Thank you to the member from London–Fanshawe for her excellent presentation.

As you know, the Ontario NDP has never supported any type of provincial carbon tax on regular consumers. We oftentimes have supported the cap-and-trade system focused on large polluters, which is where that focus should be.

When the Ford government proposed a new carbon pricing system by scrapping the cap-and-trade program that the Wynne government had put in, it effectively launched a new carbon pricing system in Ontario—a new provincial tax. That was launched January 1, 2022. Yet there was, on the bill right now, a piece of legislation left over from the 1990s Harris government called the Taxpayer Protection Act, which specifically said that any new tax had to go forward to a referendum. So, in some ways, it replicates what’s already in schedule 5. Yet, we know, in 2022, there was no new carbon tax referendum under the Ford administration.

So can the government bind any government to a referendum if they couldn’t even follow their own rules?