I’d like to thank the members from Niagara West and Essex for their presentation. As I’m sure they both know, representing rural ridings, Ontario is losing 319 acres of prime farmland per day, which represents 5% of the province’s entire farmland that will be lost in just five years. Bill 185 will make that loss even quicker. It will happen even faster.

Now, developers, airports, big manufacturers and cities are being provided the opportunity to appeal the Ontario Land Tribunal rulings that restrict building on farmland, wetland and environmentally sensitive areas, but this bill also takes away the ability for third parties. It takes away the ability of third parties to appeal these decisions. Is this yet another example of this Conservative government disrespecting rural Ontario and farmers?

I’d like to thank the member from Niagara Centre for his excellent presentation, speaking about how this government likes to move fast and break things. We have seen a Premier that calls the greenbelt a myth, and maybe it’s a matter that the government has sort of missed the mark. They want Ontarians to think that making taxpayers pay more because of their decisions while they’re lining the pockets of insider developers—they want people to think that that is a myth when the facts are clearly in the way of that.

This government also would like to position themselves as pro-worker when, again, those pesky facts keep standing in the way of what they would claim is the truth.

My question to the member: Why has this government not reached out to workers, and what changes would you like to see to make sure that this legislation does take into account the voices of people like CUPE workers?

I’d like to thank the member from Niagara Falls for his excellent question. No, I don’t think that anyone in Ontario at this point trusts the government on the way in which they’ve handled the greenbelt. They’ve talked about this swap where they’re actually adding lands that already had some protections on them. They’d like to pretend that they are doing this thing where it’s an equal exchange, but if we look at the greenbelt as a chain, if you weaken any links of that chain, such as a watershed or something else that is contributing to the filtering of our water, then that entire chain is weak.

What they’re doing to the greenbelt is odious. They’re making sure that it’s going to be easier for these developers to make McMansions, which is not what we need more of. We need more inwards and upwards development, we need affordable housing, we need rent control, we need vacancy decontrol, we need protections for tenants—none of the things that this government is doing, because they do not care about tenants.

They, on the side of the official opposition, said that they were going to change things. They agreed with the Auditor General. And now that they’re on the government benches, we see a completely different change in attitude. They’re upholding many of the things that they criticized the Liberals for, including Infrastructure Ontario, including Tarion. Now they’ve even created yet more government bureaucracy with things like HCRA.

But this attack on the greenbelt is absolutely odious. They’re also taking money away from municipalities when they need it the most. The government should be having a public builder building housing, not expecting private, for-profit agencies to—

The government has a responsibility to ensure that everyone has access to clean drinking water. The fact that there are places in this province which do not have access to that basic human right in the 21st century is unconscionable. It’s completely unacceptable.

There are areas close to my riding that have been under boil-water advisories for 25 years. If that were to happen in any large urban centre, it would be corrected immediately. It would get government attention. But we’ve seen governments, past and present, who simply want to kick the can down the road. They want to finger-point for jurisdictional change, and they simply don’t want to do the right thing. They could get clean drinking water there; they just choose not to.

With the Standing Committee on Finance and Economic Affairs, we travelled the province and we heard about the people who are struggling. And yet we see bills like Bill 23, which are just actually—they wrap that bill with the word “housing,” but really what it’s about is McMansions, and it’s about seizing land from the greenbelt.

Instead, what we should make sure is we should have a government that’s actually looking at how Infrastructure Ontario operates. We should have a government that looks at how Tarion operates. When people make the largest purchase of their lives, they deserve to have some—

For many years, we criticized the Liberals for this. But this government is doing it almost on steroids. It is unbelievable what they have achieved with Bill 23, with Bill 7, with so many different things and ways—