The spring budget plans spending $214 billion of taxpayer money, more than any government in Ontario history. Never has a government spent so much to deliver so little. And why is that? Because this Premier and his government are conducting a gravy train deluxe that delivers taxpayer money to their friends and insiders at the expense of the people of Ontario.

Speaker, who benefits from this budget? It’s not our public education system. Teachers spoke about that yesterday at the finance committee, during budget hearings. It’s not our public health care system. Doctors spoke about that too, yesterday. In fact, the OMA is so fed up with not being heard by this government about the crisis in family medicine that they are trying to get the government’s attention by saying they need to “prepare for the coming apocalypse,” all while this Premier spends money hand over fist in the Premier’s office on expensive staffers.

My question to the Premier: When will he take control of his own office and stop the gravy train?

While the Premier has spent $4 million on expensive staff in his office for at least the last three years—$6.9 million this year—the budget does not show that. The budget has been exactly the same—$2,432,661. The math just doesn’t add up.

My question to the Premier: Where is he hiding the money?

Interjections.

I’m grateful for the opportunity to speak to the budget bill, Bill 180. As we know, this government is not fond of hearing feedback from the opposition Liberals, so I don’t take this time for granted. But it is an opportunity for me to share the concerns of my Don Valley West constituents with this budget and this government, Speaker—and believe you me, they had a lot to say.

The finance minister talked about this budget as one that sticks to their plan. It certainly does stick to their plan of fiscal irresponsibility. So my constituents were not surprised to see this budget continue the government’s plan to divert money away from public services to private businesses. By the way, they’re still upset about the ServiceOntario location operated by an independent service operator that serves my Thorncliffe constituents and those in Don Valley East, that’s going to be closed down and their business given to Staples under a sole-source contract. I do wonder if the Premier would advise his business friends to do business that way.

Anyway, Speaker, they’re not surprised that a government that added $93 billion in debt—15% more debt than the Liberals did in their last six years, when they spend hour after hour talking about that Liberal government here in this House—is going to add another $60 billion—$60 billion—in the next few years.

I’d like to say I’m surprised by the lack of new measures to address urgent problems in our province, whether it’s skyrocketing rents, ER closures, family doctor shortages, student mental health crises, overburdened food banks, bankrupt post-secondary institutions—the list goes on. It’s really just a continuation, though, of the reckless spending of this government that gives money to their rich friends while telling people they are putting more money into the pockets of Ontarians.

The government does indeed like to make reference to the former Liberal government, but Conservatives will not be able to grow their way out of the debt problems they are giving to this province. GDP growth under this government is lower—1.5% on average—than it was under Kathleen Wynne’s government, which was 2.5% on average, all while government spending is higher than Kathleen Wynne, and services are worse.

When Liberals spent money, they did things like give us all-day kindergarten and free education for low-income post-secondary students, which improved their chances of success and improved their quality of life.

When this government spends billions more of our taxpayer money, it’s only their rich friends who benefit, so I’m not surprised. Overspending on initiatives that help their friends, big budget deficits, and inaction on key files have all become hallmarks of this Conservative government. Nonetheless, I am still disappointed and, frankly, shocked that in the days leading up to the release of the budget, the government labelled it as one of a cost-of-living budget. When I heard that I thought, “Wow, they’re finally hearing the message that there are people struggling. Maybe there will finally be some help for those households. But instead, it was a real shame that there was not one new measure to help people dealing with the cost of living.

There’s a long list of this government’s broken promises, policy flip-flops, and failures. In fact, it seems that they think that by moving quickly from one mess to another, they hope to confuse the public and make it hard for us all to keep track.

But Speaker, we are here to hold them to account and make sure that their record, such as the scandal of Bill 124, the most damaging piece of legislation to our publicly funded health care system—let’s not forget the RCMP criminal investigation into their $8.3-billion greenbelt giveaway; their sole-sourcing of contracts to American companies while putting independent Ontario operators out of business; giving away the park at Ontario Place to a foreign-owned spa, and then giving that spa a half-billion-dollar parking lot to boot. Then, there’s the broken promise to middle income families for a tax cut, now broken for over 2,000 days.

