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.