In fact, the Middlesex-London Health Unit just wrote to this government a couple of weeks ago with the finding that households with low incomes in our community cannot afford to buy food, and that’s why we’re seeing record numbers of people accessing food banks—record numbers of new people accessing food banks in London and across the province.

What would have really made a difference is a doubling of social assistance rates, which is what social service agencies have been calling for for several years.

I want to thank the member for her question, and also for her advocacy for paid sick days over the years.

Certainly, we know that a low-wage worker—many women saw the gender wage gap that was highlighted in the FAO report. Women in low-wage professions, when they have a child who is sick, when they are sick, are faced with this impossible choice: Do they forgo a day of pay, stay home unpaid so that they can care for their sick child and recover from the illness that they themselves are suffering? Or do they go to work, send their child to school and risk spreading illness to others in the workplace or in the school? We know what happens when they make that choice, which is understandable. They risk spreading illness to others, who go to our hospital and add pressure to our overextended health care system.

I know the member is aware of Indwell, a 72-unit building that recently opened in our city. Those 72 units came at a big price tag, much more than the additional funding that the government has provided.

London is not the only community across this province that is facing the crisis of homelessness. We need a much more significant investment from this government to address the crisis.

There are many non-profit agencies—in my community, we have Anova, we have the London Abused Women’s Centre, we have Atlohsa—across this province that provide support for those experiencing gender-based violence. Staff at those agencies are burnt out. There has been no increase in base funding for years. Those staff are dealing with wages that are so low that it is challenging for them to find housing in our communities, with rents increasing so dramatically. An increase in base funding, the stabilization of support that non-profit agencies require to serve people who are experiencing violence or who are experiencing any kind of challenge, would make a huge difference. And let’s not forget, most of the workers who work in the non-profit sector are women, so that increase in base funding would make a huge difference for women in this province.

We know from the Financial Accountability Officer that this government has a track record of not allocating funding. There has been record numbers of unallocated pots of money. There has been a huge increase in contingency funds, and there is no transparency whatsoever as to where those funds will be allocated. Budget after budget, we have seen monies allocated on paper but not actually spent.

The people of this province deserve a lot more transparency in where public dollars are being invested.

It’s always a pleasure to rise in this House and speak on behalf of the people I represent in London West. Today I want to offer some thoughts on the Conservative government’s 2023 budget and the budget bill that is before us this morning.

This budget provided the government—its first budget following the election. It provided the government an opportunity to be bold, to take bold action to address the very significant challenges that Ontarians are facing, that Londoners are facing, that people in communities across this province are facing. I have to say, as many have pointed out—the editorial board of the Toronto Star, media commentators, and people who came to committee—this budget failed to do that in any significant way.

We frequently quoted the description of this budget: that if it was a Christmas gift, it would be a six-pack of white tube socks. It’s basically a meh budget that really does not rise to the occasion and meet the moment. I’m going to outline some of the ways that it fails to do that.

Interjections.

I want to begin with a very thoughtful analysis of the budget that was provided by YWCA Ontario. They point out that in a more-than-100-page document, the word “women” is mentioned four times, the words “girl” and “poverty” are mentioned once each, and the word “gender” is not mentioned at all.

We know that the pandemic has been challenging for everyone in this province, but in particular, women have been hard hit. We saw that earlier this week with the FAO report on the persistent gender wage gap that has not closed at all under this government.

There would have been an opportunity in this budget to take meaningful action to address the gender wage gap on issues like child care.

There was no money whatsoever allocated within this budget to create a workforce strategy. We know that ECEs who have been trained in early childhood education, whose passion is to work with children, are leaving the profession because the wages are so low. They cannot afford to feed their families, and they cannot afford housing on the salaries that they are making. We need a significant investment in wages for early childhood educators in order to fulfill the promise of $10-a-day child care. This budget could have provided that workforce strategy but did not.

We also saw in this budget no mention of paid sick days. That is an issue that I have advocated on since the beginning of the pandemic, actually. We know that women workers in caring professions, in cleaning and catering, in those care roles—PSWs, child care workers. Those are the careers that are least likely to have paid sick days. Access to permanent paid sick days through the Employment Standards Act would make a huge difference to those workers and to all workers in Ontario. Almost more than half of workers don’t have access to paid sick days through their employer, and providing those paid sick days would be a real step forward to creating decent work for people in this province.

On health care and homelessness: My community, the city of London, has launched an unprecedented, one-of-a-kind strategy, a whole-of-community response to health and homelessness. Homelessness is an urgent issue across this province, and nowhere more than in London. We have seen over 200 unhoused people die on the streets in the last couple of years, and this has motivated an unprecedented coming together of agencies and community leaders to look at how to ensure that everyone in our community has access to decent and affordable housing, and supportive housing, if necessary.

What we saw in this budget was a modest increase to the homelessness support; we saw $202 million. We saw cabinet ministers coming to London and announcing that London would get, out of that $202 million, an additional $8 million for London-Middlesex. So $1 million of that is going to Middlesex, which leaves London with about seven million additional dollars, but the challenges our community is facing will require a much greater investment than that. We are fortunate to have had a benefactor, an anonymous donor family, come forward and commit to a $25-million gift to help launch the plan that has emerged from our community. And we expect the Ontario government to come to the table with much more significant dollars than what has been allocated.

