Thanks to the member for Peterborough–Kawartha for the question this morning. It’s an important one, and he’s right: This is what people are talking about on the streets in our communities with the affordability crisis that is going on right now, where people are having to choose between heating and eating in some cases.

While we have put lots of different affordability measures in the window, it’s unfortunate that the opposition Liberals here in Ontario continue to support their federal cousins in imposing a carbon tax, which, according to the Bank of Canada and according to the Parliamentary Budget Officer, is driving up the cost of everything.

I’m not going to say exactly which member it was earlier who, when I was answering a question about the carbon tax, indicated that we care more about bicycles in Ontario and riding bicycles than we do about driving. There are a lot of people outside of this city who drive vehicles and it is costing them more and more to drive vehicles. If this Ontario Liberal Party isn’t careful, they’re not going to be the minibus party or the minivan party; they’re going to be the bicycle built for two.

We are putting all of these measures on the table, Mr. Speaker.

The NDP’s plan to give heat pumps to everybody is uncosted; they said it would cost less than $1 billion. It’s that kind of half-baked policy that is going to result in massive, massive over-expenditures. If we were to give everybody who’s on natural gas or home heating or propane in the province a free heat pump, our back-of-the-napkin math would be somewhere in the neighbourhood of $16 billion.

You can’t afford the NDP. And the Liberals won’t stand up for the people of Ontario.

Thanks to the member from Peterborough for the tough but fair question this morning. He’s absolutely right when he says one thing: Under the previous Liberal government, supported every step of the way by the NDP, we saw hundreds of thousands of manufacturing jobs leaving our province. Since we brought in some economic stability to Ontario, under the leadership of our Premier and our Minister of Economic Development and everybody working so hard to remove red tape and make this a sought-after jurisdiction, we have multi-billion-dollar electric vehicle platforms that are coming back to Ontario, Mr. Speaker—EV battery manufacturing.

The folks from Dofasco are here with us today. They’re putting in electric arc furnaces at their facilities in Hamilton, just like they are at Algoma in Sault Ste. Marie.

For the first time since 2005, we’re seeing increased electricity demand in our province to make sure that we’re powering those businesses and those homes that we’re going to be building as well, Mr. Speaker. We know that millions of people are coming to Ontario because this is the place where they want to do business and, earlier this summer, I unleashed our plan to power Ontario’s growth and I’ll have more to say in the supplementary.

Under the plan we’re investing in 4,800 new megawatts at Bruce Power on the west coast of Ontario, taking that world-leading facility to an even bigger emissions-free generating facility for our province. We’re not just building one small modular reactor on the site at Darlington with OPG; we’ve announced under the Powering Ontario’s Growth plan that we’re going to be building four small modular reactors there. That’s enough clean power to power 1.2 million homes. We’re making the investments that we need in large-scale and small-scale nuclear reactors. We have the largest energy procurement in the country going with our battery-storage facilities located across Ontario, and we’ve invested $1 billion into energy-efficiency programs. We’re going to have the power that Ontario needs.