Pursuant to standing order 67, I am now required to put the question.

Mr. Thanigasalam has moved second reading of Bill 174, An Act to authorize the expenditure of certain amounts for the fiscal year ending March 31, 2024. Is it the pleasure of the House that the motion carry?

All those in favour of the motion will please say “aye.”

All those opposed to the motion will please say “nay.”

In my opinion, the ayes have it.

Interjection: On division.

Second reading agreed to.

Ms. Dunlop, on behalf of Ms. Mulroney, moved third reading of the following bill:

Bill 174, An Act to authorize the expenditure of certain amounts for the fiscal year ending March 31, 2024 / Projet de loi 174, Loi autorisant l’utilisation de certaines sommes pour l’exercice se terminant le 31 mars 2024.

Ms. Dunlop has moved third reading of Bill 174, An Act to authorize the expenditure of certain amounts for the fiscal year ending March 31, 2024. Is it the pleasure of the House that the motion carry?

All those in favour of the motion will please say “aye.”

All those opposed to the motion will please say “nay.”

In my opinion, the ayes have it.

Interjection: On division.

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

Third reading agreed to.

Mr. Rakocevic moved second reading of the following bill:

Bill 167, An Act to proclaim Orthodox Christian Week / Projet de loi 167, Loi proclamant la Semaine des chrétiens orthodoxes.

Now, the member scoffs, he laughs, but those are the facts, Madam Speaker.

Long-term-care beds—the member from Mississauga–Lakeshore was talking about more long-term-care beds being built in his riding alone than in 11 years under the previous Liberal government. I can say the same thing in my riding and many of my colleagues on both sides of the House can say the same thing.

We have lowered taxes. We’ve eliminated fees. We’re seeing revenues grow and we’re investing in Ontario, and it’s working.

Oh, my gosh.

It’s a pleasure to stand in the Legislature and pick up where the members from the NDP finished off and also thank my colleague the member from Mississauga–Lakeshore, the parliamentary assistant, who spoke for almost an hour this afternoon about the Supply Act motion and all of the investments that our government is making—$82 billion in health care.

And I thank the two members from the Sudbury area, as well, from the NDP, who talked for an hour and talked about what they saw or didn’t see in the Supply Act. They weren’t very well coordinated in their remarks today though, I’ve got to say. The member from Sudbury talked about the fact that no nurses want to work in the province, and the member from Nickel Belt talked about the fact that nurses want to work but they can’t get jobs. So they were not coordinated in their messaging, which is pretty typical for the NDP these days. They kind of spin around all over the place. But anyway, I digress.

And I do want to welcome the folks who are here for the Orthodox Christian private member’s bill that Mr. Rakocevic is going to be debating along with some of my colleagues. Stay tuned; the main event is about five minutes away. That’s it. We’ll get to that.

I do want to just take issue with a couple of things that were mentioned. I know the labour critic for the NDP was talking about Bill 124, and that horse has left the barn. We’re not debating that anymore. But what I can tell you: In some of the remarks that he made, he forgets the fact—and I moved to Ontario in the 1990s; in 1992, as a matter of fact. That was about 30-some years ago now. I was a new resident to Ontario, and Premier Bob Rae introduced the social contract. It was the only time the NDP have ever been the government of Ontario, and those in the labour movement call that legacy that Bob Rae and the NDP left a legacy of betrayal. That is what that was, and it was one of the largest wage rollbacks in Ontario’s history. But I digress.

I’m going to move to what we’re doing to make sure we have the funding that we need to invest in important participants in our province’s economy and our health care system. We have more nurses working in Ontario now than at any time in our history, and we have more nurses being trained in our province than at any time in our history—30,000 nurses are being trained, hundreds of new doctors are being trained in our province. When the Liberals and the NDP were teaming up, for a long period of time, they had a cap on the number of doctor spaces available. That’s why we’re in the position that we’re in today.

I just want to go back to one more thing: When the NDP were the government of Ontario, the budget for the province was $53 billion or so, in that area. Since we have formed government, since Doug Ford and the PCs have formed government in Ontario, we have increased revenues in the province by $52 billion. And how did we do that, Madam Speaker? Well, we didn’t do it by raising taxes. As a matter of fact, we have lowered taxes in the province: lowered income taxes, cut carbon taxes, cut the gasoline tax. The gasoline tax cut is one of the largest tax cuts in our province’s history. We have cut red tape, saving businesses $8 billion to $9 billion a year in the cost of doing business. As a result of cutting taxes and cutting fees, we have seen revenues jump from about $152 billion a year to $204 billion, which has allowed us to ensure that we have the services that we need in our province going forward.

Now, what did the Liberals and NDP do? Well, they took a different route. They raised taxes every opportunity that they had.

Madam Speaker, we have brought stability to our energy sector after 15 dark years under the previous Liberal government, supported by the NDP. As a result, we now have—now, keep in mind, when these guys were in charge, 300,000 jobs left our province—800,000 manufacturing jobs in our province today that weren’t here when we formed government six years ago.

Interjection.

Further debate?

It is my pleasure to put a few words on the record about the Supply Act, which basically looks at how the government spent the money that they had. I will focus on the $82 billion that the government had to spend on our health care system.

The first thing I want to talk to you about is primary care. Primary care is basically the key that opens the door to the rest of the health care system. You need to have a primary care provider to be referred to a specialist. You need a primary care provider to be referred to a surgeon, to be referred to other parts of the health care system. But for 2.3 million Ontarians now, they do not have access.

And yet, we have here in Ontario interdisciplinary primary health care organizations that are willing to help, that are ready to help, that would love nothing more than to take the thousands and thousands of Ontarians on their wait-list and give them access to primary care so that those people get the health promotion they need to stay healthy, get the disease prevention they need to control their disease, get the chronic disease management that they need, get the mental health services that they need right here, right now, in Ontario.

We have 111 members of the Alliance for Healthier Communities. Those members are community health centres. They are nurse practitioner-led clinics. They are Indigenous primary health care organizations. They are community-governed family health teams. They all have something in common: Their family physicians work with a team of other people. Usually the team will have nurse practitioners, nurses and RPNs. They would have somebody dealing with mental health, either a social worker or a psychologist. They would have people dealing with health issues, usually a nutritionist or dietitian. They would have a health promoter. They would have a team—a medical secretary etc.—that works to provide primary care.

Right now in Ontario, the Ontario College of Family Physicians has gone all over the province to sound the alarm bells. We cannot continue the way we are going. We were at 2.2 million when they came—we’re now at 2.3 million Ontarians without access, and by the end of next year, we will double those amounts, with close to five million Ontarians. A million Ontarians right here in Toronto won’t have access to primary care, and yet you have sitting on the desk of the Minister of Health a list of nurse practitioner-led clinics that want—all they need is a little bit more money to hire one more nurse practitioner, to hire one more nurse, to hire a dietitian, and they would be able to take on more patients.

I can speak for the nurse practitioner-led clinic in Capreol. Capreol is part of my riding in Nickel Belt, where 40,000 people do not have access to primary care. I live in northern rural Ontario, and do you know what, Speaker? We have underemployed nurse practitioners who would love nothing more than to get a job at a nurse practitioner-led clinic in a community health centre and take on hundreds of people who need their help. It is so bad that—the specific nurse practitioner-led clinic I’m talking about in Capreol had a maternity leave. During the maternity leave, a nurse practitioner came and did the maternity leave. They were able to keep her a little bit longer because they used money that was left over from COVID to keep her, and they were hoping that—they’ve been asking for more funding for nurse practitioners for years and years. I should have counted how many letters and how many requests for funding I have hand-delivered to the Minister of Health for this one particular nurse practitioner-led clinic. And yet, it is radio silence. We have solutions right there.

Do you know what’s happening now, Speaker? Lise has opened a private clinic for nurse practitioners. She bills people who come to see her. She doesn’t want to do this; she wants her job. She was excellent, actually. She worked at the nurse practitioner-led clinic in Capreol until they did not have enough money to keep her. Now there are hundreds of patients who are paying to see her, because this is the only way that they can gain access. This is wrong. It doesn’t have to be like this. We’re not talking about billions of dollars—we’re talking about hundreds of thousands of dollars more to nurse practitioner-led clinics, to community health centres, to Indigenous primary health care teams, and thousands and thousands of people would gain access to primary care.

We know what happens when people don’t have access to primary care. None of us wants to sit in an emergency room for hours and hours on end. So we wait, so we wait, so we wait, until we are so sick that we haven’t got a choice anymore.

And then, rather than being diagnosed with stage 1 cancer, you’re diagnosed with stage 3 or 4, which—for a lot of cancers, we have the treatment for you, we will treat you, we will try to gain you your life back, but it will cost the health care system hundreds of thousands of dollars for that treatment. All of this could have been avoided—and we’re talking for one person. The treatment for stage 4 cancer, the treatments for stage 3 and stage 4 breast cancers are in the hundreds of thousands—you’re talking half a million dollars per client. Are they worth it? Yes, absolutely. We have the technology. We have the knowledge. We know how to help people. But all of this could have been prevented had people had access to primary care. All of this could have been prevented if the hundreds of requests for funding that sit on the Minister of Health’s desk would have been answered. For the money we spend on treating people once they’re sick, we could have saved money and given access to all of those people. But they did not do this.

