It’s a pleasure to rise today to speak to this bill, the protecting profits for Enbridge act. I’m beginning on a note of humour because we’re getting to that point in the afternoon where it can become difficult to listen to debate, particularly debate that doesn’t make a lot of sense.

I heard it from the parliamentary assistant just now, who’s my neighbour in eastern Ontario from a riding I love and grew up in, that the member himself, like the minister, enjoys the use of a heat pump. My question is, if it isn’t not great for the member and the minister, what is stopping the province from giving that option to every single apartment building, every single home, every single business, every single farm in the province of Ontario?

Let me tell you something, Speaker: I am a proud New Democrat, and one of the founders of the New Democratic Party, one of the modern exemplars of the values I’m very proud to stand behind here in this part of the House, was J.S. Woodsworth. What Woodsworth used to say at the House of Commons is, “What we desire for ourselves, we desire for all.” We’re not happy when we’re doing okay, because we’re aware of the fact that we all do well when we all do well. We all do well when everybody is given an opportunity to be their best self.

What this bill does brazenly—and I’ve had occasion in the last six years to see a lot of brazen pieces of legislation—is say, “I don’t care about evidence. I don’t care about independent regulators. I don’t care about what the rest of the world is doing in the energy sector. I am going to listen to Enbridge’s consultants, Enbridge’s lobbyists and the chief of staff to the minister” who, as I understand, used to be a lobbyist for Enbridge. “I’m going to listen to that advice and not the advice that could make Ontario a cleaner, greener, more prosperous place for generations to come.”

You know, Speaker, when I hear the disconnect from reality over there, it makes me think of the great playwright Bertolt Brecht, who wrote a reflection on authoritarianism—authoritarian logic like I’m hearing over there. He once wrote in a poem called The Answer:

... that the people

Had forfeited the confidence of the government

And could win it back only

By redoubled efforts. Would it not be easier

In that case for the government

To dissolve the people

And elect another?

That’s what we’re dealing with here. It’s not the first time we’ve seen this government say “meh” in the face of evidence. There’s a big graveyard of former regulators and people entrusted to give advice to this particular government. What about the Ontario child advocate? What about the Ontario Environmental Commissioner? What about the French Language Services Commissioner? What the former member from Lambton–Kent–Middlesex; what about Mr. McNaughton? Do they listen to anybody over there when controversy broaches itself in their caucus, or are they only interested in what Enbridge is trying to tell the province of Ontario in this moment? And that is that the monopoly they have, the agreement they have signed with the province of Ontario and the profits they generate from it matter more than making the energy transition which is right in front of us.

I’ll be charitable to the government too, because there are elements of the province that can see it that work for this government, and they’re doing it. I’m thinking about the IESO, the Independent Electricity Systems Operator, which I’ve heard both the parliamentary assistant and the minister say were not involved in the OEB decision. Incorrect. Page 5 of the 147-page report says very clearly the IESO deputed. Their evidence was gathered toward it. Their opinion was not the one accepted by two thirds of the OEB. So, we can make up our own arguments, but we can’t make up our own facts, all right? The fact of the matter is, the IESO deputed to this process. The advice they gave the OEB was not persuasive.

But the question here, Speaker, is this: When the OEB, which is an independent body of this Legislature, gives a 147-page decision and tells us, as legislators in this place, that we are at risk if we give Enbridge the right to bilk ratepayers $300, that we will be designing, in their words, “an overbuilt, underutilized gas system”—now, that is not to say that this is a system that can change overnight. When I hear members opposite saying that, they’re technically correct. But that’s not the debate we’re having. That’s not the debate we’re having.

The debate we’re having is, what is the future? The 1.5 million homes I hear the members opposite talking about all the time. Well, let’s do a thought experiment. One expert who did actually contribute to the OEB’s study said that if we decided to build those 1.5 million new homes and we decided to heat them with methane gas, that would result in over 100 megatons of carbon pollution over the lifetime of that new infrastructure. Just for reference, Speaker, that is two thirds of Ontario’s total emissions every year. It’s the equivalent of driving 22 million cars. Ontario at the moment has just over nine million cars.

