Thanks to the member from Etobicoke–Lakeshore for the question this morning.

This is the number one issue that we’re hearing about across the province—the increased cost of living in our province, but also across our country, and the impact that the federal carbon tax, supported by the queen of the carbon tax, Bonnie Crombie, is having on their household bills. Gas bills for their vehicles, home heating, grocery bills—they’re all going up, and they’re all a result of the increasing federal carbon tax year after year.

We’ve taken a different approach in Ontario. We’re lowering the cost of living, the price of gas, taxes, fees. We have reduced taxes across the province. And our plan is working.

As a matter of fact, this morning, the Premier and the health minister and the Minister of Economic Development announced another major investment in health sciences, at Sanofi in north Toronto.

We’ve done as much as we can to lower the cost for those folks in the GTHA to get around with One Fare that the Associate Minister of Transportation has introduced, saving those who take transit up to $1,600 a year.

We’ve cut the gas tax by 10.7 cents a litre here in Ontario, but at the same time, the federal carbon tax continues to drive up the price at the pumps, which makes it really difficult for people to get out and visit beautiful parts of our province like Prince Edward county and Kingston and Essex and Windsor counties and, in northern Ontario, beautiful places like Kakabeka Falls that are wonderful this time of year.

It’s the federal carbon tax that’s making it more difficult for those people.

We should all, in this Legislature, be supportive of Premier Ford’s motion to scrap that tax in Ottawa.

Thanks to the great member from Haliburton–Kawartha Lakes–Brock for the question this morning.

We are continuing to increase the province’s supply of clean, affordable, reliable and safe nuclear power in the member’s own region with four small modular reactors—world-leading small modular reactors that are going in at the Darlington OPG site. We’re refurbishing the Candu reactors that are there. OPG and our building trades and skilled trade workers and engineers are ensuring that those refurbishments aren’t just on time and on budget, they’re actually ahead of schedule and on budget, which is a tremendous success story, and that’s given us the confidence to move forward on the refurbishment of the Pickering Nuclear Generating Station.

Just yesterday, I was down announcing a $1-billion refurbishment of the Sir Adam Beck hydroelectric facility in Niagara Falls—clean, reliable water power for our province’s future. We’re building out a clean grid, but it’s the queen of the carbon tax, Bonnie Crombie, and her friend Justin Trudeau, that are increasing the carbon tax, driving people into poverty.

Speaker, 76,000 people are working in Canada’s nuclear sector every day, and 68,000 of them are working in Ontario’s sector, in the supply chain and operating the plants. Those are hard-working people—skilled trades, engineers and plant operators—who get good paycheques every single day. They’re providing almost 60% of the province’s baseload power—clean, reliable, affordable electricity.

It’s our party, it’s our government, under the leadership of Premier Ford, that is supporting not just the current crop of skilled trade workers and nuclear operators, but those who are training to become nuclear engineers in our universities and who are going to be operating the new Candu or large nuclear plants that are being built at Bruce, and the small modular reactors, which are world-leading in the G7, that are coming online later this decade, that are going to continue to provide our province with the clean, reliable, affordable electricity we’ll be able to count on for decades to come.