The real shame is that there are no new measures to deal with the many crises that this government has orchestrated, no measures to relieve the administrative burden on family doctors—a 10% reduction in that could free up time for an additional two million patients a year—no new money to ensure hospitals don’t have to spend another billion dollars next year on private nursing and staffing agencies; no new money to ensure that teachers get the support staff in classrooms that they need to help those students who need extra help and help reduce the rising violence in our classrooms.

Ontarians are tired of this government and the crises they created in our public services. They’re tired of stagnant growth. They’re tired of hearing about how they’re building homes when they are way off their plan. Instead of owning up or stepping up on their housing record, they fudged the numbers by adding in long-term-care beds in the hopes that the people of Ontario will not notice.

A number of my constituents and others across Ontario who reach out to me as the Liberal finance critic wonder how we have the largest spending budget in Ontario history, under a Conservative government no less, yet the province is experiencing crises after crises. Never has a government spent so much to deliver so little. But the answer has to do with priorities. The government prioritizes their friends and insiders rather than the people of Ontario. I’ve been hearing from constituents about how the TDSB is having to choose between cutting education programs for seniors to prioritize their main mission, of course, which is serving kids, and those seniors are worried about those programs being cut.

I would have thought this government could have found a few million dollars in their budget to make sure that that school board was able to keep delivering services to their seniors without jeopardizing the success of their educational curriculum.

This government is indeed spending more than any government in Ontario’s history, yet, despite this, real spending on the things that matter to Ontarians—health care, education, child care, long-term care and post-secondary institution—remains stagnant in real dollars or have even declined.

According to the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives, real spending on education has declined $1,200 per student under this government. Similarly, compared to every other province, Ontario continues to spend the least per capita on both health care and post-secondary education. That is not the path to a successful future, Speaker. Ontario’s universities and colleges, the backbone of our economy, have actually been allocated less funding in this budget than they were last year. This is before accounting for inflation and it’s just not sustainable. The blue panel’s recommendations were crystal clear: Ontario’s colleges and universities need an additional $2.5 billion to remain financially stable. This government has committed less than half of that funding, so it’s not a surprise that one third of our institutions are still projected to be in the red this year.

We’ve known for some time now that this government and the Premier are fond of helping their friends: for example, developers who own land near the greenbelt; they own land near Highway 413; they own private nursing agencies; they are long-term-care developers. We have former staff members and American-owned companies. And yet with this budget, they have taken helping their friends to a new level.

Let’s be clear, helping their friends does come at the expense of taxpayers and the people of Ontario. This Premier is spending more than double what Premier Wynne spent to staff his office—double, Speaker. That’s taking money away from the services that they could be providing to our citizens, our residents, and instead they’re putting it into the pockets of the Premier’s staffers.

Furthermore, despite grandstanding about how they’re helping “the little guy,” this government has also decided to give every member but one of its own caucus a promotion and therefore a pay bump. I don’t hear them bragging about that in their “sunny day” ad campaign. But I could almost hear it now. Here it goes: “What if you lived in a place where every member but one of your government’s MPPs earned more than every other MPP? Well, you do. It’s happening right here in Ontario.”

Speaker, let’s be clear: It’s just another one of the ways this government changes the rules or gets around its own rules to make their friends richer. Let me remind the government that they put in place a law where MPPs across the board could not get a raise while there was a deficit. So what do they do instead? They have a $9.8-billion deficit, then give raises to their MPPs by making sure that all but one are ministers or parliamentary assistants: 77 out of 78 MPPs in caucus. Shameful. Unfortunately, this is the kind of special treatment for insider friends that we’ve come to expect from this Conservative government.

