Ontario is responsible for 86% of the greenhouse gas reductions for all of the country of Canada. Think about that: one-third of the population, 86%.

We have done the things that are going to make the impacts. We are leading the world in EV battery production for the electric cars. We’ve installed electric arc furnaces in our steel mills—or are installing them—which will take two million cars off the road. We’re investing in nuclear power—clean, green nuclear power. We’re on target to meet our 2030 greenhouse gas reduction goals.

We’re doing all this while building the economy and standing against the most punishing thing that people are experiencing in this province and all across Canada: the unacceptable, unfair carbon tax by your party in Ottawa.

Interjections.

But not only that; we’ve introduced an urban park in Uxbridge because people want to care about the ground. The Nature Conservancy of Canada says we’re leaders in protecting green space here in the country of Canada—the first operating provincial park in 40 years.

But all of what we’re doing on top of that—we’re giving people a break. We’ve lowered the price of gas so they can get to work or get their kids to soccer. We’ve taken away the cost of licence plate stickers. We’re doing all of those things because your party in Ottawa has got their hand in their pocket, and every time they turn around, they’re taking the carbon tax out of their pocket.

Everything is costing more because of the carbon tax. There are so many initiatives that this government and every other government could be doing if they weren’t taxing the people to death with the carbon tax.

You should use it for speech writing.

I had to wait for a second because I was overcome with the rapturous applause from the Liberal side for the last speaker. I guess they all got together and applauded at the same time. It was quite remarkable.

Speaker, the carbon tax increases the cost of everything, plain and simple. The carbon tax drives up the cost of everything we do and everything we consume. When we talk about groceries, we have to ask ourselves—and you’re talking about over the last year. I hear the Liberals and the NDP talk about cost-of-living issues over and over again, cost-of-living issues that are exacerbated dramatically by the carbon tax because it’s this spiralling thing. The carbon tax drives up the cost of something; people have to pay more for that something. The next thing you know, people are demanding that they want to get paid more for what they’re doing, and it’s just an endless upward spiral driving up the cost of living on everything we do.

I was somewhat entertained, I must say, by the member for Timiskaming–Cochrane talking about his three envelopes. I can assure you this, Speaker, and this can go out to as wide an audience as you want: The member can prepare three envelopes if he chooses; he will never, ever have the need to open them.

In fact, let’s talk about what’s going on over there. I know, because I listened to them wandering all over the world in their dissertations, and I asked myself, “Boy, I’m just glad I’m not a member of the NDP caucus these days. Wow.” I was just watching CP24 when I took a little break here. What is going on? The poor leader of the NDP must be just beside herself wondering, “Do I even want to have another caucus meeting to hear what’s going on there?” So I know that they’re having so much turmoil amongst themselves and so much confusion that they’re not sure what they’re talking about here today, because here’s one thing that is clear: There is no provincial carbon tax on anything—no provincial carbon tax on anything.

I know the member mentioned Pierre Poilievre. Have you seen those ads, how effective they are? When you’re a consumer and you’re somebody struggling in Renfrew–Nipissing–Pembroke with the cost of living, which is a burden for us as everybody else, and you see that ad—I talk to people on the street every weekend and if I’m home during the week, and they’re saying, “Wow. It’s just amazing, when you think about it, how that is driving up the cost of everything in that grocery store.”

You’ve got the input costs. You’ve got the fertilizer. You’ve got the fuel. You’ve got the trucks that move those goods from place to place. You’ve got people who drive to that farm to go to work. When you start to think about it, it is absolutely scary, because it’s endless. And when you go to buy those groceries, if you live in rural Ontario, you ain’t jumping on the subway that’s running whether you’re on it or not; you’re getting into your truck and driving to the grocery store.

So when I talk to people, they are just—I’ve got to tell you, it pains me when I see people who are just deciding whether or not they can actually buy that item in the grocery store, because the cost not just of those groceries, but everything else, is being driven by the carbon tax. Mr. Trudeau, every so often, sends out a cheque; that is just plain and simple bribery, a little bit of a cheque back to try to convince you that the carbon tax is actually working in your favour.

