I’ve got a few things I want to talk about in this budget—

I have some really great things to talk about in the budget, but I want to address a couple of things the member just said. Two facts—I think all we really need to do is talk about two facts. Health spending when we were elected was $60 billion annually. Today it’s over $80 billion. We’ve had a 6%—higher than inflation—year-over-year increase in health spending. Let’s just put a pin in that for a moment.

Then we can talk about education as well. When we were elected, the budget was $23.6 billion; today, it’s $28.6 billion. That is a $5-billion increase. That’s almost $1 billion a year that the education budget—there are 3,000 more teachers; there are 7,500 more educational workers. What they have suggested is completely opposite than what the facts outline.

Speaker, I can also tell you that our government continues to move ahead with the economy, not just the $5 billion more that’s spent in education since we were elected, not just the $20 billion more that’s been spent in health—each year, $20 billion, Speaker. This is what we’ve added up to. And all of that came as a result of the fact that when we got elected, the revenue in Ontario was $150 billion; today the revenue in Ontario is $214 billion. It is a $64-billion increase in revenue. Why? Because we lowered taxes in the province of Ontario, and that made 700,000 new people working in the province of Ontario—700,000 new taxpayers, 85,000 new businesses last year alone. Those businesses and those 700,000 workers are all paying taxes for the first time in Ontario. That’s why our revenue has gone from $150 billion to $214 billion, which allows us to spend $20 billion more in health care spending and allows us to spend $5 billion more since the election.

We are going to continue—look to just last month alone. If you want more facts, last month alone, 25,000 people were added to the job rolls in Ontario; 5,800 in manufacturing. We’re back now to where we were in manufacturing before the Liberals, backed by the NDP, gutted the manufacturing sector and we lost 300,000 jobs. That’s what’s happening. It’s because we’ve secured $43 billion in new auto investments, $3 billion in life sciences, tens of billions of dollars in tech. That’s what’s happening, and this budget 2024 ensures that we continue to build on that momentum and attract more of these job-creating investments.

Some really exciting news in the budget is the new Barrie Regional Innovation Centre. It’s a RIC, as we call it. In the budget, we announced $1 million a year over three years to establish a brand new regional information centre in Barrie. Now we have 17 of these RICs across Ontario, and they ensure that innovators and entrepreneurs have all the tools they need in front of them to succeed. These RICs will help our entrepreneurs protect and commercialize their intellectual property, attract talent, attract customers and attract capital. This is what will happen now in Barrie with this brand new, million-dollar-a-year regional innovation centre that 17 communities here in Ontario already have.

Speaker, we are North America’s second-largest tech cluster. We are growing 350% faster than Silicon Valley. Just last July, in a 48-hour period, we had 10,000 California tech workers flee California and apply for visas here in Ontario—10,000 in 48 hours. That’s the attraction that we have here in Ontario. We also saw 11,300 self-employed jobs created just in the province of Ontario. That’s the kind of activity that’s happening here.

Let me turn to Invest Ontario, our investment agency, our investment arm of the province of Ontario. In the budget, you’ll see an additional $100 million to the Invest Ontario Fund, which brings the total fund to $600 million. They have been very pivotal in the successes, in landing our investments in advanced manufacturing, in automotive, life sciences and the tech sectors.

Since its inception, Invest Ontario has secured over $2.4 billion in investments and created over 2,600 jobs. They have helped land these important auto investments, like Dana, a $60-million investment that landed in Cambridge and Oakville, and they’re creating thousands of good-paying jobs through Invest Ontario.

Just yesterday, of course, Invest Ontario was with us to welcome Asahi Kasei’s $1.6-billion investment to build an EV separator plant in Port Colborne. That’s what’s happening in Ontario because of the kind of incentives and the kind of action that are built into this budget 2024. Asahi Kasei’s $1.6-billion investment is a game-changer for the people of Ontario.

It’s almost that we’ve used that word too much, because that is actually what’s happened: $43 billion has landed here in Ontario in four years. We’ve stood here and said, “That’s a game-changer,” because these are. In a community like Port Colborne, they have been hit hard by the Liberals’ slashing of the manufacturing sector in Ontario—300,000 jobs lost. We drove through Port Colborne yesterday and saw where a lot of those businesses used to be. The person who was one of the people who are assembling the land in Port Colborne showed us: “Well, this is where that company used to be. This is where that manufacturing used to be. This is where that paper mill used to be.” It was shocking to see.

This investment of $1.6 billion is the single largest investment in the history of Port Colborne, and it’s because we put the economic climate together: lower taxes, lower red tape, lower electricity rates, all of these things. All of the things that we’ve done are why companies like Asahi Kasei are now investing $1.6 billion. They chose Ontario because they know we have everything here in our boundaries to succeed: this dependable supply chain that we’ve shown them, access to the best talent in the world, an abundance of clean energy. We have green steel—just so much more for them to be able to access.

I mentioned the $43 billion. I might have mentioned that a few times in this Legislature.