The Supply Act made it clear that the minister had announced that there would be $30 million to improve interdisciplinary care. Once they finally signed the $3.1-billion agreement with the federal government, they took the federal money and invested up to $100 million in 78 projects. But there are hundreds of other projects sitting on that desk that will open the door to people who need primary care. What are we waiting for? Why are we letting people suffer, gambling with their health and with their lives when we have the knowledge, we have the skills, we have the money? We have a government that chooses not to do that. They choose to—what is it—increase by four times the amount of money that we spend to the few private hospitals that we have. They chose to increase it by 230%, I think—I’m going by memory—the amount of money that we give to the 10 private surgical suites that exist in Ontario right now.

They have no problem increasing the funding for the private, for-profit delivery of our health care system, but when it comes to funding primary care—let me read some of the requests that the Alliance for Healthier Communities put forward. They are the ones who represent the 111 community health centres, nurse practitioner-led clinics, Indigenous primary health care teams, community-based family health teams.

They said that health human resources at comprehensive primary care organizations across Ontario has been underfunded for over 11 years. For years, health care providers and administrative staff in community-based non-profit primary, community, mental health and addiction, and long-term care have faced lower pay grades than other parts of the health care sector, including newly created government health care agencies. Funding is inadequate and does not keep up with inflation or cost of living, which makes recruiting and retaining staff a challenge. Primary health care staff have been paid at or under 2017 salary rates. Community health organizations provide care for populations that are 68% more complex, on average, compared to the average Ontarian. Despite this complexity, clients served go to emergency departments less, resulting in $27 million saved every year. On average, patients with access to team-based care have improved health outcomes, fewer emergency visits, better discharge experiences, and cost savings ranging from $10 to $90 per patient, per month.

They went on and on. And yet, they did not get a pay increase. They did not get the funding they need to hire more staff so that we don’t look at 2.2 million Ontarians without primary care—making 2.3 million.

I also want to put on the record a letter that the township of St. Joseph put forward. This one has to do with the closure of the public health lab in Sault Ste. Marie. The corporation basically went on to ask—“At their March 6, 2024, council meeting, the township of St. Joseph passed resolution 2024-61 regarding the planned closure of six Public Health Ontario (PHO) labs, including the laboratory in Sault Ste. Marie.” They attached a resolution outlining their objection. And they wished to advise the Ontario Minister of Health that it is opposed to the closure of the Sault Ste. Marie Public Health Ontario lab and requested that Public Health Ontario be directed to review past decisions to remove the Sault Ste. Marie public health lab’s ability to test samples.

Their recommendation is in writing. It has been sent to the Minister of Health. They basically made it clear that the public health lab in Sault Ste. Marie is an important part of their health care capacity. Plus, many people they serve do not have water from the city, so they need to rely on the free water testing at public health to make sure that the water that comes from different wells and also water in the pools etc. is safe. None of this will be available.

They went on to say:

“Whereas the closure of the Sault Ste. Marie” public health “lab would mean longer wait times in getting results from beach water, hotel and recreation centre spas/pools and provincial park water sampling for the region, or even the cessation of sampling altogether due to time sensitivity, and

“Whereas Sault Ste. Marie and area is currently faced” with “an acute shortage of doctors and the availability of clinical/diagnostic testing supports the attraction and retention of more doctors, and

“Whereas a strong local health care system requires a critical mass of skilled health care professionals and health care services, which include reliable and timely lab testing....”

I hope the minister will answer to the township of St. Joseph, who do not want the lab to close in Sault Ste. Marie.

I have something very similar coming from the Timmins area, where, again, we’re looking at closure.

In this Supply Act, we don’t see anywhere in there that we will bolster the public health lab in areas of the north to make sure that it continues to be available. We all know what happened in Walkerton. We all know what happens when people don’t have $135 to pay a private lab to see if their well water is safe: People get sick; people get hurt; people die. All of this is prevented right now because we have public health labs throughout the north. If those are not available anymore, many people won’t drive all the way from Hearst to Sudbury to have their water tested for free. They will either have to pay 135 bucks or go without. We all know that many will choose to go without.

The next thing I wanted to talk to you about is the supervised consumption services site. There was a letter that was written to the Minister of Health as well as the minister of mental health, about the supervised consumption sites. It was signed by 51 health care executives; 51 health care executives signed the letter to the Minister of Health and the minister for mental health, asking them to keep the sites open. Some of the letter says:

“Unregulated drugs of unknown contents and potencies are driving increased deaths, hospitalizations, injuries and trauma across Ontario, with an estimated 3,644 drug-related deaths in 2023. Several communities in Ontario have declared a state of emergency due to drug toxicity deaths. Supervised consumption sites, and particularly low-barrier overdose-prevention sites, are a necessary emergency response to this crisis and must be immediately scaled up. In 2018,” this government “arbitrarily capped funding to only 21” consumption sites. “Six years later, the government still has not delivered on funding 21.... Despite overwhelming need and local support, the Ontario government has approved and funded only 17 consumption site locations across the province. Only one of these is located in northern Ontario,” located in Thunder Bay, which is way too far for the people of Timmins, Sudbury or elsewhere. “Meanwhile, the toxic unregulated drug crisis has taken far too many lives since 2018.”

We’re talking 20,000 people who have died, many more family and friends left grieving.

“In the context of this preventable public health emergency, urgent action is required. There are at least five submitted applications for” consumption sites “that have been ... delayed by the Ontario government.” That includes in Sudbury, who sent their application 30 months ago; Barrie, 28 months ago; Windsor, 19 months ago; Timmins, 13 months ago; and Hamilton, where they had to withdraw their application in October after two years of waiting.

“The tragedy of an isolated instance of gun violence in Toronto must not prevent people in diverse locations across the province from accessing vital health services any longer. The Ontario government’s decision to stop processing applications altogether for more than seven months is punitive and irresponsible.”

They go on to talk about what is happening in Timmins, Windsor and Sudbury, with the very high opioid mortality rate, which is on average three times the provincial average. They come with a clear ask. We’re not talking, again, billions of dollars; the site in Sudbury needs $1.2 million. For $1.2 million, you will save on average two to three lives in Sudbury every single week. Every single week, two to three people’s lives could be saved with an investment of $1.2 million in the supervised consumption site. Why is this so hard to fund? But you’re not going to find this funding in the Supply Act of 2023; they did not spend a penny on this.

Another one that is rather interesting is Birth Mark. Birth Mark is a charity dedicated to providing essential reproductive health care support in southern Ontario. They are a charity that has been providing these services for free for the last six years. Their programs “offer preventive care and early intervention, leading to significant cost savings by addressing health and social issues before they escalate into more severe and costly problems. By providing adequate support, we effectively reduce emergency room visits related to mental health crises, childbirth complications and postpartum issues, thereby alleviating strain on our health care system and reducing associated costs.”

They basically work with mainly pregnant homeless women and help them through their pregnancy, help them through their delivery and help them, post-partum, to look after their newborn. They have been doing this for free through donations. They’ve been having a tough time with the pandemic and everything else to raise money through donations and are asking the ministry for a very small amount of money so that they can continue to do this.

We all know what happens to homeless pregnant women once they give birth, if they are homeless, the CAS comes in, take their baby away and nothing good comes of that. Through the program, through Birth Mark, all of this changes. They support these women. They support them through their pregnancy, through their delivery, through their post-partum, through how to care for a child so that even when CAS comes and does their assessment, they are deemed to be fit mothers and get to keep their babies. It’s good for the baby; it’s good for the mother; it’s good for our health care system, for our social system. It’s very low money, but you won’t see a penny that has been spent so far by this government for this very worthy program. This is a cost-saving program. This is the right thing to do for newborns, for mothers, yet this government leaves them high and dry.

The next one I wanted to talk to you about is home care. Our home care system is broken. It fails more people than it helps every single day, and this has dire consequences on so many people. One of my constituents came to see me. Her husband has been discharged from the hospital. He was alternate level of care, so he was admitted into the hospital, had a stroke and had multiple problems. He’s waiting for a long-term-care bed. She has agreed to take him home and keep him at home until a bed becomes available in one of the long-term-care homes in Sudbury.

The home care system fails her pretty much every single day. She needs help early in the morning to care for her husband, to help transfer, to help bathe, go to the bathroom, feed etc., but the worker is never there. They gave her a call and said, “Oh, we will be there soon. We should be there by 3 o’clock in the afternoon.” Nobody gets out of bed at 3 o’clock in the afternoon. Nobody can wait till 3 o’clock in the afternoon to have breakfast. She needs help to get him out of bed, to get him fed, to get him to go to the bathroom and all of this, but home care never came. I had a little meeting. Bayshore, that has most of the contracts in my riding, came. Her daughter was there and her daughter mentioned that as soon as she’s finished work, she comes and helps her mom. So around 3:30, 4 o’clock in the afternoon, she’s with her mom. They don’t need a PSW anymore; all is good.