So if the government wants to please Enbridge and allow them to increase the gas bills of Ontarians to fund their infrastructure plans, which are not borne out by evidence, that has a consequence. In my community right now, people in Ottawa Centre are faced with the—I mean, you have to laugh, Speaker, because you don’t want to cry all the time. But we in Ottawa are really proud of our festival called Winterlude. We’re proud of the great canal skateway that we have, biggest in the world. Well, it was biggest in the world. It didn’t open at all last year. Didn’t open at all last year; we’ve had five days of skating this year. And who is one of the principal sponsors of Winterlude back home? Enbridge.

Many of us have asked the National Capital Commission, “Why are we doing this? Why are we working with a company that is pressuring this government, that is pressuring other governments to embrace forms of electrical generation that are counterproductive to our climate goals?”

When I left off the debate, I was talking about the fact that we have a home care industry that works really well for private executives seeking to take money—like the billion dollars proposed by Bill 135—and channel it into investors and private profit. The studies that I’m familiar with have shown that we lose up to 30% of every dollar the province invests in home care in for-profit companies and the dividends they pay to shareholders and the fantastic salaries they lavish on their executives.

I was talking about Linda Knight at CarePartners, someone who has been in this building a lot, lobbying politicians—the $140 million that her company enjoys in contracts.

I want to talk about this from the more important side of the home care spectrum, from the standpoint of personal support workers who work for Linda Knight and CarePartners. I want to quote Dyana Forshner-Juby, who spoke to a reporter three years ago. This is what she had to say, “I’m just sad that I’ve done [care work] for my whole career. My whole career has been taking care of people and trying to uphold a certain standard of care. And to come to this stage, so close to being able to retire and of course, I’m retiring with nothing. I got nothing. There’s no pension plan. And I’m sitting here with a toothache because I don’t have dental coverage, and I’m like, I take my whole life to take care of people. And nobody’s taking care of me.” That is home care, sadly, in the province of Ontario.

The folks on the front lines who are directly delivering the care to persons with disabilities and seniors are getting the shaft by Linda Knight. They’re being told, “Come work for me and enjoy a career” in the glossy brochures. When Dyana shows up for work, she shows up without dental coverage, without a pension plan and without travel being covered, and she goes from client to client. In what province do we treat care workers this way? I’ll tell you what kind of province, Speaker: It’s the kind of province that over the last two decades has seen Conservative and Liberal governments take this critical industry, home care, and hand it over as a gift to the private sector, hand it over as a gift to Linda Knight and CarePartners.

The people who suffer when we line the profits of home care executives are the workers like Dyana. They are also the patients—patients like Mike McLean. Mike McLean, who, back home, had to receive—wait for it—palliative care not from the Bayshore worker assigned to him as he tried to die with dignity in his own home, but he had to receive palliative care from his daughter, who happens to be a nurse, because more often than not, PSWs working for Bayshore were double-booked and they couldn’t show up.

Can you imagine, Speaker, a situation in which the McLean family does what they’re supposed to do, gets on the roster, files for at-home PSW care for palliative care—a very difficult situation that I’m sure some of us in this House have had to deal with—people aren’t showing up, and the daughter of the family, who happens to have medical expertise, is filling the gap? Filling the gap—why? I submit, for our debate on Bill 135, she’s filling the gap so Bayshore can make profits at the expense of the Ontario public, at the expense of the Ontario taxpayer.

It is shameful that we aren’t—I can’t even remember; I’m looking at my colleagues here for some help. How many times have we debated home care in different pieces of legislation in the last five years? At least three or four. Not once has the government proposed taking home care out of the for-profit hands of Bayshore, of ParaMed, of CarePartners so that the McLean family wouldn’t have to rely on their daughter to administer palliative care to her father in his last days.

