit unions—we could get back into the business of building the kinds of sustainable, environmental homes that people want to live in.

My office sits at Beaver Barracks. People know Ottawa; it’s an old military base that was transformed into a series of residential properties powered, heated and cooled by geothermal sources. It is absolutely even heat and even cool when you’re in there. Come visit us any time if you’d like to sample it yourself. It’s wonderful. We don’t have a big space, but it’s a great place for residents to interact with us.

The folks in the buildings all around us really appreciate their living conditions, too. But it required a significant investment by CCOC on the infrastructure side. They took on a large debt obligation, because they didn’t get the help they needed from the federal or provincial governments. They got some, but not enough. Sarah Button said to me, “Joel, can you imagine what we could do for environmentally conscious housing if there was an active partner at Queen’s Park and an active partner at the federal government?”

Just in case my colleagues in government think I’m only holding them to account, let me just say clearly for the record that the federal housing strategy, the 10-year housing strategy, insofar as how it has done its job to provide affordable, sustainable housing, has met 3% of its target. Those 3% of the homes built under the strategy five years in are 30% of the residents’ income. We are subsidizing highly profitable corporate landlords to build housing that people can’t afford at the federal level. Just in case the government thinks I’m only having concerns about them, I have massive concerns with how the federal government has fallen short of its obligations—some changes lately, but that’s the reality.

But back to Enbridge. If you think about the amount of money we are shovelling to Enbridge, and you think about what we could use it for—I think about a subject near and dear to my heart: public transit. Talk to a transit user in the city of Ottawa, and you will get a look back of massive consternation. We, through this bill, are going to be offering a subsidy to Enbridge of billions of dollars. But our city right now, in this year, is 74,000 service hours less with the buses we have on the road, bringing people around to where they need to go because of cuts from Queen’s Park.

The latest new deal we signed with the government which has some stuff in there that we could work with on community safety, security, emergency housing. There is absolutely a goose egg for transit. There’s nothing for transit.

And hey, I’m not sure what the Premier is thinking. Maybe his view is that everybody works for the federal government, has a wonderful salary with benefits, and that’s what Ottawa is. That is not—some people in our city meet that description, but in Ottawa Centre, we have the highest number of rooming houses in Ottawa. A rooming house is a multi-unit building where people rent out a room. Conditions are often squalor in many of these buildings that I’ve had occasion to visit neighbours in. We have a lot of deep poverty in Ottawa Centre too. What do those people rely on to get around? Transit.

So I think if we were to propose a climate solution, following the advice we’ve given to this government, through all levels of this bill, it makes a lot more sense—excepting the fact that the OEB made a decision that upset Enbridge, certainly. But it set us on track, were we to have followed it, to do a lot more by the climate. Ottawa has been the recipient of some significant weather emergencies. We’ve had tornados rip through the west end of our community. We’ve had floods on the east and west. We’ve had a historic derecho that happened literally during the provincial election where all of us were competing for our seats. We had to shut down our campaign for two days so we could check in on neighbours who had power lines falling across their verandas or their apartment buildings by phone and signalling to emergency services where there were emergencies—like this is the world we’re living in. We’re having more and more significant weather events, and the decisions we make on the big files—the big files being housing, transportation and this one, energy—set the pattern for everything else.

Some 45% of the emissions in the city of Ottawa come from buildings, come from housing. When I think about one in particular, I’ve got a great relationship with many of the residents in the apartment buildings all over the downtown. But I think of one in particular, on McLeod Street, the Golden Triangle area of Ottawa Centre. If you walk up to McLeod—it’s a community housing building—in the dead winter in January, you will see at the top of the building, the windows are wide open. Ottawa winter; the windows are wide open. Why are they wide open? Because literally the families and the people living in those units, because of the nature of the heating system they have, which works in one direction only: on 100%—they’re sweltering. They might as well be living in a sauna. They find mould all over their units, because of the amount of condensation that drips into their homes.

If you talk to Ottawa Community Housing, you talk to people like Stéphane Giguère, the executive director or Brian Billings who is the properties manager. They shrug their shoulders, like “Joel, we’re doing our very best, but there’s no magic pot of money for us to be able to refurbish our buildings and to embrace the technologies that are becoming more and more affordable right now.” So windows are left wide open in the middle of January. And we are paying, the province is paying—as we direct subsidies to municipalities for community housing, because they are unsustainable—to have heat escape into the air. Oil boilers in these buildings makes absolutely no sense.

