I appreciate the question from the member opposite. It’s very important, first of all, and our job here in the province is to ensure that we get the infrastructure to the doorstep of the individuals across the province so that they can access high-speed Internet service for their businesses, so their kids can do their homework, all of those important things so they can do their business from home. We put $4 billion out there, and the Minister of Infrastructure has been working extremely hard to ensure that happens by 2025. The reverse-auction that she has run has been successful in ensuring that we have the ISPs, those Internet service providers, that are going to do the work to get it to the door.

I’m not exactly sure what the question is that the member is asking, because it’s still going to be up to individuals to sign up with that ISP to get the Internet service so that they can run their business, and it will be up to them to make that decision, but the Internet service will be available to each and every home and business across Ontario.

For an example, there are companies and manufacturers in our province that are operating battery storage facilities. They would be able to share, peer to peer, the energy that they’re producing and storing in their facilities, and potentially making that electricity available to their local distribution companies. So if it’s in Ajax, they would be sharing the electricity they’re producing, with a fee, to Elexicon, which is the local distribution company, which will then make our grid even that much more stable.

These are some of the ideas that we’re looking at, and there’s lots of innovation opportunities in the sector.

Every time we bring forward a piece of legislation, you know what you’re going to get out of the New Democratic Party: You’re always going to get a no. But I think it’s pretty rich to allege that this government hasn’t done anything on housing. We’ve done more on housing than any government in our province’s history.

Interjections.

Red tape is suffocating businesses in this province, but not as bad as it was five years ago because of all of the legislation we’ve brought forward to reduce red tape. The red tape bills that we have brought forward have had an impact on just about every sector.

One of the blessings, I guess, of being a new member back in 2011 and given this portfolio was going out and seeing just where red tape was impacting people across the province, and it wasn’t just small businesses. Certainly it was impacting small businesses, but it was impacting our delivery of health care. It was impacting our delivery of education. It was impacting our delivery of social services. It was impacting all of the ministries that deliver very, very important services to the province.

So we set out on a mission to reduce that red tape and we have surpassed our goals, but we’re not stopping there. Minister Gill is still charging forward like a bull at a red flag in front of him to remove red tape.

It was really Giles’s fault, not mine.

Anyway, I’m really pleased to be able to stand here and talk about Bill 91, the Less Red Tape, Stronger Economy Act. This bill is just another step in the right direction and is going to continue to build on our government’s strong track record of reducing red tape across Ontario.

As stated by my colleagues here this afternoon and earlier this morning by the minister himself, Bill 91 is going to pave the way for better services and help Ontario businesses grow and save people time and money.

Before we came into power—and I think this speaks to the grade we did get from the CFIB in 2019—Ontario was the most highly overregulated province in Canada. Many of these regulations were unnecessary, they were outdated—they were red tape. That’s one of the reasons why Ontario’s economy was plummeting at the time.

Madam Speaker, this will hit it home to you: I was the Minister of Economic Development, Job Creation and Trade when we got that call in early November of 2018 that after over a hundred years of building cars in Oshawa, General Motors was closing its plant. The folks at General Motors said to me, “Minister, it’s not anything that you and the Premier have done; it’s just become so oppressive and costly to do business here in Ontario that we’re having to close that plant”—after a hundred years in Oshawa.

I remember having an emergency meeting in Oshawa that night with Mayor Dan Carter and my colleagues from the Legislature, going out there, saying we were going to support Oshawa, we were going to support the Durham region and we were going to make sure that we became a competitive jurisdiction again—one that reduced red tape, one that got electricity prices under control and back to being competitive—and that General Motors plant was going to be back. I’m proud to say that four years later, there are multi-billion dollar EV mandates going in not just at GM Oshawa but at OEMs right across this province, and a supply chain that’s going to support it. It’s an incredible accomplishment, and it’s been a whole-team-of-government effort to ensure that we’re back and competitive in this market.

I go into small businesses regularly in my home riding of Bay of Quinte. These local establishments are staples in their communities, and they have been for decades and really hold our riding’s economy together. I know they do so in other ridings right across Ontario. We’ve seen first-hand during COVID-19 just how we needed to support these small businesses, and we did that, Madam Speaker. We can’t stop supporting our small business. That’s why we’re coming forward with bills like Bill 91.

