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April 21, 2011

39th Parliament, 2nd Session

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Hansard Transcripts

Votes and Proceedings

Orders and Notices

Hansard Transcripts 2011-Apr-21 (PDF)

L113 - Thu 21 Apr 2011 / Jeu 21 avr 2011

LEGISLATIVE ASSEMBLY OF ONTARIO

ASSEMBLÉE LÉGISLATIVE DE L’ONTARIO

Thursday 21 April 2011 Jeudi 21 avril 2011

ORDERS OF THE DAY

TIME ALLOCATION

WEARING OF RIBBONS

INTRODUCTION OF VISITORS

ORAL QUESTIONS

HYDRO RATES

HYDRO RATES

EXECUTIVE COMPENSATION

ACCESS TO INFORMATION

AIR AMBULANCE SERVICE

TENANT PROTECTION

ENERGY POLICIES

AIR AMBULANCE SERVICE

STEEL INDUSTRY

ONTARIO ECONOMY

CURRICULUM

AGGREGATE EXTRACTION

WORKPLACE SAFETY

AND INSURANCE BOARD

CORRECTIONAL FACILITIES

ONTARIO DRUG BENEFIT PROGRAM

USE OF QUESTION PERIOD

VISITORS

LEGISLATIVE PAGES

INTRODUCTION OF VISITORS

MEMBERS’ STATEMENTS

BEYOND THE HURT

SKETCH

AMATEUR SPORT

SCHOOL TRANSPORTATION

BOB COYNE

ORGAN DONATION

ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT

EASTER

INTERNATIONAL CHILDREN’S DAY

REPORTS BY COMMITTEES

STANDING COMMITTEE ON ESTIMATES

INTRODUCTION OF BILLS

SUPPORTING SMOKE-FREE ONTARIO

BY REDUCING CONTRABAND

TOBACCO ACT, 2011 /

LOI DE 2011 APPUYANT

LA STRATÉGIE ONTARIO SANS FUMÉE

PAR LA RÉDUCTION DU TABAC

DE CONTREBANDE

RESIDENTIAL TENANCIES

AMENDMENT ACT

(VITAL SERVICES), 2011 /

LOI DE 2011 MODIFIANT

LA

LOI SUR LA LOCATION

À USAGE D’HABITATION

(SERVICES ESSENTIELS)

MOTIONS

PRIVATE MEMBERS’ PUBLIC BUSINESS

STATEMENTS BY THE MINISTRY

AND RESPONSES

TOBACCO CONTROL

SMOKING CESSATION

TOBACCO CONTROL

SMOKING CESSATION

TOBACCO CONTROL

NATIONAL DAY OF MOURNING

PETITIONS

PHOTO IDENTIFICATION

HOSPITAL SERVICES

HOME WARRANTY PROGRAM

ASSISTANCE TO FARMERS

WIND TURBINES

ONTARIO DRUG BENEFIT PROGRAM

CHILD CUSTODY

PARAMEDICS

PRIVATE MEMBERS’

PUBLIC BUSINESS

ONTARIO ONE CALL ACT, 2011 /

LOI DE 2011 SUR ONTARIO ONE CALL

PUBLIC SECTOR

SALARY DISCLOSURE

AMENDMENT ACT, 2011 /

LOI DE 2011 MODIFIANT

LA

LOI SUR LA DIVULGATION

DES TRAITEMENTS

DANS LE SECTEUR PUBLIC

TOWING INDUSTRY ACT, 2011 /

LOI DE 2011 SUR L’INDUSTRIE

DU REMORQUAGE

ONTARIO ONE CALL ACT, 2011 /

LOI DE 2011 SUR ONTARIO ONE CALL

PUBLIC SECTOR

SALARY DISCLOSURE

AMENDMENT ACT, 2011 /

LOI DE 2011 MODIFIANT

LA

LOI SUR LA DIVULGATION

DES TRAITEMENTS

DANS LE SECTEUR PUBLIC

TOWING INDUSTRY ACT, 2011 /

LOI DE 2011 SUR L’INDUSTRIE

DU REMORQUAGE

PUBLIC SECTOR

SALARY DISCLOSURE

AMENDMENT ACT, 2011 /

LOI DE 2011 MODIFIANT

LA

LOI SUR LA DIVULGATION

DES TRAITEMENTS

DANS LE SECTEUR PUBLIC

The House met at 0900.

The Speaker (Hon. Steve Peters): Good morning. Please remain standing for the Lord’s Prayer, followed by the non-denominational prayer.

Prayers.

ORDERS OF THE DAY

TIME ALLOCATION

Hon. Gerry Phillips: I move that, pursuant to standing order 47 and notwithstanding any other standing order or special order of the House relating to Bill 151,

An Act to enact the Ontario Forest Tenure Modernization Act, 2011 and to amend the Crown Forest Sustainability Act, 1994, the Standing Committee on General Government be authorized to meet on Wednesday, May 4, 2011, during its regular meeting time for the purpose of clause-by-clause consideration of the bill; and

That the deadline for filing amendments to the bill with the clerk of the committee shall be noon on Tuesday, May 3, 2011. On Wednesday, May 4, 2011, at no later than 5 p.m., those amendments which have not yet been moved shall be deemed to have been moved, and the Chair of the committee shall interrupt the proceedings and shall, without further debate or amendment, put every question necessary to dispose of all remaining sections of the bill and any amendments thereto. The committee shall be authorized to meet beyond the normal hour of adjournment for clause-by-clause consideration on Wednesday, May 4, 2011.

Any division required shall be deferred until all remaining questions have been put and taken in succession, with one 20-minute waiting period allowed pursuant to standing order 129(a); and

That the committee shall report the bill to the House no later than Thursday, May 5, 2011. In the event that the committee fails to report the bill on that day, the bill shall be deemed to be passed by the committee and shall be deemed to be reported to and received by the House; and

That, upon receiving the report of the Standing Committee on General Government, the Speaker shall put the question for adoption of the report forthwith, and at such time the bill shall be ordered for third reading, which order may be called that same day; and

That, when the order for third reading of the bill is called, one hour shall be allotted to the third reading stage of the bill, apportioned equally among the recognized parties. At the end of this time, the Speaker shall interrupt the proceedings and shall put every question necessary to dispose of this stage of the bill without further debate or amendment; and

That the vote on third reading may be deferred pursuant to standing order 28(h); and

That, in the case of any division relating to any proceedings on the bill, the division bell shall be limited to five minutes.

The Speaker (Hon. Steve Peters): Mr. Phillips has moved government notice of motion number 57. Further debate?

Mr. John O’Toole: I don’t know where to start, actually, because this is the most tragic event that has happened this year. In fact, this day is a bad day: Not only are the pages experiencing their last day here at Queen’s Park, but you’re witnessing another time allocation. What that is is truncating the whole system of democracy. It’s cutting off debate. We call it the guillotine motion. It’s decapitating the whole purpose of parliamentarians: to speak on issues. It’s also a signal, a very profound signal, that Premier McGuinty has lost his way. He has lost respect, I believe, for the people of Ontario—perhaps even for this very precinct. It is most troubling.

In fact, yesterday when I read the paper, I found another sign of this slippery slope we’re on: when they announced another price increase for energy. Where is it going to end? It’s almost like having someone standing with their foot on your chest. I can hardly breathe.

When I look at the bill—this time allocation, government notice of motion 57. It has been used so many times now that we almost know the motions are there for almost every bill to time-allocate it, which cuts it off. It’s routine procedure. But Bill 151 is at the very heart of this. I’m waiting—because there’s such limited time. Usually I have an hour, but it’s such limited time here to actually get to the point. This is really about northern Ontario being ignored by Premier McGuinty.

I should point out that today—this very day, as I speak, Thursday, April 21—our leader, Tim Hudak, is in northern Ontario listening to the concerns of people in northern Ontario. Our leader Tim Hudak is listening.

What was the whole problem with Bill 151? Premier McGuinty would not allow this House to go to the north to hear the people’s concerns. They have trouble with the forest industry; we know that. Part of it is because of the price of electricity. Part of it is the price and the HST and the GST all combined into an enormous tax grab, and there is where our leader is, listening to the people who are at the very heart of this time allocation motion.

I know that the speakers who are lined up this morning, I think on both sides of the House—and I can only speak for our member from Leeds–Grenville. He knows. He participated in the debate on that bill, the very Bill 151 at the heart here. They put forward amendments, and I know that the member from Timmins–James Bay did as well, from the NDP. We worked side by side for the people of Ontario. Who was missing? The people from the other side, Premier McGuinty’s side of the House. Somehow, at the end of the day, they have lost their way on representing all of the people all of the time, as fairly as possible.

I don’t blame it entirely on him. I understand that the economy is in trouble. But who has had his hand on the tiller for the last eight years? Premier McGuinty. He can’t blame Stephen Harper, which he tries to do every day. He can’t blame Tim Hudak: We’ve been here arguing on behalf of the people of Ontario.

In the last couple of minutes I have, because I want the member from Leeds–Grenville to have the most time today, which is very generous on my part—

Interjection.

Mr. John O’Toole: —and it’s actually surprising as well. But anyway, one of the papers that I read fairly regularly is the Working Forest—

The Acting Speaker (Mr. Jim Wilson): You know what I’m going to say.

Mr. John O’Toole: Mr. Speaker, you’re giving me a chance to get a second wind there.

The Working Forest is a very widely-publicized paper. It’s not a prop. It’s made from pulp from northern Ontario—what can you talk about here?

This

article is about wood supply. Here’s another error that has been made. It’s a false announcement, technically. They announced on January 31—that is, Premier McGuinty. This isn’t personal. This is just simply a case where the Premier has lost his way.

Listen to the people. They’ll always tell you what’s on their mind. He’s stopped listening. In this announcement here, they announced that the Atikokan Renewable Fuels plant was going to be making wood pellets, basically. Eventually, the plan to close the coal plants and replace the coal plants. The fuel would then become wood pellets.

Now, wait a minute here. Who are we kidding? Wood pellets: What is wood? Wood is carbon, basically. Trees store carbon dioxide; that’s how they grow, basically. It’s a little more complicated than that. When you burn it, it releases the carbon. So they’re replacing coal with wood. I think that’s a step backwards, personally, yet they’re investing money.

But this is what Mayor Lee Kennard from Ignace says: “Ignace still has a skilled workforce.... We’ve lost workers who continue to maintain a house in Ignace and a house in Thunder Bay or in other parts of the country. We need the provincial government to make a decision....

“Despite the recent announcements, many people in the existing or potential biomass sector are frustrated with how slowly the provincial government is releasing” the money and getting on with the project.

Really, this time allocation this morning—I’ve made my point. The Premier is refusing to meet with the people of Ontario. Tim Hudak is up there, along with Randy Hillier from our side, who’s the critic on this file. They are listening to the people of the north.

This is a time allocation motion shutting down debate on the very essence of northern Ontario, and it’s an insult to this House.

With that, I’m going to pass the baton to my good friend from Leeds–Grenville.

The Acting Speaker (Mr. Jim Wilson): Further debate?

Mr. Gilles Bisson: I’ve got to say, I’m not happy to be participating in this debate. Normally, I start my presentations in the House with how glad I am to debate this issue. But I’ve got to say, right off the top, I am not happy one bit as a northerner and I’m not happy one bit as a legislator to be debating a time allocation motion on a bill such as this. The government says they’re really good at consulting. Well, if you’re so good at consulting, why do you have to use time allocation to stop debate on Bill 151?

I just think that this government, quite frankly, has got it wrong. I think the people in northern Ontario are mad, and rightfully mad. I think that the government, in the next election, is going to have themselves all kinds of problems in ridings where they thought they might have been safe to where I think, quite frankly, they’re going to be finding they have a heck of a race on their hands and, in some cases, they’re going to have some losses they weren’t expecting. Why? Because this government has decided to not pay attention to northern Ontario, as other governments have done in the past.

Previous governments—and I’m not going to go into the different brands, because all three parties were there in government: New Democrats, Liberals and Conservatives—have always had an approach in the past that you have to pay some attention to the north. Why? Northern Ontario happens to be two thirds of the land mass of Ontario. We may not control all of the seats—we’re only 10 seats in northern Ontario—but almost two thirds of the land mass of Ontario is the north.

