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December 5, 2013

40th Parliament, 2nd Session

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Hansard Transcripts

Votes and Proceedings

Orders and Notices

Hansard Transcripts 2013-Dec-05 (PDF)

L096 - Thu 5 Dec 2013 / Jeu 5 déc 2013

LEGISLATIVE ASSEMBLY OF ONTARIO

ASSEMBLÉE LÉGISLATIVE DE L’ONTARIO

Thursday 5 December 2013 Jeudi 5 décembre 2013

ORDERS OF THE DAY

INFRASTRUCTURE FOR JOBS

AND PROSPERITY ACT, 2013 /

LOI DE 2013 SUR L’INFRASTRUCTURE

AU SERVICE DE L’EMPLOI

ET DE LA PROSPÉRITÉ

WEARING OF BUTTONS

INTRODUCTION OF VISITORS

ORAL QUESTIONS

HYDRO RATES

MINING INDUSTRY

HYDRO RATES

ENERGY CONTRACTS

ONTARIO COLLEGE OF TRADES

CHRIS MAZZA

TUITION FEES

HYDRO RATES

HYDRO RATES

EDUCATION

HORSE RACING INDUSTRY

HORSE RACING INDUSTRY

PARALEGALS

ONTARIO DRUG BENEFIT PROGRAM

VIOLENCE AGAINST WOMEN

INTRODUCTION OF VISITORS

MEMBERS’ STATEMENTS

MYALGIC ENCEPHALOMYELITIS

HEALTH AND WELLNESS

MYALGIC ENCEPHALOMYELITIS

AGGREGATE RECYCLING

VIOLENCE AGAINST WOMEN

PEEL HIV/AIDS NETWORK

HOCKEY TOURNAMENT

EDUCATION WORKERS

TRACEY MCDONAGH SIMPSON

INTRODUCTION OF BILLS

HEALTH STATUTE LAW

AMENDMENT ACT (HEALTHY

DECISIONS MADE EASY), 2013 /

LOI DE 2013 MODIFIANT

DES LOIS RELATIVES À LA SANTÉ

(DÉCISIONS SANTÉ SIMPLIFIÉES)

MOTIONS

HOUSE SITTINGS

VISITOR

STATEMENTS BY THE MINISTRY

AND RESPONSES

NATIONAL DAY OF REMEMBRANCE AND ACTION ON

VIOLENCE AGAINST WOMEN

PETITIONS

JURY DUTY

LONG-TERM CARE

CHILDREN’S AID SOCIETIES

GREENBELT

PROTECTION FOR WORKERS

ENVIRONMENTAL PROTECTION

CHRONIC OBSTRUCTIVE

PULMONARY DISEASE

DENTAL CARE

JOB CREATION

ASTHMA

MINIMUM WAGE

CHARITABLE GAMING

PRIVATE MEMBERS’

PUBLIC BUSINESS

PROTECTION OF MINORS

IN AMATEUR SPORTS ACT, 2013 /

LOI DE 2013 SUR LA PROTECTION

DES MINEURS PARTICIPANT

À DES SPORTS AMATEURS

ENERGY POLICIES

RYAN’S LAW (ENSURING

ASTHMA FRIENDLY SCHOOLS), 2013 /

LOI RYAN DE 2013 POUR ASSURER

LA CRÉATION D’ÉCOLES

ATTENTIVES À L’ASTHME

PROTECTION OF MINORS

IN AMATEUR SPORTS ACT, 2013 /

LOI DE 2013 SUR LA PROTECTION

DES MINEURS PARTICIPANT

À DES SPORTS AMATEURS

ENERGY POLICIES

RYAN’S LAW (ENSURING

ASTHMA FRIENDLY SCHOOLS), 2013 /

LOI RYAN DE 2013 POUR ASSURER

LA CRÉATION D’ÉCOLES

ATTENTIVES À L’ASTHME

ENERGY POLICIES

ORDERS OF THE DAY

SUPPORTING SMALL

BUSINESSES ACT, 2013 /

LOI DE 2013 VISANT À SOUTENIR

LES PETITES ENTREPRISES

NELSON MANDELA

SUPPORTING SMALL

BUSINESSES ACT, 2013 /

LOI DE 2013 VISANT À SOUTENIR

LES PETITES ENTREPRISES

The House met at 0900.

The Deputy Speaker (Mr. Bas Balkissoon): Let us pray.

Prayers.

ORDERS OF THE DAY

The Deputy Speaker (Mr. Bas Balkissoon): The Minister of Rural Affairs.

Hon. Jeff Leal: Mr. Speaker, for those wonderful people in Lakefield, Ontario, who may be tuned in to the Legislature this morning, I will call second reading of Bill 141, government order G141,

An Act to enact the Infrastructure for Jobs and Prosperity Act.