The member talks about—we’re not debating about whether we have climate change. That’s not the debate here. But what is clear is that Canada produces abut 1.5% of the world’s emissions. Are we the ones who are going to have to pay for the rest of the world that doesn’t implement climate change solutions, such as India and China, which are exempt from those agreements? But we’re the ones that should suffer, and our citizens are the ones who should pay the price, because Justin Trudeau wants to have a little fun that he can play games with—him and his environment minister, Steven Guilbeault? That’s what you get when you put a radical activist in as the environment minister for Canada, because they don’t care what the average person is going through.

So what we’re trying to do here in the PC Party—and yes, we went to court. Yes, we went to court, not because of our philosophy or our beliefs on the carbon tax; it was because we believe, on behalf of the people of Ontario, that the carbon tax would be harmful to them, and we’re right. We’re 100% right. You can dance around that all you want over on the other side, but the carbon tax is hurting, and it is not leading to a reduction of Canada’s carbon emissions. So it’s failing on two counts, but it’s driving up the cost of everything the people do.

So it doesn’t matter if you’re a farmer, a worker, a labourer, particularly if you live in rural Ontario. I remember one bill—we heat with oil in our house, and there was one bill for an oil tank fill-up—over $1,700 for a fill-up, and a significant amount of it was taxation. I said to my wife, “You know, we’re fortunate. We can afford to pay that bill, and we’ll pay it on time.” But if you’re one of those people who is struggling on everyday cost-of-living issues, and you have an oil bill, and it’s the wintertime, you either put oil in, or you don’t and you freeze. What kind of hardship are you placing on them—additional hardship—because of the federal carbon tax, for them to heat their homes? How can you in good conscience actually sit there and say, “We’re doing that because we’re going to save the world, when the rest of the world isn’t”? Little old Canada, with 1.5%, is going to take care of all of that, but our citizens are hurting deeply because of it.

The carbon tax was totally motivated by politics, not about environment—totally motivated by politics on behalf of those Liberal socialists who decided, “We have to find another way to extract more money from the people so that we could put it into the pet programs that we actually like, not because it was going to be a benefit to the people. It was going to be a benefit to us, because now we can now highlight the things that we want the people to see, at least those people we consider our core voters.” So now, that’s just what you get anew.

Speaker, we’re just seeing the tip of the iceberg, as they say, because as this carbon tax rises to 2050, what we’re getting today is just a small sample of the pain that people will be experiencing if this federal government continues on the path that it is on. The sky is the limit, and the provincial NDP were supporting a 300% increase in the carbon tax. And if they’re saying over there that the carbon tax is good and is not inflicting pain on people, then they are denying reality. If they’re going to stand there or sit there or just try to say that the carbon tax is not hurting people, they know they’re wrong. So if it’s wrong today, how wrong will it be tomorrow when it goes up and up and up? And yet those other countries that are far bigger polluters will be doing nothing. But they must be sitting back thinking, “Man, those Canadians are stupid. They are just committing”—I can’t think of a word that is parliamentary. “They’re doing it to themselves,” is what they’re saying.

But we have an opportunity as elected people—and thank goodness that Pierre Poilievre is standing up and saying, “If we’re elected, it’s gone, because we actually care about the cost of living, issues that people in Canada are facing.” He has an ally here in Ontario, because we believe the same thing: It has absolutely gone too far, and it is not succeeding in its purported purpose. We were going to reduce CO₂ emissions by inflicting this carbon tax on the people. Well, they haven’t done it. It hasn’t happened. So in spite of all that, they’re determined that they’re going to not only continue with the carbon tax; they’re going to raise the carbon tax. They’re going to increase the amount of the carbon tax. Where does it end?

If it continues like this, how does it do anything else but drive the cost of inflation up, drive inflation up continuously and incrementally even more? Because if every day you have to pay more for the things that you absolutely have to have—and I speak as a rural member, and the member from Timiskaming–Cochrane would understand this as well as anybody—it costs more. It costs more to get around in rural Ontario.

I’m grateful for the tremendous work that Premier Ford and our government is doing to increase public transit in the GTHA. It’s a tremendous expansion, the greatest in Canada’s history, the largest in Canada’s history. So that will do a lot to reduce the amount of CO₂ that we’re producing. We’re doing those things. We’re putting electric arc furnaces in our steel mills. That’s taking one to two million cars off the road. We are doing the kinds of things that will actually matter to people, but not with a carbon tax.

We actually believe over here—of course, we believe; they don’t believe. We believe that we can actually protect the environment, continue to reduce CO₂ without it having be that tremendous burden on people who are trying to raise their families and wondering whether they’re going to be able to make the mortgage payment.

