I want to touch on some of the things that you talked about in your speech—or rather, that you didn’t talk about in your speech. You talked about things that weren’t in this bill, but I’d like to remind the member that every time we’ve introduced an omnibus bill, the NDP have objected to it and said that we’re piling everything together.

In my speech, I mentioned that we had more than 350,000 regulations in Ontario—the next largest province was British Columbia, at 169,000. Would the member opposite change his mind and support an omnibus bill that wipes out almost 200,000 regulations so that we could get back down to what was in other provinces, and that includes a number of the things he’s asking for, if we were to do that?

I like to say that I’m in the productive middle and there are the fringe corners on either side of this side—because our government is so big that we span that entire side as well as a large chunk of this side of the House.

There are so many things that are in this red tape reduction bill that are going to help so many different businesses. I’ll touch on two of them.

If you’re doing jury duty, for example—if you get called to that, not having to waste your time filling out paper forms for it, being able to go on and do it electronically at your ease, at your comfort, is one of those things. It doesn’t sound like it’s a big deal, but all of those small things start to add up.

On the agriculture side: Our Grow Ontario Strategy is something that’s not only going to help agriculture, it’s not only going to help husbandry and livestock, but everyone who consumes all of those. There’s an expression in Ontario that one in eight work in agriculture, but I can guarantee you, eight out of every eight people eat what comes from agriculture.

The NDP can virtue-signal all they’d like. They can throw out all kinds of different things to distract from the great work that we’re doing.

This is one of those bills that will make a positive difference for the people of Ontario. This is one of those bills that will reduce the cost of doing business, which will reduce the cost to every single person in this province. This is one of those things that’s a good-news story.

I’m sorry that the NDP doesn’t want to talk about the good things that this government is doing for the people of this province.

Interjections.

That’s a fantastic point that reiterates exactly what I was saying at the very beginning. I talked about OBIO, who are here for a lobby day today, talking to us about how we change things in health care so that those great innovations can get to hospitals, can get to health care, can be used by the people of Ontario. These are all things that we have to do, absolutely; I agree 100%. We need to make sure that the Ontario government’s procurement rules do not get in the way of the fantastic work that’s being done in Ontario. We’re promoting a made-in-Ontario approach for pretty much everything that we’ve got, and the previous governments made it so difficult for companies in Ontario to get their product to consumers in Ontario.

We’re embarking on an entire process. We’ve worked on it for the last four years, and we’ll continue working on it to reduce that burden, so that great innovations from the province of Ontario get to be used in the province of Ontario by the people of the province of Ontario to the benefit of everyone who lives here in Ontario.

What we’re doing in this bill is, we’re taking 28 different actions across 11 different ministries to reduce the cost of doing business in this province, to make it easier—something as simple as filling out a form online rather than having a paper copy of it, something as simple as having jury descriptions being made available online, having the ability to fill that information out. Why is that important?

I’m going to go back a little bit to something that happened with our Minister of Finance—he was actually President of the Treasury Board at the time. Fax machines were something that were constantly in use. Someone had to physically take that paper, feed it into a fax machine, take it from the other side, and then retype it into a computer. Simple things like that make a massive difference in the operating costs for companies, and these are things that we’re making changes to.

What we would be doing is—if we broadcast how much money we’re going to spend to do this, all of the bids would come in at $1 less than what we have said that we’re going to spend on it.

Anyone in business knows that when you’re going to put a procurement out, you do not lay on the table how much you’re going to spend on it. You want a competitive bidding process, where people are bidding to get to the lowest price, to save the taxpayers of Ontario as much money as possible and deliver the best possible service.