So instead of giving a multi-billion dollar gift to Enbridge and continuing that regime, why wouldn’t we consider doing what we ran on in the last provincial election and the NDP proposed, which is a significant retrofit program for community housing and apartment buildings right across the whole province, where we would make a big upfront investment, create a lot of jobs for skilled trades workers, create jobs for manufacturers of heat-efficient windows and heating in cooling units? We could make sure that people don’t live in a sauna in the winter if they live in community housing. We could spend the people’s money wisely, but instead, no, we’re not doing that. We’re giving a gift to Enbridge.

Now, Enbridge has also said that they want to be part of the energy transition, they see the value of homes making this shift towards electrification or geothermal sources of heating and cooling. The words are nice, and the anecdotes that you see every now and again in the Enbridge brochures are great, but, ultimately, this is a company that has a lot of influence in this province. This is a company that has a monopoly agreement in the province for the transmission and distribution of gas. We here in this House get to sell the rules by which they exercise that monopoly right.

I want to believe that if a Conservative government in Prince Edward Island can undergo a revolution in the heating and cooling of homes there, we can do it here. I want to believe that if a Conservative government in England can say to energy giants like Enbridge or other oil companies that, “Hey, you’ve been doing fantastically well. Time for you to share some of that wealth with the societies in which you live so people can get access to the things they need”—that makes a lot sense, but I don’t see that in this bill.

What I see in this bill is continuing a very favourable playing ground for Enbridge. I didn’t get elected in this House to work for Enbridge; I got elected to work for the people of Ottawa Centre. All of us have our responsibility to look our residents in the eyes and say in this moment we made the right climate decisions, and that involves voting no to this bill.

Further questions?

Response?

Is it the pleasure of the House that the motion carry? The motion is carried.

Ms. Dunlop has moved third reading of Bill 166, An Act to amend the Ministry of Training, Colleges and Universities Act. Is it the pleasure of the House that the motion carry?

Interjection: On division.

Be it resolved that the bill do now pass and be entitled as in the motion.

Third reading agreed to.

Resuming the debate adjourned on May 8, 2024, on the motion for third reading of the following bill:

Bill 165, An Act to amend the Ontario Energy Board Act, 1998 respecting certain Board proceedings and related matters / Projet de loi 165, Loi modifiant la Loi de 1998 sur la Commission de l’énergie de l’Ontario en ce qui concerne certaines instances dont la Commission est saisie et des questions connexes.

I want to take you back to standing committee again when we were deliberating on Bill 166. We heard disturbing accounts from students who lost lab positions, had members of their families threatened and who were physically assaulted on the basis of their race or ethnicity. We also heard from the students that their institutions did nothing, absolutely nothing, to help them or hold their perpetrators accountable. One said that it was futile to report anything since nothing would be done if they did.

To the member from Ottawa Centre, this legislation provides provisions to address the concerns that these students expressed. I hope you’ll join me—

To my colleague the member for Ottawa Centre: One of the things that we heard at committee is that there are two basic essentials for policies to be effective. One is the direct engagement and involvement of those who are directly affected by a policy, to be involved in the development of that policy, and the second is the resources to operationalize a policy, to implement it. I wondered if the member sees either of those two criteria included in the bill.

I move that the question now be put.

It is now time for questions and answers.

I want to thank the member for Ottawa Centre for his impassioned speech. I certainly understand where he’s coming from, but I know in my community there is a development called Little River Acres. It was, I’ll call it, a modern development in the 1970s, and none of the homes were built with natural gas, and, boy, are they regretting that decision today, because the cost to power these homes is significant through electric heating and cooling.

I know that the Keeping Energy Costs Down Act speaks not just to my constituents, who need affordability at their homes, but all Ontarians. By reversing the Ontario Energy Board decision, we’re saving families tens of thousands of dollars on the price of a new home and will save, down the road, heating and cooling costs for those people like my constituents at Little River Acres.

So I ask the opposition why their party is trying to make housing more expensive than it already is rather than working with the government to keep the cost of housing affordable down, not just on the capital but on the operating side too.

I guess to properly answer the member’s question I’d ask, through a head nod, are those electrical systems electrical baseboards or heat pumps?

Interjection.

Buying into this market right now, the electrification of heating and cooling right now, is getting more and more affordable, and what will cost us a lot is stranded assets of natural gas-heated communities that may not even be relevant 20 or 30 years from now.