The second

part is that northern Ontario is extremely important to Ontario’s economy. Mining and forestry, which are the mainstay of the economy of northern Ontario, don’t only generate jobs and wealth in northern Ontario; they generate all kinds of jobs and wealth in southern Ontario.

Take a look at what’s going on right now with the stock merger issue on the TSX. We know that here on Bay Street the majority of the people who work in the financial sector here in downtown Toronto are directly related to the mining industry and what needs to be done to list stocks and sell stocks and to do the kinds of things you need to do in order to get mining companies up and running. A lot of the headquarters are here. My God, even the Australian exchange has a headquarters here in Toronto, because we are the mining capital of the world.

When northern Ontario doesn’t do well, my friends, the rest of Ontario doesn’t do well, and that’s what this government doesn’t seem to understand. They say, “Well, look, things are going well in mining.” My God, $1,500 gold. You don’t have to be too bright to make money at 1,500 bucks. The mining sector has a lot of bright people in it. I come out of the gold sector; I used to work in the gold mines back in Timmins in the days when the price of gold was $300 an ounce. At $300 an ounce, with substantially less costs then than there are today, we were having a hard time trying to turn a profit.

If the gold sector is doing well, the government can’t say, “Oh, it’s all because of what we’ve done.” It’s because of the commodity price; we’re up to $1,500. As they say in mining terms, everything is waste until you can make money with it, and then it becomes ore. I tell you, there’s a lot more ore in northern Ontario than there is waste in these mines, and there’s money to be made.

If you take a look at the forestry sector, it’s the opposite. We’ve lost 30 mills across northern Ontario; mills that have shut down, in 30 communities. Actually, no, it’s 30 communities that have lost mills; there are more mills than that. I’ve lost at least four mills in my riding alone. If you take a look at what’s going on in the forest industry, it has been a basket case. People in northern Ontario are upset.

They’re saying, “Listen, we understand that part of what is going on in the forestry sector and what was happening in mining”—not so much anymore—“is cyclical and is also tied to what’s happening with commodity prices. We understand that. We’ve been at it for a long time in northern Ontario. For 100 years we’ve been mining and we’ve been into forestry activities of different sorts. We’ve been very good at it, and we’ve been competing with the world quite successfully.

But we also understand that government policies are able to assist when you’re having sectorial problems when it comes to your particular industry.”

When the McGuinty government came to power in 2003, I remember the battle cry back then, as it just started. We were seeing all of these mills that were very profitable and that were making lots of money, and that the market in the United States when it came to the sale of lumber was quite strong. We were making money.

Then we started seeing the market drop, because we all know what happened in the United States with housing starts. We’re now below a million housing starts in the United States, something that’s unprecedented. You’d never seen that in the history of the United States. We’re down in housing stocks in other nations as well. We started seeing the commodity price drop and the demand drop, and what ended up happening was that a lot of these mills were having a hard time trying to make money.

People understood in northern Ontario that there would be tough times, but we had gone through those tough times before. We weathered the storm because governments were there in order to assist. For example, I was a member of a government in 1990, in the NDP government of 1990-95, who went through a similar downturn in the forestry sector. We had mills in Kapuskasing that were going to close down. We had mills in Sault Ste. Marie; we had mills in Thunder Bay; we had mills in Sturgeon Falls and Timmins and different communities that were facing similar challenges.

And the government said, “Listen, let’s sit down with the communities and let’s sit down with the forestry companies and the unions and figure out what has to be done.”

We took a bunch of different approaches. In some cases, where the employers said, “Listen, we don’t have enough money. We cannot afford to continue operating. We want out, or we’re going to have to declare bankruptcy,” we restructured the ownership. In some cases, we ended up with worker ownership, in places like Kapuskasing, in places like Sault Ste. Marie, in places like Thunder Bay, where we got the workers to come to the table with their union. We found a new buyer. We sat down. We brokered the deals.

Yes, we helped finance it to some degree, and those companies were then able to deal internally with their cost structure. They were able to say, “Okay, what do we need to do on the wage and benefits side for a temporary period in order to weather the storm?” And the unions knew what to do. To these people who think that unions only negotiate increases: Listen, when the market is bad, unions know what to do in order to save jobs.

But the point is, we empowered the communities. We empowered the unions to do what had to be done so that we were able to weather that storm. Then when the storm ended, the northern Ontario forestry sector took off like gangbusters. It was booming like we had never seen before. Why? Because the government of the day—in this case, the NDP government—actually sat down with people, consulted and did what had to be done in order to be able to deal with the issues that that sector was facing.

What we have now is a Liberal government who have been in power for the last eight years, who have said, “You know what? We’re going to have to let the private sector work this out. The forest companies know what to do, and we’ve got to let them work it out themselves.” And then what they ended up doing on top of that was that they changed the electricity policies in this province. It was started by the Conservative government, but the Liberals took deregulation of hydro and the privatization of hydro to lengths that are unprecedented in the history of Ontario.

As a result, we have doubled the energy prices in northern Ontario. So a lot of those mills that are very energy-intensive, especially the pulp and paper mills and refineries and smelters, like there used to be at Xstrata in Timmins, found it harder and harder to make a buck. They closed their doors, and the government response here was hardly a whimper. They said, “We’ve got the northern Ontario energy program in order to assist the private sector with their energy costs,” but nonetheless, even with those programs, the price of electricity is still more expensive in Ontario than it is in Manitoba or Quebec.

If you are Domtar or Tembec or any one of those national or multinational forestry companies and you decide that you have an operation in Ontario, where the price of electricity is more expensive than an operation you may have in Quebec and Manitoba, it’s a no-brainer where you’re going to put your money to invest in modernization and to bring your plant up to the latest standards as far as the technologies of those plants. It’s going to be where your costs are lower.

This government, for whatever reason, has decided to take a laissez-faire approach; let the private sector do what it must as an approach to what goes on in northern Ontario.

I look at Mr. Brown going like this. I’ve got to tell you, Mr. Brown, you’re going to be shaking your head after the next election. That’s all I can tell you.

People in northern Ontario expect their government to come to the table. They expect their government to be at the community meetings and to be at the meetings that have to take place between municipalities, private sector employers, unions and others in order to come up with solutions. The government, basically, did hardly anything to deal with the cost of what’s going on in forestry.

They said, “The answer is, we’re going to offer money to companies to be able to invest in their plants.” Well, they were so far in debt, it wasn’t a question of adding debt that was the problem; the question was, they needed to find a way to reduce their costs. The government, I would say, failed at it, and I think the people of northern Ontario understand that quite well.

Then here’s the kicker—and this is where it comes down to Bill 151. When the mills started to close down in northern Ontario, one of the first ones was in my riding, Excel lumber in the Tembec plant in Opasatika. The company shut the plant down and the community said—rightfully so, and all of the regional communities and myself took the same position—that if Tembec was to shut down its mill, the government should take the wood back and make it available to the community for a successor employer. At the time, it was Mr.

Ramsay who was the Minister of Natural Resources, and he took his direction from Dalton McGuinty, because Mr. McGuinty, the Premier of Ontario, has a laissez-faire approach to economics in Ontario. So they took this position: “You know what? This is only a short-term, cyclical thing. We’re not going to take the wood back.

We’re going to leave it with the companies because they’re going to need that wood to reoperate mills when the sector comes back, and rather than having five or six mills, they’ll go down to one or two super mills and all of that wood will get cut and transported to some super mills in northern Ontario.”

I, along with other community members, said, “No, that’s completely the wrong approach. Yes, it might be advantageous, to a degree, for the private sector to operate fewer mills but larger mills, but when it comes to the communities where those mills operate, there are going to be lots of losers and there are going to be few winners.” And that’s what the communities understood.

The point is, you can still make money. I look at Ben Lecours, who is running Lecours Lumber up in Calstock. He’s an individual operator who is still making—well, he’s not making a lot of money in this market, but he has one of the mills that is still operating. It shows that small independent operators—and he’s not exactly small; he has 300 people that work for him when they’re running full out—are able, quite frankly, to do well as independent operators. It made no sense for Calstock or Hearst or Opasatika or Kapuskasing or Smooth Rock Falls or Cochrane or Kirkland Lake—and the communities go on—to go to super mills.

So this government didn’t take the wood back, and I, along with a whole bunch of other people in northern Ontario, said at the time to Minister Ramsay, “Hey, listen. You guys are wrong. When that mill shuts down, the first thing you should do is take the wood back, and then say to the community, ‘This is your wood.

Go out there and try to find somebody who is interested in using the wood in some form of operation that will create employment in your community.’” And yes, it may not have happened right away with what’s going on in this forestry downturn, in the cycle in forestry that we see now, but certainly communities would have been positioned to do something alternative when it came to the use of the wood, or they’d be in a position, when the economy did come back, to know that they could have a successor employer.

For communities like Opasatika and Smooth Rock Falls, they really got the short end of the stick, because the government refused to do that. Let me give you the story of the two communities.

Smooth Rock Falls, when they lost the old Abitibi mill—which is a Tembec pulp mill—they lost essentially about 800,000 cubic metres of wood. There was a directive on the licences in surrounding communities that they’d get 800,000 cubic metres of wood in the form of chips. What the community wanted, and what I asked for, was that the government needs to make sure that there’s an equal allocation of timber to that community for the future.

So they went out and said, “Okay, what can we do?” Their first proposal was that they found somebody who was interested in starting up a cedar mill in Smooth Rock Falls, something we don’t do a lot of in Ontario, where there’s good potential. They found the investor. They came to the table with the money and said, “Government, Mr. McGuinty, can we have the wood?” And they said, “No, you can’t have it. We’re not prepared to go through a redistribution of the resource,” and that particular project died. It would have created some 60 jobs in that community.

Then they said, “Well, okay, the government announced they want us to move to use biomass in the forest”—taking the tops of trees and the waste wood and some of the chips and converting it into fuels or converting it into heat in order to make energy. So Smooth Rock Falls and Opasatika went out and were quite aggressive in trying to find people to invest in their communities to be able to go forward with those particular projects. I’ll talk about Opasatika in a minute.

Smooth Rock Falls went out, they basically got everything they needed, and they found yet another investor who was prepared to invest in their community. But the key was to get the wood. The long and the short of the story: They spent all kinds of money in Smooth Rock Falls to get to that point, they go to the Minister of Natural Resources at the time, again, Mr. Ramsay, and they said, “Can we get the allocation of wood? We’re ready to go.” And the government refused to reallocate the timber. That was wrong.

That wood should have been set aside for the community so that if they can find a successor employer, they’re able to get a project going based on the wood that would be allocated to the community.

Opasatika is even worse. This is one that really drives me off the deep end. I’ve got to tell you, the former mayor, Donald Nolet, and the rest of the community members who worked on this project are just fit to be tied. Here’s the deal: The government says, after a bunch of meetings and encouraging them to do a biomass project, “Listen, don’t come to us for the wood; go to Tembec or somebody and do a business-to-business relationship where you’re able to get the wood through an allocation from the licence of an existing operator.”

That’s a very hard thing to do because the reality is, if I’m Tembec—and I understand this—I’m not necessarily excited about having to negotiate use of my timber because, at the end, it really gets in the way of what I’ve got to do as a business. They are not in the business of starting up other businesses and doing value added; they’re in the business of producing wood for their own mills.

Nonetheless, Opasatika went to the various licence holders, and they ended up with Hearst FMA with an agreement for 100,000 cubic metres of wood. That was pretty significant. Opasatika now had an allocation of 100,000 cubic metres, so they were in the ballpark.

With that 100,000 cubic metres, they were able to get an investor to come to the table who said, “Listen, I’m prepared to invest in your community. On 100,000 cubic metres of wood, we can go ahead with phase 1 of the project by using 100,000 cubic metres of waste wood, and we’re going to use that to convert that into energy and/or make some biomass fuel. Then we can work on expanding the mill by getting more wood. If there’s a reallocation of wood, we can then get ourselves up to 300,000 or 400,000 cubic metres of wood.” Here they were, ready to go.

So the government now, Mr. Gravelle, the Minister of Northern Development and Mines—whom I have a great amount of respect for, I have to say on the record. He basically started an RFP process for underutilized and unutilized wood. At the time when the government announced that, I said that was a good thing. I had been pushing the government, along with communities in northern Ontario, to go through a reallocation process because, up to that point, the government was saying, “Oh, no, we don’t have the authority because the act doesn’t allow the minister to redirect the wood.” I used to say, “Poppycock.