I know that this is not just a London problem. There are 444 municipalities across this province that are dealing with similar challenges. The $202 million that the government has allocated is nowhere going to meet the need of those 444 municipalities—and certainly not the additional $7 million that London has received.

There’s nothing in this budget to deal with the challenges that tenants in our province are facing. We did not see in this bill any new measures to protect tenants, to move forward with rent control on buildings that were built after 2018. This is a big problem in London West—across the city, actually. There are new towers going up, and every new tower that goes up, every new unit that is added to our housing supply is exempt from rent control. What happens is that tenants move into those units and they do not realize that the landlord basically has carte blanche to increase the rent on those units to whatever level they want because those new units are exempt from rent control. So people are economically, financially evicted, basically, because they cannot afford double-digit rent increases; they did not budget for double-digit rent increases. At a time of unprecedented inflation, this lack of rent control is particularly difficult—especially when you can’t afford the rent in the unit that you have signed a lease on, when the landlord tells you that it’s going to increase at a double-digit rate, and there’s no other option. There are no other affordable options in the city, and I hear that more and more from people in my community.

On health care: This budget doubles down on the government’s plan to privatize. Instead of making investments in hospitals across this province—like we have in London at LHSC; we have the Nazem Kadri centre for ambulatory care, which is a model of how we can provide outpatient support for those less-complex surgeries, with all of the oversight and protections in place that are offered in our public system. Instead of moving in that direction, instead of making those investments in hospitals across the province so that other hospitals could establish centres like the Nazem Kadri centre, this government is instead ramming forward with its plan to privatize health care and put those profits in the hands of for-profit corporations.

This is a budget that has failed Ontarians.

I listened to the remarks from my colleague the member for Thunder Bay–Superior North and want to thank her for the issues that she raised and the concerns that she identified with this budget.

One of the issues that we face in my community, in the London area, is a dire shortage of family physicians, primary care providers. We’re short 65,000 family doctors in the London area, which has a huge impact on people’s ability to access the preventive programs and services they need.

I wondered if the member would comment on whether there was anything in the budget to deal with that significant shortage of family physicians across the province and what the people in her community are facing in terms of access to primary care.

I want to thank my colleague for her remarks. Last week, we had a constituency week and I took the opportunity to visit a number of community service agencies in the London area. I visited staff at Community Living London, Thames Valley Addiction and Mental Health Services, L’Arche, Meals on Wheels etc. One of the things I heard repeatedly was that there has been no increase at all in base funding for many of these vital community support agencies for a decade or more. They are already dealing with wages in that sector that are far below the wages that are paid to similar workers in the institutional sector.

I wondered if the member would like to comment on whether there was any funding in this budget to help stabilize and ensure the sustainability of that vital community support sector.

I want to thank the member for his speech and for his advocacy on behalf of the Niagara region.

Yesterday in this Legislature, there was a reception hosted by a number of elected officials and others from the Niagara region, and I had the opportunity to talk to the chief of the paramedic service in Niagara. He talked about the impact that off-load delays are having on the people in that region, both from the point of view of not being able to access emergency transportation when someone is in a medical crisis and also for those paramedics who are stuck waiting in hospital parking lots.

I wondered if the member wanted to comment on whether this budget provides any hope that the government has a plan to deal with the off-load delay pressures in Niagara.

I think here in the province of Ontario we’re very fortunate to have a Financial Accountability Officer as an independent watchdog officer of this Legislature who does the analysis of budgets, like the ones that we have seen brought forward by this government time and again. We know from the Financial Accountability Officer that so much of the budgeting that comes out of this government is smoke and mirrors. It’s a shell game. There are huge contingency funds—money socked away in contingency funds. There are revenues that are underestimated to come up with the numbers they want. There are billions of dollars of funding that is underspent year after year.

Thank goodness for the Financial Accountability Officer for telling us the truth about the budget.

We need to see a permanent increase in financial support for seniors, but we also need to see some real action taken to address the affordability challenges that people and seniors are facing with housing, with groceries, with utilities.

I don’t think the member actually listened intently to my remarks. I gave the example of a 72-unit supportive housing building that had been constructed in London with a significant investment from the city of London, at a cost of $21 million. For one 72-unit supportive housing building—how on earth is the $202 million that’s allocated in this budget to meet the needs for supportive housing across the province going to address the serious crisis that we are seeing in communities across Ontario in homelessness? London deserves a piece of that $202 million, but so do so many other communities in this province.

It’s my pleasure to rise today to participate in this debate on the 2023 Ontario budget. I have to say, Speaker, I was really struck by the editorial in the Toronto Star that described this as “An Ontario Budget Without Vision.” The Toronto Star editorial writers said, “If this budget were a Christmas present, it would be a three-pack of white socks. Not entirely useless. But an exercise in going through the motions.”

