Thank you, Speaker. It’s always good to see you in the chair.

I’m proud to rise on behalf of the people of Toronto Centre to speak to Bill 46. This is an omnibus bill with a series of housekeeping amendments that are largely supportable. There are nine schedules.

When this bill came before the House, using our time in debate—it does make me wonder whether or not we are actually cutting red tape. There seems to be a lot of talk about cutting red tape—but the actual motion of cutting the tape, perhaps not so much.

Because there are nine schedules and we don’t have a lot of time to go through all of them, I’m going to try to go through at least the portions I have flagged that I want to raise specific issues with.

I’m going to begin with schedule 2 of the bill. Schedule 2 extends the allowable time of service for retired provincial judges serving on a part-time basis from 50% to 75% of full-time service.

I recently spoke with members of the Federation of Ontario Law Associations regarding Bill 46; specifically, around schedule 2 and allowing retired judges to take more time back onto the bench. I need to be clear that I have a great deal of respect for judges and those who have retired and those who’ve served us incredibly well in the judicial process. However, I was taken back by the reaction of the members of the federation when they heard about this specific change. First of all, they were surprised. They had not been consulted about this change, and they want to know who was pushing for it. Many legal workers shared experiences that they had during the pandemic, when judges near retirement struggled with the simple use of technology, such as Zoom, which was underpinning the virtual court system and their court duties. They were apparently not ready for this change, and they were not able to do their work in the most professional and timely manner. Secondly, I heard from people who work in legal clinics, and the discussion came about this in this way: They said that trying to fix this problem in the courts from this particular angle was simply wrong. What they did share with me is that they needed more judges and more court staff to ensure that everyone has a right to a timely and fair trial. That is something that everyone is convinced is needed in order for the backlog to be cleared. I heard this loud and clear, and, frankly, the members did also describe that there was a missed opportunity by the government, by not addressing the issue structurally.

How could we expand the talent pool of our bench by bringing in more lawyers and giving them the experiences that they need to become the talented judges that they will be? This is something that requires a fundamental investment of new money.

I want to quote one lawyer who told me after hearing about this proposal—they wish to remain anonymous:

“I have to express extreme concern about this proposal to, rather than appointing new judges, bring back older judges because I can tell you that it was a disaster in the Milton courthouse. It created a complete disaster for children and families in the hopper for over a year during the pandemic. We had two Family Court judges that one Family Court judge ended up having to go on medical leave and another Family Court judge went on medical leave and then left. And as a result, we had many, many per diem retired judges coming to our court on a daily basis with no knowledge of the files, no continuation of the files, a journey many, many of the court files as long as they could, until we finally got an appointment that took, I think, almost a year to get the new appointment. And many I’m telling you the child protection lawyers, the lawyers representing the families were all very upset because it was obviously no continuity in the court cases. I think that by allowing more judges to come back and sit on a per diem basis is going to make a much bigger mess of the entire system right now, which is already in a big mess because of COVID. So I’d like you to know, I think you need to please investigate this” to ensure that you can hire more judges, that you should appoint more judges. We’re going to need more—instead of producing more per diem judges—and it’s just going to create more havoc.

Again, I want to stress that retired judges can be an extremely powerful tool in helping the court system move faster.

I also want to respect the professional experience of practising lawyers, and when they reacted to this news with disappointment and concern, that gave me absolute reason to pause.

While we’re on the topic of the legal system, I want to talk about schedule 8, which makes amendments to the Provincial Offences Act. Schedule 8 reverses prospective reforms of the early resolution process for provincial offences. The prospective reforms were passed in the 2017 budget bill to further government aims to streamline and modernize the court system by supporting early resolution of cases where appropriate. The Provincial Offences Act will continue to provide for early resolution but will no longer provide for these discussions to happen through email, would no longer permit the prosecutor to withdraw charges without a court appearance, and would require that a defendant appear before a judge in all cases where a plea agreement is reached. This change appears to be a step backwards from the goal of increasing efficiency in our court system. This change would get rid of an amendment that would never be implemented, and I understand that this government has been asked by municipalities to remove it, as this is an amendment which would be exceedingly difficult to implement.

Both schedules 2 and 8 are intended to propose changes to speed up the experiences Ontarians have in their court system, and ultimately the intention is to drive down the backlog, but we’re hearing from practising lawyers that this is not going to be the outcome that you are seeking.

I want to quote Daniel Goldbloom from the Law Society of Ontario, who described Ontario’s case backlog: “If you ever speak to an American about how long it takes to get to trial in Ontario, they’re shocked. They can’t believe that it can take a year and a half for trials in the lower courts, and up to two and a half years in the Superior Court.”