People think that red tape only affects businesses. It doesn’t. It affects all of us in our daily lives. This is why we set out on a mission to reduce red tape by the amount that we have. I’m honoured to be a part of a government that’s reduced Ontario’s total regulatory burden by 6.5%. That 6.5% is equivalent to $700 million in annual compliance costs for not-for-profit organizations, municipalities, school boards, colleges and universities and hospitals. Our government has eliminated that.

I recall, when I became the minister, our goal was to reduce red tape by 25% across the province and save businesses $400 million. Well, we just hit the $700-million mark, which is amazing and a credit to all of us for the work that we’re doing.

Let me touch on a couple of the pieces in the bill that affect my current portfolio. By reducing red tape within the energy sector, it’s honouring our commitment to ensure that there’s a reliable, affordable and clean electricity system to power the province, to continue to drive electrification and support our strong economic growth that we’re now seeing in Ontario. Within the energy sector, there still is some red tape that’s holding us back, and we’re looking to eliminate that here in Bill 91. If passed, it would mean that our government is reducing burdens on stakeholders and making life easier.

There are two measures that I’m really excited about as the Minister of Energy. First, we’re expanding the OEB’s, the Ontario Energy Board’s, authority to enable innovation. Innovation isn’t just a buzzword; it is happening in the energy sector at a rapid pace, Madam Speaker. This will exempt proponents of innovative projects which have future potential from certain licensing requirements.

With Ontario’s population and economy growing, expanding the OEB’s authority to grant temporary licensing exemptions to specific legislative requirements would better empower the OEB to facilitate innovation in the energy sector. By allowing the OEB to expand its innovation sandbox—and I’ve been out with the OEB at a number of these sandbox announcements over the years; the IESO also has a Grid Innovation Fund doing similar things, allowing for innovators in the province to showcase what they’ve been working on through pilot projects—participants are going to be able to continue to undertake innovative pilot projects such as exploring peer-to-peer energy trading, and that could result in benefits for the energy sector and economic development here in Ontario.

Our government has been working with the OEB since we took office, and we know that Ontario’s energy advantage is made possible by our many partners that we have in the sector.

The OEB is an independent regulatory body. Its core mandate is to protect the interests of families and businesses accessing energy with respect to the price, reliability and the quality of the electricity services that they are receiving.

Again, we’ve been working hard with the OEB to modernize their governance structure and make room for innovation.

So we took this action as we know that increased transparency, reduced regulatory burdens and greater efficiencies in the OEB are going to build trust and are going to benefit all electricity customers in Ontario. It also helps to ensure that our electricity system continues to be one of the cleanest and most reliable in the world, and that is what’s allowing us to see the type of multi-billion dollar investments that we have been seeing over the last number of months.

The next measure that is going to positively help the energy sector is the “keeping administrative monetary penalties off rates” measure. The proposal is part of our plan to keep energy affordable for all Ontarians. The government is proposing to amend the Ontario Energy Board Act to ensure that ratepayers aren’t subjected to additional costs as a result of administrative monetary penalties—those AMPs that, when they’re charged to energy utilities, won’t be passed on to electricity ratepayers and recovered through energy rates. It’s one more way that we’re helping to keep our rates predictable and low and not spiking at the double-digit percentage rates that we were seeing back in 2015, 2016 and 2017. We’ve brought those types of massive, massive spikes in our electricity bills under control.

Another part of our plan is to work with Ontario’s Independent Electricity System Operator to procure about 4,000 new megawatts of generation through competitive processes—not sole-sourced deals, not feed-in tariff programs that are driving up the cost of electricity massively. We’re doing this in a competitive, business-type approach that has already resulted in massive savings to electricity customers through the processes that we’ve undertaken so far through the IESO procurements, with competitive procurements through the RFPs that we have had out in the field and that we continue to have out in the field right now.

So more can still be done for ratepayers—and reducing the red tape in the sector is obviously going to do that.

