—$39,000 a year?

Interjections.

So I said to the neighbour, the Conservative neighbour back home, “I understand the province is a powerful entity. I understand they can introduce back-to-work legislation. They can legislate a collective agreement. They can threaten fines. But, ultimately, they require the compliance of the working people responsible for administering that fine.” And I told him, “I don’t know how many people are going to be motivated to walk up to a low-paid education worker, who spends their day working with people with disabilities, and say, ‘Here’s a $4,000 fine.’”

What I’m saying with this particular bill is if you open up transit workers’ collective agreements and they are faced with the prospect of their working conditions dropping, when these are the people, during the pandemic, that made sure we could get safely to work or to the hospital, that took risks of getting sick and getting hurt on the job—I don’t know where this is going to lead, but it won’t lead to a good place, not a good place. As my friend from Sudbury will say and has said many times, you come up in the labour movement by demonstrating your capacity to listen to members and fight for them. You don’t hold on to your job as an elected representative or a staff member in the labour movement if you do not rise to the occasion.

Let’s hope, in our country, unlike other places around the world, it doesn’t have to get to that. But in November 2022, we almost got there. We almost got there. When I was a university professor, Speaker, I used to have to teach about labour history in this country. We would recall moments like the Winnipeg General Strike, and the students would say to me, “I can’t even imagine what that would look like.” Then, of course, we went through the convoy movement and have a heckuva better idea of what throttling a city looks like.

But the fact of the matter is I don’t want and I don’t think—I hope no one in this place wants to pick a fight with transit workers. I don’t think we want that. I think what we want to do, as I began, is build public transit.

If the government wants to work with willing municipalities who would administer a transit administration fee to build GO stations in their communities—places like Bowmanville or elsewhere—it sounds like a great idea, provided the regulations make sense and we’re not favouring people like Mr. De Gasperis, who, as I understand from my friend from Spadina–Fort York, purchased the land across from the Ontario Science Centre a month before the Ontario Line announcement. Or the $450-million, now $600-million, subsidy we are putting into a parking garage for an Austrian spa, at a time when, if we were all to go together and go down under the Don Valley Parkway, we would see people living under bridges, and we would see, as we have said in this place, young people trapped in their parents’ basements, looking for housing—and we have $600 million to give to an Austrian conglomerate to build a luxury spa at Ontario Place? And we have a transit authority like Metrolinx, which has increased the price of building subways to $1 billion a kilometre?

Alarm bells should be going off in the Premier’s office. Alarm bells should be going off, Speaker. We need to clean a little house, as my grandmother used to say. We need to get our act together.

The good news is, we’ve got people—smart people—who know how to build public transit. We’ve got a public desperate for more public transit. We’ve got workers who are ready to operate and build public transit. But who we work with matters—who we work with really, really, really matters.

My colleague from University–Rosedale once said in this place, on October 29, 2020—her words—“Toronto is a graveyard of failed transit” plans. To quote from what she said, “It’s an absolute graveyard.”

She says, “The Eglinton West project”—that was, you know, the Crosstown that we are discussing ingloriously today—“which has a lot of merit, would have been built right now” if then-Premier Mike Harris hadn’t filled in the holes that were being prepared to build it then. It might have been built 20 years ago, according to my colleague, had we followed previous progressive mayor—previous to the progressive mayor we have in Toronto right now—David Miller’s Transit City plan. We might have had a line “from Pearson to Kennedy.” The Sheppard extension could have been built back then. The Finch West extension could have been built back then. The Eglinton East extension could have been built back then, but, according to the member from University–Rosedale, what seems to be the recurring theme—and we heard Matt Gurney talk about it before is—idea after idea, vision after vision, and the consultants’ meter starts running, but the product does not get built, or in our case, in Ottawa, when it does get built, it does not operate terribly well.

So here is what we can do. We can commit, as a Legislature, to recognize that transit is critical and valuable, that active transit is critical—let me go into some more positive notes, Speaker. Something I love to use, in the city when I have to take a plane—I try not to, but when I have to take a plane—is the Bike Share program that Metrolinx offers. That’s a success story. Let’s say something positive about Metrolinx for a moment. All you got to do is put an app on your phone, you tap it, and a bike pops out of its docking station. You don’t have to bring your own bike to Toronto. You jump on it and you head to wherever you need to go at a very, very, reasonable cost. In my case, I’ll go all the way down to Billy Bishop, if I have to. It’s fun. I don’t drive fast. I need to remember to bring my helmet, but it’s a great way to get around the city; it’s a fun way to get around the city. So that’s a positive thing. It’s a pilot we have.