You know what, Speaker? Since Bayshore found out that at 3 o’clock in the afternoon they don’t want a PSW anymore, every day the PSW is only available after 3. Then, when she says, “Well, I don’t need you at 3; I needed you at 9 o’clock this morning,” they say, “Oh, you’re refusing care.” We all know what that means. That means Bayshore takes the 56 bucks for that visit, the PSW never gets to come and hundreds of millions of dollars in profit just keep growing and growing for Bayshore while an 84-year-old woman who is trying to look after her 87-year-old spouse while he waits for a spot in long-term care has to go at it on her own. This is wrong.

We had the same thing with a lady from Azilda who has a kidney issue and has qualified for home care that is supposed to come to her house every day. They know that on Monday, Wednesday and Friday, she goes to dialysis at the hospital and she’s not there. Those are the only times where Bayshore will say, “Oh, we have a PSW that can come for you at 12:30 on Wednesday.” They already know that on Monday, Wednesday and Friday, she goes for dialysis in the afternoon. You figure that they would send the PSW on Tuesday, Thursday, Saturday and Sunday to help her—no, no, no. They know that she will turn it down on Monday, Wednesday and Friday because she’s at the hospital receiving dialysis, so that’s when they make it available.

I want to talk to you about Tina Senior, who has a very disabled child, a beautiful little boy, big blue eyes—anyway, a beautiful, beautiful child, six years old, goes to school, and he needs to be fed through a G-tube. So a nurse is assigned an hour and a half every day that he’s at school to feed him through a G-tube tube. So he connects it, puts in the food, and often the machine goes “beep, beep, beep” and the nurse handles it and goes. That’s not what happens at all.

Bayshore gets paid for an hour and a half for that call, but they only assign the nurse to go for 15 minutes. So the nurse goes in, connects the G-tube, gets the food, and then takes off. But at least twice, sometimes three times a week, the machine will go “beep, beep, beep,” and then they don’t know what to do. They call the mom.

The mom is an intensive care nurse at Health Sciences North. She has had to leave the hospital to go care for her son so many times that she has now quit her job as an intensive care nurse at Health Sciences North in order to be there every time the nurse, who is supposed to be there to look after her son for an hour and a half, is not there. Again, we sit with Bayshore, we try to straighten that out, and it never works. Bayshore gets paid for an hour and a half to look after this kid, sends the nurse for 15 minutes, and then depends on the mother to back this up.

This is causing a ton of stress. Think about it: You’ve lost your income as a nurse. You’ve lost your opportunity to continue to provide care to your community, a profession that she loves doing, because the home care system is failing her.

She also received direct funding for respite. Trying to recruit, train, book all of that on her own, submit the receipt in time at the right place, at the right time is a full-time job. It shouldn’t be like this.

This is not what home care is about. Home care is supposed to be there when you need it. Home care is supposed to be there. If you qualify for an hour and a half, they’re supposed to be there for an hour and a half. But given that you don’t get paid in between clients, they will come in 10 minutes late and then leave 10 minutes early because they have to drive.

In my riding, they showed me 750 kilometres. How long do you figure it takes, Speaker, to drive 750 kilometres in the middle of the winter in rural northern Ontario? And they don’t get paid for that time. It shouldn’t be like this. We know better than that.

I also want to put on the record a little request from Gilles Proulx, who is a constituent in my riding who basically said, “I am writing to express my concerns regarding the financial challenges faced by parents participating in the Model Parliament program. My son, Yanick Proulx, is a dedicated participant in this valuable program, and while I’m immensely proud of his involvement, the associated costs pose a significant burden on our family, particularly due to our residence in northern Ontario, specifically the Sudbury region.”

I’m just putting it out there that this is something that the government could look at. We want all the kids to participate in the Model Parliament. It is a beautiful, beautiful program that helps a lot of kids experience things that they would have never been able to experience before. Helping with transportation, helping with accommodation for those kids that come from more than 50 kilometres away would really help. There are very few kids from my riding who have participated, mainly due to the fact that their parents did not have the money to do so.

I had the list of other things to talk about, certainly the private, for-profit long-term-care homes and the way that they pay their staff. We have the Elizabeth Centre in Sudbury right now that refuses to negotiate. It has been two years now where PSWs and RPNs have not seen an increase. None of that is in the Supply Act.

Further debate?

Well, the member opposite said no. You probably could conclude the time when Mike Harris laid off a whole bunch of nurses, but I’m talking about nurses just exiting, nurses who don’t want to be here anymore.

I went to a graduation ceremony at Laurentian University. I met a wonderful young woman who was studying nursing. I was on the stage, got to shake her hand and everything, as many of us get invited to. I saw her at the reception afterwards. I said, “Congratulations. We really need nurses.” And she said, “I’m never working in this field. I had my placements. It is a terrible working condition. Nursing today is not like it was when I started the course. I’ll never work in this field ever. I just paid my tuition, so I thought I should graduate my final year.” That’s the reality for people. The reason the Conservative government counts the number of people signing up to be nurses is because they don’t want to pay attention to the number who are exiting, who are taking their pensions early, who are graduating and saying, “No, not for me, man.”

We have to address this. I’m here to help you. It sounds like I’m insulting you, but I’m here to help you, because this is a crisis that is affecting all of us. We cannot have a health care system where people don’t want to be there and working. I don’t want to work in health care. That’s a specialized job where you care about people and you take care of people in vulnerable moments. It’s critical. I’ve been in the hospital. I had vertigo a couple of years ago and had no idea what was wrong with me. I just felt nauseous. I was concerned about all kinds of stuff. The people who work in health care—amazing, amazing. When you’re at your most vulnerable, that’s who you put your faith in.

But with Bill 124, for 53 months, we treated these workers—not just in health care but all public sector—like dirt. I’m going to take that back. Not “we”—the Conservative government chose to treat them like dirt. You’ve got to wear that. And there was a pandemic and in the worst conditions of time, you treated them terribly.

The outcome of this: When Bill 124 was ruled unconstitutional, I started getting phone calls from hospitals, from school boards, asking, “Is there going to be additional funding? Because now we have these payouts.” All these unions that have these clauses allowing them to renegotiate—when they renegotiate what’s happening is, when they go to arbitration, the arbitrator says, “Yes. You were entitled to this. You should have got this.” They’re getting these payouts, and it creates this additional crunch on hospitals that are already underfunded. They’re feeling this crunch and saying, “Now we’ve got this giant price tag, courtesy of the Conservative government, but there is no extra funding to date or announcements or promise of funding to date from the Conservative government.” So I look forward on Tuesday in the budget for the relief that the school boards, the schools, the hospitals and other organizations like that are desperately looking for when it comes to that sort of money.

The other thing, when I was thinking about cost of living and expenses, was the minimum wage, because Bill 124 was one of the first things the Conservative government did, but freezing minimum wage was probably the first thing. There was an expectation that minimum wage was going to climb, but before it could, the Conservative government passed a law to freeze it at $14 an hour, and they froze it for two years at $14 an hour.

Deena Ladd said, “What he did”—talking about the Premier—“was basically take away a dollar increase, then take away the adjustments for two years, and then start to adjust it again in 2021.” So 2018, nothing; 2019 nothing; 2020, nothing; 2021, it started to readjust. So, if you cost that out, each minimum wage worker would since have earned between $3,000 and $6,000 more between 2018 and 2021.

I’m starting to think that the reason they don’t want to go after the wage theft is because they are helping people with wage theft. Between $3,000 and $6,000 from minimum wage workers was stolen from their pockets that they were entitled to.

The authors of the estimate write, “Many minimum wage workers put their own health at risk to keep working on the front lines of our economy throughout the pandemic. The three-year delay in raising the minimum wage to $15 cost them dearly.” That’s a sad thing.

Minimum wage used to be a whole different thing. Whenever I hear minimum wage, I always think of Chris Rock saying minimum wage means if they could pay you less, they would. And do you know what? The Conservative government is allowing multi-billion-dollar companies to pay workers less. They’re finding a loophole in the digital worker rights protections act, which is a fantastically fictional name because it doesn’t offer any protections for these workers. What it does is protect these large gig companies—Uber, the food delivery companies, the driver services—to pay workers less than minimum wage.

What it does is it says that you have to pay at least minimum wage, but only for the amount of time you’re actually doing work, only while you’re doing work. So if you work it out per hour, while the person is working, they make less than seven bucks. It’s like $6.36, but let’s just say less than seven bucks—way below minimum wage. Then you take out the expenses, and it’s less than three bucks.

