I appreciate the remarks from my colleague the member for University–Rosedale. She talked a bit about the cost-of-living pressures that people in her community and across the province are experiencing. She talked about the tolls, for example, on Highway 417. Now, this bill prohibits tolls on provincial highways that don’t have tolls. So I wondered what her opinion is on whether that provision to remove tolls from highways that don’t have tolls is going to really help Ontarians deal with the affordability crisis that we are seeing in this province.

My question is to the member for Oakville North–Burlington. Last week, we had food banks from across the province gathered here at Queen’s Park to call on the government to make those fundamental public policy changes that would address the root causes of food insecurity in this province.

Food banks told us that they are seeing huge spikes in first-time users. They are seeing dramatic declines in donations because of the affordability pressures that people are facing in this province. We need to see a doubling of ODSP and Ontario Works rates. We need to see rent control in order to lift people out of poverty. Why are those measures not included in the 2023 budget?

Economist Mike Moffat put out a report just recently showing that typically in Ontario, about 80,000 people move and about 80,000 people move in from other provinces. This past year, under this government, we have seen 50,000 more people leave Ontario than are coming to this province, and many of the people who are leaving are the skilled trades workers that we will need to build the houses that we need here in Ontario. Many of them are the health care workers that we need to shore up our health care workforce. And the reason that they are giving for leaving is because of this government’s failure to deal with the affordability crisis.

I would like to hear from this member what the government is doing to try to retain those mainly young adults who are leaving the province in droves, going to Alberta, going to the east coast because this province has simply become too unaffordable.

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.

My question is to the Premier.

In the last year, 50,000 more people left Ontario than have arrived, which is out-migration at a level we have never seen before in this province. Most are young adults aged 25 to 35 who can’t afford to save for a home on the salaries they are making—and that includes demoralized, disrespected London West nurses Nicole Forster and Lindsay Smale.

Instead of standing by as nurses like Nicole and Lindsay leave Ontario for good, will the Premier stop fighting nurses in court over the unconstitutional Bill 124 wage cap and start actually fixing the housing affordability crisis?

Thank you, Speaker. I do believe that housing affordability is a key piece of economic development. I am just basing my comments on what we have heard from members on the other side: that this is an economic development bill; that the purpose of this bill is to facilitate investment-ready land for a potential electric-vehicle-battery manufacturing plant. I am just pointing out to the province that in order to be successful with this project, they’re going to have to do more, as I said, to make sure there’s access to affordable, quality child care and to ensure that workers have access to housing that they can afford.

The other concern I wanted to raise—and this is an email that was shared with my office—is the government will also need to make certain that there is that skilled workforce available to take advantage of those new jobs. This is an email I received from Brett Gundlock. He says that three years ago, he began a career transition into the carpentry field to gain his Red Seal certificate. It took him a while to find an employer to sponsor him for the program, and now he estimates that it is going to take as much as two years in order to get into a classroom to complete the classroom requirements of that apprenticeship program.

He says that he was told by the Ministry of Labour that it looks like it will be next fall before he can begin the classroom aspect. Three other carpenters in his company are also waiting to hear about schooling. They were last in the class 12 months ago and haven’t heard anything.

He says it looks like it will take him up to seven years to finish his Red Seal since he began working as a carpenter.

Making the investments in those kinds of opportunities for skilled workers, the kinds of skilled workers who will be needed by economic development projects, such as the one that will be facilitated by this legislation, will be very important if that project is to be successful.

Speaker, I did want to make a couple of other comments before I close, and one is to echo some of the questions that have been asked already about this bill. It is rather ironic that we have a government whose first order of business when they were elected back in 2018 was to rip out electric vehicle charging stations. And now, the government claims to be a champion of electric vehicles. That is the other work that will have to be done by this government if this site is actually successful in recruiting this investor. The rumour is that it’s Volkswagen who is going to access the site to manufacture those batteries, but if that is to happen, the government has a long way to go on its electric vehicle strategy and a long way to go on its climate action plans to deal with the carbon footprint that we have in this province and try to prevent some of those once-in-a-lifetime severe weather events that we are seeing with horrifying frequency across Ontario and around the world.

It’s good to see the government trying to move forward to facilitate this investment in electric vehicle battery manufacturing, and I encourage them to take a holistic look at what is needed to ensure the success of an electric vehicle sector in the province of Ontario.

What I did say is that we received the bill yesterday. We have not yet had a briefing from the minister’s office. We are going to be doing some talking to stakeholders, which is what every MPP in this place should do when legislation arrives. But at this point, we do not see any major red flags in this bill and have not raised any objections to this legislation.

We were able to do a little bit of investigation to understand what this is really about, but there are all kinds of questions that we would appreciate answers to. Why this particular site? We don’t have a map showing exactly which lands are proposed for annexation. We don’t have any detail about what environmental attributes those lands may have. We don’t know how invested the proposed investor is in this site. There is lots of information that—

I will do that, Speaker. I do feel that—I listened to half an hour of remarks by the Minister of Economic Development and Trade who positioned this bill very much as an economic development tool, and so I am just reminding the government that there are important issues that have to be addressed if we are to be serious about economic development in this province and ensuring that people are able to take advantage of all of the potential new jobs that are going to be generated by this bill. Sustaining a child care workforce is fundamental to that work.

Another issue that is very much tied to economic development is ensuring that people can find affordable places to live if they are to take advantage of all of these new jobs that are potentially going to be generated by this mega-site that will be formed by this bill. In London, and similarly in St. Thomas—although I don’t have the data right at my fingertips. London is experiencing an intense housing affordability crisis, much worse than anywhere else in Ontario and most of Canada. Rents in London have doubled and have become beyond unaffordable for at least 60% of the residents who live in the city of London.

Affordability, of course, is measured by how much of a person’s income rent represents. So if you’re paying more than 30% of your income on rent, then that rent is not considered affordable for you given all of the other costs that you have to make in a year.

A London household needs to make $59,000 a year or more to keep shelter costs below 30% of their income, but only 40% of London households make at least that much. So we have 60% of households in the city of London that are paying more than they should on rent if they were to meet that affordability threshold.

The CMHC, the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corp., that recently released the report on housing affordability in London noted that it is particularly acute in London compared to the rest of the country. We have a 1.7% vacancy rate, which is the second-lowest level since 2001. Homes are hard to find; in particular, affordable homes, and that is what the NDP has consistently pointed out to this government. The huge missing piece of the government’s housing plan is that there is nothing there to support affordable housing, deeply affordable housing, supportive housing—all of those housing options that are so desperately needed in our communities.

We also, in London, have been having a homelessness crisis, and once again, homelessness—the desperation of people who are experiencing homelessness—is not good for economic development in the city. As merchants in downtown London will tell you, that has been very challenging for them, and particularly since the pandemic. In London, we have lost more than 200 residents of our community who were experiencing homelessness and who have died over the last couple of years. Currently, there are an estimated 2,200 people experiencing homelessness in our city. That actually brought the city together in a series of summits. More than 60 social service agencies, business owners, municipal officials, a wide diversity of individuals and organizations came together over the course of three summits to develop a made-in-London housing and homelessness plan.

One of the things that the city of London has called for in its pre-budget submission to the government is support to enable the city to move forward with that health and homeless system transformation. Fortunately, our community has a philanthropist who came to the table with $25 million—