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.