Of course the act allows you to redirect the wood.” And they said, “Well, how do you know?” I said, “Because I was there when we drafted the legislation.” It was 1992 or 1993. I sat on the committee that drafted it. I was on the cabinet committee. I remember darned well what that legislation was all about, and I remember the conversations about what we wanted in the bill and how it ended up at the end when it was finally voted on here at third reading.

I argued, along with others, that the minister and the crown had the right to reallocate timber that was either not being used on an existing licence or was being underutilized; in other words, species that were not being used on an existing licence.

About two years ago—I forget the exact date—Minister Gravelle announced one of the largest reallocations of timber in the history of the province of Ontario, which proves the point that we were right in the first place. The government did have the right to reallocate that timber. I was hopeful, when that announcement was made, that we would then have a process where communities really were in the driver’s seat so that the Smooth Rock Falls, Dubreuilvilles, Terrace Bays and Opasatikas out there would be able to go forward and say, “Here is our request of what we want to do with timber.

It’s sort of a community forest model so that we’re able to get the timber in order to do what has to be done in our communities.”

The government went through the reallocation process, and what did they do? First of all, before they even made the announcement, the government took back the 100,000 cubic metres of wood that was negotiated by Opasatika from the Hearst FMA. This was after an agreement was signed between the parties. After the Hearst FMA had signed with the entity from the community of Opasatika a contract on 100,000 cubic metres of wood, the government took the wood back.

I said to the minister of the day, “Why are we doing that, Mr. Gravelle? These guys have actually got a use for the timber. They did exactly what you guys asked them to do, which was to spend a lot of time and a lot of money to get an agreement with the Hearst FMA to do a business-to-business relationship on the wood, and now you’re taking the wood back.” I was told, “What they could do is, they could apply for the wood, and they should be okay.” Can you imagine what the investor said? “I’ve been at this now for two years,” says the investor, “and I can go back and start all over again?

I’ve already spent in the hundreds of thousands of dollars to get this far, and now the government of Ontario has changed the game on me. They told me, ‘Here are the rules; here’s what you have to do in Ontario to start a plant. And all of a sudden, they change the rules.’”

It’s a little bit like what the government did with De Beers. De Beers went and built a $1-billion diamond mine in my riding, and after the fact, when the mine was about to start up, they changed the royalties on the diamonds. It drove the company crazy because they went and sold this project on the basis of how profitable that place could be, and one of the issues that they sold it on is that Ontario—and Canada—is a stable place to do business. My God, how stable can we be when we change the rules after the fact? That’s what they did to the community of Opasatika. So the investor walked away and said, “No, I don’t have the money or the time to go through this all over again.”

It ended up taking another two years before the government did the allocation of timber. And did Opasatika get wood? Did Smooth Rock Falls get wood? They didn’t get a tree, because the government’s allocation process was flawed. So what we ended up doing was, we went to communities—

Mr. Michael A. Brown: Huh.

Mr. Gilles Bisson: The parliamentary assistant says, “Huh, huh.” Talk to the people of Dubreuilville. Go talk to the people of Wawa. See how they feel. You go into those communities and say, “Huh,” and you’ll see how far you’re going to get.

Mr. Michael A. Brown: It’s you I’m saying that to.

Mr. Gilles Bisson: Don’t say “huh” to me, because I’m saying exactly what the people of Dubreuilville and the people of Wawa are saying. They’re saying, “Here we were. We had mills that were idle, that were shut down because of what has happened in the economy.” In the case of Dubreuilville, they were ready to partially reopen this summer, and the government basically took 200,000 cubic metres away from them, hamstringing them from being able to reopen. A flawed process? Darned right, a flawed process. Are people mad? They are hopping mad.

In the case of Wawa, the Jager mill that opened but 15 years ago, they basically lost all of the wood. The frustrating

part is, Wawa is trying to find a buyer for the mill, and the condition of being able to buy the mill is what? You have to have some wood tied to it, and the government took the wood away. You left Wawa high and dry; you left Dubreuilville high and dry, and Sioux Lookout, and the list goes on. And you wonder why people like me are coming to the Legislature, upset with you guys? Because you’re killing northern Ontario. It’s a great place to live. I want to continue living there, and I want my kids and grandkids to live in northern Ontario.

And a Liberal government is going to make sure that they scoot from northern Ontario, because there will not be the jobs if we follow the policies of this government.

I can tell you, after the next election, there are going to be some changes—huge changes, if we form the government of Ontario or if there is a minority government.

Interjections.

Mr. Gilles Bisson: You guys can laugh all you want. Take a look at your polls federally and see how you’re doing. My God, what arrogance the Liberals have, I must say. What arrogance. Arrogance: That’s all it is.

In the case of Wawa, in the case of Dubreuilville, here are two communities who are trying to either have somebody purchase the plant to restart it or have a plan to restart it, depending on which community we’re talking about, and the government took back the wood.

The government says, “We have an answer: We’re going to introduce Bill 151.” Bill 151 essentially deals with the allocation of timber and the pricing of wood. Here’s what’s going on now: Communities have been asking for a community forest model. That’s what the community of Hearst and others have been asking for. I recognize that, for some people, that’s difficult to accept. The larger forest operators, if you talk to them, don’t want the community forest model; I understand that.

But from the community perspective, they’re saying, “We need to find a balance between the need to ensure that the large corporations like Tembec don’t have their licences and wood taken away from them”—and if there is wood left over, underutilized or not utilized, communities are saying, “We’d like to have a community forest model.” There are already examples of where we do that in Ontario, to a degree.

Interjection.

Mr. Gilles Bisson: Yes, Westwind, and also Algonquin, to a degree.

So it’s not something that we’ve not done in this province. It has been around for a long time, except we’ve only done it in a few places.

Communities have said, “We want to engage in this Bill 151 dialogue.” The government consulted—and I’m putting it on the record—quite effectively when it came to the pre-introduction of the bill, in what they call the white paper, or what we should put in the bill. The government did travel across all of northern Ontario. They held multiple meetings, without a doubt. There were lots of people who showed up. There was lots of dialogue. I don’t deny that for a second, because it is true.

But here is the problem—and I’m going to speak about two or three different issues, because in Bill 151, there are three issues: There is the community forest issue, there is the licensing issue for large companies, and then there is the whole issue of pricing the wood, and I’ll deal with those separately.

On the issue of the community forest, people were saying to the government, “What we want is a community forest model.” The government then came out with these LFMPs, once the legislation was drafted, and everybody said, “What? We didn’t talk about wanting LFMPs.”

Interjection.

Mr. Gilles Bisson: Well, they’re going to have a couple of pilots: one in the northwest and one in the northeast.

The problem with the LFMPs is simply this: It doesn’t deal effectively with the underutilized, non-utilized wood. If you really engage in a community forest model process, you really need to go that way. You really need to say, as the crown, as a policy, that if an existing mill doesn’t use its wood and is not able to use its wood, it’s going to go into sort of a community forest, and then you develop the structure by which that is managed, which is a whole other debate.

When the communities looked at what the government did in the bill, it is not what they asked for. So when people in northern Ontario said, “We want you to travel this bill now,” after second reading, it was because what they had discussed prior to the introduction of the bill and what they saw in the legislation was different. That’s why Mr. Hillier, the member of the Conservative caucus on the subcommittee, and myself said, “We want to at least travel this bill to northern Ontario.”

I was at the foresters’ association meeting in Timmins last Friday, and Bill Thornton, the head of a division of MNR, was there and said, “Well, the reason that they didn’t do it is because the government couldn’t travel this bill because they don’t travel bills when the House is in session.” Well, that is true. But we’re going into a constituency break next week—and that’s what we asked for.

We said, “During the constituency break next week”—and we’ve done this a number of times—“let’s travel that bill to four or five communities across northern Ontario and at least have some consultation in places like Thunder Bay, Timmins, Sault Ste. Marie and down in the Peterborough area”—not Peterborough.

Mr. Jerry J. Ouellette: Pembroke.

Mr. Gilles Bisson: The Pembroke area. I always get the two mixed up.

We said, “Let’s have the bill go out so that people who were part of the discussion prior to the drafting would be able to at least show up and say, ‘Okay, here’s what’s in the bill. Here’s what I like about it’”—because there are some people who like what’s in this bill, but there are a lot of people who don’t—so that the government can go back and try to fix the bill so it reflects what people wanted in northern Ontario. That’s why we wanted the public hearings.

In the first place, there was no community forest model, as such, in this bill. What you’ve got is an LFMP, which is a very different thing.

Mr. Michael A. Brown: LFMC.

Mr. Gilles Bisson: LFMC, sorry. My acronyms are wrong. Thank you very much, parliamentary assistant. The local forest management corporation, LFMC, is a different model to a community forest than what people expected.

The second

part is, inside those LFMCs we’re going to go to a competitive bidding process for the wood. People fear, if you go that way—there are two or three issues. One is, what happens if, for whatever reason, the price of the wood in a depressed market is not enough to deal with reforestation? The crown is going to be on the hook. And if you truly have a competitive wood system, is that right? I think that’s a good question.

Others say, “If we end up in a depressed market of wood and the price is not enough to cover the cost of reforestation, and the government pays for that reforestation, will the Americans see this as something to trigger a countervail against Canada for using government money to subsidize what is a market-based system?” I think that’s a fair argument. I’m going to get lawyers who are going to agree with that and lawyers who will disagree with that. But my point is, the Americans will use it as a trigger for a countervail. That’s what we’re being told.

The second thing is that what we end up with in a competitive bid system—let’s say that the LFMP is in Mr. Brown’s riding. I’m just going to make this up.

Mr. Michael A. Brown: LFMC.

Mr. Gilles Bisson: LFMC, okay. We’ll put it in my riding then.

Let’s say the LFMC is somewhere up on Highway 11, and now you have about five or six mills that are bidding on that wood: Little John Enterprises, probably people out of Cochrane and Kirkland Lake. They’re all bidding on the wood. And you’ve got a mill in Quebec that operates at a much lesser cost. Why? Electricity prices are less expensive. There are government programs to assist those mills in Quebec that we don’t have here, and their overall cost is lower.

What do you think they’re going to do on the bid of the wood? They’re going to bid higher, so that, at the very least, will drive up the price of lumber for Ontario operators beyond what the market should dictate, because it won’t be only Ontario operators bidding on the wood; it’s going to be whoever wants to bid on the wood.

So it’s going to drive the price up, and what people really fear is that we’re going to see even more wood than we have today leave Ontario and go into Quebec if you’re on the Quebec side, into Manitoba if you’re on the Manitoba side, or into the northern United States if you’re up around the Rainy River area. We’re going to see ourselves cutting the trees down, putting the wood on the trucks, and then people in communities that don’t have jobs will be waving their jobs goodbye over the border. That’s what people fear with the competitive bid system.

Right or wrong, northern Ontarians deserve to be consulted on that part. Whether you agree with me or don’t agree with me is not the issue. The issue is that people have raised this as an issue; therefore, the north should be consulted. That’s why the committee should have travelled.

On the last issue: Again, in this whole discussion prior to drafting the bill—and I was at some of those meetings—there was not a huge clamouring of people saying, “We want to go to a competitive wood-bidding system.” I didn’t hear that. I talked to a lot of people who participated at the time, and that’s not what they were asking for. They were asking for a community forest model, those who were advocating that.

The third issue, which is the big one, is the issue of the licence to the existing licence holders. To make it simple, a company like Tembec has a licence to operate wood. It’s a long-term licence that essentially says, “Here’s how much wood you have. It is guaranteed to be yours for a period of 20 years, provided you follow the conditions under the forest management plan.” And Ontario has lots to be proud of when it comes to how well we do in reforestation and forest management in northern Ontario. We are world leaders when it comes to what we do in our forests.

I look at forestry like a farming operation. A farmer sows his fields, he grows his crop and he cultivates it once or twice a year, depending on the crop. In northern Ontario, we have a crop, and it’s called trees. Unfortunately, it takes about 80 years to grow them, so our crop cycle is much longer, but we manage our forests in a way that it is sustainable. We are doing the right things.

