Speaker, what I’m going to rise in this place and defend all the time is community safety. The member can engage in any number of culture-war statements he wants, but what I’m going to ask him and what I’m going to ask every member in this House is: What does that accomplish by the day’s end? What does that actually accomplish? Will it bring back the lives we’ve lost of first responders? Will it bring back Sergeant Mueller? Will it bring back Carl Reinboth? Will it give people a new lease on life, or is it just about scoring points on Twitter?

I’m not here to score points on Twitter. I’m here to fight for my community. I’m here to make sure that we do right by people living in crisis, and comments like that? It’s just performance. I’m interested in actual solutions. Believe it or not, Speaker, I’ve found that there are times members of this government will do that. I invite this member to talk to those members of this government, because those are people actually engaged in serious work, not games.

I began my life as a community organizer, Speaker, in this city, working with the great Jack Layton to make sure people didn’t freeze to death on the streets of this city and got access through a housing-first program. We convinced a Conservative mayor, Mel Lastman, to invest millions of dollars in a housing program called the Streets to Homes program, that the city currently has, which needs another tranche of reinvestment.

But there are solutions that exist, Speaker. We don’t have to keep throwing money at the problem in ineffective ways and putting people in difficult situations. We can and must do better.

Back to the Premier—I really hope the Premier himself will answer the question that my colleague just posed.

Look, I think one of the biggest things we can do in politics sometimes—and it’s not easy—is to admit when we’re wrong, and we now have a federal commission that said a few embarrassing things about this government. It said that the Solicitor General said, in response to the public safety minister requesting a meeting, “You’re not my effing boss.” That was act number one.

The mayor of Ottawa asked the Premier, “Will you please come to these meetings with your political colleagues?”, and the Premier said, “It’s not worth my time.”

And then, to add insult to injury, when Justice Rouleau asked this government, asked the Premier, asked then-Solicitor General Jones to come to Ottawa to appear before the commission, they invoked parliamentary privilege and ran and hid.

Now is your opportunity to turn the page. It’s our first day back. Acknowledge you made a mistake. Apologize to the people of Ottawa.

I’ll say to my friend from Carleton, I’m not only relying on the current mayor. I think it’s significant because that’s the current office-holder. There is not one enthusiastic supporter of this bill running for the office of mayor in our city right now—some have said they might want to use it. Wouldn’t that give the member pause to think this isn’t going to work?

What would a strong mayor actually do? If I was the mayor of the city of Ottawa right now and I looked at how I’m spending money—and we’re spending $25 million on police-related calls for homelessness, and $17 million on affordable housing. What would a strong mayor do?

We would build more housing through non-market housing—repurposing federal office buildings that are currently vacant because people aren’t working in them, and creating housing out of them.

That’s the kind of mayor we need. That’s the kind of leadership we need.

Folks in Ottawa are ready to work with you.

One needs to have mapped out the next steps of how we make affordable housing happen in Ottawa, how we help small businesses, how we help people who are suffering in the mental health crisis, how we fix our hospitals and schools.

One needs a plan, and hope is not a plan. Railroading is not a plan.

I mean it, to my neighbour from up the Ottawa Valley there. Let me work with you, my friend.

Take this bill on the road through the community, and they will tell you why a mayor-driven model is not going to build you more homes. It’s not going to help feed people who are suffering, help them recover and get a decent life. It’s not going to help a small business that is going to close right now.

I think of a place like the Ottawa Bike Café on Sparks Street, which is a fantastic enterprise. If you’re ever in our city, I encourage you to patronize it. Just like every Sparks Street business right now, they have been hammered by the pandemic, because they’re in the red zone. As we figured out, from a security perspective, what to do going forward after the convoy, we forced a lot of these businesses to close, or we forced them to open up, because they needed the revenue, without a lot of traffic, because now we have federal government workers who used to work in that area of the city working from home. I think about the owners of that place, Jason and Maria, and I think about what their future is going to be. What is Bill 3 going to do for them?

If the government would allow us to take this bill on the road and not rush it through this House, I think they would hear from those voices directly, not just the carping socialist on Wednesday morning.

So where are we at, Speaker? We’re in a situation where my friends in government are telling us that the only way to build housing in the province of Ontario is to put more power in the office of the mayor. The mayor of our city, who was not consulted on this piece of legislation, is telling this government, “Put on the brakes. You never talked to me about this.” But we’re marching forward nonetheless.

