On several occasions, the legal sector magazine Canadian Lawyer has raised legitimate concerns about this government’s pattern of politicizing the judicial appointment process.

Internal government documents show that on November 19, 2021, the Attorney General was notified of an imminent judicial vacancy in Cornwall. This provided more than enough time for the Attorney General to work with the Judicial Appointments Advisory Committee, a non-partisan and respected advisory body, and choose from the committee’s highly qualified and vetted list of candidate recommendations.

Speaker, it’s been two years since that notification and Cornwall is still short one sitting judge. Is the Attorney General ignoring the committee’s advice because his Conservative candidate choice was not on the list of qualified and vetted recommendations?

Political interferences has produced dire consequences for Ontario’s justice system. Under this Conservative government, there have been record-high tribunal wait-lists, massive court staffing shortages, courtrooms literally falling apart, charges against violent offenders being tossed for unconditional court delays, and much more.

Considering their insistent political meddling with tribunal and judicial appointments and the current criminal investigation of this government for reported corruption, how can anyone from the legal community or the general public ever trust this government again?

Interjections.

To the member across, thank you so much for your presentation. I wholeheartedly agree with you that we have to be able to force and move and compel businesses to innovate, especially in the new digital economy. I’m a huge believer around modernization, especially around making it more efficient and reducing any type of red tape, as we like to call it in this House.

But the conversations I’ve had with small business owners and small-to-medium enterprise, including with the representatives with the Canadian Federation of Independent Business, are that the biggest concerns right now with small business owners and business owners in particular is the debt that they’re carrying because of the COVID pandemic. That’s probably their number one concern that’s not being addressed in this bill. They’re carrying about $139 billion of debt. Over 76% of those businesses are going to have to take a lot of their one year to pay that debt. How does the government plan to address that specific business concern that’s coming so prominently from the community?

The question to the member from University–Rosedale is that the government claims that the bill is largely in response to an Auditor General report regarding its management of real estate services. In particular, the Auditor General cited that Infrastructure Ontario has not done a good job of managing real estate assets on behalf of the people of Ontario, in particular its management of private contractors and its uncompetitive bidding process, as well as the lack of managerial oversight of those private contracts.

Is there anything in the bill that actually addresses the concerns that the Auditor General raised, based on her 2017 report?

Thank you very much, Speaker. I appreciate the opportunity. Like the opposition critic for housing, I did take some time to read the bill last night. It was very long—123 pages—and it intersects and amends 13 acts. It’s not easy to digest, certainly. But I do recognize, as I was reading the bill, that a few things were coming to mind. One of them was the fact that the government is reframing this whole affordable housing crisis as a supply crisis. Certainly this bill is trying to get to that, but I don’t think it gets to the affordability piece.

What the bill does do, interestingly enough, is gut certain things. You’re gutting the conservation authority, you’re undermining food security by not protecting farmland, and you’re taking away critical revenues for cash-strapped cities.

The bill also ignores the fact that there’s a rising cost of construction, a labour shortage, land values and other building regulations that are stopping the construction of affordable housing. How will your bill address those concerns that I’ve just raised?