Thank you to the great member from Kitchener–Conestoga for the question. He’s absolutely right; the carbon tax is driving up the cost of everything, including the food items we buy.

Let’s just take a little ride with a loaf of bread—the loaf of bread that you get at the grocery store. The Grain Farmers of Ontario expect to pay $2.7 billion in carbon tax by 2030, driving up the cost of grain. But it doesn’t stop there. Businesses that mill the grain into flour and then turn that flour into bread pay a carbon tax on their operations, and then there are carbon taxes on the fuel to get it to the distribution centre and to the grocery store. And the grocery store pays carbon tax on their operations, including their heating and their cooling and everything else. It’s a never-ending saga under these Liberals.

The fact is, if the federal government would understand the damage that they’re doing to people all across Ontario, they would scrap the tax.

Energy is a great subject for us to be talking about; not so much by the Liberals, because they could never figure it out.

We’re doing everything we can to make energy affordable here in the province of Ontario so families and businesses can survive and businesses can invest in their operations. We’re ensuring affordable home heating through our Clean Home Heating Initiative and the natural gas expansion program. We’re building the next generation of affordable nuclear energy in this province so we will have guaranteed energy for decades to come.

Speaker, they failed in energy policy. They’re failing in their approach to the carbon tax.

We’re going to continue to make life more affordable for the people of Ontario.

Mr. Speaker, I want to thank the member for Niagara West for continuing to stand up against this punitive, regressive carbon tax. And he’s absolutely right: It has raised the cost not just at the pumps; it’s on the grocery shelves—it’s everywhere. Everything is going up as a result of the carbon tax. And we’ve been standing here and fighting for the people of Ontario and trying to reduce their costs, reducing the gas tax $320 to the average family in the course of a year—that’s going to save them money. We’re removing the cost of licence plate stickers on the cars—that’s going to save them money as well. All of these things, while the Liberal government continues to raise the carbon tax 23% on April 1.

Justin Trudeau had a choice. He could have sided with the people or sided with the ideologues. He chose the latter. It’s time to side with the people and scrap the tax.

We’ve reduced the cost of doing business in this province by $8 billion. That gets passed on to the consumers because businesses have had more freedom to operate here in the province of Ontario, creating more jobs. All this while Bonnie Crombie stands with her leader from Ottawa in supporting the carbon tax.

Speaker, we are doing everything we can to put money back into the pockets of people in Ontario. We know they’re suffering under the carbon tax. It’s time for the Liberals and the NDP to support what we’re doing: Help us scrap the carbon tax.

Thank you to the member for her address today. The NDP, I think they really wanted us to write their budget, but the only way that happens is if there’s an election and they get elected. But you know what? We’re building on last year’s budget in this year’s budget, and we took that budget to the people and the people gave it a resounding yes. The people gave it a resounding yes. I shudder to think what the cost, and when we might ever balance a budget, if the NDP actually got their way.

What I’m saying to the NDP: We did it last year, just about 10 months ago. I know that people on this side of the House and our colleagues on the other side would be more than willing to take this budget to the people right now if it was necessitated.

I ask the member of the NDP: Can you tell us what your budget proposals would cost and would you actually be willing to take that to the people?

I want to thank the members for their comments.

I’m so glad that the member for Davenport raised the question of development charges. The NDP over there talk about affordable housing, but they want to support everything that continues to make housing less affordable.

My colleagues talked about $800-plus a month in the mortgage payments at current rates. My friend talked about somewhere around $119,000 being added to the cost of a home.

We have a housing crisis in Ontario.

I want to ask my colleagues, when there’s almost $9 billion in development charge reserves, isn’t it important that we do every possible thing we can to help lower the cost of building those 1.5 million homes across the province of Ontario?