But let’s get back to the numbers in the budget. This government has added over $90 billion in debt since coming to power in 2018 and are projected to add another $60 billion, and for what? What are we getting for the record amount of money being spent by this government? Speaker, I’ll tell you what we’re getting: We’re getting a record number of crises in every sector.

In health care, we have record ER closures. Under this government and this Minister of Health, we had three more rural ERs close just this past weekend. We have a wait-list for family doctors that’s record high and growing; 2.3 million Ontarians do not have access to a primary care provider. That number will skyrocket to 4.4 million as soon as 2026. And, Speaker, who benefits when people don’t have a family doctor they can access through the public system with their OHIP card? It’s the for-profit clinics that provide care you pay for with your credit card.

But instead of solving that problem, this budget only makes provisions to provide an additional 600,000 Ontarians access to a family doctor, and only by 2027. That means we will hear more and more in the years to come about Ontarians who are accessing care via for-profit clinics. I hear about that every week in my constituency office. In fact, hospitals in my riding are trying to find solutions for this because they know that 80% of people living in assisted living in my riding don’t have family doctors, and so they end up in the ER. That’s not good government.

This government hasn’t had the courage yet to say it, but they are defunding our public services—basically privatizing our public services—because we have a Premier who doesn’t actually believe in public services. That’s why he says the worst place you can give your money is to the government. In our public schools, we have growing staff shortages. According the recent Annual Ontario School Survey, 24% of elementary schools and 35% of secondary schools report facing staff shortages on a daily basis—record high staff shortages—under this government. Teachers and principals have cited several reasons, like mental health. Students are suffering from mental health. Young people are not doing well in this province, and it’s having an impact on our schools to function as safe places where kids can learn.

Yet this budget barely even touches on this issue, proposing only to spend a paltry $8.3 million over five years on youth mental health hubs. With about two million students in Ontario, that’s about 83 cents a year per student. That’s not going very far. There is no plan to expand access to mental health services in schools, where they are needed most.

So again, Speaker, where is all this record spending going, if not towards education and health care? It’s going to things like moving the science centre; to building Highway 413, a highway that will cut through more valuable farmland and only benefit private developers who are looking to build more car-dependent suburbs. The budget did find half a billion dollars to build an underwater parking garage for a foreign-owned spa. Those are the kinds of priorities of this government, not education and health care.

We shouldn’t forget about the hundreds of millions in federal dollars that this government has turned down because they won’t allow fourplexes as of right across this province. They wasted millions on fighting public sector workers in court and millions wasted on partisan Super Bowl ads. There is a pattern, Speaker, and it’s not a good one. The government is spending billions, costing Ontarians billions with their mistakes, and they’re mortgaging our future to pay for it all.

Last week, while answering questions about the budget, the Minister of Long-Term Care referenced my advocacy for a not-for-profit care home in my riding, and I did not have time to answer it, so let me summarize here. It seems the minister was upset I’d asked for help from his office to meet with that home, to provide clarity regarding their current contract, so they can have certainty to build new beds. But it seems that the not-for-profit sector, despite providing better care at a lower cost, always seems to be last in line.

Speaker, Ontario does have a bright future, but it’s not with a budget like this that adds billions to our debt and puts the future of Ontario at risk.

Thank you to the member for Brampton West for his remarks. Certainly there are good things in every budget; it would be nice if we could hear some of that from the Conservatives from time to time about previous Liberal budgets, but I digress.

Could you talk a little bit more about GAINS? You talked about that the program. It’s ending on December 31—the doubling. Can you tell us why it’s ending at that time?

I think I’ve given a lot of reasons here today why this budget is not supportable by me or my constituents, whether it’s a lack of transparency on what the government is spending, spending money on parking lots instead of housing or not fixing our opioid crisis. We see the problems in front of us, Speaker, and this government knows that those problems are not being addressed by this budget.