When we go to cut the trees, we plan what effects that will have that would be negative against the environment, against the animals, the people who are out there blueberry-picking or have cottages, or hunters or anglers, and if we shouldn’t cut in an area, we just don’t cut there. That’s the way that it essentially works.

Anyway, back to the point of the larger companies: What we ended up with was that the government, in this case, under this bill, said, “We’re going to basically put those licences at risk.” What they essentially said in the legislation was that the minister, if he or she chooses, could cancel a licence of an existing operator at the stroke of a pen. You can imagine how Tembec, Domtar, Eacom, AbitibiBowater and OFIA reacted. They said, “Whoa. We’re financed on the availability of wood and the sustainability of being able to bring wood into our plants.

If you, all of a sudden, say that you changed the legislation, that the minister can cancel my licence, if I go to borrow money in order to do something in my plant—expand, modernize, whatever it might be—I’m going to have a heck of a time trying to raise the money, because I don’t have the assets to secure the loan.” Because the asset is not just the mill; the asset is the forest.

The government is putting that at risk, so we said to the government—not only I but also the people who presented at committee—that that had to be fixed, at the very least. The government—here’s the amazing part: Not only did they not go out and consult northerners on any of this stuff; they drafted amendments, and on the day of the committee hearings—we met at 2 o’clock—we got the amendments at 10, if I remember correctly. So at 10 o’clock, I get a package of amendments on my computer that was, like, 230 pages thick.

Yeah, the government is going to say, “Well, we only had five.” That’s beside the point; there are 230 amendments. I had to take a look. They’re saying that a lot of the other amendments from the Conservatives are similar. How do I know that unless I look at it? You have to look at every amendment and say, “Oh, yeah, that’s similar; oh, that’s different.” You’ve got to decide what position you’re going to take on those amendments, because who knows what the Conservative amendment might or might not be? I have to take it seriously that there are amendments that I have to deal with.

I said to the government—I had a motion that I brought to the committee that was supported by my friends in the Conservative Party, and it was simply this: My first motion was, “We, New Democrats, oppose this bill in this form and we will not be providing any amendments to the bill because we don’t agree with what this bill is doing.” What was the use of my putting in amendments on local forest management corporations if I don’t agree with them? Why would I try to amend something that I don’t want? Why would I amend a pricing system that I don’t want? It made no sense to put amendments forward.

So we took the position, “We’re going to vote against the sections of the bill that we’re not happy with and we’re going to vote against the bill in its entirety.” So I put a motion forward to make that clear, why we were not doing the amendments.

The second amendment was saying—again supported by the Conservative caucus, and I want to thank them for that: “We need to go out to communities in order to consult in northern Ontario.” We recorded the vote; the Conservatives and New Democrats voted in favour of going out to do the consultation. What did the Liberals do? They voted no. A recorded vote: Mr. Brown and all the other members on the committee on the Liberal side voted no. That’s where we were at.

The ironic part about all of this is that Mr. Brown is doing all the dirty work for the Liberal government at committee, killing the ability to have hearings in northern Ontario on this bill, but then he goes back to his riding. Then the local media say, “Well, what’s all this noise that we’re hearing about how the Liberals don’t want to travel this bill in northern Ontario?” “Oh, no,” says Mr. Brown. “I don’t think bills like this should go to cities. I think they should go to communities, should go to all small communities in northern Ontario, like Espanola.”

Mr. Michael A. Brown: And they were heard.

Mr. Gilles Bisson: Oh, he says they were heard. Oh, my God. Yeah, you’ll be heard in the next election; that’s all I can tell you.

The point is, he goes into his riding, he gives the impression to the person who picks up the paper that he is in favour of having public hearings in northern Ontario, and he then comes here and puts the boots to the opposition and uses the majority on the committee to kill any opportunity to have any consultation in northern Ontario by the committee travelling there. He’s like the quintessential Liberal. He meets with you and says, “Oh, I’m your friend. You have to know I’m your friend. I’m with you,” he says.

Then he comes to Toronto and says, “Dalton, what dirty work do you want me to do today?” It’s just so ridiculous. Man, no wonder these guys are in trouble in places like northern Ontario and southwestern Ontario and other places—

Interjection: Everywhere.

Mr. Gilles Bisson: Everywhere, quite frankly.

I just say that the government didn’t want to allow this bill to travel. I think that was rather unfortunate.

So then I said, “Okay, listen. We’ve just now got these amendments. There are five government amendments on which I have no idea if those who presented to us support the amendments or not. We need the time to take the amendments, call the stakeholders, and say, ‘How are you on this, that and the other thing?’ So let’s adjourn the committee until May 4, which is the Wednesday when we’re back after constituency break.”

The government voted for it. Now, you know as well as I do why they did: They didn’t want to stay there with 20-minute divisions until 6 o’clock. They wanted to go to whatever reception was going on that day.

Hon. Carol Mitchell: Oh, Gilles, that is just so rich. Give me a break.

Mr. Gilles Bisson: Oh, give me—rich. Oh my God, the Minister of Agriculture, give me a break.

Hon. Carol Mitchell: Give me a break, Gilles.

Mr. Gilles Bisson: So here we were—well, that’s the truth. You guys voted for my amendment, and I thank you for it. It at least gave me some time to go and do some consultation with the stakeholders who presented in the Toronto committee hearings. But here is the thing: Now we said, “All right.” So we get on the phone. We start chatting with people. I expected there was a really strong chance they’d time-allocate, but I thought, “Are they really going to do it?

Are they going to time-allocate this bill after they got beaten up on not travelling to northern Ontario?” At the end of the day, there were some signals from the Conservative caucus: They were not going to be holding up the committee to great lengths with those amendments. That was at least my understanding. I’ll let the Conservatives clear the record for them. And there was going to be an opportunity to deal with some amendments when we went back on the Wednesday.

So what if it took a day or two days to do the clause-by-clause? That’s not the end of the world. The government still gets their bill. They’re going to be here until the end of May. Even if we took a day or two extra of committee clause-by-clause, the government would still get its bill. So the government says, “No, no, we don’t want to even be bothered with that. Not only do we not consult the northerners; we’re not going to give the opposition the opportunity to ring bells.” Man, can you imagine that, if we rang bells in the committee?

Do they know there’s a thing called democracy? I hear Michael Ignatieff run around and say, “Oh, Mr. Harper, he’s just stifling democracy in Ontario.” He should look at his own provincial cousins here in Ontario and get the lesson about how you stifle debate in this House and how you stifle northerners from being heard.

So I’m going to vote against this time allocation motion, and it’s no surprise to you. All I’ve got to say to my friends in the Liberal caucus is that this is very wrong-headed. Not only are you time-allocating this bill, but not travelling the bill back to northern Ontario at the end, I believe, is a huge mistake. It piles on to what people think about you, which is, “You know what? We’ve made our mind up about Liberals, and we’re not voting for those guys in the next election.”

That is clear. We’re seeing it on the doorstep as we knock on doors across northern Ontario. I’ve got to say, this government will pay for its actions of the last eight years, for how they’ve left northern Ontario and a whole bunch of other places in this province behind.

The Acting Speaker (Mr. Jim Wilson): Further debate?

Mr. Steve Clark: I’m glad to join in the debate today. I appreciated the comments on our side of the House from the member for Durham, and I know the member for Oshawa will also make a few comments on the record. Like the member for Timmins–James Bay, I will be voting against this time allocation motion, this guillotine motion, as the member for Durham called it.

I was on the general government committee, and I agree with a number of points that the member for Timmins–James Bay brought forward this morning. When the subcommittee came back on March 30, they had clearly left the mandate with the general government committee to provide hearings in the north. And I think, from some of the points that have been made here today and yesterday when we discussed the opposition day motion and comments in committee, it was clear that that was said as part of the consultation—and there was extensive consultation in the north prior to the minister making comments in January.

The minister made a speech up in the north in January, and I think what put people on alert was the fact that what was talked about during the consultation, the white paper discussion, was different from what the minister said and then different from what was in Bill 151 as it was presented. So there was a real call from people in northern Ontario to have public hearings.

I just want to put a little meat on the bones for what the member for Timmins–James Bay—the committee laid out a pretty good plan. It included going to the north during constituency week, which will be next week. It gave ample opportunity to tour Pembroke, Timmins, Thunder Bay and Sault Ste. Marie during that week, to bring it back and then to do clause-by-clause on May 2.

That was completely—completely—removed from the committee’s agenda by the parliamentary assistant, the member for Algoma–Manitoulin, Mike Brown. It was surprising, almost shocking, given what happened at that same committee for Bill 191, the Far North Act. It was almost a mirror image of the deletion of northern consultation at that time.

Then when we had the two days of hearings here in Toronto, it became quite obvious that half of the people—maybe more than half—hadn’t been given the opportunity to know what the government was bringing forward in terms of amendments. There was a long list of people who seemed to know what was being proposed by the government, how they were going to change the bill that they had circulated, but many did not.

A lot of municipalities that had participated in those two-day hearings, many of them by videoconference, indicated their strong suggestion that there be northern consultation. That motion was gutted by the member for Algoma–Manitoulin; he deleted numbers (2) and (3), and he moved up the days so we didn’t have clause-by-clause on May 2.

As with the member for Timmins–James Bay, we were given a package. I brought the package with me, just to get the right record. It was 267 amendments. This was the amendment package that we received early in the morning on Monday, prior to that meeting at 2 o’clock—267 amendments. Now, I understand from the government that they placed five amendments, the NDP one, with the lion’s share of the amendments from our caucus—and I apologize: the member for Lanark–Frontenac–Lennox and Addington was the lead as our critic in the committee. A lot of our amendments are really calling for northern hearings.

If you look at the package that was presented, it includes many of the northern communities that asked us to come to the north—very pragmatic.

In addition, some of those amendments that we put forward were as a result of some of the deputations, the fact that the LFMCs, the local forest management corporations—I know that we affectionately called them, during second reading debate, tree LHINs or forestry LHINs, this other level of bureaucracy. However, during the hearings, there were a number of discussion points about the two pilots that were being started—one in northeastern Ontario and one in northwestern Ontario—and the fact that after we have the review, after they looked at the pilots, there would be a review process in five to seven years.

The one very clear point that the member for Lanark–Frontenac–Lennox and Addington made in committee was that when those reviews take place, they shouldn’t be done by the minister, in conjunction with the bureaucrats; that this Legislative Assembly, this body of 107 MPPs, should have a role in that review, almost like a sunset review. Those organizations would be required to come back and to provide some meaningful discussion here in the Legislature about the effectiveness of those two pilot projects.

I’m not encouraged by some of the inclinations I get at committee by the government opposite. I think they’ve lost their way. Certainly, if the Far North Act or Bill 151 was presented early in their term, I have to believe that they would have consulted northern Ontario by having hearings. But I just feel that they are a bit adrift, that their heart is not in it.

I’m just so concerned that northerners still have issues with this bill and still want this process slowed down. And by slowing it down—I know the parliamentary assistant, Mr. Brown, talked about foot-dragging and talked about us delaying. All we were talking about was using constituency week—which is the norm in this assembly when it comes to public hearings—to take that four days and travel to four or five or six northern communities to give them what they want.

But that’s not what was discussed on March 30. Mr. Bisson, Mr. Hillier and myself asked, and this is what Mr. Brown, the parliamentary assistant, said on March 30 in the Standing Committee on General government: “We are about to hear, hopefully, two full days of public presentations to us. People can do this. This is 2011. Hopefully, we can do some of these things by audiovisual means, some of them perhaps just by audio. Many will want to come here. Many of the companies that are involved here are not unacquainted with the city of Toronto and the environs. These are very large companies.”

Later, when asked by myself and others whether he felt, because second reading debate collapsed, that they were good to go, he said yes. In fact, he went on to say, “I’ve said what I needed to say. We need to move on. Northerners have had ample opportunity to comment on this.” That was the parliamentary assistant.

But, as was said by Mr. Bisson, the member for Timmins–James Bay, in the Mid-North Monitor that’s not the same story that Mr. Brown had on March 30. He changed his story when he got back up in the north.