You think, if you have insurance and a car, you’re paying for your brakes, you’re paying for your gas, you’re paying for tires over time, and you’re making less than seven bucks an hour—and so instead of rushing to the aid of these workers to ensure that, “Hey, the Employment Standards Act says, ‘You have to pay minimum wage. It’s here; you’re only way down here. PS, you’re a multi-billion-dollar company. You’re not a struggling mom-and-pop. You’ve got billions of dollars, so you can at least pay minimum wage.’” Instead of doing that, what they said is, “No, no, we’ll write legislation. Did someone say billionaires? We’re running over. We’re right there for you because we’re going to write legislation to ensure that you can continue to pay these workers less than minimum wage.”

And so they started off the last session freezing minimum wage so that the lowest-paid workers wouldn’t get a raise, could barely make ends meet. They continued in this session by saying, “Is there a way we can pay workers even less? Oh, yes. Yes, there is a Conservative way to do that, absolutely. Let me tell you how I can help you out, Mr. Billionaire-Company-Owner and your shareholders.” Because there is nothing more important for the Conservative government than jumping for wealthy and well-connected friends over the top of just regular working-class people.

And the shortage of this—I was thinking—I was talking to my son, actually, who is going to graduate this year. When I was going to school, I had my own apartment. I had a job that paid just slightly over minimum wage, but I only worked on weekends. Any other day I worked was for other expenses, if I wanted to get new clothes or treat myself or something, but my core expenses—food, rent, hydro and all that—was by working on the weekend.

And when I wanted to find an apartment, it was based on where I wanted to live. Do I want to be near the beach—because Sudbury is fortunate to have a couple of beaches that are right downtown—or in the core city? Do I want to be near my school? Do I want to be downtown where the nightlife is? And all of that was a range of about 50 bucks. All of that was affordable. All of those places were places that you would bring your parents to and not feel embarrassed of the conditions.

Do you know what I see lately? I see people renting out their garages as if it’s an apartment, and for a rent that seems unbelievably high. A garage where you use the local restaurant’s bathroom is being rented as an apartment. That’s shameful. When you look at rents in Toronto where people are making minimum wage, because many people here represent downtown Toronto, I don’t know how you’d make ends meet. And in even my riding, looking for an apartment, it starts at about a grand. You’re not going to be able to afford that with minimum wage—not even close.

Here’s the reality of what’s going on with the investments, and I listened to the last hour about the investments and how great this is for the economy, but I have to tell you, I live in a reality in Ontario that seems different than the Conservative government’s. I live in a reality where more and more people come to me and tell me it has never been this bad. Affluent people tell me this, people struggling to make ends meet. Middle-class people tell me this. Definitely not-for-profit industries tell me this on a regular basis. They have never seen it this bad, this critical, this need for help.

The stats from Feed Ontario reflect this. This is from Feed Ontario, “Ontario’s food banks were visited more than 4,353,000 times throughout the year”—this is their last stat—“an increase of 42% over the last three years.” This is the startling one that hits me, especially as labour critic: There has been “a 47% increase in people with employment accessing food banks since 2018.” I think the stat is up to 2022, but every year, that number increases—47% increase in people working, going to food banks.

I shared stories about Charity, back when Bill 28 was attacking education workers, and Charity allowed me to share her story so many times. I really thank her, because there is a position where you wouldn’t want people to know this about you when you are working full-time at a government job, working for the province, being paid by the province and making so little money that you go to the food bank with your children. You don’t even have enough money to leave your children with somebody else to go to the food bank so they don’t have to know. You have to bring your kids with you. You have to tell them, “As a mom, I work full-time, but I don’t make enough from the government of Ontario, my employer, to make ends meet. I have to go to the food bank to feed you.” That’s disgraceful. And this trend keeps getting worse.

This isn’t me. I know sometimes people think in opposition we just say stuff, because we want to hurt your feelings. This is Feed Ontario’s stats. I’m just amplifying it so you’re aware of it. You can’t look the other way. This data is not working for you. If more and more people every year are using food banks, well: (1) it’s the wrong direction; but (2) fewer and fewer people can afford to donate to food banks. I think if we’re going to do an oath or something we want to do substantially, that if you’re sitting on the government’s side, then you don’t get to stand outside of food banks and do photo ops, because they’re an earmark of the failure of the government. I don’t care if the government is Liberal or Conservative, Green Party or NDP, that you no longer get to stand around and brag about how much money was collected under your watch as government, when you can do something about it.

“The proportion of food bank clients with full-time employment doubled in the past year to 33% in 2022.” The following year up to 47%. This doesn’t make sense. This isn’t a success story.

Let me go on to other issues. Ontario Works—this also comes from Daily Bread Food Bank. A lot of people on Ontario Works, who are receiving it, are going to food banks. So Ontario Works is the money you would get if you can’t find employment or are unable to work—it used to be called welfare in the old days. It is below the poverty line. It is $733 a month. That’s the same amount it was in 2018. Since the Conservative government was elected, they didn’t increase Ontario Works at all. As inflation goes up every year, typically 2% to 3%—last year, I think it was between 6% and 7%—this has never gone up. You can’t find housing for $733 a month.

The slap in the face is there’s a portion of that that they say is for housing. I can’t remember off the top of my head what it is. But imagine them saying—let’s say 400 bucks is housing—“Don’t spend anything else because that’s for housing.” That’s a joke. You can’t get housing for $733. Basically, what you’ve done to these people is you’ve said, “Look, we know the poverty line is up here. We’re going to hold your head under the water here.”

They did the same thing for people who are disabled on ODSP, Ontario disability support. “Despite inflation having risen by 16.68%”—this is from Daily Bread—“a single individual on disability is receiving $1,229 per month to survive on,” which is, “$900 below the poverty line.” So you’re living with a disability; somehow, to make ends meet, you’ve got to come up with $900 a month.

For many of these people, it is their parents, typically seniors, who are helping to compensate for this. Many of these seniors I end up talking with are worried that they’re coming to the end of their lives and don’t know what’s going to happen to their children and are terrified for what’s going to happen to their children. I’m talking about adult children.

This is a broken system. Feed Ontario points out that, “Two out of three people who access food banks are social assistance recipients”—32.5% from ODSP, 26% from OW—“as their primary source of income.” We have a broken system that we all know is broken. No one is naive here. None of my colleagues from the other parties are naive. We just, as New Democrats, say it as loud as we can because we care about people who are starving to death. We care about people who can’t pay their bills. We think it’s important.

I know very often the Conservative government will say things like, “The best solution is a job.” It’s hard to get a job if you cannot find food, if you can’t buy clothing to go for job interviews, if you cannot get on your feet. There’s that old expression: “It’s hard to pull yourself up by your bootstraps if you don’t own boots.” It’s hard to get a job if you don’t have clean clothes or new clothes or if you can’t afford to take the bus somewhere to apply for a job.

Poverty creates horrible conditions. Poverty is one of those systems that creates the social determinants of health, that creates people with lower immune systems who are more sick and a larger burden on our health care system. Solving poverty would save us money in so many other ways, but we’re not interested in solving poverty. What we are interested—not us. What the Conservative government is interested in is investing in $2.2-million ads for Metrolinx saying that the people of Toronto who are complaining that the project has taken more than 12 years to get finished are kind of whiny and don’t really understand what’s going really on.

If you haven’t seen this ad, you can’t find it because Metrolinx has pulled it, so you’ve got to go and look up a CBC article. But you’ve got to watch this ad. It is unbelievable. I can only imagine Phil Verster wrote this ad while riding in his limousine, and this is how he imagines the people who ride the TTC look like and speak like. It is absolutely insulting and out of touch, and I think it’s a reflection of how the Conservative government feels about the working-class people of Ontario.

Speaking of ODSP, WSIB is somewhere we can invest money into. I talked the other day—yesterday, in fact—about how just raising it 5%, restoring that original 5% cut that was taken, I think, by Mike Harris back in the old days—it was promised prior to the election. Like a lot of election promises, it has kind of fallen apart because it has been almost two years since the last election. But people who are on WSIB are desperate for this 5% increase. If you restored that, it would make all the difference in the world.

I was surprised when I heard that. I thought they would be asking for a 10% or 20% increase. But they said, “Just restore the 5%.” Obviously, they would like anything, but that 5% would make a world of difference.

The thing with the WSIB is, if you’re never hurt, you think it works. If you work with people who are on WSIB, you realize how terrible it is, how broken it is. Recent government studies show that only around 170 of the approximately 3,000 annual fatal occupational cancer cases in Ontario are compensated. Imagine that: 3,000 people die from occupational cancers; about 170 of them are compensated, and I’m going to guess that those 170 are probably unionized workers who have full-time workers’ compensation officers—WSIB officers, I guess, now they would be called—and they have to fight.

I come out of a union, Local 6500. The Steelworkers have three full-time compensation officers, and I have met—because I was in health and safety, and our office that we would meet in regularly was across the hall from theirs. I have met so many retirees or people who had to retire early or people who have gone off on sick because of occupational disease. I have met so many of them who are desperate—desperate that they will hear that they had a reward before they die, so they know that their life meant something, so they know that their spouse and their kids will have something when they leave, their lives stolen from them. Speaker, 170 of the 3,000 every year get that phone call. They get into financial ruin when they’re on WSIB, and most of them end up on ODSP.

