It’s an honour to rise in the House today to speak on behalf of the constituents from Toronto Centre.

The bill that we’re debating is entitled Less Red Tape, Stronger Economy Act. It’s an omnibus bill. It has got hundreds of pages and 37 schedules, and was just recently dropped in the House. We’re all scrambling to read it, understand it and offer some hopefully meaningful reflections on how this bill can—perhaps right now it does not—support the needs of all Ontarians.

I want to offer you a few reflections. The government is really fantastic at creating bills that are very lengthy in nature—sometimes they’re truncated—but the titles are always very fascinating, because if you don’t read the rest of the body of the bill or any of the schedules, you actually think it’s doing some really outstanding things. But, unfortunately, the title reaches much higher than the content of the bill, as we have seen in the past.

I have some mixed feelings about the bill, largely because the title is very ambitious, but the content, the substance, the meat of it, is fairly weak. So yes, there are some housecleaning matters which have to be done, and some of it is about streamlining the application around paper transfer and moving it to the digital side, which I think is absolutely fantastic. We should be doing it. There’s no reason why we should not pursue that. However, that’s not what I would call groundbreaking, and it certainly doesn’t meet the needs of what Ontarians are asking for today.

And so, the bill does feel like it’s out of touch. It feels like, once again, it’s not meeting the moment and the needs of Ontarians, and Ontarians are very clear about what they’re looking for. They’re looking for some financial relief from the punishing financial environment that they’re under right now: stagnated wages, much higher costs of just about everything with respect to the cost of living.

I did raise, in earlier questions—I shared some information from the Canadian Federation of Independent Business. They have been specifically concerned about making sure that all parliamentarians at this House—and every other order of government—understand what their small business owners are struggling with. They are being ground into the pavement with astronomical debt, and the simple mathematical formula is that they had a lot fewer customers coming in, and at the same time, the cost of service delivery was getting higher. And yes, there are supply chain issues, but right now they are dealing with grappling debt and the soaring interest rates that are just beating them down every single day, and they’re not getting help from this government.

Now, omnibus bills can hide things, and there are a few things that I believe this bill has sort of put aside, hoping that we can gloss over it, but I’m not going to, and I will bring that up in a few minutes.

But I wanted to speak, Madam Speaker, about my community in Toronto Centre. I happen to represent the Church-Wellesley Village. It is a very dynamic business environment. We also happen to be the largest lesbian and gay community in Canada, and one of the biggest ones in North America. There’s really nothing in this bill that helps that community meet the needs that they need to have addressed today with respect to soaring commercial rates and the challenges that we’re seeing on our streets. Oftentimes what we’re seeing is a lack of safety for our community.

Now, red tape can mean a lot of things to a lot of people, but for my community, we need to be free from hatred and bigotry. We need to know that our businesses can open their doors without a group of protestors trying to shut them down and intimidate them. Right now, we’re seeing this happen in so many businesses across Ontario, as I noted yesterday. I want to share with you that cutting red tape for the trans and queer community means that they are going to be able to open their businesses and operate freely. In particular, the drag artists that are under attack right now in Ontario, the audiences that support them and the businesses, the venues that host those events are under attack.

Speaker, I have received a deluge of hate these past few days, specifically because I dared stand up for our communities—and your communities, because it’s happening right across Ontario. I dared to stand up to intimidation, to hateful speech, to death threats and harassment, all because I want to defend the rights of LGBT people in Ontario.

I have a message for those who are trying to shut us down, to try to push us back into the closet: We’re only going to get louder. We’re only going to get prouder. We’re only going to get more visible. We’re only going to get more fabulous. We’re only going to throw out a lot more glitter. We’re only going to get queerer.

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?