But the good news is this: I’ve worked with these folks before to get a public inquiry declared into our LRT system. I’m happy to work with them again to make sure this bill actually does what it’s intended to do. Because we have elections coming up province-wide for municipal elected officials, every single one of those aspiring municipal elected officials are going to have to try to prove to our neighbours how they’re going to help people get housed, how they’re going to help small businesses be successful, how they’re going to help deal with our mental health crisis everywhere in our city. They share an ambition for urgent change.

I’ve often found, as I’ve listened to my friends in government talk about legislation over the last four years, that we share a commonality of urgency. They want to get things done, to time-allocate, to move fast. If I was in government, I would probably be sitting at the table and saying the same thing—“Enough talk. Enough studying things to death.” I like that.

What I absolutely don’t like and what I would never consider adequate for me, for people working with me, is to march ahead with proposals that have never been presented to those they will directly impact first. I can’t do that; that’s a red line.

So let’s back up a bit. Let’s think about how we can build housing, how we can make municipal decisions co-operatively. Let’s involve all stakeholders at the table, and let’s actually build the Ontario that we’ve dreamed about. We never do that. We hit each other with partisan gloves in this place all the time. We never stop for a second to think about what we agree on and how we can build the Ontario we dream about. Bill 3, in my opinion, is falling short on that right now, and we need a piece of legislation that will make that happen.

Strong mayors—that’s what this bill is talking about this morning.

I want to mention, Speaker, though you, to the government, to my other colleagues in this chamber this morning, something that has been said at committee, I said it at committee; other people said it at committee—I’ll pull up my reading glasses here, because my 50-year-old eyes sometimes fail me: No one asked anybody in our city, in Ottawa, about this bill.

I just want to say rhetorically, off the top, for our collective benefit, would we ever think a piece of legislation is adequate for third reading in this place—a place built by our grandparents, by generations of people who wanted to build a better life for people in this province—if we didn’t actually take a piece of legislation that directly impacted a community for review first?

The mayor of Ottawa, Jim Watson, has said publicly that he found out about this bill in the media—in the media, Speaker.

I’ve asked business improvement associations at home; I’ve asked community groups at home; I’ve asked advocates of all different kinds at home, all of whom are concerned with issues I hear this government is concerned about: affordable housing; the need to make sure our transit systems work well; the need to make sure that, in particular, our neighbours who are suffering right now in mental health crisis and the opioid crisis—which is ripping a hole through many aspects of our community right now. I hear the government talk about these issues a lot; I commend them for doing so. They’re talking about this bill, in particular, around housing as being important.

But I would ask the government, through you, Speaker, would we ever want to introduce a piece of legislation that would impact a particular municipality or community without talking to them first? I would hope we could get across our party lines and agree that, no, of course we wouldn’t. But that is happening right now. We are at third reading. A bill is being pushed quickly through this chamber—within the rules, I’ll acknowledge, but very quickly compared to how previous Parliaments in this place have worked—and the community I represent has not been consulted.

What is the model for this bill? As I understand it from my friends in government, when I heard this bill being debated in committee with MPP Burch and others, the idea is the mayoralty model in Chicago, the strong-mayor model, which would basically empower a mayor to create their own staff infrastructure to be able to implement budgets. Decisions which have previously been collective hiring decisions—for the head of transit, for the head of auditing processes and budgets—would now solely rest within the mayor’s office. If someone was contacted from Ottawa—the mayor, myself, any of our business or community leaders, labour organizations—if they were asked about this bill, the Chicago bill, which would rest these powers in the office of the mayor, I think the first thing we might have told the government is why this particular model did not work with our light rail transit system in our city, a $2-billion investment in a train that has not worked—not worked through our northern climate; wheels that appeared correct flattened over time; stations that smell of sewer gas; doors that jam and don’t open.

How did we get to this particular issue, and what’s the link to Bill 3 and this particular situation? Non-consultation. A sole-source contract with the Rideau Transit Group. I see a government member shaking their head. Perhaps in debate you can enlighten me as to how I’m wrong.

We worked with you. I say, from my perspective, standing here, from my community, as the MPP for Ottawa Centre, I encouraged you for two years to declare a public inquiry into this failed light rail transit system—failed and failing. After two years of advocacy, not just from me but from people back home, the government agreed to a public inquiry into the system, something we could not convince the mayor of our city to do. The mayor of our city would not declare a judicial inquiry into the light rail transit system despite repeated advocacy locally, but we got this government to agree to it. I congratulated the government at the time for doing it, and we are going to see the fruits of that work relatively soon. But why did we have to do that in the first place? We had to do it in the first place—and this is what I’m learning through disclosure in that inquiry process—because some people, apparently very close to the current mayor’s office, were creating a transit system, the details of which were not disclosed to the public.