The quote was when the Mid-North Monitor contacted him: “‘I don’t want to see consultations in the cities, that is what I said, because that is not where the people directly affected by this piece of legislation live,’ explained Brown. ‘I want to see the hearings go to the communities directly affected by this legislation, places like Espanola.’” But there was no motion by the member on having hearings in Espanola. There were no amendments put forward by the parliamentary assistant to go to Espanola.

So there was one story here and another when he got back up north. In fact, he talked about the fact that the PCs suggested video conferencing. Well, we did. But when you read Hansard, clearly it’s after he moved his version of the guillotine motion by removing those northern travel days, those northern hearings, off the table.

I’m also on the Legislative Assembly committee, where we talked about video conferencing capabilities, where we discussed that room 151, the Amethyst Room, the room that we met in as the general government committee, could easily provide live streaming of the committee.

So we talked about that immediately after because we wanted to use Skype and we wanted to use some of the available technologies to help northerners who were guillotined by the government opposite—the government that made sure we weren’t going to the north—so that we would give them more opportunity, and that when we had the hearings in Toronto on those two days, the hearings would be streamed live on the Internet, which I think was one of the first opportunities. But when the government advertised the two hearings, they didn’t mention that.

In fact, when you looked at the website on the day the hearings were on, it was just a small little line right beside the Queen’s Park webcast. It didn’t talk about the fact that it was being streamed live, that northerners were given the opportunity to log on to the Internet to watch the proceedings, the companies, the individuals, the First Nations, municipal officials. The government did a really crappy job. But that again goes back to the fact that Mr. Brown had one story here and another story up north.

When we met this week, yes, we did the normal little filibuster. We did the 20-minute break here and the 20-minute break there—again, trying to raise awareness. My hat is off to the member for Timmins–James Bay to place those three motions on the floor. I’m glad that he put on the floor the fact that we could have adjourned on Monday, we could have had an immediate meeting of the subcommittee and we could have made a change; we could have righted the wrong that the committee made on March 30. We could have set up the northern hearings, just as were originally scheduled.

We could have spent time next week attending those four, five or six communities to address the concerns of the amended bill, because we had the 267 amendments. It would have given us time to stand in the north and talk to them about the amendments, but that wasn’t given. The three members—Mr. Bisson, Mr. Hillier and I—voted in favour. The parliamentary assistant, Mr. Brown, and all of the Liberal members—

The Acting Speaker (Mr. Jim Wilson): I’ve been letting it go for quite a bit but I’d just remind honourable members that we refer to each other by our riding names or titles.

Mr. Steve Clark: Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I know that the member for Algoma–Manitoulin kept correcting me yesterday to call him by his name, so I just took that invitation from yesterday, but I will adhere to your ruling.

Hon. Carol Mitchell: Are you arguing with the Speaker?

Mr. Steve Clark: I’m not arguing, Minister, not at all.

So we had the opportunity on Monday to right the wrong from March 30. We could have still visited northern communities. Finally, the government passed the third motion that was presented for us to defer to May 4.

Interjection.

Mr. Steve Clark: And that’s right, Mr. Parliamentary Assistant; I’m going to talk about that. That’s—

Mr. Gilles Bisson: On a point of order, Mr. Speaker: I believe we don’t have a quorum.

The Acting Speaker (Mr. Jim Wilson): I’d ask to see if we have a quorum.

The Clerk-at-the-Table (Ms. Tonia Grannum): A quorum is not present, Speaker.

The Acting Speaker ordered the bells rung.

The Clerk-at-the-Table (Ms. Tonia Grannum): A quorum is now present, Speaker.

The Acting Speaker (Mr. Jim Wilson): A quorum is now present. The honourable member for Leeds–Grenville has the floor.

Mr. Steve Clark: Again, we could have, in committee on Monday, righted the wrong. We could have travelled to northern Ontario. I know that the member for Lanark–Frontenac–Lennox and Addington did take the opportunity, and I applaud him for that, because he took the time from Monday at 6 o’clock to May 4. He jumped and went up north to talk to people. He has travelled to—

Mr. Michael A. Brown: Is Jack there?

Mr. Steve Clark: No, I’m talking about the member for Lanark–Frontenac–Lennox and Addington.

He has been up in Sault Ste. Marie and Thunder Bay. He has been travelling in northern Ontario, as has our leader, Tim Hudak. Our PC leader, Tim Hudak, the Leader of the Opposition, has also taken the opportunity to travel to North Bay, Sudbury and Thunder Bay. We’ve taken the time after that adjournment on Monday to go up and speak to northerners about this bill.

I also want to take the opportunity just to talk about a letter that we received on Monday, because I think it’s very important to put in the record. It’s a correspondence that was copied to members of the committee—at least I received a copy—from the Ontario Forest Industries Association; it’s a letter to Minister Gravelle about concerns with Bill 151.

There were five issues that they brought forward in the letter that they still believed that, prior to third reading, there should be amendments to. It goes back to some of the points that were being discussed today.

The first one was something that we heard at committee: the fact that there should be some “inclusion within the

preamble of the bill of the background information concerning the aspects of Minister Gravelle’s January 13, 2011, announcement, including the initial LFMC limitations.” We heard that at committee over and over again, that that initial January announcement by the minister and what was presented in Bill 151 were a bit inconsistent.

Second was the fact that there needs to be “protection measures for validly supported existing and future supply agreements, excepting for the purposes of agreed measured and moderate tenure reforms.”

The third one was the amendment that was discussed to “section 27(2) of Bill 151 to include the development of criteria defining ‘sufficient and consistent use’ within the OFTMA regulation.”

The fourth was “the amendment of

section 27(2) of Bill 151 to include the development of objective criteria for independent evaluation of various tenure models within an OFTMA regulation.”

Finally, “the inclusion of rights of compensation in accordance with the principles of natural justice that are otherwise well enshrined in Ontario law” is referencing Ontario Bar Association correspondence dated April 13 that the committee received.

So there were still issues brought up by OFIA on Monday. There were still issues that were brought up by the Ontario Bar Association to members of the committee. There are still issues on the table that our party has put forward.

Yes, we are consulting. Yes, the member for Lanark–Frontenac–Lennox and Addington is in the north consulting. Yes, Tim Hudak, our leader, is consulting as Leader of the Opposition. They’re doing what the government chose not to do, and that’s to give us the opportunity to take those four or five days and travel to the north.

Mr. John O’Toole: Four minutes left.

Mr. Steve Clark: Thanks for the time. Thanks for my shot clock—because I know the member for Oshawa wants to speak

We had lots of opportunity on March 30 and April 4, during the two hearing days, and on Monday to provide those hearings. I know that the Ontario PC Party, through our fine critic the member for Lanark–Frontenac–Lennox and Addington, put a number of very pragmatic amendments to the committee, and you’re cutting it off at the knees. So we will not be supporting this guillotine motion, this time allocation motion. We’re committed to consulting the north when it comes to Bill 151.

The Acting Speaker (Mr. Jim Wilson): Further debate?

Mr. Jerry J. Ouellette: I thank my colleague for the opportunity to speak on this.

As I’ve said before, as members of the Legislature, one thing we all have to remember is that so long as the forest continues to have value, it will continue to be a forest. As soon as we remove the value of that forest, municipalities and governments and other aspects will find other purposes for that.

The government went on yesterday talking about the 50 million trees it was wanting to plant and move forward. I think they had eight million trees—the minister was out planting a tree. As my colleague from Timmins–James Bay knows, all you have to do is look at the forest industry in communities like Hearst, where they’ve planted well over 200 million trees because they care about the forest—they see it as the lifeblood of the communities in Ontario.

All you have to do is look around in the north to know where the lifeblood is. It’s the forestry sector and the mining sector. It’s those mills that employ people. My colleague from Timmins–James Bay mentioned the fact that one community was going to get 60 jobs out of it. Well, in our community in southern Ontario, if they say you’re going to get 60 jobs, they say, “What are they doing? Opening a new Lowes?” No, it’s opening a community in the north.

The people in the south and some of the individuals across the floor don’t understand that this is the essence of what the north is all about. It’s understanding how those trees grow and the viability of jobs and the economy. Whether it’s the cutters, the truckers and the plants that process the entire material—to get that out to all the people across the province and throughout North America.

Some aspects are quite surprising. My colleague from Timmins–James Bay mentioned the value of the forest to the communities. Last year, I was in Alberta. I always pick up the small papers when I’m in these communities. This is rather interesting. I picked up the paper and they were advocating a cord of white poplar, which is essentially a large-tooth aspen—the poplar that is used by a lot of the mills here. A cord of white poplar was selling for $450. Let me put that in perspective.

About seven years ago, you could buy a tree that last year I paid $76 for—because I’m building a log cabin, as some members know—it was $700 for the same tree. To get $450 for a cord of white poplar in Alberta is certainly more than reasonable, because that’s one of the quality woods out there, from the perspective of what they’re able to grow,

whereas that same tree to the pulp and paper companies may represent about $15 or $20. The difficulty now is, that tree becomes very viable in order to cut, process, split and ship out to Alberta at the very prices that they’re trying to sell that product at.

Some of the other aspects of this legislation—quite frankly, we’re talking about a closure motion here and shutting down the debate, which a lot of individuals, particularly in the north, have concern with, as do we, because we know what it means to those northern communities.

The new local forest management corporations: One of the concerns with that is, what is going to be the makeup of that? Is it going to be individuals from southern Ontario who are going to come forward and be the ones who are going to be appointed to these boards, to once again make decisions in northern Ontario that don’t apply to the north? We have to ensure that these individuals have complete compliance with what’s taking place in their communities.

There were a number of locations where community forests were taking place. As the member from Timmins–James Bay mentioned, the Algonquin-Westwind model is one that’s working very effectively. Those individuals have a say in which way the fibre is going to flow and what’s going to take place.

Quite frankly, a lot of this bill—if you just have a look at what it states in the Working Forest in regard to the number of operators in the particular area—Mr. Brian Nicks, I believe, was going on to say that the number of management units would drop from 43 to about five or 15. That has a lot of concerns, and I know we are concerned very specifically about what’s taking place in that aspect.

If you’re looking at the number of players in this, the small players in the small communities have a big say in what takes place for employment.

I think, Mr. Speaker, you’re giving me the sign that the shot clock is just about over, as the member mentioned, so I will close at that.

Debate deemed adjourned.

The Acting Speaker (Mr. Jim Wilson): It being just about past 10:15 of the clock, this House stands in recess until 10:30, at which time we’ll have question period.

The House recessed from 1016 to 1030.

WEARING OF RIBBONS

Hon. Charles Sousa: On a point of order, Mr. Speaker: I believe we have unanimous consent that all members be permitted to wear ribbons in recognition of National Day of Mourning.

The Speaker (Hon. Steve Peters): Agreed? Agreed.

INTRODUCTION OF VISITORS

Mr. Bob Delaney: I’m very pleased to introduce the executive of the Probus Club of Streetsville and some of their spouses. Joining us today in the members’ east gallery are Lou Pinarello; Phil and Alison Saunders; Harold and Ruth Anne Jaques; Murray Scott; John and Diane Wilton; and Wayne and Loreen Chambers. They’re here to watch question period and to get a tour of the building today. Please welcome the Probus Club of Streetsville.

Mr. Robert Bailey: I’d like to introduce some guests of mine today. First of all, I have Christine Poland, the mother of our page, Travis Poland; and her brother-in-law, his uncle, Steve Poland, who’s also here.

Also with me, for my bill today, Bill 180, my private member’s bill, are Lauren Whitwham from Union Gas; James Whittaker from Union Gas; and Jim Douglas from the Ontario Regional Common Ground Alliance. Please welcome them to Queen’s Park for my bill today.

Ms. Cheri DiNovo: I’m delighted—we should all be delighted—to have in the members’ gallery today Dr. David Hulchanski, who is associate director of the Cities Centre and a professor at the University of Toronto. Beside him sits his daughter, Tessa, from Ursula Franklin school, and beside her sits Mary Todorow, who is a policy analyst for the Advocacy Centre for Tenants Ontario. I’m delighted to have them.

In addition, Dr. Kaur will be the keynote speaker at this Sunday’s Nagar Kirtan, being hosted by the Ontario Sikh and Gurudwara Council. It will end here on the south lawn of Queen’s Park.