Down the road from me—I see the member from Glengarry–Prescott–Russell over there, so it’s down the road for both of us into the province of Quebec—is the city of Montreal, which may be the foremost cycling destination right now in all of North America. They have a plan from 2023 to 2027 to build an incredible amount of bike infrastructure.

Commuters with cars love it, because the streets are less congested. Cyclists, wheelchair users, walker users and pedestrians love it, because they’re protected. Montreal is currently in a boom. It works, but here sadly in our city—the run-up to the last mayoral by-election—we had many mayoral candidates presenting themselves as anti-bike-lane warrior and divisive. That’s not going to get us far at all.

I don’t believe in the war on the car. I don’t believe in the war on the bike lane. I don’t believe in that language at all when it comes to how we get around our cities, because the obligation instead is for us to all keep each other safe. It’s for us to all keep each other safe.

On my bike ride that I just did to Toronto, before I left, I had occasion to talk to a mom, Anita, whose daughter Serene, 14 years old now, will have a brain injury for the rest of her life. She was struck with her brother when she was crossing Fisher Avenue. The driver, if you can believe it, fled the scene and later tried to sell the car to avoid being detected by the Ottawa police. I give the Ottawa police full credit, because they did a full publicity campaign, a picture was found and they ultimately found this guy. But that was the level of malevolence that that person exhibited behind the wheel.

If you are a young person trying to get around your community—going to school, doing groceries for the family, meeting up with your friends—what’s going through your mind? Because what happened to this fellow two weeks ago is before a justice of the peace, he was levied $1,000 fine and had his licence suspended for a year—and that is the exception to the rule. That is more penalty than normal. The maximum fine normally is $500, but only because he fled the incident was the penalty worse, was the licence suspension in effect. In the beginning of the sentencing, the guy showed no remorse. He was smirking, in fact—smirking. I was talking to Anita, the mom, and she was just saying, “It’s really hard for us to live through that moment and to know for our other kids and for Serene that there is no justice.” So what would any parent do? You’re going to put that kid in a car, which you deem to be a safe place, and you’re going to drive them where you feel they need to go. But now we’re moving in the direction, as we talked about off the top, that we don’t want to go.

I talked to a lovely fellow named Randy when I stopped in Brighton, Speaker, who was one of the coordinators for the cycling groups out in Brighton, Ontario. I talked to Minister Piccini before getting there and got a sense of the different groups to contact before I got there. But Randy tells me that, out there, it is all too common, when they have those group rides and they’re doing them safely, that someone will buzz them within like six inches, that people will be swiped off the road.

I’ve talked to dump truck drivers, construction workers who don’t feel like cyclists or pedestrians or other drivers have a sense of how poor their sightlines are. I’ve sat in the cab of the truck and I’ve tried to imagine, could I see someone down there? The dump truck driver had told me, “You know, when I’m on a construction site, I’ve got a flag person following me around everywhere to make sure people are safe, but when I leave the construction site, that person’s not there and I’m just expected to figure it out.”

There’s so much we could do with this legislation, with the companion pieces of legislation to make the province safer. I really, really do think, as critical as I have been of aspects of this legislation, that there’s a lot here that we can come around and work together on: expanding public transit, GO stations. There’s a lot here we’ll agree on. The notion of people being safe, getting to work, getting home—we’re going to agree on that. These should not be partisan issues. They should be political priorities of this place. We should be able to come behind it. We should be able to give parents and kids and everyone out there confidence that this House will design laws that will make sure people can get around this city and other cities, that people can do that safely and, moreover, to return to the context, that we’ll do our part for the climate crisis.

Thirty years from now, you and I, Speaker—I don’t think I’m ever going to retire, it’s just the nature of my hyperactivity, but whatever I’m doing 30 years from now, I’ll be able to say, “You know what? I did my part. I worked across the aisle. I worked with my caucus. We were active in our community. We made sure that you had the opportunities that I was lucky to have.” Let’s hope we can make Bill 131 like that. I welcome questions.