On a more local note, as the MPP for Bay of Quinte, there are a number of measures in this bill, as well, that I fully endorse and am excited about. The first measure is going to be helping many constituents in my riding get broadband Internet service. The first measure that will help is the proposed amendment to the Building Broadband Faster Act, 2021. We’re proposing legislative amendments under that act that will ensure Internet service providers can plan, design and build high-speed Internet projects as quickly as possible. I’ve been working with my seatmate here, the Minister of Infrastructure, on this file for the last year and a half, just ensuring that when we are building broadband, we’re doing everything that we can to remove red tape, to make it quick and easy for Internet service providers, those ISPs, working with LDCs, the local distribution companies, to get cable in the ground, to get access to the poles that we need and to reduce the cost of getting access to those poles, so that the folks who are working on this can get broadband out there as fast as possible.

We remain committed to bringing high-speed Internet access to every community in Ontario, including Bay of Quinte, by the end of 2025. It was a major, major frustration for people in my riding since I was elected in 2011 that there were huge pockets in our area that, first of all, didn’t have cell service and didn’t have broadband Internet access. It was very frustrating. I would say over and over again, “We continue to push the government of the day, we continue to push the government of the day.” I’m happy to say the government of the day, the Doug Ford government, is actually the first to put $4 billion on the table to ensure that we’re getting high-speed broadband Internet to every corner of the province.

I’m excited about broadband Internet making its way into Bay of Quinte because a lot of people have moved out of the GTA over the last couple of years thanks to the pandemic. They’re living on Sheba’s Island or they’re living on West Lake or they’re living up in Hastings county on a lake up there, and they want to work from there. We’re ensuring that they’re going to have the Internet that they need.

I know my good friend who sits behind me here, Minister Thompson, the Minister of Agriculture, is excited about a couple of things impacting the agriculture, agri-food and farming communities. We have a big farming community in Bay of Quinte. So the amendments to the Milk Act are going to be warmly received, not that we drink our milk warm in Quinte; we like our milk cold. But these are welcome changes to the Milk Act. Then there’s also streamlining the farm financial protection programs, which are great. We have a very, very active agricultural community. This is going to impact all sectors in the ag community, from dairy, obviously, to the grain farmers. We’ve got some great grain farmers in my region as well and the beef farmers, which I love. We get out to some great twilights in the summer.

For those city folk, they probably don’t know what a twilight is, but it’s where you go out to one of the local farms. The entire community is invited out there, and it’s just a whole lot of fun. You get a chance to see the animals and see the great work that they’re doing on the farm. I’m looking forward to twilight season coming up a little bit later on this summer.

In conclusion, here this afternoon, I’d like to thank the Legislature for providing me with the time to speak to the Less Red Tape, Stronger Economy Act, 2023, which, if passed, would allow ratepayers across the country, the people of Ontario, to save money on bills, which follows our government’s commitment to ensuring a reliable and affordable and clean electricity system to power Ontario. Personally, I am really excited about the Building Broadband Faster Act amendments. I know full well just how badly that type of work is needed.

This is going to positively impact the people of Bay of Quinte. It’s going to positively impact the people of Ontario.

I just want to close by saying this: There’s a lot of work that goes into these red tape bills. I’ll go back to where I started with commending Minister Gill and also PA Oosterhoff and their team at this new ministry, the Ministry of Red Tape Reduction, for the work that they’re doing, because it’s a bit like herding cats. All of these great ideas come into your office on how you can reduce red tape. And it sounds really easy, but it’s not, because when those ideas come in, you then have to go to every single line minister and make sure the due diligence is done to ensure that the red tape that you are cutting is in fact red tape, that it’s overregulation, that it is having an impact on businesses or impacting the people or not-for-profits in our province. It is a heck of a lot of work.

The commitment that we have as a government not just to do this every now and then but to do it twice a year is a major undertaking. It’s a thick document. It’s going to make a huge difference in our open-for-business policies here in Ontario.

I look forward to seeing more multi-billion dollar investments in Ontario because of Minister Gill’s Bill 91.

Madam Speaker, I am just so intrigued by this member’s analysis of our energy sector I have to dig a little bit deeper.

I was here in 2011, and a few members were here in 2011. The NDP were in lockstep with the Liberal government of the day when it came to the Green Energy Act: FIT contracts, feed-in tariff contracts, that were paying 80 cents a kilowatt hour for solar, and much more for wind as well. These projects were being spread out all across the province. The Financial Accountability Officer indicated that $38 billion is the cost of overmarket contracts that were signed as a result of the Green Energy Act, therefore the subsidy that the member opposite talked about.

