I’d like to thank the member from Nickel Belt for her excellent presentation.

It’s deeply concerning to think that the government is sitting on assets that could be used and could be leveraged to help the people of Nickel Belt and help people who are working—and yet chooses not to.

In my discussions with the Tourism Industry Association of Ontario as well as the Sarnia Lambton Chamber of Commerce, they’ve indicated that many small businesses are having to actually bus workers into their areas for service jobs—such as Tim Hortons and others—because they simply can’t afford housing within their areas.

I want to ask the member, how does the government’s neglect of providing truly affordable housing impact local economies in Nickel Belt?

It’s a great honour for me to stand here in this place and represent the great voices of the wonderful riding of London North Centre.

As I take a look towards Bill 139, the Less Red Tape, More Common Sense Act, it is an interesting bill to arrive at this time. We have yet another doorstopper bill, a bill with a number of different technical amendments to legislation—which are in and of themselves not necessarily odious. As the official opposition, we usually look towards these large, omnibus sorts of bills that are full of schedules and try to look for that poison pill, the arsenic in the pie that majority governments are often foisting upon oppositions—you know, something that appears as though we cannot technically vote for.

But if we take a look at this bill, I also think about the current situation in Ontario. Families in Ontario are hurting incredibly right now. We have a cost-of-living crisis. We have a housing crisis. We have an opioid epidemic across our province. And this government seems content to pursue technical amendments.

Today, as it turns out, Speaker, we have an opportunity for the government to vote on really life-changing legislation that would help empower low- and moderate-income families. Today we’re going to be voting on my motion that was debated just yesterday, for the government to actually provide affordable housing and supportive housing to low- and moderate-income families. Given the debate yesterday, I am deeply concerned that the government is not taking the housing crisis seriously, because they have indicated that they won’t be voting for it.

If we look towards the Less Red Tape, More Common Sense Act—just at first blush, given I only have a few minutes on the clock this morning—this bill sort of tinkers around the edges. It’s interesting because, within this bill, it is going to tinker with the agricultural act, while at the same time, in recent memory, we have seen that this government has been hell-bent on carving up the greenbelt, turning millionaires into billionaires with their greenbelt grab. And to that $8.3 billion that they were content to hand over to a few well-connected insider friends, that was also—just a point of note, Speaker—based on the Auditor General’s 2016 numbers. So that number could be far, far more than $8.3 billion.

We look at the impacts that would have had for our province, for our precious farmland, where we’re losing 319 acres of prime farmland each day—once you lose that farmland, it never comes back—the ecologically sensitive areas such as the Duffins Rouge Agricultural Preserve and so many more.

But what I wanted to just speak about this morning is about the bill itself and what it hopes to achieve, and also what it is entitled. The bill is entitled the Less Red Tape, More Common Sense Act, and it harkens back to a time—I hope the member, my friend from Kitchener–Conestoga, will cover his ears for this next little bit. When this government talks about common sense, it harkens back to a very dark time in Ontario’s history. It harkens back to a government that had what they called the Common Sense Revolution, and it’s something that strikes fear into many people’s hearts.

I was a high school student at that time, and I saw the tremendous and grave impacts on the educational system, where a billion dollars was stripped out of the educational system that was never put back—certainly not by the Liberal government—something that has impacted education for many, many, many years.

We can also thank Conservative common sense for downloading services from the provincial jurisdiction onto municipalities. They downloaded social assistance. They downloaded public housing. They downloaded public health. We need not look far to think of what that downloading and the impact of it was, considering the deaths and all of the poisonings that happened in the Walkerton area as a result.

We can also thank Conservative common sense for cutting funding to health care and closing hospitals. I believe the Harris Conservative government closed 28 hospital and laid off 6,000 nurses.

And we can also thank the Conservative common sense for creating our current housing crisis: 16,000 units of co-op and non-profit housing that were under development at that time were cancelled by the Harris Conservative government. What a shame. You think about those 16,000 units and how many lives would have been impacted by having that economic stability, having that safe place to call home, having something that they could pass on to their children, where the economic benefits could have been realized with these low- to moderate-income folks. Think of those lives—16,000 individual spaces. Think of all the lives that could have been within those units. It’s shocking to think.

You know, earlier—