I’m pleased to be here to speak about Bill 149, which amends various statutes with respect to employment and labour and other matters. This is an omnibus bill. It changes four schedules.

We have heard the MPP for Sudbury speak very eloquently and practically about what this bill means, but I also just want to put it in context.

The kinds of jobs that you can get in Ontario today are not the kinds of jobs that you could get 20 or 30 years ago. People want good-paying jobs, where they have a career, where they have benefits and the possibility of a pension, where they can afford to pay their rent or their mortgage, where they can save some money and put it aside, where they can live a good life here in Ontario. Unfortunately and deliberately, for many people that’s not the kind of work that they have in Ontario today. Increasingly, the kind of work that is available to people in Ontario is contract work, precarious work, just-in-time work, low wage work, where you cannot afford to pay the bills, and where the kinds of benefits and pension that people typically got in the past are not available for many people anymore. It has created a situation where we are seeing the working poor and the middle class having to work harder and harder and harder for less, and we’re seeing a real concentration of wealth at the top. It is exacerbating the inequality that exists in Ontario today. I think it’s a shame, and I think that should be reversed. Does this bill do that? No, it doesn’t.

This bill has some modest improvements, and I do want to go through some of them. The first one was the decision to provide presumptive coverage for esophageal cancer for firefighters. This is a good move, and I want to thank the MPP for Niagara Centre for his advocacy to convince the government to do the right thing for firefighters, to ensure they have presumptive coverage for esophageal cancer, because we know that if you are an urban firefighter, you put yourself in very dangerous situations. You go into the fire, you go into a building or a house, when everyone’s just trying to get out.

Given the way homes are made today, the way furniture is made today, there are a number of pollutants and toxins—glues, fire retardants—which can cause, in the long term, cancerous conditions. We know this. So it’s a good move to ensure that people who keep people alive, who stop fires, are protected when they get older.

What is a shame is that what we didn’t see in this bill is for presumptive coverage to include wildfire fire workers. As the MPP for Sudbury pointed out, urban firefighters go in with a ventilator, but forest wildfire firefighters are wearing a wet cloth, and that’s not the kind of coverage that you’d expect given how dangerous being a forest wildfire firefighter is today. We just went through the worst fire season in Canada’s history last year. We expect fires to get worse. Firefighters, wildfire firefighters, are an essential service, and they should be protected, so we would have liked to have seen that in the bill.

The other piece that we see incredibly modest steps being taken on is around providing additional protection to people who work through a gig app such as Uber. This is really prevalent in my riding of University–Rosedale. Many students will also be gig workers in order to have enough money to pay for rent, and this bill, quite frankly, just doesn’t do enough to protect them. What we’re seeing with this bill is that it sets a minimum wage standard, but only for when workers are actually engaged, which means they have a job and they’re biking or driving there. So all that time where you’re waiting for a job, you’re not paid for. That’s absurd. That’s like having a customer service person at McDonald’s only being paid when they’re dealing with a customer. That’s absolutely absurd.

What’s also absurd is that this requirement to set a minimum wage floor doesn’t take into account that workers have to pay for all their expenses: driving a car, gas, insurance. What happens if they get into an accident? All those costs have to be borne by the employee, by the worker, and I think that’s a real shame. It means that in some cases, these workers are being paid very little: $4 an hour, $6 an hour. You cannot live on that in Ontario. You cannot live on that in Toronto. So we see that as a shame.

The MPP for London West has, very sensibly, put forward a bill that is called the Preventing Worker Misclassification Act, which provides a simple ABC test to determine whether a worker is a contractor or whether they are an employee. In many of these cases, these Uber workers, these gig workers are employees. They should be paid a minimum wage. They should be protected by the Employment Standards Act. They should have access to rights, and they should have access to benefits, and they don’t, and that is a shame.

We would have liked to have seen the Preventing Worker Misclassification Act to be included in this omnibus bill, in order to provide and lift the working floor of thousands and thousands of workers who are earning less than minimum wage, and we don’t see that in this bill. They—

Thank you to the member for London West for her excellent presentation. I know and I recognize the huge amount of work you’ve done to improve workplace conditions. I’d like to get your perspective on the government’s changes to digital workers. Where are they falling short?

I’m proud to rise to speak to Bill 23, the government’s new housing bill. This government’s bill is big, very big. It’s sweeping. And it was introduced yesterday at 3 p.m., which means that we are still digesting the changes, going through the schedules, consulting with planners, municipalities, housing experts, renters and the building sector to determine what this bill means, how it will affect our province and how it will affect the housing sector.

A few things come to mind just off the top. One is that this bill gives the province far greater control over development and planning. The minister has much greater authority to change heritage, to give fines to consumers, to change municipal laws that hurt developer profits. That’s our initial take.

The other measure that advocates have raised very quickly with us is the decision to get rid of cities’ right—the rental housing replacement program. The reason why I just want to dwell on this for my first few minutes is because this measure ensures that a renter, if they need to move because a building is being demolished, has the right to return once the new building is complete at approximately the same rent that they were paying before.

The reason why this is important is because, in Ontario today, we have thousands and thousands of purpose-built rentals that were built in the 1960s and 1970s. These are typically buildings that have far more affordable rents than the kind of unit you’re going to get if you move into a new condo downtown; you might be paying closer to $1,100 to $1,600 for a one- to two-bedroom apartment.

In my riding, many of the people who live in these buildings are older. They are rent-controlled. They have lived there for many years, and the beauty of a purpose-built rental is that it provides a tenant with more certainty that they’re going to be able to stay there year in and year out. That’s very different if you move into a rental property that’s part of a single-family home. Maybe it’s being bought by an investor who wants to flip the property within a year to five years. It does mean that if you live in a semi-detached or a single-family home, it’s far more likely that you could be evicted because the landlord wants to move in or sell it or the property has a new homeowner.

Those people who live in purpose-built rentals deserve protections, and they deserve to keep the protections they’ve got. Getting rid of the requirement—that any renter that is evicted is then potentially not allowed to move back into the new development means that every renter who lives in a purpose-built rental, every renter who is living under rent control, every renter who has more affordable rent could be in a situation where they could face eviction because their corporate landlord or a potential investor could see these properties as an opportunity to convert into luxury condos and force these tenants out. That’s where our affordable units are in the city, so I’m very concerned to see that measure in there.

We are already hearing from housing stakeholders who have raised this issue, and the reason why I’m focusing on this to such a great extent is because if we are going to build new homes, which we absolutely need to do, we also need to keep the affordable homes that we have.

I’ll give you an example of an individual, Carolyn Whitzman. She is an expert on housing supply, including meeting new housing supply. One of her biggest concerns is the decision to get rid of section 11, and this is what they say: “This would have a disastrous impact on net affordable housing. Canadians lost 15 homes renting at $750 or less for every one new affordable home created at that price point between 2011 and 2016. Most of this net loss was due to demolition and renovation of residential rental properties.”

What that means is that this rental housing protection bylaw that exists in some municipalities, including the city of Toronto, is the main reason why many of these—