Nicole Myers, an associate professor at Queen’s University who studies our court system, said, “Across Canada, 67% of the people in provincial custody are in pretrial detention, and in Ontario” that number goes up to 77%. “The rate with which we hold people in pretrial has more than doubled in the last 40 years, and the number of actual individual people held in pretrial detention has more than quadrupled in that time....

“Keeping a person in pretrial removes them from the community and may provide some short-term safety; this protection, however, is temporary. It is undermined by the long-term negative public safety outcomes. We need to be mindful that custody is extraordinarily expensive, but it’s also criminogenic. Even short periods of time in custody make it more—not less—likely that someone is going to commit offences in the future. And there are many reasons for this, some of which include pretrial being overcrowded, harsh, dangerous, and rehabilitative programs being virtually absent. Removing people from the broader community is also incredibly destabilizing, disrupting connections to the community, families, employment and other social supports.”

Speaker, legal experts are telling our government how to speed up the courts. They are trying to make Ontario safer. They’re trying to say the following: Resource the courts, hire the staff, and ensure that the court schedule is operating efficiently. Use the real estate that you have. Get it going.

We should be embarrassed that Americans cannot believe how slow our system is, when Ontario leads America in most indicators of well-being.

Again, if we really want to cut red tape, we have to help Ontarians navigate the invisible rules and procedures that hold our legal system together by reversing the cuts to legal aid and increasing funding to legal aid.

I want to dig into how inadequate legal aid funding is creating so-called red tape for Ontario.

First, our court system has many precedents and rules that internally operate to ensure that all Ontarians have the right to a fair trial. This puts a significant onus on the courts to determine that people charged with provincial offences are treated equitably and fairly. I need to stress this point: Many court cases are mostly, if not entirely, resolved before going to trial, in pretrial meetings and resolution meetings. Here, legal aid lawyers are the subject matter experts in fighting to ensure that marginalized people’s rights are protected and that due process occurs. This takes a massive and hugely expensive burden off our courts. It saves us court time, thereby saving taxpayers money.

Secondly, legal aid funding ensures that people’s time in court is well used, as much as possible. When people represent themselves—and this does happen—it is often not only detrimental to the likelihood of the success of their cause, but also the time of everyone in the courtroom.

Third, legal aid clinics help stabilize people’s housing and other essential life needs so that they can then stabilize their lives and mitigate the crushing impacts of poverty that so many in our court system face. They often serve a rehabilitative role, connecting people to local health organizations and to local service providers, and helping people access the government benefits to which they are legally entitled.

It is for these reasons that studies in other jurisdictions regularly find that legal aid is at least revenue-neutral, if not a net source of savings, for government spending. But this government has not reversed the cuts to legal aid made in their first year of government, and the legal aid clinics and practising lawyers are all crying for help—not to mention those who are recipients of legal aid.

A member of the Federation of Ontario Law Associations was discussing how to modernize access to justice in Ontario and told me: “We’re concerned about the financial cut-offs in terms of whether people are eligible because there’s such a gap between the top limit of eligibility for legal aid and people who are unable to afford a lawyer. We have major areas within the province where no one is able to access their legal aid certificate. And that’s a huge problem for us within the clinic system. We also in the clinic system have funding issues because of inadequate compensation” for lawyers “we’re having a great deal of difficulty maintaining staff. So without continued adequate funding going into that system, we’re really undermining the administration of justice—particularly for our most low-income residents.”

Another lawyer told me, “One of the things that I’m hearing a lot from my members is that a great deal of the backlog and wasted judicial resources in the system comes from the high turnover rate that we are seeing. It’s difficult maintaining staff who have experience and who are more efficient in particular areas. So I encourage you” to take a “look into that. Because I know that it has been impacting my practice and the practice of others that I represent.”

Speaker, lawyers from all over Ontario are in agreement: Our legal institutions need to be better resourced, and funding must be in place in this budget coming this Thursday. If we are to retain the good staff, the qualified and experienced staff, in order for us to deliver this service most effectively, then we need to make those investments. Every business will tell you that investment in people is the number one way to get the best outcome—and if you want to call it “return,” the very best return.

I now want to discuss schedule 5, which deals with oil and gas resources. This bill does nothing to address the 27,000 oil and gas wells across Ontario, 15,000 of which have been identified as abandoned and almost 4,400 that have been identified as posing an immediate and significant risk to both property and life. The Auditor General talked about this in her very recent report. She said the province failed “to identify and inspect high-risk oil and gas wells, even though improperly maintained or abandoned wells are a safety risk for people.” We know this to be true because we had the explosion in Wheatley, Ontario that flattened their downtown core and sent 20 people to the hospital.

