It’s always an honour to speak in this House, and it’s a particular honour to speak about the budget.

I have to say that the budget process itself is really steeped in theatrics. Every year, we come in at around the same time, and I have to say that it feels like a great big wheel of cheese is rolled into the chamber when the budget is presented.

I remember last year’s budget was a little different, because it had this analogy of the minister travelling around all of Ontario, and I found that the reflections at the time were very one-sided in the description of what Ontarians were facing; it was as if nothing wrong was happening in the province of Ontario, and we know this to be very, very far from the truth. I remember, at the time, just like now, the minister, after vigorous applause—the government benches were as rowdy as a Manchester bar during a soccer match, at the time of budgets.

There’s cheering. It’s so vigorous. The minister is sort of finger-pointing at people and all of this, and then he goes into his speech. We’re all handed a piece of paper where we could follow along, and I’m sure most of us take the time to read ahead, hoping for those pearls that would help our community. Often, we find ourselves left so disappointed. That is not to say that every government doesn’t have something to offer the people, because they always do something—but is it enough, and who are they truly helping and supporting?

I’ve often said that the individual members of this government are well meaning and well intentioned, but when they come together as a government, it’s one of those few examples that the whole is lesser than the sum of its parts.

Budgets are a value statement. They are a statement of the values that a government has. They also talk about the value for money, and I think that this budget, unfortunately, is failing on both counts, because we’ve never spent so much to have so little—and when I say “so little,” don’t take it from me; take it from your constituents. The proof is in their own lives.

I know the government will take credit for things that they see as positive but will never ever take responsibility for the actions they often take that can lead to harm, whether wilfully or by neglect or by ignoring issues. The list is so long, yet the fact that after six years of a Conservative government and over $1 trillion spent, so many of the most vulnerable Ontarians are left on waiting lists—I’m talking about youth, teenagers looking for mental health counselling, almost 28,000 of them still waiting, in some cases two and a half years, for counselling that could change their lives.

Health care: You want talk about a legacy? This government is doing everything they can, in any way, shape or form possible, to privatize the health care coverage that we see, and this is not delivering better value for money. In fact, we know that this government has spent a billion dollars on agency nurses to get a third of the hours that they would get from our nurses in hospitals, but they don’t care because this is planned obsolescence. What their hope is, is to continue to privatize health care by making decisions that intentionally harm and really restrict hospitals from helping people in many ways.

Under this government—and they don’t want to admit to this legacy—the average wait time in emergency rooms is 21 hours. We’ve had over 200 emergency room closures across the province, but the government doesn’t want to accept that. They don’t even want to discuss it. In fact, if you ask them a question in question period, they won’t even answer it. They’ll just answer something else. I know I’ve been often reminded over and over that there’s a reason why it’s called question period and not answer period, but the reality is, answers or that lack of answer is insulting for people across this province, and it only harms them because the people cumulatively that are being harmed by the decisions this government makes are keeping score and they’re waiting for their time to cast a vote, and you’ll see eventually that those numbers add up and add up and you’re not going to like the outcome of it. Value for money, auto insurance—one thing that this government loves to do is reannounce announcements. It’s mind-boggling.

Auto insurance is a perfect example of that. There are parts in the GTA, in particular— Brampton, Vaughan, my riding, the Premier’s own riding and Scarborough—where people pay sky-high auto insurance rates, people with clean driving records, and they’ve talked about this postal code discrimination they’ve faced. In fact, I have a bill that I’ve placed before the chamber to deal with that, to end this. In the summer, right after the election, the Premier himself said that this was something important to change, a priority. Two years later, at this budget, as I looked and, as I said, was reading ahead, what do we have on auto insurance? Looking through the budget, they’re going to study it for another two years. This is four years.

And the thing is, the last government of Ontario is actually not the independent members; it’s this government. So when they look and they criticize about cleaning up a mess, there have been about five and a half—almost six—years now of their own mess that they’re creating. In fact, the mess is so messy that they’ve spent—some would say wasted—at least a month of solid debate walking back bad decisions, and more than that.

And where do these decisions come from? And I’ve said it before in this House: I’m not going to blame individual members. In many cases, I can’t even blame ministers, because the decisions made by this government come from two different sources: PR people and special interests. Those who criticize the doubling of the staff in the Premier’s budget—maybe it’s because there are just so many special interests that they have to cater to, that you need more staff to be able to do that in the first place. I don’t know. But that’s where the decisions get made. And sometimes the PR person has to whip this government into line and say, “The people are frustrated.” That’s why we see what happened with the greenbelt.

And the thing is, this government is not a government to be outdone. I’ll give that to them, because the Liberals before them were investigated multiple times by the OPP for decisions they made, and ultimately paid the price. Not to be outdone, this government upped the ante and said, “How about an RCMP investigation?” And that’s where we stand to this very day: investigation after investigation.

We’ve heard a lot about carbon tax, but do you know what I’ve noticed in this House? Where that quota of saying the words or the phrase “carbon tax” about a hundred times a day started was, it really started at the point of that greenbelt debacle, when they had to walk it back, because that was at that point of popularity that this government faced before the pandemic, where people were starting to question the transparency and what the real decisions were behind this government. That’s where we began to hear the phrase “carbon tax” over and over and over, almost like a channel change.

The reality is this: There are Ontarians who are really struggling, very vulnerable, and in times of hyperinflation like this that this government is not able to rein in—grocery prices skyrocketing—the list goes on and on and on. They seem to be willing to let industry themselves write their policies for them.

That is the case in auto insurance, because the only people lauding this government when it came to changes in auto insurance have been one of the biggest auto insurers, that literally came out and said—I guess I won’t read the entire quote, but they essentially said that their decisions on auto insurance, the direction they’re taking Ontarians in, is the right choice. The auto insurance companies—of course, they wrote it for this government.

The reality is this: Where they’re taking auto insurers—and the Liberal government before them can tell you this. The auto insurers are going to tell you, “Do what we say, or we’re going to leave, and then what are you going to do?” And what they say is, “Give less and less coverage to those in need, and we’ll reduce rates.” Do you know what happened after years of Liberal governments? Rates just continued to increase, just like they have under this Conservative government.

Now it’s like the final nail in that coffin. Their choice right now, to tell people that they need to opt into necessary and essential coverages as a solution to bring down rates, is going to be extremely dangerous for many drivers, I would say, especially those in areas where they are being discriminated against because of where they live. They are going to be forced to make a tough decision: “Do I eliminate all my coverage just so that I have insurance, so I don’t get pulled over by the police?”, and then white-knuckle their steering wheels as they’re driving, hoping that nothing bad happens.

This government is spending more money than we’ve ever seen—over a trillion dollars in the last six years. And when you ask everyday Ontarians—I’ll tell you this: They’ll tell you every day, and they tell me, that their lives are only getting harder.

If this government wants to help people, they know what they need to do: Make their investments count, protect our public systems, protect our public health care and stand up for everyday Ontarians, like they say they do, because right now, Ontarians are hurting in a way they never have had before.