Let me tell you about the gravity of that situation. Councillor Catherine McKenney, who represents the Somerset ward—if you’ve been to our beautiful city of Ottawa, that is the downtown core of our city—asked to see a copy of the $5-million-a-month maintenance contract for our LRT system—just the maintenance contract. Under the current public-private partnership agreement signed between the city of Ottawa, the province and the federal government and the Rideau Transit Group, the only way Councillor McKenney could review that contract was in the city solicitor’s office, with the city solicitor looking over her shoulder, without the right to take written notes, without the right to use any digital device to record what was being read. That’s the level of non-transparency we got with stage 1 of the LRT in Ottawa, under a procurement model that, I’m going to tell you, Speaker, and tell my friends in government this morning, resembles very closely what you’re doing with this legislation and how you’ve proposed it and rolled it out.

We desperately need transit in our city. I’m going to talk about housing in my 20 minutes; I’m going to talk about adequate incomes, too; but we desperately need transit in our city that works. There was so much hope and promise when people saw the LRT coming. People in our city were excited to get out of their cars and get on the train. We have a fantastic—as you know, Speaker; I know you’ve been to our city many times—bus system, a dedicated bus-lane system that works well in our city. This was meant to complement that and to do our part in climate action, but we have a system that time and again has often failed to operate.

Thanks to the inquiry we worked really hard for, we’re going to find out exactly what has gone wrong. Given what has been disclosed to date—and I hope the government will agree with me on this—the way in which this LRT system was rolled out was a major problem. Any time you have a non-transparent situation in which elected representatives cannot scrutinize a major infrastructure project to make sure it works correctly, you’re bound for trouble.

Let’s go back to the city of Chicago model that’s inspiring Bill 3. What are people in Chicago saying right now about their experience with this model? I’m hearing a lot of criticism. I’m hearing a lot of people who would actually much rather a collaborative approach to leadership, which is probably why, interestingly enough, our current mayor, Jim Watson, has asked all candidates presenting themselves for office for mayor of the city of Ottawa to promise not to use the powers presented in this bill—not to use veto powers, not to use single-capacity hiring contracts for key positions in our city, either financial or otherwise.

Why would the mayor do that? I think the mayor is doing that, quite frankly—and Mayor Watson has been outspoken on this himself. He and I haven’t always agreed on everything. That’s politics. That’s life. He’s saying very clearly that Ottawa, our city, is at a crossroads right now. We have to make huge investments in major infrastructure to make sure we actually have a city that we are proud of, that we leave to our children and our grandchildren, that will work for our small businesses, that will help people live good and dignified lives. He’s actually bypassing the government at this point. He’s asking the people running for office—presumably because no one in the government has picked up the phone to call him about this—“Please don’t use this legislation.” So, colleagues, if you weren’t inspired to shop this piece of legislation by people in the city of Ottawa, I hope that alarming fact gives you pause for not wanting to rush this through.

Why don’t we take Bill 3—I’ll help you. I know how to do town halls. We have a fantastic community in Ottawa that loves to do community organizing. We’ll go across the city—urban, suburban, rural—and talk to people about whether this strong-mayor model will actually help the city, and, as I said off the top, what did our experience with light rail transit teach us about what happens when you have a process that is not transparent, that is not consultative enough?

Let’s talk about housing, because I know the government believes this piece of legislation is going to help build more housing. If you go across Ottawa Centre right now and look at the cranes that are up and look at the projects that are being built, they generally have one thing in common: They are beautiful, tall, glass buildings that are going to be great housing for people who want to downsize from a family home they might have had for 30 or 40 years, to live downtown, to live on transit. It sounds good, right? It checks all the boxes—except we need to look at the price, except when you look at the price of some of the offerings by developers like Claridge or Minto or Trinity Group, highly successful developers who are working very quickly to get projects up and out to market. None of these projects have affordable housing components to them, and that is what we desperately need. In our city, we desperately need more affordable housing—just as I’ve heard the government say everywhere. But, Speaker, I ask the government, through you, if it continues that kind of construction—because I don’t see anything in Bill 3 around inclusionary zoning to ensure that structures that get built—a percentage, as other jurisdictions have done—will be affordable.

