The courts have confirmed that the Ford government owes the public answers about why they skipped an environmental assessment for the mega spa planned at Ontario Place. The judge said the matter was of significant public law interest, despite government lawyers arguing that the challenge should be thrown out.

My question to the Premier is, will you halt all redevelopment activities on the Therme site and conduct an environmental assessment?

I would say—I mean, there are only two schedules in the bill, and both schedules are cause for concern, because in schedule 1, it is possible—it’s not clear yet, but it is possible that the government is going to interfere with ATU’s collective agreements. We do not support that. The courts don’t support that.

In schedule 2 of the bill, again, the government is downloading the responsibility for building provincial infrastructure to municipalities. Think about what happens to municipalities who desperately need a GO station but are not able to attract the developers, the investors. What happens to them? They don’t get a station? Where are the equity considerations? They go to the back of the line. So both these schedules in the bill are cause for concern.

But let’s talk about how they got there. It’s because the province failed to build a GO station for Durham. So now, the province is essentially saying, “We’ll get out of the way if you want to build it yourself.” And heck, Durham is saying, “We’ll do it. We cannot wait any longer because who knows when that is?”

So yes, Durham wants to build it. I say go for it, but only because the province failed to do their part.

To the second part of the member’s question around regional transit, again, when the province is not actively building transit in every part of the province, whether it’s urban, rural, south, west, north—it doesn’t matter—the province has a responsibility to do that, to connect the entire province, to connect people in the province. And when you leave it to simply developers taking up the incentive, you’re not going to have that equitable infrastructure built in this province.

It is a goal that is laudable. We agree with the overall goal, but we do not agree with the downloading of that responsibility. We think that provinces must play an active part. And keep in mind the context as well. Municipalities have already lost a big source of revenue because of Bill 23, which your government put forward. And so when you are putting them in such a tight place, with limited revenue and no transit infrastructure projects happening, they’re going to start to look at different avenues to do the work.