We have a limited amount of time because my colleague from Nickel Belt is going to be speaking soon.

I want to talk about supervised consumption sites.

Friday was a dark day in Sudbury. Friday, Heidi from Réseau Access—which was taking care of our supervised consumption site, The Spot—had to go and meet with her employees at The Spot. There is only one full-time employee left. She gave them their notice that they would have to close their doors. The supervised consumption site in Sudbury has been waiting just over three years for a response from the Conservative government. That cheque has never showed up. The city of Sudbury, recognizing the need, recognizing the costs to our EMS services, the cost to the people, the financial and also the emotional costs for people when their family members are dying and suffering from opioid overdose, invested for an entire year, waiting for the Premier to get off his wallet and cut a cheque for a provincial responsibility for health care—a cheque that never showed up. They saved lives for over a year. At Christmas, their funding ran out. People tried to stick around, but you’re not going to stick around very long in health care, so there’s only one employee left. The rest of the people are shuffling around from other organizations in Réseau to keep it going. On Friday, they heard it was closing.

The Conservative government arbitrarily said that 21 supervised consumption sites would be funded in the province. They took everybody who had their applications and said, “Jump through the hoops again and rewrite your applications.” Sudbury jumped through those hoops and rewrote them. To date, out of those 21, only 17 have been opened; the only one in northern Ontario is in Thunder Bay.

I want you to picture northern Ontario—the size of France. Sudbury would be at one corner, at the south end of France, and Thunder Bay would be up in the northwest corner. It would take you between 12 and 14 hours to drive there. It’s probably not going to work out too well for a supervised consumption site. It’s probably not going to be effective there—and it’s probably why Sudbury is the leader by proportion of the number of people who die by opioid overdose.

I called for help for this many, many times. I asked for a private member’s motion to declare a medical emergency. The Conservative government never answered those calls. The Conservative government voted against my motion.

We’re floating, in Ontario, around 20,000 deaths from opioid overdose. The Premier has his fingers in his ears—doesn’t care about those people; doesn’t care about their families; doesn’t care about their friends; doesn’t care about the deaths. They’re having a magical, wraparound service—that 20,000 people continue to die, and many more will continue to die.

I don’t know what this bill is, but it’s nothing to brag about. I only had a little bit of time to talk about the things that were wrong with it—but there was a lot wrong in Sudbury. And I’ll echo what I’ve been hearing time and time again from people across the province: It has never been this bad.

No.

Thank you to my colleague for his debate. One of the things he said near the end was that every dollar spent comes out of the pockets of hard-working taxpayers, and it’s something I’ve been thinking about recently because—I’m sure we’re all hearing this in our communities, about the money that was spent on Super Bowl ads or, if you’re listening to podcasts, the money that’s spent on podcasting ads talking about the amazing work that is being done or, more recently, the $2.2 million that was spent on a Metrolinx ad basically really disdainfully talking down to people riding the TTC about how long it has taken, more than a decade, for some of the projects to be finished. I don’t think that’s an effective use of our taxpayer dollars. It’s not specific to this bill, but it was just something I thought of recently.

The money that we’re spending—I don’t know what it costs to get a Super Bowl ad, but I’m sure it’s millions of dollars. A billion dollars? I’m not sure what it is for a Super Bowl ad. But I do know it’s one of the most expensive ad spaces you can buy.

I don’t know what it costs to be in podcasts—you’ve got to compete with the mattress factories and everything else. Every single podcast has one or two of these ads, as well. That Metrolinx ad I do know, because I read the article yesterday—$2.2 million.

If we could have taken that money, those millions of dollars, and put it into actually getting work done, put it into investing in people, put it into getting Metrolinx finished, put it into retaining our nurses, put it toward—instead of having Bill 124; not having Bill 124 and allocating that money so that nurses, for example, as public sector workers, wouldn’t be exiting the province and going to other provinces where they’re treated fairly and treated respectfully.

Yesterday, when this was first announced—normally, when we table a bill, and you’d know this, Speaker, you’ll read the name, there’s a bit of formality, and the Speaker will say, “Would you like to explain the bill?” The member said, “It’s pretty self-explanatory,” and I thought, “Not really.” The bill is titled An Act to authorize the expenditure of certain amounts for the fiscal year ending March 31, 2024—point being, it’s not hard to tell what it’s about, but it’s not really, really straightforward.

When I looked at the bill, this number caught my eye: $6,079,277,000. The full quote says, “For the period from April 1, 2023, to March 31, 2024, amounts not exceeding a total of” over $6 billion “may be paid out of the Consolidated Revenue Fund or recognized as non-cash investments to be applied to the investments of the public service....” The reason that caught my eye, that six-billion-plus dollars, is because that’s what we know Bill 124 is costing this province to date.

Bill 124 was a bill put forward that was unconstitutional. It said that, for anyone in the public sector, you could not bargain your wages more than 1%, and it would stay in place for three years. In debate, we said it was unconstitutional. As labour critic, I said, “This is unconstitutional, and you’re going to lose this in court.” In fact, they did lose it in court. The Conservative government decided they would appeal it, and I said, “You’re going to lose the appeal,” because what the Chief Justice had ruled in it—I don’t read a lot of legal text, but I do read a lot of arbitration rulings; it was a pretty embarrassing outcome for the Conservative government. Everyone they put up as a witness contradicted the reasons for having the bill. It was probably a very frustrating day.

Interjection.

So what we know is that when you do something that’s unconstitutional, it basically means it’s illegal. We know from the Liberals that when you do this it’s going to cost you a fortune—not you, because, as the member said earlier, every dollar spent comes out of the pockets of hard-working taxpayers. So you’re writing cheques with taxpayers’ dollars. You’re writing cheques to fight court battles that you’re going to lose because the Liberals proved you’re going to lose. The Liberals did the same thing and wrote cheques with taxpayers’ money to fight these court challenges, and then the penalties and the payouts afterwards for the Liberal Party were hundreds of millions of dollars. But in this case, $6 billion plus and counting—$6 billion plus.

I want to be clear about this. This isn’t a surcharge. This isn’t a penalty. This isn’t like when you watch Matlock or something and there’s victim fees and stuff. What you did—the Conservative government did—is basically equal to wage theft. You took money out of people’s pockets that they deserved, they fairly could have got the money for, and they never got the interest on.

I’m allowed to say you broke the law. It was unconstitutional, so it was a violation of law. It was ruled that way.

It was wage theft. For the last six years as the labour critic, I have been wondering, why isn’t the Conservative government, if they care so much for workers, going after the $10 million they know that unscrupulous employers have stolen from workers—actual wage theft that’s been reported, proven? They’ve been found guilty, but the Conservative government has refused to collect it. I can’t wrap my head around it, because it seems like an easy win. I would like to think that some of these businesses, if they’re unscrupulous and not taking care of their employees, perhaps they didn’t survive, so you couldn’t get some of that money. But why not go after even a dime of that money?

It hit me, when I saw this announcement about the $6 billion of wage theft, that the Conservative government is the biggest wage-theft employer in the entire province—$6 billion at this point. It could be more than $13 billion, according to the Financial Accountability Officer. It’s wage theft. You took money out of workers’ pockets.

And the Premier—the gall the Premier had is that, “I had to do this to save jobs—to save jobs.” That’s a ridiculous statement. Number one, we have lost more nursing jobs than probably any other time of our lifetimes—nurses walking out the door.

Further debate?

It is an honour to rise in the House this afternoon, in my role as parliamentary assistant to the President of the Treasury Board and as a member of the Standing Committee on Public Accounts, to speak in support of Bill 174, the Supply Act for the 2023-24 fiscal year, introduced by my friend the government House leader.

Speaker, this is the fifth year that I have had the privilege to rise in the House to speak in support of the annual Supply Act. As you know, this discussion and the vote that will follow are critical steps towards the final approval for all spending for the fiscal year, which ends in less than two weeks, on March 31, 2024.

It is important for me to note that the government is not proposing any new spending today. Those debates and those votes have already taken place. This House is required to pass the Supply Act in every fiscal year to approve all spending by the government of Ontario and the offices of the Legislature that has already happened through the year which was outlined in the estimates. Members will recall that this House gave its concurrence to the 2023-24 estimates two weeks ago, on March 6. This allows us to move on the Supply Act, where we are today. This is a very important part of the fiscal process because it gives the government an opportunity to outline the provincial fiscal position for the record and because, if passed, it represents the final agreement of the House with the estimates proposed by the government, including the supplementary estimates tabled last month.

Speaker, as I said here two weeks ago, this process will not be the subject of water-cooler discussion tomorrow; it won’t trend on Twitter, and it won’t be covered on the nightly news. But as we approach the end point of the fiscal cycle, I believe it is important for the general public and, especially, for all members in this House to understand how this Legislature approves all government spending.

As I’ve said before, the previous Liberal government and the previous Liberal Minister of Finance did not follow public sector accounting rules. Some members will remember the Auditor General saying that the previous Liberal Minister of Finance and the previous member for Mississauga South was making up his own rules, treating billions of dollars of losses as assets to avoid recording it as a deficit.