Thank you to the member for the question. Certainly, those are big numbers, but I don’t find them inspiring. It’s more of the same. The numbers are very similar to those that were in past budgets. I talked about some of the ideas around investing in things like our semiconductor strategy, digitization and technology. Manufacturing jobs are good, but we need to invest in other sectors as well to make sure we’re firing on all cylinders.

Thank you to my colleague from Don Valley East for his great work and support.

Speaker, I’m here today to talk about this motion 11, about Ontario’s budget—not the federal budget, which the Conservative government seems to find more interesting today, maybe because they’re coming to the same conclusion I am: that this budget is more of the same. It’s uninspiring. It’s uninspiring in terms of addressing our homelessness crisis, in terms of driving economic productivity across all sectors and in terms of making sufficient investments in post-secondary education which help drive our economy.

Actions speak louder than words, and while this government talks and talks and talks about record investments, the people of Ontario want more than the Conservative government’s catchphrase when it comes to action. Let’s talk about how this budget leaves people behind. While I welcome the talk of a $202-million increase in funding for supportive housing and homelessness programs, this government now has to put its money where its mouth is.

This government seems unwilling to say how many chronically homeless people there are in our province, and we know that when it comes to addressing homelessness, in at least one case they’ve done quite the opposite. The people of Toronto remember when the Associate Minister of Transportation lobbied against a supportive housing facility in his riding of Willowdale. They remember how then Mayor Tory and the city councillor pleaded with the associate minister to ensure the project proceeded, because it would save lives; that the modular housing units were ready to deploy and just needed provincial go-ahead. And they remember how the associate minister and the Minister of Municipal Affairs and Housing refused to work with the city of Toronto, accusing the city of not sufficiently consulting the community, at the same time they were, ironically, passing legislation that guts the consultation process.

This is a government led by a Premier who broke his word when he said he would not build in the greenbelt. So while this government breaks its word and now says yes to building in the greenbelt, they have a history of saying no to helping the homeless when it’s in their backyard.

We were just in Kenora in January as part of SCOFEA and heard about their homelessness problem, like many other northern and rural towns. According to the Kenora District Services Board, there are 400 homeless people there, a town of only 15,000. The most vulnerable people on our streets have been left behind by this government. While we hear estimates of a $400-million parking lot that’s being built to replace Ontario Place, our housing and homelessness funding gets an increase of only $202 million. Here, again, their actions speak for themselves.

Now let’s talk about productivity. Investing in manufacturing jobs is good—we need good jobs in this sector—but we also need to make meaningful investments in other sectors to see Ontario’s economy be the hub of productivity. In their pre-budget submission, the Council of Canadian Innovators called on this government for increased investment to support innovation, digitization and technology in Ontario, to develop a semiconductor strategy, to future-proof our economy so that Ontario tech companies can also be roaring engines for economic growth.

Post-secondary education is also a key driver of our economy and productivity, and that leads to better quality of life. A couple of years ago, it came to light that Laurentian University was mismanaged financially. Regretfully, the provincial government abdicated their responsibility to ensure a sustained quality education in the north, and this government presided over massive cuts there that have greatly impacted northern students with program cuts.

We heard in the pre-budget consultations from l’Université de Sudbury. They implored the province to fund the university, because northern students deserve a French education in the north. They spoke about how when young people leave the north for post-secondary schooling, they often do not return. That has real consequences. Those bright kids are a lost asset to the north. What does this government say to them? “You’re on your own.”

This government strives for a path to balance, but people and families are not feeling the balance. The people of Ontario have been feeling the pinch of inflation in housing costs, grocery stores, rising property taxes because of Bill 23, at our hospitals and in service cuts to transit. The people of Ontario want the government to take some of that $25 billion spent on highways and spend a bit more of it on affordable and attainable housing; to spend less on luxury spas, which will not be accessible to all Ontarians, and more on health care and mental health.

We were just at the Canadian Cancer Society reception and heard from Rebecca, who suffered through high costs and administrative burden to get the home cancer drugs she needed. In 2022, all parties committed to tackling inequities faced by cancer patients by bringing together an advisory table; in their 2022 budget, this government said it would do just that. Speaker, as of today, the government has yet to take action.