Speaker, I was at the social policy committee in the last iteration of Parliament, and the CEO of Bayshore deputed to the committee. I asked that gentleman, “Can we see all of the contracts that you currently have with the Ministry of Health? Can we scrutinize how much Bayshore spends on administrative costs, on management compensation, dividends to shareholders? The Auditor General has seen some of those reports, and she has told us that we’re losing up to 30% of every dollar Ontario is investing in home care in frivolous administrative costs, executive compensation and dividends to shareholders.” That gentleman told me in the course of that meeting, “Oh, MPP Harden, yes, I would be happy to give you some of those records.” We followed up once, we followed up twice, we followed up three times, through the Chair of the committee, to Bayshore. We heard the sound of one hand clapping—not a single document released, not a single effort made on behalf of this discredited corporation, in my opinion. And I am talking about the leadership here. I’m not talking about the hard-working PSWs and community care nurses who are doing their best to provide the care that we deserve here in Ontario. I’m talking about the greedy, pocket-stuffing executives we have been subsidizing in this province for far too long.

Frankly, I am embarrassed that we are debating home care again in this province and there’s no proposal from the government to do what great countries like the country of Denmark have done, which is to take home care out of private, for-profit companies and to make sure that there is an immediate care coordinator available to every single family in that country; that they can sign folks up; that people are never double-booked as PSWs or care attendants; that the people providing the care have decent pensions, have decent benefits; that being a personal support worker, being a community nurse, is a desirable occupation.

Do you know, Speaker, I was saying to the member for Niagara Falls before we started debate—I don’t think he would mind me sharing this with the House—that I had a private conversation with the former mayor of Ottawa, Jim Watson. We were at one of the many events the city runs to celebrate achievers in our community, like the city of Ottawa awards. And every time the mayor does this, they bring out the colour guard, the marching band for the police and the fire and the paramedics. It’s always a really wonderful bagpiping ceremony. It adds a certain air of professionalism. I said to the mayor at the time, given what we had been through in the pandemic, “There should be a personal support worker colour guard. They should be as honourable and celebrated a profession as those other first responders”—because every personal support worker I know in the city of Ottawa, that’s how they think of themselves often. They are first responders. They are the ones who look in on people. They sometime find people who have fallen and hurt themselves. They often go into homes in dangerous situations, where people have behaviours—they may be living with dementia. They may not want to lash out and hurt a PSW—but it might just be a function of the job.

I would love to see the province of Ontario devote a lot of attention to not just talking about all the awful situations in which PSW members have found themselves, because that scares people out of the occupation, but I would like to see us promote it, to say that a PSW, a community nurse—these are critical occupations, and we need people going into colleges, we need people going into universities, we need people choosing that as their path.

A government that I, personally, would love to be part of is a government that did exactly what the country of Denmark has done: create a systematic home care system, funded by the public, accountable to the public—all disclosures are made available to the public—where the workers were proud of their work, and seniors and persons with disabilities got to live in their homes for as long as they chose. They got to choose the moment, if they wanted to, when they would require 24/7 frailty care—high-acuity care. But that’s not the situation right now. We have situations in which persons with disabilities and seniors are choosing to go into private, often for-profit long-term care with shoddy records—not on the workers’ side, but again, on the management side, and how money is squandered for private profit. They are choosing to be admitted into these institutions because they can’t afford home care or there’s no home care available.

I’m going to round this out by saying this again to my friends in government: If we are serious about home care—because I think it actually is one of the critical industries of our province—we have to stop treating it like the neglected cousin of health care.

We have to go on a mass recruiting drive in high schools right now to say, “Being a personal support worker and a community nurse is an honourable profession. You are going to be giving people dignity. You’re going to help people get out in their community.”

We have to partner with culturally appropriate care, so if a senior is coming from a particular community—the Chinese community, Muslim community, Jewish community, whatever that community may be—they have home care that is culturally appropriate for them.

And finally, please, can we stop lining the pockets of Linda Knight, of Bayshore, of CarePartners, of these companies that somehow managed to seize control of the home care industry, from the time that we had an NDP government in this province and we cared about that?

We have to retile the doors—retile the doors. Inside the house will be all the people who want to care for our loved ones, people who need the care—and the public prepared to pay for it. People on the outside, if we have our way, will be all the gougers, the profiteers, the people who should have never been there in the first place.