This government was elected to restore fiscal accountability and transparency to the provincial government.

I know this has been said many times, but I want to reiterate that every dollar spent by the province comes out of the pockets of hard-working Ontario taxpayers. This is the lens through which we should look at all government spending here at Queen’s Park and, for that matter, every level of government.

Speaker, Ontario families and small businesses are dealing with high inflation, high interest rates and global geopolitical uncertainty. The federal tax increase on April 1 is also adding to their challenges—including a 23% increase in the federal carbon tax.

I want to take a moment to thank the members for their support for my motion 81, calling on the federal government to stop its alcohol tax increase on April 1. With many of our local breweries and restaurants still struggling to recover from the pandemic, now is not the time for another tax increase.

But there are economic pressures right across the province, in almost every sector. These challenges have touched all areas of our lives. So it has never been more important to remind everyone who is paying the bills and to review how the government handles the public purse with even greater scrutiny.

At the same time, as we look to the future, the most important factor is the resilience of Ontario’s workers, businesses and families. The people of Ontario are our best asset. That is why the government must account for every dollar that we spend. That is what the people of Ontario expect from their elected representatives, and that’s what they deserve. The fiscal decisions that we make today will affect generations of Ontarians to come. This is a heavy responsibility, but I’m confident that we are on the right track.

At this point, I would like to provide a quick overview of our government’s fiscal cycle. I know that some members have been through this process many times—for them, this will be a review—but some members may be going through this process for the very first time.

The former President of the Treasury Board tabled volume 1 of the 2023-24 estimates on April 20, 2023. This volume of the estimates provided a detailed public record of government ministry and office budgets, based on the spending plans outlined in the 2023 Ontario budget.

Of course, the government may also table supplementary estimates to ensure that the government has the resources it needs throughout the fiscal year. And in 2023-24, supplementary estimates were tabled twice: first, on November 29, 2023, and again just last month, on February 29, 2024. Combined, they provide additional funding for the contingency fund, to add flexibility to the fiscal plan, and for new education and transportation initiatives.

The President of the Treasury Board also tabled volume 2 of the 2023-24 estimates on November 29, 2023. This second volume of the estimates outlines the spending plans of the independent legislative offices, including the Office of the Assembly, the Office of the Auditor General, the Office of the Chief Electoral Officer, and the Ontario Ombudsman.

Together, the estimates provide details of the operating and capital spending needs of ministries and the legislative offices for the 2023-24 fiscal year. They represent the government’s formal request to the Legislature to approve its spending requirements. Every Ontario government must complete this annual process to provide each ministry with the legal authority to spend their capital and operating budgets. Basically, this allows us to proceed with the essential business of the government. It’s how we fund the programs and services that Ontarians rely on every day.

And for anyone curious about the estimates or the public accounts, they are all available to the public. I urge everyone to visit ontario.ca/estimates. This is an excellent resource, because the estimates are available going back more than 20 years. The public accounts are available online going back 30 years, to 1994.

Once the estimates are introduced, they are referred to the standing committees for review. These committees then select ministries to appear, to answer questions about the estimates. The committees review specific allocations, referred to as “votes” because the committee votes on each allocation. It is also important to note that almost all the ministries have their estimates reviewed by all-party standing committees, so the spending we are being asked to approve today has already been discussed over the last several months.

I want to reiterate that the government is not proposing any new spending today. The government is only asking us to approve the spending outlined in the 2023-24 estimates, based on the 2023 budget and the fall economic statement, for the current fiscal year.

Combined with the public accounts process, the Supply Act can be seen as crossing the finish line for the fiscal year. If any member should vote against this bill, they would be voting against the programs and services that the people of Ontario depend on.

Speaker, again, I appreciate the opportunity to address this House this afternoon to outline the important process in the provincial fiscal cycle.

At this point, I would like to outline some of the top-line numbers to provide an update on the overall picture of Ontario’s economic and fiscal outlook. These are the most up-to-date numbers reported by the Ministry of Finance in the third-quarter finances just over a month ago, and I believe they give us a clear picture of exactly where the province is right now.

The provincial deficit is a key measure of Ontario’s financial health—because it is not fair to the next generation to leave them with an unsustainable debt.

With that being said, the 2023-24 third-quarter finances project the province’s deficit to be at $4.5 billion this year. There is no denying that this is a significant amount of money, but it is also important to note that this is an improvement of $1.1 billion compared to the outlook in the 2023 fall economic statement. This is a significant improvement, and it deserves to be recognized here because it is a great sign that the province is moving in the right direction. The reduction in the deficit was mainly due to increased revenue and lower interest on the provincial debt. This is great news for all Ontarians.

Of course, to see the overall fiscal picture, we need to look at the provincial revenue. Government revenues in 2023-24 are projected to be $202.7 billion. That’s $942 billion more than the forecast in the 2023 fall economic statement. It is reasonable to ask why revenues were almost $1 billion higher than what was predicted, and the answer is actually quite simple. There were stronger and expected tax revenues and slightly higher tax revenues as a result of new information received from the federal government since the fall economic statement.

In 2023-24, overall program expenses are now projected to be $193.4 billion. That is $424 million higher than the previous forecast in the 2023 fall economic statement, and it is also $2.8 billion higher than the 2023 budget plan. Again, the question that seems obvious is “Why?” Well, there are a few reasons for this increase.

Firstly, there was an additional $1.7-billion investment in health care, mainly for compensation costs, cancer treatment services and other health initiatives. There was also a new $704-million investment through the New Deal for Toronto, including $504 million for transit and transportation funding and $200 million in operating supports for shelters. And lastly, there was a $583-million increase in the college sector, offset by third-party revenue. These three examples where program expenses have increased represent three of the top priorities for the government: health, education and infrastructure.

Speaker, in a perfect world, our initial projections would be 100% correct 100% of the time. But one of the strengths of this government is fiscal flexibility and making adjustments to meet the changing needs of the province. That’s the reason for our quarterly spending updates.

The bottom line is that Ontario’s economy is expected to see continued growth in 2024. In the context of the global economic situation, this is a win. In large part, this is because of the resilience of the people of the province of Ontario, but also the targeted investments and the prudent fiscal management of this government, under this Premier and this Minister of Finance.

Speaker, as I said, the Supply Act supports the spending plans outlined in the 2023 Ontario budget, Building a Strong Ontario.

As a member of the Standing Committee on Finance and Economic Affairs last year, I also had the opportunity to travel across the province for pre-budget consultations, in Kenora, Thunder Bay and Sault Ste. Marie in the north; in Ottawa and Kingston in the east; in Windsor and Essex in the southwest; and of course, right here in Toronto. As I’ve said before, the 2023 budget reflects the priorities of the people we heard from right across Ontario during this process. It was a long-term, prudent and realistic path forward for Ontario, designed to make life easier and more affordable for families, workers and businesses across the province.

As the parliamentary assistant at the Treasury Board, I had the opportunity to work with the Minister of Finance and with our colleagues on some important measures for small businesses and manufacturers in the 2023 Ontario budget. And I’d like to give just a few examples.

Firstly, we are expanding access to the small business corporate income tax rate by increasing the phase-out range. This provides Ontario’s small businesses with income tax relief of $265 million from 2022-23 to 2025-26.

Secondly, the new Ontario Made Manufacturing Investment Tax Credit provides a 10% refundable corporate tax credit to help local manufacturers lower their costs, invest in their workers and become more competitive. Manufacturers will receive a tax credit of up to $2 million each year, because we recognize that it is critical that we rebuild our manufacturing sector in this province.

As the Minister of Economic Development said earlier this month, before we were elected in 2018, companies were leaving Ontario. Ontario had lost over 300,000 manufacturing jobs, including many in the auto sector. Sergio Marchionne at Fiat Chrysler told former Premier Wynne that she had made Ontario the most expensive place to do business in North America. And at the Ford assembly plant in Oakville, where I worked for 31 years, we watched as Ontario lost auto sector jobs, while the former Liberal Minister of Finance from Mississauga South, at the time, told us that assembly line manufacturing was a thing of the past. Well, he was incorrect, because today we’ve been able to attract $28 billion of automotive investment in this province, under this Premier.

Speaker, our government has a very different approach. The Premier, the Minister of Finance and our team have made Ontario open for business again. This government is focused on driving growth by lowering costs, cutting taxes, red tape and energy costs, and attracting more jobs and more investment to Ontario. These policies have produced an economic recovery that leads the country.

Since 2018, Ontario has added over 715,000 new jobs. In fact, in 2023, Ontario created more manufacturing jobs than all 50 US states combined. Can we just imagine that? All 50 US states—we are creating more jobs here in the province of Ontario.

There is no better example than the auto sector, where we have attracted over $28 billion in new investment from global auto manufacturers in the last three years alone. They see the enormous potential in Ontario’s Critical Minerals Strategy. They’re excited about all the work we’re doing to build new, made-in-Ontario supply chains, connecting critical minerals from the north, including the Ring of Fire, to manufacturing in the south.

