I am also a very big fan of food. My father was a chef garde manger for many years. He toiled away in the finest hotel kitchens in Toronto.

Absolutely, we need more food and more food grown locally, especially as we are seeing more and more climate change. As we know, we are also seeing an erosion and removal of some of the very best farmland in Ontario.

So is there more in this bill that actually does more to protect farmland, to enable those farmers to make sure that they hold onto the very best? It does not. And if you wanted to address that issue, we certainly would welcome it.

In my conversations, especially acting as the official opposition critic for the Ministry of the Attorney General, I’ve now had a chance to meet with an extraordinary number of legal professionals. Without exception, I would say—and they don’t agree on everything, but without exception, they all identify one of the systemic problems that now exists in Ontario is the defunding of legal aid. They’re losing qualified lawyers who want to stay in practice. Their clients who can’t get access to lawyers are suffering. The lawyers they have hired are now leaving the profession. And now we have a corporate sector that’s saying that they also don’t agree with the defunding of legal aid. All of this means that the government has a chance to take action on Thursday, when they drop the provincial budget, to put the money back in and to index it to the rate of inflation. I would describe it as a crisis, as it has been described to me.

I think that the challenge here is that the government is placing the moving to a digital administration of justice as the silver lining or the quick silver bullet on fixing and modernizing the program, and that is simply only one prong. There are many other ways to do that, including the efficient administration of court time, courtroom usage, hiring new judges, and staffing up the court system properly. All of those things in conjunction with modernization, plus an efficient working between policing as well as the court system as well as the ministry—that’s what you need, and that’s not happening right now.

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?