Dr. Kaur is joined by Tehal Singh Brar, the coordinator of the Punjabi Press Club; Daljinder Singh Puar, a former employee in my constituency office; Councillor Raj Sandhu from Bradford; Jagmohan Sahota; Sulakhan Singh Atwall; Sarbhjit Sandhu; and Harpal Randhawa, who is a small business owner in my riding. Please join me in welcoming them to Queen’s Park.

Mr. Peter Tabuns: It’s my pleasure to introduce Mark Calzavara, regional organizer of the Council of Canadians. Mark and others are participating in a five-day walk from Queen’s Park to Shelburne, starting tomorrow, to raise awareness about the environmental dangers of a proposal for a massive open-pit mine north of Shelburne.

Mr. Reza Moridi: It’s my pleasure to introduce Dr. Adeli from Sick Kids hospital, and Dr. Zamani, Dr. Madanni and Dr. Khavarian from the Universities of Isfahan and Tehran, sitting in the members’ gallery.

Ms. Sylvia Jones: It is a pleasure for me to welcome Carl Cosack from NDACT, representing the North Dufferin Agricultural and Community Taskforce. He is also here to participate in the walk starting tomorrow—and, in fact, it’s going to Melancthon.

Hon. Charles Sousa: I’d also like to acknowledge and welcome to this House Mr. Wayne Chambers, who was my first boss at Royal Bank of Canada 23 years ago.

Mr. Tony Ruprecht: April 23 is International Children’s Day. With us to help us celebrate International Children’s Day are a number of people who began the International Children’s Day festivals in Turkey in 1929. First, with us is the teacher of the Nil Academy, Fatih Kirmizci. Then there’s Fatih Yegul, who’s the executive director of the Anatolian Heritage Federation, and Ahmet Tamirci, who’s the executive director of the Intercultural Dialogue Institute.

Mr. Speaker, as you probably know, this afternoon at 4:30 there’s an exceptional reception for International Children’s Day, and all members are cordially invited.

Hon. Monique M. Smith: It’s my privilege this morning to introduce Peter Price, who is the son of the revered and sometimes feared Carrol Price, who works in the government whip’s office. Peter is here with us today, and we’re very delighted to have him here today.

ORAL QUESTIONS

HYDRO RATES

Mr. John Yakabuski: My question is to the Premier. Premier, you tried to sell Ontario families on your green energy experiments by promising that they would add only 1% to the energy bills that they pay—promise made, promise broken. Then you conceded it would be 46%—promise made, promise broken.

In fact, your list of broken promises has grown longer than Pinocchio’s nose on a bad, bad day. You’ve blown well past your lowball estimate of what Ontario families will pay for your expensive energy experiments. Premier, what is your new number? Is it in triple digits?

Hon. Dalton McGuinty: Here’s something that is in the triple digits: It has been 662 days since the leader of the official opposition has had that responsibility, and they have yet to put forward any kind of a plan on electricity—662 days.

I would again recommend to my honourable—

Interjection.

Hon. Dalton McGuinty: If he would pay attention, I would recommend to my honourable colleague that he visit the Ontario Energy Board website. There has been all kinds of talk, of course, about rates and prices and costs associated with electricity. I would strongly recommend that he visit the Ontario Energy Board website.

In the supplementaries, I will speak about the reliable information that we can find on that very site.

The Speaker (Hon. Steve Peters): Supplementary?

Mr. John Yakabuski: Premier, there are less than 170 days till the election. That’s the one you should keep in mind.

I can understand that the Premier is preoccupied with the sex ed curriculum since he backtracked on sex ed classes for six-year-olds a year ago. But even a grade 2 student can do the math.

Hydro bills are skyrocketing. The Ontario Energy Board says so in the other 99% of their report that you gloss over. They say that “electricity is costing more.... How we’re producing it and the types of generation we’re using are costing more.” The OEB confirms what every Ontario family and senior already knows: Keep a defibrillator nearby when opening hydro bills because they are going through the roof.

But the real question is: Just how much more will Ontario families and seniors pay because you refuse to stop your expensive energy experiments?

Hon. Dalton McGuinty: Again, I welcome the question.

Interjections.

The Speaker (Hon. Steve Peters): I remind the member from Leeds, who’s not in his seat, that if he’s going to choose to sit in that seat, he should be sitting there silently.

Premier.

Hon. Dalton McGuinty: It’s interesting that my honourable colleague, whose questions are always gratefully received over here, refers to our investments in clean energy and our determination to shut down coal-fired generation in Ontario and to clean up the air as “an experiment.”

I would ask him to turn to his colleagues the MPPs for Burlington, Haldimand–Norfolk, Leeds–Grenville, Cambridge, Sarnia–Lambton and others whose names escape me at this point in time and ask them, “Why do they keep showing up at our announcements for clean energy jobs in their ridings?” They’re doing that because they support those jobs, and they’re doing that because their constituents support those jobs.

The people of Ontario want us to continue to pursue clean energy opportunities. They want us to pursue clean energy jobs—

The Speaker (Hon. Steve Peters): Thank you, Premier.

Interjections.

The Speaker (Hon. Steve Peters): The member from Leeds.

Please continue.

Mr. John Yakabuski: It is clear that the Premier himself has not seen a hydro bill in a good long time. Stop insulting Ontario families by thinking they can be fooled by lame claims that hydro bills have flatlined, and stop ignoring the 99% of the Ontario Energy Board’s report that says electricity is costing more, like where they say the increase in hydro is due to “changes in supply mix” and because “costs that contribute to the global adjustment are expected to increase.” Note that they did not say “expected to flatline.”

The OEB says that hydro bills are expected to increase because of your $7-billion Samsung sweetheart deal, the Big Becky boondoggle and all those contracts you’ve signed to pay up to 80 cents for five-cent power. When will you stop insulting families and admit that your expensive—

The Speaker (Hon. Steve Peters): Thank you. Premier.

Hon. Dalton McGuinty: Again, I would recommend to my honourable colleague that he visit the Ontario Energy Board website and see the sample bill that has been posted there, which shows that, year over year, last May to this May, and whether you are on a tiered system or the time-of-use system, it shows clearly that it’s a wash. It’s the same. Bills have in fact stabilized.

Again, I would refer my honourable colleague to statements made by his colleagues. Here’s one made by the MPP for Haldimand–Norfolk: “Our area has significant economic and geographical potential for solar energy generation.” The MPP for Leeds–Grenville: “Building future jobs in the renewable energy field is clearly the way to go.” I would encourage my colleague opposite to speak to his colleagues and get with the system. It’s time for clean, renewable energy in the province of Ontario.

HYDRO RATES

Mr. Peter Shurman: Back to the Premier: Premier McGuinty is so desperate and so out of touch, he won’t give up claiming that hydro bills are the same this year as they were last year. You want families to compare from May 1 to May 1, but if you turn the clock back one day to April 30, it would account for the 36% increase in hydro rates, and if you count the increases to hydro bills that take effect May 1, it accounts for 23% more. That’s a 50% increase in just two days. Nice try, Premier. Have you ever even seen a hydro bill? What made you think Ontario families would buy your lame claim that they aren’t paying more?

Hon. Dalton McGuinty: The Minister of Energy.

Hon. Brad Duguid: As the Premier said, I recommend to the members opposite that they have a look at the regulated price plan as put out by the Ontario Energy Board. It’s very obvious that they have yet to do that, because this is what it says, and I quote directly from the Ontario Energy Board. This is the province’s independent regulator. This isn’t us saying it; it’s the Ontario Energy Board: that “a comparison of May 2010 and May 2011 shows overall the total bill has remained relatively flat as a result of the introduction of the Ontario clean energy benefit.”

Now, they put on their website a comparison of somebody’s bills, because what Ontario families want to know is whether the bills have gone up from last year. The answer from the Ontario Energy Board is no; they’ve remained flat.

The Speaker (Hon. Steve Peters): Supplementary.

Mr. Peter Shurman: Eight years ago, you came to office promising to keep hydro rates under control, but somewhere along the way, you grew out of touch and now Ontario families pay 150% more for time-of-use pricing. You’ve made such a mess, local hydro companies have begun a rebellion by refusing to install your smart meter tax machines. They hear from Ontario families and seniors who say they cannot afford to pay for your expensive energy experiments. The Ontario Energy Board agrees. It gave Cambridge and Thunder Bay hydro companies a reprieve on installing the smart meter tax machines.

Ontario families and seniors get that your expensive energy experiments are driving up the cost of hydro bills they pay. Local hydro companies get it. The OEB gets it. Why can’t you?

Hon. Brad Duguid: As I said earlier, Speaker, they can torque it any way they can try to torque it, but the Ontario Energy Board has been very clear. Bills have been flat between last May and this May. That’s good news for Ontario consumers. It’s bad news for those guys, because it’s very obvious now that bills are stabilized in the province of Ontario.

But while bills have stabilized, we’re continuing to invest in our efforts to move from dirty coal, which they support, to cleaner sources of power, which we support, to modernize our energy system, which we also support. They want to go back to the old, outdated system. Ontario families deserve better.

We’re creating thousands of jobs in our clean energy economy. That’s where we stand: with Ontario workers—thousands of clean energy jobs. We’re leading the world in this clean energy economy. They want to kill those jobs. Given the choice—

The Speaker (Hon. Steve Peters): Thank you. Final supplementary?

Mr. Peter Shurman: Don’t you compare May to May; you compare April 30 to May. Only McGuinty Liberals could be so out of touch to believe that Ontario families will buy that they pay the same for hydro as last year.

Municipalities and local hydro companies see through your phony spin that Ontario families pay the same for hydro as last year. The Ontario Energy Board has already surrendered to two hydro companies that are refusing to install your smart meter tax machines, and 14 more local hydro companies have joined the smart meter tax revolt, including London Hydro, Hydro Ottawa, EnWin and Enersource. They haven’t given up on Ontario families, and neither have we. An Ontario PC government will unplug your smart meter tax machines to give seniors and families relief. Why won’t you?

Hon. Brad Duguid: The Ontario Energy Board made it very—

Interjections.

The Speaker (Hon. Steve Peters): Order. Minister?

Hon. Brad Duguid: The Ontario Energy Board made it very, very clear this week. Year over year, bills are flat. It’s good news for Ontario consumers; it’s bad news for the opposition, because they just can’t make it up anymore with credibility.

I ran into somebody on the weekend who happened to run into the Leader of the Opposition at Future Shop. We know that they’re against the modernization of our energy system, but the Leader of the Opposition was a little bit upset at Future Shop on the weekend. The reason was that he found out they’re no longer carrying the Commodore 64. That’s where they’re at.

We’re for modernization. We’re modernizing our energy system, we’re cleaning our energy system, we’re creating jobs, and we’re doing it in a way that stabilizes the energy bills of Ontario families. We’re determined to move forward—

The Speaker (Hon. Steve Peters): Thank you. New question.

EXECUTIVE COMPENSATION

Ms. Andrea Horwath: My question is to the Premier. Many Ontario families are struggling. They’ve been hit hard by job losses and flatlined wages and by rising home heating and hydro bills. When they see public sector executives receive secret golden handshakes of hundreds of thousands of dollars or more, it makes them angry. Will the government support the NDP’s bill to make government spending more transparent by posting severance payments on the sunshine list?

Hon. Dalton McGuinty: I appreciate the question from my honourable colleague and the sentiment that informs it.

I know that my honourable colleague is going to want to recognize the steps that we’ve taken—and they have been considerable—to introduce more accountability and more transparency, whether it’s expanding the ambit of the freedom-of-information legislation or giving more authority to the auditor to take a look at colleges, universities and hospitals, for example; whether it’s the new rules we’ve put in place, curtailing expenditures for travel and advertising; whether it’s requiring the auditor to, in fact, take a look at the books and approve those before we go into the election, so that nobody can ever again hide a $5.6-billion deficit—no names mentioned.

I think our record reveals that we have done much. There’s always more to do, and I appreciate the advice being offered by my colleague.

Ms. Andrea Horwath: Ontarians expect their tax dollars to be used wisely in a time of cuts to front-line health care services, to emergency rooms and to nurses. It’s unacceptable for public sector executives, some of whom have been fired or resigned in disgrace, to receive secret golden handshakes of six figures or more. It is just wrong. Why won’t this Premier commit, at least, to making these severance payments public?