Instead of worrying about their jobs, my friends at the Ford assembly complex in Oakville are now working to transform the facility into a global hub for manufacturing electric vehicles.

Again, I want to thank the Minister of Economic Development and the Minister of Mines for all the work they’re doing on this. I was proud to join them both at the PDAC convention this month. My son Joey, a student at the Queen’s University department of mining, attended as well. I know that he is excited about the province’s $3-million investment through the Ontario Junior Exploration Program. This is a program designed to help companies search for mineral deposits and attract even more investment in this growing sector.

Growth has given us the revenue we need to invest in our hospitals, schools, transit, highways, and other key infrastructure. I would like to speak about some of these investments now in greater detail.

The 2023 budget includes over $81 billion for the health care sector this year; that is up by 40%, from $59 billion in 2017-18.

I would like to give the members an example of what this means for us in Missisauga. Provincial funding for Trillium Health Partners has increased by over $356 million over the last five years, from $281 million in 2018 to $1.2 billion now. That is an increase of almost 50% for Trillium Health Partners over the last five years. As I mentioned earlier, the estimates and the public accounts are available online, going back over 20 years. That means we can also look at the five-year period before 2018, and I would really encourage all members to do this. Under the previous Liberal government, provincial funding for Trillium Health Partners increased from $768 million in 2013 to $821 million in 2018. That is an increase of under 7% over five years, or only about 1% each year.

As former Liberal Deputy Premier and Minister of Health George Smitherman said, “Ontario Liberals really starved health care for five years, and that is not spoken enough.” I want to reiterate that: Minister of Health George Smitherman said, “Ontario Liberals really starved health care for five years, and that is not spoken enough.” And I agree.

They left us with overcrowded hospitals and badly outdated facilities that simply were not up to the challenges we faced during the pandemic.

As well, we know that the new leader, Bonnie Crombie, told TVO that she would have spent even less on health care. Can you imagine that? She would have spent even less on health care.

Under the leadership of this Premier, in the 2023 budget, the government committed over $54 billion over 10 years in the largest hospital and long-term-care building programs in Canadian history. Speaker, $32 billion in capital grants are getting shovels in the ground to build the health care infrastructure Ontario needs, including over 50 hospital projects, with 3,000 new beds.

In Missisauga–Lakeshore, this includes a historic multi-billion dollar investment to build the largest and most advanced hospital in Canadian history, with 22 storeys, three million square feet and almost 1,000 beds. This will include a 200,000-square-foot women’s and children’s hospital, which will be the first of its kind in Canada. In total, it will be triple the size of the current hospital, which first opened in 1958. I was born at that hospital, and both of my sons were born there—and not only that; my mother worked in the kitchen, as a first-generation immigrant, and my niece was a candy striper at that same hospital.

The truth is, we needed a new hospital 20 years ago, and the former Liberal government kept saying no. Now the RFP process for the new hospital has closed, and construction is expected to begin next year, in 2025.

To the east, by Etobicoke Creek—for my friend from Etobicoke–Lakeshore—we’re expanding the Queensway Health Centre, with a new nine-storey patient tower, with 600,000 square feet, and over 350 new hospital beds in a modern centre for complex care.

To the north, in Brampton, we are working with the William Osler Health System to transform the Peel Memorial hospital into a 24/7 patient hospital.

And I could go on with examples from every corner of this province that will provide better health care for patients and their families.

Of course, any new facility that is being built is going to require staff—more trained doctors, nurses, PSWs and other health care professionals. That’s why we are building a stronger health care workforce. Ontario has added over 10,000 new doctors and over 80,000 new nurses to the health care system over the last five years.

And as the Deputy Premier announced last month, the government is investing $110 million to connect up to 328,000 people to primary care teams. Combined with historic investments to expand medical education and the work that we are doing to allow internationally trained doctors to care for patients, the Ministry of Health expects that up to 98% of Ontarians will be connected to a regular health care provider within the next few years.

In the 2023 budget, the province announced significant investments to reduce hospital wait times by offering more surgeries at community surgical and diagnostic centres. This allows hospitals to turn their attention towards more complex and high-risk surgeries, reduce surgery wait times, and ease emergency department pressures. I’m pleased to be able to say that we have already seen the results of this approach. As of June 2023, the wait-list for surgeries has been reduced by more than 25,000 people from the peak in March 2022. I know that we are all committed to learn from this and to reduce wait times even further, by expanding funding to existing community surgical and diagnostic centres, and funding new centres for MRIs and CT imaging, and other surgeries and procedures.

Of course, reducing hospital wait times is just one part of our vision for the health care system in this great province of Ontario.

We’re also making great progress on our plan to build modern, safe and comfortable long-term-care homes for seniors and residents. The 2023 budget included a historic investment of $6.4 billion to build over 30,000 new beds and to upgrade 28,000 long-term-care beds across the province by 2028. In my community of Mississauga–Lakeshore, this includes the largest long-term-care home in Ontario, which we just opened in November.

Speaker, it is important for me to pause here to note that from 2011 to 2018 the former Liberal government was only able to build 611 beds across the entire province. Speaker, can you imagine that? From 2011 to 2018, they only built 611 beds across the province. In one location in my riding of Mississauga–Lakeshore, we have 632 beds—more than what the previous Liberal government built throughout the whole province.

As the number of Ontarians over 75 grew by 75%, the number of long-term-care beds increased by less than 1%. There were over 4,500 people on the wait-list for long-term care in Mississauga alone, when I was elected five years ago. We had 20% fewer long-term-care beds than the provincial average—and, again, many were badly out of date.

That’s why, during the pandemic, I joined the Premier to announce the Accelerated Build Program, in Mississauga–Lakeshore, to build modern, comfortable and safe new homes that follow the latest standards for design and safety. As I said, 632 new residents have just moved into Wellbrook Place, the largest long-term-care home in Ontario—even larger than the Credit Valley Hospital when it first opened 38 years ago. Mr. Speaker, can you imagine that a long-term-care facility that has 632 beds is larger than the Credit Valley Hospital when it first opened 38 years ago? This is an incredible achievement from our Minister of Long-Term Care and our Premier, who committed to build long-term care throughout the province of Ontario.

It is part of a new campus of care for seniors, including a new health services building and the first residential hospice in the city of Mississauga.

Another thing: You can’t imagine that in Mississauga, being a city as large as it is, we do not have a hospice there yet, but we will under this Premier.

Again, I want to thank Karli Farrow at Trillium Health Partners and Tess Romain at Partners Community Health and their teams for all their great work.

It is important to note that there are projects like this under way right across the province of Ontario.

And since the 2023 budget, a number of new long-term-care homes have been completed and opened to new residents, including the Humber Meadows Long-Term Care Home with 320 beds, which opened last June in North York.

We all recognize that Ontario’s population is growing rapidly. In fact, Ontario grew by over half a million people last year alone, and we’re on track for at least another half a million people this year. That’s more growth than any US state, including the fastest-growing states, like Florida and Texas—our population is growing faster than all the US states combined. This represents a tremendous opportunity, but it also demands action.

It’s one of the reasons this government has the most ambitious capital plan in Ontario’s history. Ontario’s plan to build includes investments of $185 billion in infrastructure over the next 10 years, including $20.4 billion this year alone and almost $26 billion next year, in 2024-25. That is the largest capital plan in the 156-year history of Ontario. I’m going to repeat that, Mr. Speaker: It’s the largest capital plan in the 156-year history of this province.

I want to thank the Premier, the Minister of Finance and the Minister of Infrastructure for building Ontario, which was neglected for so many years.

It includes $71 billion for transit infrastructure, including $7.5 billion this year—the largest investment in transit in Ontario’s history. This will continue to transform the GO Transit rail network into a modern and reliable rapid transit system.

It also includes the largest subway expansion in Canadian history, including the Ontario Line, the Scarborough subway extension, the Yonge North subway extension and the Eglinton Crosstown West extension. These are game-changing new projects, like the Ontario Line here in Toronto, which will connect to over 40 other transit routes including GO Transit lines, TTC subway and streetcar lines, and the Eglinton Crosstown LRT line. In my community of Mississauga–Lakeshore, it includes the new 18-kilometre Hazel McCallion LRT line on Hurontario, connecting with a new BRT on Lakeshore, which will connect the Lakeview development that is going to have over 16,000 new residents over the next 30 years.

The government’s plan also includes $28 billion over 10 years to support highway expansion, maintenance and repair projects right across the province, to improve our highway network, because we know that highways and roads are critical to the economic well-being of Ontario. This includes Highway 413, a new 400-series highway and transport corridor, which will connect Peel, Halton and York regions to support the movement of people and goods across the western GTA. Hundreds of thousands of new residents are moving to the area every year. We don’t have the highway capacity we need to support this growth. All of our major highways in the western GTA will be over capacity within the next 10 years. Highway 413 will finally bring relief to an area that needs it the most, saving drivers up to 30 minutes each way.