I want to read the Auditor General’s report into the record on this matter:

“Few oil and gas wells are being inspected annually. The ministry has not assessed the risk of all 27,000 oil and gas wells in the province, and is therefore unable to determine whether it is focusing its proactive inspection efforts on the highest-risk wells. Furthermore, based on our analysis of inspection data in the ministry’s database for oil and gas wells, we found that only 19% of oil and gas wells in the province have been inspected since 2005. Of those, 38% of inspections occurred more than a decade ago. The low rate of inspections could lead to a risk of complacency by well operators.”

This is red tape cutting? You’re putting people’s property, their lives, their communities at risk.

“Unreliable information on how many high-risk wells have been plugged. Wells that are poorly maintained and improperly plugged can lead to contaminants getting into the province’s groundwater or rising to the land surface around the well. Based on our own analysis, 6% or 1,625 wells are not in use and have not been plugged. A further 30% or 8,011 were plugged prior to 1970 when materials used to plug them included logs, gravel and lead which can lose their integrity over time. As a result ... 36% of wells could pose a danger. Further, we found that three high-risk wells have been leaking since ... 2018, but only one is scheduled to be plugged during 2022-23. We were told that the gas explosion that took place in Wheatley, Ontario in August 2021, was in part due to a well that had been plugged in the 1960s, where the materials used to plug the well had deteriorated over time.”

Speaker, these incidents can be prevented. Lives can be saved. Property and communities can be protected. That’s not red tape; that’s just providing good government. If we want Ontario to be open for business, we need to think of red tape not just as regulation but all of the avoidable systemic barriers that matter to the lives of Ontarians and people doing business here in this province. This bill is opening the act governing oil and gas to allow carbon sequestration and storage for oil and gas recovery. Right at the time when we collectively need to find ways to keep fossil fuels in the ground, this section of the bill wants to put carbon back into the ground only to squeeze it out for more oil and gas at a later date.

To be clear, it is not offensive that I’m seeing that we can move some carbon into the ground, but I am worried that maintaining our society’s commitment to an industry of the past is not any kind of innovation; it’s certainly not the direction that Ontarians are expecting from this government.

This brings me to schedule 9 of the bill. Schedule 9 tinkers with the Workplace Safety and Insurance Act, removing the requirement of a strategic plan but still requiring that the board meets four times a year. On one hand, injured worker groups are concerned with the removal of the requirement of WSIB to produce a five-year strategic plan, as they have made submissions about this plan. However, the injured workers additionally point out that none of their plans have been adopted.

One way that this bill could actually cut red tape for WSIB would be by ending the controversial practice of deeming. Jessica Ponting, a legal worker at the Industrial Accident Victims Group of Ontario, has described deeming as an egregious and pernicious tactic used by WSIB. WSIB identify suitable occupations that they think the worker can do, and then they cut off the workers’ benefits as if they were working that job, even though many workers never find a job that they can do.

Migrant workers said, in an open letter to this government last year, “We believe that the workers’ compensation system is racist and that we are treated very badly. This systemic racism does not treat us like we are human.” The letter says, noting that migrant workers are hit hardest by the province, “Rather than helping us heal, the current system makes it worse for us. We have been denied the right to function as humans in Canada. For those of us who have been repatriated, we are returning to our home countries with injuries and traumas.” That is their souvenir after working and toiling in our factories and our fields in Canada.

If this government really wants to cut red tape surrounding WSIB and Bill 46, this government would have made the acknowledgement that COVID is an airborne disease. This has been said by the World Health Organization and by the Centers for Disease Control. It has been singled out by every order of public health in Canada, but it has not necessarily been said in this House, and it has not been said by the members of the government side. This matters, because workers who are getting COVID on the job—that is still happening, and sometimes those COVID symptoms are long-lasting. Health Canada estimates that up to 15% of people now have long COVID, and COVID-19 Resources Canada projects that over 858 Ontarians contract COVID every single day in our province. They have life-limiting symptoms that last more than three months—they’re not able to go back to work any single time, but WSIB doesn’t cover them. It’s a safety net, WSIB. Our safety net is supposed to be integrated into our building code. Our health guidance and recommendations are there to avoid the suffering, but instead it reinforces the suffering. It actually condemns the workers to less and not more.

These are the issues that Ontarians are dealing with, and these are the issues that are not necessarily dealt with in Bill 46. So is it a perfect bill? Far from it. Can this government do more? Yes, they can.

At this point in time, Speaker, I want to thank you for the opportunity to rise to speak to the House. It is an absolute honour to deliver these remarks.