I want to rise in the Legislature today to speak to our bill to ban the government from spending millions of dollars of our money on advertising that is just designed to make the Conservative government look good.

Let’s just give the Minister of Health a round of applause; she was the one who wrote the bill in the first place.

Interjections.

We’re not talking about ads that are designed to help Ontarians learn about important programs like driving safely in winter or vaccination programs. That is not what we are talking about today. What we’re talking about are ads that provide no useful information but instead just provide a general positive impression, using tag lines like “it’s happening here,” or “building a better health care system,” or the crazy Metrolinx ads that criticize transit riders for saying, “Hey, why is it taking so long to build a transit line and why are you millions of dollars over budget?” Those are ridiculous ads. No, we are talking about ads that are essentially propaganda and are puff pieces. Ontarians do not want their money spent on unnecessary partisan ads. What they do want is for that money to be reinvested in services that they all depend upon.

We are talking about investing funding in our hospitals so that we have the staff that we need to provide the surgeries, the testing and the care that people are desperately waiting for. We’re talking about investing in our schools, so we have the educational assistants and the vice-principals and the teachers who can provide high-quality care to our kids. We are talking about investing in affordable housing, so we can solve one of the biggest issues of our generation, which is the affordable housing crisis.

We are not seeing any of that here with this government. What we are seeing is partisan ads. It’s time for it to stop. Ontarians want it to stop. Stop telling us that everything is fine and start investing our money in services and programs that people are asking you to invest that money in.