The Bradford Bypass, a new, four-lane, 16-kilometre freeway connecting Highway 400 in Simcoe county and Highway 404 in York region, will save commuters even more time, up to 35 minutes per trip.

Highway 7, a new, four-lane, 18-kilometre highway between Kitchener and Guelph, would save commuters more time.

Again, I could go on with many more examples.

In my own community, the first phase of the QEW/Dixie interchange improvements is now complete in Mississauga–Lakeshore. And the $314-million QEW/Credit River Improvement project is well under way, with traffic now open on the new twin bridge over the Credit River. We’re rehabilitating the existing heritage bridge. So we will have two bridges going back and forth to move commuters back and forth.

Speaker, I also want to take a few moments to speak about some of the measures in the 2023 budget that were designed to keep costs down for individuals and families across the province.

Firstly, we have extended the province’s gas tax and fuel tax rate cuts until the end of June 2024. This simple move means savings for the people of Ontario every time they go to the gas pumps. It means putting money back in your pocket to help put food on the table or to help buy other essentials to support your family. As Jay Goldberg, Ontario director of the Canadian Taxpayers Federation, said, “This will ensure that critical tax relief continues into 2024.”

At the same time, we continue to call on the federal government to stop their 23% carbon tax increase, which would add 17.6 cents per litre to the price of gas on April 1.

My first job was at the Pioneer gas station in Port Credit. At the time, a litre of gas was 33 cents. By 2030, the carbon tax will be 37 cents more than a litre of gas was when I first started my job there.

I also want to take a moment to highlight the One Fare initiative, which eliminates double or triple fares for most local transit services across the GTA, when commuters also take GO Transit, saving an average of $1,600 each year. Soon, commuters will be able to travel on the GO Transit Lakeshore West line, the new Hazel McCallion Hurontario LRT, the new Lakeshore BRT corridor, the TTC, and on other municipal transit systems right across the GTA on only one single fare. I want to congratulate my friends the Minister of Transportation and the Associate Minister of Transportation on this excellent initiative.

The 2023 budget also provided support to more seniors with an expansion of the Guaranteed Annual Income System. Starting this July, it will allow for 100,000 more seniors to be eligible for this program, including payments of up to $166 per month for single seniors or $332 per month for senior couples. It is important for me to note that this benefit is now adjusted each year based on inflation.

Our government is also committed to support the province’s most vulnerable people, with an additional $202 million each year for the Homelessness Prevention Program and the Indigenous Supportive Housing Program—a 40% increase over 2022-23. Both of these programs were designed to help those who need it most. As I’ve said before, in my community of Mississauga–Lakeshore, this investment is helping to double the capacity of Armagh House, the only transitional housing facility in the region of Peel for victims of domestic violence. Again, I want to thank the Minister of Municipal Affairs and Housing for all his great work on this program.

These are just a few examples of the actions that this government is taking to keep costs down for some of this province’s families, businesses and people right across Ontario.

In every budget, the government has to make some difficult choices. It’s always a balancing act, but I’m happy that our targeted tax cuts and assistance programs have been able to help those who need it most.

I would also take some time today to highlight some important initiatives from my ministry, the Treasury Board Secretariat. I think members will agree that these are great examples of the approach this government is taking with the public purse.

Firstly, I’m very proud to remind the House that a new regulation under the Building Ontario Businesses Initiative Act, or BOBI, was approved and will come into effect in just a few weeks, on April 1. This will help to level the playing field for Ontario businesses, providing greater access to procurement opportunities across the entire public sector, including ministries and agencies, hospitals and schools. This will promote economic growth and help Ontario businesses to sell more goods and services and create more jobs right across Ontario. We expect that by 2026, contracts worth at least $3 billion will go to Ontario businesses every year. That’s $3 billion back into our own economy.

And when you think about it, it’s obvious that Ontario businesses should benefit from the spending of their own government. We will do this by changing the way we evaluate bids and by taking into account all the extra costs Ontario companies pay to comply with our high standards to protect worker health and safety and the environment.

I am so pleased with all the hard work that went into preparing this new regulation. It demonstrates the kind of common-sense approach that our government is taking with the public purse. And I know we will continue to look for new ways to protect and promote our small businesses.

To take another example, the government is now using innovative procurement strategies and a variety of delivery models to make it easier to work with builders on project requirements, design and pricing. This is helping to ensure that Ontario gets strong and competitive bids on our infrastructure projects. We are now separating large, complex projects like the Ontario Line into smaller contracts to generate more market interest, to build more transit, highways and other infrastructure better and faster.

The government is also using modular builds and promoting design standardization, and working with municipalities to get shovels in the ground faster and approvals faster. These initiatives are helping us to get shovels in the ground, creating new jobs, and helping to build much-needed new infrastructure. That is why we introduced the Building Transit Faster Act to streamline progress on priority transit projects. As well, the Supporting Broadband and Infrastructure Expansion Act and the Getting Ontario Connected Act have made it easier for Internet service providers to deploy infrastructure, to provide faster access to reliable, high-speed Internet.

Speaker, it is absolutely essential that the government addresses these infrastructure needs. Ontario’s taxpayers cannot fund the infrastructure that the province needs alone.

That is why we set up the Ontario Infrastructure Bank, a new, arm’s-length, board-governed agency. As the government moves forward with our plan to build, we are always searching for new ways to attract trusted investors, like Canadian public sector pension plans, to help build the essential infrastructure that we all need. Many of these plans already make investments in infrastructure around the world. For example, the Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan has over $200 billion in investments around the world. Can you imagine that, Mr. Speaker? The Ontario Infrastructure Bank will give pension funds like this new options to put their members’ investments to work right here in Ontario, to help the government deliver large-scale infrastructure projects right across Ontario. The province did not reinvent the wheel here. We are following in the steps of our own federal government, the UK government, and many US states, including California and Connecticut. We’re working to deliver more infrastructure faster, with new capital from investors, and the new Ontario Infrastructure Bank will help the government deliver it.

Speaker, thank you again for the time to speak on the Supply Act this afternoon. I would like to close my remarks by thanking all the members who are here today listening to this Supply Act debate, as I have outlined some of the key spending initiatives of the government’s 2023-24 budget. I think I’ve touched on several critical areas where each dollar spent supports the families, workers and businesses of this province.

Mr. Speaker, I just want to reiterate some of the things just in my riding of Mississauga–Lakeshore alone.

We are building the largest hospital in Canadian history. This hospital will be 22 storeys tall—24 surgical rooms, almost a thousand beds. Mr. Speaker, when I say 22 storeys, that’s 22 storeys—not home storeys. That’s a building, so that works out to 35 storeys. Can you imagine seeing a hospital that is 35 storeys tall and having more surgical rooms than any other hospital in Canadian history?

As well, 632 long-term-care beds in Mississauga–Lakeshore—more than the previous Liberal government built from 2011 to 2018, in one location.

I can continue with the new Credit River bridge—$314 million to build a new bridge over the Credit River to get our commuters back and forth from Toronto to Burlington to Hamilton to Niagara Falls, to get our products to market much quicker; with $28 billion of investment coming into this province in automotive investment. We need the highways so that we can transport our parts into plants much quicker due to the fact that the plants nowadays work on a just-in-time system. If the part is not there on time, the line goes down in production. We need these plants so we can compete with the world.

And we’re attracting automotive investments, from the Minister of Economic Development—the largest VW plant in history. It will be the fourth-largest building—1.6 kilometres long and one kilometre wide. Can you imagine a building of this magnitude being built right here in Ontario?

Mr. Speaker, I want to reiterate that every dollar spent by the government comes out of the pockets of the hard-working Ontario taxpayers. I also said earlier, it is a heavy responsibility to be trusted with the hard-earned tax dollars of the people of this province, and it’s not to be taken lightly. The government made a promise to be responsible and transparent with the economic and fiscal situation of this province, and I believe that during this fiscal cycle, this is exactly what we have done.

Finally, I want to reiterate that the government is not requesting approval for any new spending here today. All of these important investments have already been made.

I’m looking forward to voting for the Supply Act, and I hope that all members will join me here today to support the spending here from the 2023-24 fiscal year.

I just want to thank all members here for listening to me. Like I said, this will not be talk at the water cooler tomorrow, and it won’t be on the news this evening. The Supply Act is what we have already spent this year in our province of Ontario—and these are historic investments that we have made in Ontario.

I always look at the 2017-18 budget, and I look at the previous Minister of Finance, and the previous government spent $152 billion.

Today, under this Premier, this Minister of Finance and this government, we’re spending $202.7 billion without raising a tax for the regular families here in Ontario. And I think that’s the most important thing—that we are not raising taxes, and we’re giving money back to our people here in Ontario.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker, for giving me this opportunity today to speak on this.

It’s always a pleasure to stand in this House to represent the good people of Scarborough–Rouge Park.

I look forward to hearing the remarks from the parliamentary assistant to the President of the Treasury Board, the member for Mississauga–Lakeshore, and from the official opposition.

Further debate?

No, sir. I think it’s self-explanatory.