So I just want to know: Do the member opposite and his party still support the Green Energy Act, and do they support the fact that it has resulted in $38 billion? That doesn’t even cost the electricity that people are using; this is just the overmarket cost of those 20-year contracts, many of them 80 cents a kilowatt hour, when you’re getting nuclear for seven or eight cents a kilowatt hour.

I want to thank the Minister of Red Tape Reduction, Minister Gill, for his hard work on this file, and I want to thank MPP Oosterhoff as well for his hard work on making sure that we’re continuing to reduce red tape. I want to thank him for his dedication to this cause.

Speaker, I’m really excited to speak on behalf of this bill, another red tape reduction bill that our government has put forward. I’ve been trying very hard over the last 12 years that I’ve been here to reduce red tape in this province. I arrived, along with a number of individuals on my side and the other side, in the election of 2011, and when I was elected in 2011, our leader at the time made me the small business critic and the critic for red tape. I was a busy, busy guy, because there was a lot of red tape in this province at that time—overregulation that was holding businesses back from expanding. My goal as a critic was to hold the previous government, the Liberal government, to account for all the red tape that they were foisting and imposing on Ontarians.

I’ve got to tell you, my parents in New Brunswick are actually moving out of my childhood home. They were going through a lot of their stuff that you accumulate over 75 years. Some of the things that they were going through were old pictures. When they sent me a picture the other day, I had a full head of hair, and that’s not the case anymore. Now, that’s not because I’ve been pulling it out trying to have red tape reduced in the province, because we’ve been making great progress on that since I came here. But I saw first-hand just how unnecessary a lot of the regulation or overregulation was in the province, and how it was affecting businesses in my riding of Bay of Quinte and right across Ontario, and I made sure to let the Liberal government know my thoughts on that matter.

When we formed government in 2018, I was the Minister of Economic Development, Job Creation and Trade, which was also the minister responsible for red tape reduction at that time. Now we have a full-fledged ministry for red tape reduction, which I think speaks to just how important this is for our government, to make sure that the province truly is open for business, open for jobs and open to see our economy moving.

While I was in that portfolio of economic development, job creation, trade and red tape reduction, we brought forward a couple of bills, as we do, every year. One of them was Bill 66; it was called the Restoring Ontario’s Competitiveness Act. After seeing all of the red tape that was created by the previous Liberal government and the damage it was doing to job creators and consumers alike in our province, I wanted to make sure that Ontario was competitive again.

The first bill that was brought forward to reduce red tape was Bill 47, and that was the Making Ontario Open for Business Act, a reducing-burdens-while-protecting-workers act. I’ve got to say thanks, and probably our public servants don’t hear thanks enough: The deputy minister who I had on that file was a gentleman—and I mean gentleman—by the name of Giles Gherson. Giles was so passionate. He was responsible for reducing red tape, and do you know why he was so good at reducing the red tape? It was because he was a public servant when the Liberals were in power, so he knew exactly where all the red tape was adding up and he knew exactly where to go back and peel it off. So I just want to say thanks to Giles Gherson. He has since retired from the public service, but he made a real impression on me in my time in that ministry.

Bill 47 and Bill 66 removed dozens of pieces of overregulation in most of the ministries that we had at that time, and it really did make a difference. As I say, we’re not stopping there; we now have a full-fledged minister on this file.

I recall the Canadian Federation of Independent Business, as they do every year, hand out an award to the various provincial governments across the province when it comes to their efforts in reducing red tape. I remember in 2019, the CFIB came into my office—I was the House leader, too, at the time. It might still be hanging on the wall in the House leader’s office; I’m not sure. But we got an A-, which was the highest mark in the country for reducing red tape from the CFIB.

Interjections.

That has to be one of the most ideological speeches I have ever heard in this place, and I have been here for 12 years. No wonder the member opposite doesn’t understand how their caucus was cut in half in the last election and ours grew, because people don’t want a socialist government in this province, and that’s what they would get if that member was successful in winning the election last time. Thank God for the future of Ontario they didn’t win.

Madam Speaker, why does the member believe that we have attracted $17 billion in new EV platforms in Ontario? Why does the member believe that’s happening, and does the member opposite support—

Interjections.

Oh, that’s okay.

No, John. No.