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 Many of these regulations were unnecessary, they were outdated—they were red tape.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.