What kind of housing are we going to see moved more expeditiously through the mayor’s office after Bill 3? I suspect it will be more of the same, which is great for my parents; it’s great for other people who have a family home that they want to—believe me, my partner and I would love to have our parents move to Ottawa to help us with the kids, have a condo downtown. Sure, it works for me, but will it work for my friend Candyrose?

Let me tell you about Candyrose, Speaker. Candyrose is someone I’ve known in Ottawa’s urban Indigenous community for a long time. She’s a fantastic person. She’s active in the arts in our city and has been part of many theatre performances, many different cultural outreach efforts to try to bring people who come to our city from many contexts of trauma into a new community so they can feel part of our city. That’s Candyrose’s contribution to our city.

Candyrose lives on the Ontario Disability Support Program. Her income is $841 a month. On that $841 a month, Candyrose has to find housing, has to feed herself, has to get around the city. I think we can all agree that that is an undignified situation—not solely responsible by this government, but generations of governments in this place that have set up a situation of legislated poverty.

What has Candyrose done? Just like thousands of social assistance recipients in our city, despite that challenging context, she goes out every day to contribute. It may not show up in gross domestic product, but every day Candyrose goes out there to contribute.

I’m not sure what other members in this House are experiencing, but I recently saw Candyrose at the Labour Day march. She walked up to me—and it had been about a year since I’d seen her in person, pandemic conditions being what they are. I think my friend Candyrose may have lost about 25% of her body weight, for real. I was shocked at the optics of seeing my friend marching with me, talking to me about how much she’s suffering, how much more food costs, how difficult it is to live a dignified life, how she’s even potentially going to lose her own assisted housing through mental health supports, because she just can’t survive. Then I think about what Bill 3 would do for her. Maybe the government would tell me, “What it would do, Joel, is centralize in the office of the mayor immediate payments to people like Candyrose.” It’s kind of the philosopher-king approach to politics: We rest all hope in the office of one person to break up NIMBYism, to break up political gridlocks, and the money will flow straight from the office of the mayor to people like Candyrose, people who are suffering in our city right now. But I suspect that’s not going to happen.

What I think would make it more likely to happen is if I could work with this government to set up actual community conversations back home about this bill, so they could hear directly from Candyrose—not through me—and directly from people who are suffering right now on our streets.

If anybody in this chamber went to the AMO conference recently, you would have walked in our streets and you would have seen people living out in the open and suffering.

At the moment, in the city of Ottawa, we spend $25 million on police calls with respect to homelessness issues—$25 million. And our budget for affordable housing in the city of Ottawa is just over $15 million.

If you talk to any police officer in our city, they will tell you the same thing: There’s one reality for people who are housed, there’s one reality for people who can safely work during the pandemic from home, and there’s another reality for people who live with any kind of trauma, who’ve had any manner of bad luck, who find themselves on the streets with limited to no support.

And here’s the big irony—and former Senator Hugh Segal has spoken about this very eloquently: The big irony is that it costs Ontario a lot more for these folks to suffer in front of our eyes than it would for us to marshal the courage to go in the direction of Scandinavian countries that have said, “There will be a minimum income in this country. We are not prepared to watch people suffer any longer.” Do you know the great thing, Speaker? Every time we have tried it in this great country in which we both live, it has worked.

Almost 50 years ago, in the town of Dauphin, Manitoba, an experiment called Mincome was tried, where every family in that province was guaranteed an income, in those days, of $19,000 a year. There’s a terrific book—I’m not allowed to use props, so I’ll just talk about it—called Utopia for Realists, written by Rutger Bregman, a major intellectual coming out of the Netherlands. Mr. Bregman has documented, from Professor Forget, who has looked at the boxes of documents from that experiment, that spousal abuse dropped, hospital visits dropped, birth rates increased, prosperity reigned. It was more affordable for the province of Manitoba to guarantee a basic income than to watch people suffer.

Feed Ontario, the organization that comes here to lobby us on behalf of food banks in the province, has told us that the cost of poverty in Ontario is $33 billion a year. That’s approaching what we spend on education in the province—if you look at costs to the health care system, the costs to policing and incarceration.

So what I would ask us to consider with this bill, if you were take it on the road—take me up on my offer. Bring it back home. Let me help you. I’m here to help, not just to criticize. Take it on the road.