Hon. Dalton McGuinty: I was with my honourable colleague in terms of the general direction of her argument, but we

part company when she insists that somehow we’ve been making cuts to health care. There is no foundation in fact for that, and my honourable colleague knows that.

Let me tell you about some of the things we have been doing in hospitals. First of all, as my colleague will know, we’ve introduced freedom-of-information legislation to cover them. We’ve given the additional authority to the auditor to take a look at our hospitals. We have new accountability agreements that we’re entering into with our hospitals. We have new provisions that require that CEO pay be directly connected to the quality of the care being provided by the hospital itself. We’re also making sure that hospitals are subject to the 10% reduction in their executive offices.

Those are all steps in the direction which I understand my colleague would embrace, but again, we

part company if she insists that we’ve made cuts to health care, because we have not.

The Speaker (Hon. Steve Peters): Final supplementary?

Ms. Andrea Horwath: If I was this Premier, I’d be asking the people of Port Colborne and Fort Erie whether they think that there’s been a cut, considering that their emergency wards are now closed.

This is about priorities. The McGuinty government chooses to secretly hand out hundreds of thousands of dollars to well-connected public sector executives while our health care system suffers. On April 7, the government services minister was asked if he would cap severances. He said, “We are moving towards that. We will do whatever is required to manage expenses.”

The NDP’s Bill 177 is a small step towards doing that by making severances public. Why won’t the Premier commit here and now to supporting it?

Hon. Dalton McGuinty: I just want to remind my honourable colleague about some of the things that we’ve done with respect to health care. I believe we’ve hired 11,000 more nurses and 2,900 more doctors. We are building 18 new hospitals. We started with zero, and now we have 200 family health teams which are going to care for three million Ontario patients. We have the first nurse practitioner-led clinics in all of North America; in fact, we’re putting 25 in place. Ninety-three per cent of Ontarians now have access to a family doctor; 1.2 million more Ontarians now have found a family doctor.

Wait times: We didn’t measure wait times at all before. Now we’ve been found to have the shortest wait times in the country.

We’re not all the way there yet; there is more to be done. But surely my honourable colleague will acknowledge we are moving in the right direction.

ACCESS TO INFORMATION

Ms. Andrea Horwath: My next question is also to the Premier. The Premier likes to talk a good game about openness and transparency, but his actions are anything but. As he prepares to keep severance packages a secret, why is he also sneaking through an amendment to the freedom-of-information rules that would allow hospitals to keep documents from public scrutiny?

Hon. Dalton McGuinty: To the Minister of Health.

Hon. Deborah Matthews: I welcome the opportunity to talk about this. The amendment that was included in the budget bill is an important amendment because it protects patient safety. That’s what this is all about. We have introduced quality legislation in this House. It received unanimous consent.

We are determined to improve quality across our health care sector, starting with hospitals. Hospitals are charged with a very serious responsibility. They have to report on quality indicators, and they develop annual quality improvement plans so that the public knows that quality is improving in those hospitals.

In the supplementary, I’ll be more than happy to talk more about how quality is improving in our hospitals.

The Speaker (Hon. Steve Peters): Supplementary?

Ms. Andrea Horwath: The Pinocchio virus seems to be spreading over there.

Interjections.

The Speaker (Hon. Steve Peters): Stop the clock since the government’s going to be interjecting.

One of the challenges, certainly, in the Speaker’s chair is trying to focus on somebody asking a question but as well trying to deal with interjections at times. It was brought to my attention that, in trying to deal with a minister and bringing a minister to order, I may have missed a comment earlier that I probably should have asked to be withdrawn, but I did miss it.

But I will ask the leader of the third party to withdraw the comment that she has just made, please.

Ms. Andrea Horwath: I withdraw, Speaker.

The bottom line is that the Premier and his minister are quickly running out of credibility when it comes to the issues of openness and transparency. They refuse to give the Ombudsman oversight over hospitals. They’re allowing hospital executives to pocket sky-high salaries and walk away with six- and seven-figure severances, even when they leave in disgrace. Now they want hospitals to be less accountable to the public than ever before.

When a loved one gets sick and something goes wrong, people simply want answers. Why is this government making sure they won’t get those answers?

Hon. Deborah Matthews: The member opposite might want to make a joke about patient safety, but I tell you that on this side of the House we take it very, very seriously. The member opposite should understand that we’re talking about lives. We’re talking about people who are unnecessarily dying because quality is not as high as it could be. We’re taking action on that.

Tom Closson of the Ontario Hospital Association has described our quality legislation as, “Could be the single most important piece of legislation since the creation of our publicly funded health care system.” Hospitals will be required to report on a number of indicators: C. difficile rates, MRSA, VRE, hospital standardized mortality rates, and primary-line blood infections. Improving quality is the highest priority for us right now, and—

The Speaker (Hon. Steve Peters): Thank you. Final supplementary?

Ms. Andrea Horwath: The only joke is the mockery this government is making out of the idea of transparency and accountability. I have to say that the secrecy in our public health care system that this government is prepared to implement is unacceptable. The minister is not coming clean about the fact that they buried an amendment in the budget bill that puts to waste their idea of FOI in the hospital sector. That’s exactly the truth, and this minister knows it.

Ontarians need and demand full transparency and accountability, especially from their hospitals. Why are this Premier and his minister trying to ram through a legislative change that would create the exact opposite? What are they trying to hide?

Hon. Deborah Matthews: Opening hospitals to freedom-of-information legislation is not exactly hiding anything. As I said, improving quality in our hospitals is a high priority for us. In order to improve quality, conversations about how to do that, understanding where those problems are and what needs to be done to improve quality, have to take place in an environment of confidentiality. Our patients’ lives depend upon it. I’m not overstating this.

The Ontario Hospital Association and the OMA did ask for complete exclusion of this information. We did not go that far. We struck a balance. We have an exemption. The IPC can review the requests for information. The IPC is an independent officer of this Legislature. I trust her judgment when it comes to releasing information.

AIR AMBULANCE SERVICE

Mr. Frank Klees: My question is to the Premier. The Minister of Finance and the Minister of Health have repeatedly refused to answer questions relating to the financial arrangements between the Ministry of Health and Ornge, the organization under contract with the government to deliver air ambulance services. According to Tom Lepine, chief operating officer at Ornge, taxpayers have no right to that financial information. Does the Premier agree with the chief operating officer that Ontario taxpayers have no right to the financial information of an organization that receives millions of dollars from the Ministry of Health every year?

Hon. Dalton McGuinty: To the Minister of Health.

Hon. Deborah Matthews: Ornge, of course, is an ambulance service. They provide critical air ambulance services to Ontarians in many parts of this province. In fact, throughout the province we rely on Ornge to get people to the care they need as quickly as possible. Through Ornge we have been able to increase access to emergency medical transportation, especially for Ontarians in northern and remote communities.

We fund Ornge through a transfer payment agreement. We have an accountability agreement with Ornge ensuring that they provide Ontarians with air ambulance services, with base hospitals, with organ recoveries and with air paramedic training certification. They provide over 20,000 admissions a year, which improves health care for Ontarians.

The Speaker (Hon. Steve Peters): Supplementary?

Mr. Frank Klees: One hundred and fifty million dollars are being transferred to this organization by the Ministry of Health every year, and the taxpayers are told they have no right to know how those funds are being allocated. A creature created by the government that claims it is not a government agency, yet it has 116 employees on the government’s sunshine list—a so-called not-for-profit organization that has spawned a number of for-profit entities under its umbrella and refuses to disclose financial information.

I’d like to know this from the Premier: How can the Premier ignore the potential for conflict in this organization that receives multi-millions of dollars of government funds while at the same time operating a number of for-profit entities? Can the Premier see the conflict?

Hon. Deborah Matthews: The member opposite would know that Ornge is a non-profit corporation. It receives government funding. As a result, they are required to report to the sunshine list any employees that make over $100,000 per year. I understand that they have frozen non-union compensation since 2008.

I’m sure the member opposite is interested to know that the Auditor General is in fact looking at Ornge right now and is doing a value-for-money audit. I know we certainly all look forward to the results of that audit.

TENANT PROTECTION

Ms. Cheri DiNovo: My question is also to the Premier. In Ontario today, tenants who pay for their utilities as part of their rent could still have their vital services cut off if the landlord fails to pay the bills on time. In January of this year, tenants in a three-storey apartment complex, Ellrose Manor in Windsor, had their power cut off in the dead of winter. The tenants paid their utilities as part of their rent. However, they were left out in the cold because their landlord failed to pay their bill.

I’m introducing a bill today that would protect tenants from having their utilities cut off. It’s supported by David Hulchanski from the University of Toronto and also Mary Todorow and the members of ACTO, among many, many others in the province. Will this government also support this bill and ensure protection for all tenants in Ontario?

Hon. Dalton McGuinty: The Minister of Municipal Affairs and Housing.

Hon. Rick Bartolucci: I want to welcome ACTO here to the House today as well. We had a very positive, very proactive meeting just a month and a half ago. They are very important stakeholders—partners—in tenant advocacy, and I appreciate that they’re here.

I wonder, though, if the member for Parkdale–High Park has told ACTO of her party’s record when it comes to protecting tenants in Ontario. They voted against reforms to the Residential Tenancies Act, which doubled fines for landlords who fail to protect vital services. They voted against reforms that provide fairer hearings for disputes through the Landlord and Tenant Board. They voted against reforms to the rent increase—

The Speaker (Hon. Steve Peters): Thank you. Supplementary?

Ms. Cheri DiNovo: This from a government who is now in active violation of the United Nations human rights charters and laws when it comes to housing, and has condemnation on their record from the special rapporteur.

To get back to tenants, however: They suffer the consequences of the loss of vital services, which in some situations means being forced from their homes, even though they’re absolutely blameless. There’s no protection for tenants who are third party victims in such cases.

I ask again: Will this government protect tenants in the province of Ontario?

Hon. Rick Bartolucci: First of all, we’re very proud of Bill 140, the bill that this House unanimously supported, including the member from Parkdale–High Park.

Just to reinforce: The NDP is the party that voted against reforms to the Residential Tenancies Act that doubled fines for landlords who fail to provide vital services. They’re also the same party who voted against $2.5 billion for affordable housing, which has benefited 680,000 low-income tenants across Ontario. She called our $1.2-billion investment—at the height of the recession—in affordable housing “crumbs.” I don’t think ACTO agrees with that.

We are very, very proud of our record. We will compare our record in advocacy—

The Speaker (Hon. Steve Peters): Thank you. New question.

ENERGY POLICIES

Mr. Rick Johnson: My question is to the Minister of Energy. Minister, there has been great interest in the microFIT program in my riding of Haliburton–Kawartha Lakes–Brock. It seems that there are farmers on every side road who have installed solar systems and are enthusiastically buying into our government’s green energy plan. I am told by my rural caucus colleagues that this is happening across rural Ontario.

Could the minister provide the House with an update as to the number of microFIT projects feeding clean, green energy into the grid to date, as well as the economic benefits realized as a result of this program and our government’s forward-thinking plan?

Hon. Brad Duguid: I want to thank the member for Haliburton–Kawartha Lakes–Brock for that question. Indeed, our microFIT program has been a tremendous success. I’m pleased to hear that so many of his constituents are taking an active role in helping to grow Ontario’s clean energy economy and build a healthier, more prosperous future for our kids and our grandkids.

I can tell the member right now that over 5,000 small renewable energy projects are feeding clean energy into Ontario’s grid, and an additional 5,000 projects have now been green-lighted for connection as soon as their installations are ready.

Many, if not most, of these microFIT participants are farmers, and they’re supplementing their farm income with clean energy. That’s providing those families with an extra $10,000 a year, on average. That’s a great help to our farming community. It’s a great asset to the—

The Speaker (Hon. Steve Peters): Thank you. Supplementary?

Mr. Rick Johnson: I’m encouraged by the level of interest in and the success of the microFIT program. I know it’s creating good-paying jobs in my riding. So I was extremely disappointed when I received an email from the owner of a booming green energy business. My constituent Mr. Randy Burke of Evergreen Energy Solutions had asked Ms. Laurie Scott, PC candidate, to clarify her party’s plan for the microFIT program. Ms. Scott’s response in an email was, “We will shut down all of the planned expansion of that unaffordable, unworkable microFIT plan. There will be no”—

Interjections.