The Minister of Economic Development has been a tremendous salesperson around the world, bringing to Ontario the greatest expansion into our auto and EV, electric vehicle, manufacturing system. We couldn’t have believed that was going to happen. What is it doing? We’re going to be the world leaders in electric vehicle battery production. If I’m not mistaken, $27 billion has been earmarked or invested or contracted for Ontario in these particular ventures. How much will we be reducing our emissions by because of that? Think about it, folks.

But the NDP actually want us not to continue to produce and build nuclear power facilities. So we’re going to have all these electric vehicles—world leaders in electric vehicles. But what are they going to do? Put a windmill on the roof? I don’t know where they’re coming from. They want us to be able to put all of these things that require more electricity, move them away from fossil fuels into electricity, but they don’t want us to produce electricity except by the way that they want to produce it: unreliable, intermittent sources. There is a place for solar. There is a place for wind. We absolutely understand that. But you can never have your baseload on something that you cannot absolutely depend on.

You might have the smartest guy in the world working for you, but if he only shows up to work on Mondays and Thursdays, he’s going to be a problem. But I’ll tell you—

Yes, intifada—calling for it on our university campuses, what does that say about how safe it’s going to be in this country?

We have to do every single thing we possibly can to combat that kind of hate. It applies to Islamophobia as well, but, today, the issue is the hatred of the Jew and Israel. Hatred for anyone is absolutely unacceptable, but when we allow university student associations to perpetrate that kind of sickening desire to kill—that’s what they’re saying on those campuses. How does a Jewish student feel safe at York University today? And that’s just one of them.

And there is no moral equivalency. I’ve heard that from the other side too much. There is no moral equivalency. If you want a safer place for everyone, today you have to start with stomping down the anti-Semitism that is like a cancer right here in Canada and in this city and in the province of Ontario. We must stand firmly against hate of all kinds—all kinds. But today, we have the opportunity to unanimously stand up against hate for Israel and the Jewish people.

Yes, thank you, Speaker. In addition to the member for Don Valley North having a birthday today, the Minister for Seniors and Accessibility will be having a birthday tomorrow: number 86.

Applause.

Well, I thank the member for Ottawa Centre. We’ll have to see about that meeting with my mother-in-law. I’ll say to that meeting, not so fast. Anyway, I always appreciate his questions. I understand his passion, and I respect him for that. But at the same time, he doesn’t understand how we’re actually going to get it done. We’re going to get more housing built—more affordable housing, more housing for everyone—by eliminating the unnecessary red tape, eliminating the obstacles, the barriers that keep us from doing things in a timely fashion.

We don’t have 30 years to build 1.5 million homes. It doesn’t matter whether they’re affordable or not. If we don’t get them built, they don’t exist. We have to get them built, and we’ve got to move some things out of the way to ensure that we don’t lose sight of that goal. We can’t get caught up on NIMBYism or BANANAism or whatever. We need to make sure we get the homes built, and we’re going to get it done.

Getting things built is the key. I didn’t reference it in my speech, but I know sometimes that my friends from the NDP—when you mention the word “developers,” I see smoke coming out of their ears because they get so upset with the word. They attach the word “developers” with some kind of evil. But it’s developers who are going to build those homes.

We have to work with developers. We have to work with builders. We have to work with planners. We have to work with municipalities. We have to work with the people. Everybody has a role to play in ensuring that when we hit the 10-year mark, we actually have 1.5 million—maybe even more. If we’re going to accommodate the growth in this province, if we’re going to be able to accommodate the needed people to keep this economy rolling along like it is, keeping us the engine of Canada, we’re going to need those houses built for those folks.

This bill, like every bill that this government brings forward—its genesis is based on where we know Ontario needs to be, where Ontario needs to go, and building more homes to accommodate the people, as I began to say in the last response, to be able to support the people who are going to provide the economic activity of the future, to fill the vacant jobs. We have about 400,000 jobs today already that aren’t being filled. We have to be able to fill them, and we have to be able to build those homes so the people will have them.

I am quite comfortable that our government did what it always—we know we did. Most of the homes that are going to be built are going to be in Ottawa and Toronto. We know that—the biggest number. We reached out to the people and said, “What can we do to help remove the gridlock in these two cities?” For a start—a strong mayor. A strong mayor will help us get those homes built. That’s what we need to do.