As a member of the opposition, which I know many members opposite will remember from their years on this side of the House, it is my job to give the government constructive feedback on what they could be doing to make legislation better, how to do better for the people of this province.

While this budget is uninspiring for us here in opposition, what the government needs to know is that this mediocrity translates to real life consequences for people in this province, who just need a little bit more and not more of the same.

Thank you for the question.

I think the member has nailed it on the head here when he says that people are on their own.

Again, that money is basically being stored away for a rainy day and potential risks that the government talks about. Well, again, those risks are here. As you’ve mentioned, children are suffering from the pandemic. Their mental health is suffering, and they’re being told, “Here’s a couple of hundred dollars to go get some tutoring help.” That will not advance their learning. Seniors are being told, “Wait for your eye care appointments.” People are being told to keep waiting for their surgeries.

That money could be invested in our economy, invested in our health care system, invested in helping the homeless, whom we know are struggling, and that’s affecting all of us more broadly in our economy.

The member is quite accurate in saying that that money could be better spent under many different programs, instead of squirrelling it away for a rainy day.

Certainly, investing in new immigrants to Ontario and to Canada is important.

I know the government likes to point out that if we vote against the budget, we’re voting against the whole thing. I certainly don’t think that’s the case.

I think the focus really needs to be on keeping the workers we do have. The government is focused on finding new workers. That’s because they’re driving away workers. They’ve driven away workers in the health care sector. They’ve driven away education workers. And they’re driving away daycare workers, so that’s actually preventing us from achieving the full potential we can around the federal government’s program for daycare.

While I support supporting new immigrants to Ontario, we need to also make sure that we’re fighting for the workers we have today.

It was really heartbreaking to hear the interview with the mother of the 16-year-old boy who died. She was very brave and spoke up about the need not only for investment in our transit systems but for investments in the people who are vulnerable—the homeless man who allegedly killed her son.

So I think that, on two fronts, this budget lets us down. It is not investing in our transit systems. There are broken promises related to new lines that the previous budgets have laid out that are not here.

We know that the TTC is having to cut service, and that only leads to more unsafe conditions on our transit systems, because with fewer people around and longer wait times, we know that that can lead to more issues.

Absolutely, the member is correct that we should be investing in public transit and the surrounding supports to make sure the homeless are supported.

We need to be making sure that if we build transit, we actually can run it. We can’t run it without sufficient operating budgets. We know that the TTC is one of the most underfunded transit systems in North America, and I expect that’s probably the case for others, like in Ottawa.

Again, having government support for that transit system will provide safety, but we also need to talk about how many people are homeless, what kind of supports they need, what kind of housing they need. Let’s look at things like small homes that can be affordable, that can be done quickly, to put a roof over their heads so that they can then get the help that they need.

Yesterday, the FAO provided their analysis on the government’s health sector spending plan, and the numbers are clear and scathing. Their five-year plan is $21.3 billion short. The FAO said, “The province has not allocated sufficient funds to support existing health sector programs and announced commitments.”

The Conservative government promised five years ago to end hallway medicine. Under this government, a record number of people are waiting in the halls—1,300 people per day. Under this government, there have been 145 emergency room closures, and wait times for admission have passed 20 hours, on average.

Talking about investments does not equal providing care.

My question is for the Minister of Finance. Will the minister spend the money the government said they would or will their word once again come up short?

While the government boasts about record investments, Ontarians see record ER closures, record numbers of nurses leaving the profession, and a record shortage of family doctors.

The government has shortchanged our health care funding by $21.3 billion, and while the federal Liberal government has pledged to cover half of that, this Conservative government appears to have no plan to pay their share.

My question to the Minister of Finance: Will he commit to putting the necessary money in the budget to address this shortfall or will he leave the people of Ontario short?