Speaker, the leader of the official opposition has very clearly described this budget as a document that fails to meet the moment. It fails to acknowledge the reality of the hardships that people in Ontario are facing. For me, as the representative for London West, it certainly fails to address the homelessness crisis that we are seeing in our community, the lack of access to affordable housing, the crisis in access to health care services.

I want to focus my remarks on housing and homelessness.

A couple of weeks ago, we had a proud moment in our city. Indwell, a non-profit supportive housing provider, opened up a new 72-unit supportive housing building in London. That came at a cost of just over $21 million for 72 units of supportive housing. Of that $21 million, the province contributed the absolute bare minimum that was necessary for Indwell to be able to access federal dollars.

It’s encouraging, finally, after years of avoiding any involvement in providing supportive housing, to see this budget make an allocation for supportive housing. But $202 million across the province is going to do nothing to address the breadth of the need that communities are experiencing. The 72 supportive housing units in London came at a cost of $21 million. This government is allocating $202 million for supportive housing for 444 municipalities across Ontario.

In London, we have seen a dramatic increase in the number of people who are homeless on our streets. We currently have more than 2,000 people who we know are experiencing homelessness on a daily basis. That doesn’t take into account the number of people who are precariously housed, who are couch-surfing, who are not counted in the by-name list. We have more than 6,000 applications for social housing in our community. That represents 11,000 parents and their children who are trying to get access to housing they can afford.

Our community came together and acknowledged the health and homelessness crisis as a major priority—as the number one priority—for the city of London to move forward on in a collaborative. So 60 social service providers and 200 individuals came together with funding from a very generous anonymous donor family who provided a gift of $25 million to jump-start an innovative, never-seen-before plan to develop a whole-of-community response to deal with health and homelessness in the city of London.

That plan alone calls for 600 net new supportive housing units that will be necessary just in London alone, and that is just what’s needed in the next three years. So you can see, Speaker, how the $202 million that’s allocated to meet homelessness needs across the province is nowhere near enough to address the concerns of other municipalities outside London.

Now the city of London’s pre-budget submission had actually called on the province for a significant investment of $15 million in capital funding to support the construction of these net new supportive housing buildings, as well as an additional $4 million in annual operating funding for the supportive housing programming. So that is the mention of London that we would have expected to see in this budget. We saw one reference to London—one reference to a school that’s being built. We need new schools, there’s no doubt about it, but this was an announcement that had already been made by this government, and that’s the only reference to the city of London in the entire budget.

London is looking at a $97-million deficit caused by the measures that this government brought forward in Bill 23 that were supposed to tackle the housing crisis that we see in Ontario. Instead, this budget actually confirms that not only did the measures that the government set out in Bill 23 fail to move Ontario forward to meet that 1.5 million homes goal, but we’re actually falling further behind. The numbers that are reported in this budget show that Ontario is lagging in the pace that it will need to meet if we are going to achieve that 1.5 million home target.

When I talk about Bill 23, there’s the financial impact on municipalities with the revenue hole that it’s going to create in municipal budgets, but there is also, associated with Bill 23, the attack on the greenbelt. This budget would have been an opportunity to actually take some serious measures, some bold and strong measures, to deal with climate change mitigation and resilience. We saw none of that in this budget, and that has people in my community very concerned.

The other thing that is of huge concern to people in London is the money that this government is allocating to expand for-profit private health care facilities. Instead of investing in excellent stand-alone facilities like the Nazem Kadri ambulatory surgical care centre that is run under the oversight of a hospital, this government decided not to invest in those kinds of services and hospitals but instead to funnel yet more money to investor-led private for-profit health care facilities. They’ve increased the budget from $18 million last year to $72 million this year, and that has a lot of people concerned.

We’ve heard not just from the Auditor General but from patients of private health care facilities who talk about the aggressive upselling that they have experienced at these facilities. As much as the government would like to say, “Oh, no, you won’t pay at a private health care facility,” the experience of patients in this province has been very different. They have had to pay. They’ve been told they need surgeries that, when they’ve gotten a second opinion, they find out that that surgery was unnecessary. They’ve been told they have to pay for the ability to stay longer than they would otherwise have been asked to stay. So there are huge concerns about funnelling public dollars into private health care facilities.

But, Speaker, just to get back to what I said initially, this is a budget that falls flat. It really ignores the pressures that Ontario families are facing, the affordability pressures that Ontario families are facing, as daily, we get calls from people who tells us about the huge spike in their Enbridge gas bills. The price of food in grocery stores, the price of Internet services, the price of insurance—everything is increasing, and this budget includes no measures to help people deal with those realities.

In particular, for those who are the most vulnerable, the most disadvantaged, those living on social assistance, this government provided a measly 5% increase when we know what’s needed is a doubling of social assistance rates.

I’d like to commend my colleague the member for London North Centre on his remarks. We come from a community where there are currently at least 2,000 homeless people who are on the by-name list. There are many other people who are precariously housed. We have 6,000 applications for social housing, representing 11,000 parents and children in our community.

London has identified a need for a minimum of 600 net new supportive housing units. We know from a recent supportive housing complex, Embassy Commons, which has only 72 units, that the cost is significant. That was $22 million for one 72-unit building.

Will this budget enable London or any other municipality to meet the need for supportive housing?