Mr. Rick Johnson: Minister, my constituent fears that countless good clean energy jobs across the province are on the chopping block, the very jobs that support so many families that her party claims to respect. Can you outline for my constituent and for rural Ontario the impact of such a move on our energy economy?

Hon. Brad Duguid: I think it’s very important that the member brought this up today in the Legislature, because we’ve worked very hard to create jobs right across the province. In rural Ontario and urban Ontario, jobs are being created. Quite frankly, what the PCs are proposing would have a devastating effect on our clean energy—

Hon. Brad Duguid: Mr. Speaker, jobs are a priority for this province; they’re not a priority for the opposition. The plan of the opposition would kill those jobs—

The Speaker (Hon. Steve Peters): You’re obviously not listening.

New question.

AIR AMBULANCE SERVICE

Mr. Frank Klees: To the Premier: Taxpayers expect us to get answers to the basic questions we’ve been asking about the financial affairs at Ornge, a not-for-profit charitable organization created by fiat of this government under the direction of a former Minister of Health. The minister’s chief of staff now has a senior position at Ornge.

Multi-millions of public assets were absorbed by that organization without public tender. Overhead, administration, salaries and capital costs are paid by taxpayers. For-profit entities are doing business under the same roof, and there is no disclosure of the financial relationship of those businesses.

I ask again: Does the Premier not share our concerns over the potential conflicts inherent in this organization, and will he not agree to ensure that—

The Speaker (Hon. Steve Peters): Thank you. Premier?

Hon. Dalton McGuinty: To the Minister of Health.

Hon. Deborah Matthews: As I said in the earlier—

Interjections.

The Speaker (Hon. Steve Peters): Stop the clock.

Minister of Health.

Hon. Deborah Matthews: As I said in the earlier question, I am delighted that the Auditor General is, in fact, looking at Ornge. I want to assure you that Ornge is co-operating fully with the Auditor General. We are looking forward, as we always do, to what the Auditor General recommends to us. As we have always done, we will respond to the recommendations of the Auditor General. We look forward to that.

The Speaker (Hon. Steve Peters): Supplementary?

Mr. Frank Klees: Now we know why the “A” is missing from Ornge: It obviously stands for accountability, and it’s nowhere to be found anywhere in that organization.

I want to ask the Premier this: Since this issue was raised here in the Legislature I have received numerous emails from employees, people in administration, pilots and paramedics in that organization giving inside information about what is going on there. Will the Premier agree to personally accept delivery of those emails and will he agree to personally read the content of those emails so that he can know first-hand what is going on at Ornge?

Hon. Deborah Matthews: Of course we would welcome that information, and I’m sure the auditor would, too. If you’ve got information you’re willing to share, we’re sure willing to accept it and pass it on to the Auditor General. Perhaps you might have done that, actually, yourself—

Interjections.

The Speaker (Hon. Steve Peters): Stop the clock.

Mr. John Yakabuski: Perhaps the minister should have been looking into this herself.

The Speaker (Hon. Steve Peters): Member from Renfrew.

Minister?

Hon. Deborah Matthews: Speaker, you know—

Interjection.

The Speaker (Hon. Steve Peters): It didn’t take the member from Renfrew long. I just called him to order. I sit down, he interjects. Your seatmate right beside you wants to hear the answer.

Minister?

Hon. Deborah Matthews: We are not going to be taking any lessons on accountability and transparency from the party opposite. They are the party that hid a $5.5-billion deficit. We passed a law requiring the Auditor General to sign off on the books of the province before the election. They are the party that kept OPG and Hydro One off the sunshine list. We are the party that brought them back on. They refused to include OPG, Hydro One, universities, hospitals under—

The Speaker (Hon. Steve Peters): Thank you. New question.

STEEL INDUSTRY

Mr. Paul Miller: My question is to the Premier. On March 23, I questioned the Premier about US Steel moving Canadian-processed coke offshore for processing. The Minister of Economic Development and Trade responded, “There is a lot of information that we are not aware of, in terms of resources moving in and out....” And she further said, “We don’t want to respond to questions where we simply don’t know what the facts are about what the company is doing on-site.”

It’s been four weeks since the minister gave the response. Does she have the facts and could she now tell us why the Premier and his government have taken no action to stop the removal of processed coke which should be used to produce steel in Hamilton?

Hon. Dalton McGuinty: To the Minister of Economic Development and Trade.

Hon. Sandra Pupatello: I do appreciate the question because our ministry does follow up on a regular basis with US Steel about the situation in Hamilton. The government of Ontario does not have access to the level of detail within operations of a company. We don’t know where their feed stock necessarily comes from, we don’t track it, we don’t know necessarily where it’s being exported to, and the government of Ontario does not necessarily track that either.

In this instance, we are very mindful that the Ontario government played every role that we could play in resolving the negotiations that at this time don’t seem to even exist between US Steel and its employees. We’re concerned because there are hundreds of families in Hamilton who want to work. That’s very important to this government, and we want to do everything that we can to help.

The Speaker (Hon. Steve Peters): Supplementary?

Mr. Paul Miller: This past Sunday, locked-out workers from Steelworkers 1005 took desperate action that this government should be taking. They braved foul weather to block a ship from taking out Hamilton coke to another site for steel-making, taking our Hamilton jobs with it. The mayor of Hamilton supported these workers, but where was the government?

Why does the McGuinty Liberal government refuse to stop the removal of coke from Hamilton and help these locked-out, unionized workers get back to work in steel plants in Hamilton?

Hon. Sandra Pupatello: I just want to say, especially to the people of Hamilton, that the local member of provincial Parliament, Sophia Aggelonitis, the people that we’ve been working with at US Steel—we are determined to play a role that we can play to be helpful. What this member opposite is expecting, I think there is no government level that could possibly be involved in that level of detail within a company, and I don’t believe that the public expects that we would.

What’s important is that we expect that member opposite’s support when we have 300 people hired who used to work at US Steel who were laid off, where we brought in foreign direct investment by Max Aicher to reopen bar and bloom mills that were closed in 2009—reopened by Max Aicher within six weeks of them landing in Ontario, and 300 new jobs in that community—

The Speaker (Hon. Steve Peters): Thank you. New question.

ONTARIO ECONOMY

Mr. Dave Levac: My question is for the Minister of Economic Development and Trade. A few days ago, I came upon an interesting

article in our local newspaper, the Brantford Expositor, which discussed the Financial Times’ latest foreign direct investment report, the FDI report. The FDI report stated that for the second consecutive year, Ontario and California have been named the top two destinations for foreign direct investment in North America. This is very encouraging news.

Minister, what does this mean to the average Ontarian? How does being number one in foreign direct investment affect our daily lives, particularly the constituents in my riding of Brant?

Hon. Sandra Pupatello: I think it is important that every now and then, we have people from around the world who are watching Ontario closely. When reports like the foreign direct investment report that comes out on an annual basis are tabled, all of the world is watching to see who ranks number one.

Let me tell you how proud I am to be part of a Liberal Dalton McGuinty government, where Ontario is ranked number one in foreign direct investment. This province is equal to a great state like California. There’s a difference between Ontario—little Ontario compared to big California. Yet here we are ranking number one in the number of jobs that land in our province because of foreign direct investment.

This is critical to the people of Brant, to the people of Windsor, to the people of Sudbury, because it means jobs—real jobs. While the world is still shaking and turning their way out of the recession, we’re starting to see Ontario flourish.

The Speaker (Hon. Steve Peters): Supplementary?

Mr. Dave Levac: I, for one, am not going to get in the way or mess with the minister when it comes to fighting for jobs in Ontario. I’m just going to make sure that she gets it done, and I want to support her for doing that.

The FDI report certainly shows that Ontario’s economy is turning the corner, and it’s being done through various investments and strong policy.

Minister, I know that the McGuinty government and, specifically, your ministry and you, have done a lot to get Ontario’s economy back on its feet after the 2008 economic downturn. But those tough times are somewhat behind us, and we have to prove ourselves. Now we have to continue to look beyond our provincial government, beyond the national borders, and to expand the livelihoods and the economic growth and prosperity of Ontarians. We need to show the world what Ontario has to offer. In fact, the economists said that it is crucial that we get this economy moving.

What we’d like to know, Minister, is what you are continuing to do to attract—

The Speaker (Hon. Steve Peters): Thank you. Minister?

Hon. Sandra Pupatello: I can tell you that for the people of Brant, in particular, having a great MPP like the one they’ve got is a sure sign of great success in their future, because here’s an MPP who works with the Ministry of Economic Development and Trade to land business and to expand the business we have. This MPP, in particular, had a personal role in seeing the expansion of the Ferrero Rocher plant there, which is an expansion of foreign direct investment that landed about four years ago.

So it’s not just bringing them to Ontario, but it’s nurturing them as well; it’s showing great, new, better tax policy for businesses here, a business climate where they can flourish, so that companies like Ferrero Rocher continue to expand. In this instance, it is their second expansion in Brantford, largely because of the kind of representation they have in their MPP—

The Speaker (Hon. Steve Peters): Thank you. New question.

CURRICULUM

Mrs. Elizabeth Witmer: My question is to the Premier. One year ago, the Minister of Economic Development was Acting Premier. When we raised the concerns of parents who were surprised by your plan to teach sex ed to kids as young as six years old, the Acting Premier stood in this House and gave a very passionate defence of why you definitely were pressing ahead anyway. That was in the morning.

Three hours later, you pulled the rug out from under her with a backtrack on the sex ed curriculum. Then you sent out the education minister to confess that you hadn’t really consulted and you would now do so.

It is a year later. Why is there still no indication that you will consult parents?

Hon. Dalton McGuinty: To the Minister of Education.

Hon. Leona Dombrowsky: First of all, I think it’s really important that I take this opportunity to correct some of the statements that have been made by members of the opposition. I’m surprised that a former Minister of Education would not know that when they were in government, we had sex education in our schools. In fact, some of the things they have objected to in the curriculum are in fact what was in our schools when she was—

Interjections.

The Speaker (Hon. Steve Peters): “Aie, aie, aie” is right. Minister?

Hon. Leona Dombrowsky: It’s important that we remind the honourable member of what was in place when they were in government, because you’re suggesting that that maybe was not the case.

The other thing that I would remind the honourable member of is that in the province of Ontario we have a process around curriculum review. We follow this process for all curriculum, whether it’s mathematics, social studies or sex education. That was the process that was followed with the delivery of the sex ed curriculum that was in place.

The Speaker (Hon. Steve Peters): Supplementary?

Mrs. Elizabeth Witmer: The issue is consultation. It’s like what happened earlier this week when Ontario families suddenly learned that you had only promised to post daycare and serious-incident reports online because you were put on the spot four years ago, and then you said whatever it took to make the problem go away. We know now that that promise was not lived up to; it was broken.

One year ago, you promised to consult parents on the changes to the sex education curriculum that you viewed as a fait accompli last year. There is no

schedule of consultations, and parents are telling us that they do not see that anything will change.

My question to you is: Why shouldn’t they believe that you’re waiting until after the next election to bring sex classes back if you’re given the chance?

Hon. Leona Dombrowsky: I cannot believe a former Minister of Education is asking to bring back sex education. It has always been there. It has been in our classrooms for 25 years. To stand in her place and suggest that that has not been the case is highly unusual.

What I can say to the people of Ontario: We are committed. We used a process. We did consult. Families told us they wanted us to do a better job—

Interjections.

The Speaker (Hon. Steve Peters): Members will please come to order. New question.

AGGREGATE EXTRACTION

Ms. Andrea Horwath: My question is to the Premier. A US-owned company wants to build North America’s second-largest open-pit mine next to the Niagara Escarpment and amidst the headwaters of rivers that provide drinking water for over a million Ontarians. Farmers, citizens, aboriginal people and environmentalists oppose this planned quarry, which will destroy thousands of acres of prime farmland.

The Ministry of Natural Resources is only allowing 45 days for public comment on this 3,000-page proposal. Will the Premier order a 120-day extension for public comment to allow full input from the growing number of concerned citizens?

Hon. Dalton McGuinty: To the Minister of Natural Resources.

Hon. Linda Jeffrey: I’m very pleased to answer this question. I know that the member from Dufferin–Caledon