INFRASTRUCTURE FOR JOBS

AND PROSPERITY ACT, 2013 /

LOI DE 2013 SUR L’INFRASTRUCTURE

AU SERVICE DE L’EMPLOI

ET DE LA PROSPÉRITÉ

Mr. Murray moved second reading of the following bill:

Bill 141,

An Act to enact the Infrastructure for Jobs and Prosperity Act, 2013 / Projet de loi 141, Loi édictant la Loi de 2013 sur l’infrastructure au service de l’emploi et de la prospérité.

The Deputy Speaker (Mr. Bas Balkissoon): Mr. Murray.

Hon. Glen R. Murray: Thank you very much, Mr. Speaker. Every once in a while, there’s a piece of legislation that comes along that is not well understood, and 10 or 15 or 20 years later, we look back on moments in Ontario’s history and we realize that we’ve done something very significant. Many times those things that were done were controversial at the time.

I remember one of the things that, at the time, didn’t get much note was when Bill Davis, in this House in 1967, introduced the act that introduced our college system. I remember the headline in the Toronto Star that year, when that was announced, was essentially something to the effect of we were creating universities for dumb people.

What has happened is our college system quietly got built through government, successfully, and I think all parties in this House contributed significantly to the expansion of it. I would say that it was one of the best economic policies in the history of Ontario. The college system gave us and continues to give us—which is why this government nurtures that legacy and wants to pass on a healthier college system and is investing.

As Minister of Infrastructure, I’ll talk a little bit about some of the investments in our college system. We continue to expand it, modernize it and, in partnerships with Bombardier, bring the classroom to the workplace, and we’re looking at expanding the model.

But you cannot separate the economy from quality of life, the value of the people who are our great teachers, and the importance of the ambitions and imagination of our students.

I would like to think that the bill that we are introducing today is very much that consequential, because—well, the Premier has pointed out that we are driven by a number of things in our economic strategy and our job strategy, and that people and infrastructure are two important components of it. So today the government is advancing one of the foundations of its economic and job strategy, which is to really look at expanding the role of infrastructure in creating jobs and advancing our economy.

I do think that in 10 years, we will be looking at this bill as having been extraordinarily consequential to our ability to become, over the next 50 years, the most successful innovation economy in the western world in the same way that we were the most successful production economy.

So far, we have invested, as a government, about $85 billion in infrastructure. That’s in completely modernizing our hospital system. That’s in building new colleges and universities; hundreds of new public schools; the largest expansion of our transit systems ever in Toronto and Ottawa; the introduction of rapid transit in communities that did not have it before, like Kitchener–Waterloo; and the expansion in Windsor of the largest parkway and soon the most important bridge crossing on the busiest trade corridor, which will develop and magnify our trade.

Mr. Speaker, our infrastructure is the foundation of our prosperity. Without this critical connectivity, without clean water, without twinning our northern highways, which are actually our east-west trade route, none of our economic prosperity would be possible. So when we’re asked, as a government, what our job strategy is and what our economic strategy is, when the opposition wanted, to use their words, to “clear the deck” so that bills could be brought forward that would dramatically increase jobs—this is one of those bills.

Is the government’s job strategy successful? Well, we have about 600,000 people who are unemployed. Some of those folks are not employable in the terms that economists use, but my view is that everyone’s employable. Right now, according to the Canadian Manufacturers and Exporters association, we will create in Canada, within the next 24 months, 1.3 million jobs. That’s not government numbers; that’s private sector numbers.

In Ontario, at the current rate, in the portion in Ontario, which is one of the world’s job creation leaders, that will create 800,000 jobs in Ontario that will either become available or be created between now and 2016.

Just think about that for a moment: 800,000 jobs being created in Ontario in the next two years, or jobs becoming available because people are retiring or there’s capacity. That is more jobs than there are people unemployed in this province, and 2016 is not far away. So our job creation capacity of our economy is truly remarkable.

The challenge is, those are skilled jobs, and there is a mismatch. As my friend Benjamin Tal says, “We have people without jobs and jobs without people.” So how do we use our education system, which this government has introduced much legislation on and advanced—but how do we use our infrastructure in two ways: to build the right kind of infrastructure for the 21st century economy so that we secure, expand and keep that rate of job creation, and how do we use our infrastructure spending to create opportunities for people to get the skills? Because right now, we are spending $13 billion a year on infrastructure, each and every year.

Now, for 50 years, in today’s dollars, Ontario never spent much more than $3 billion or $4 billion. As a matter of fact, we were spending at 20% or 25% of what we’re spending today, so we have an infrastructure deficit to catch up on.

This legislation will do a number of things. One, it will require us to have, and I want to emphasize, at least a 10-year plan, which means, quite frankly, that we would eventually like to get to a 20- and 25-year plan, which we do have. We have the Big Move, which is a 20-plus-year plan for rapid transit. We have a northern highways plan, which is quite aggressive. Now we’re going to build our plans and put them into our budgets over those periods of time so there is a plan, a policy and a budget, so that it is actionable, measurable and transparent.

I don’t think this is a partisan issue. My friends in opposition—I know I’ve had some very positive conversations with my friends in the third party. I think this is something that unites us as progressive politicians wanting to see a higher level of public investment, and it being predictable, understandable and transparent.

This will actually require us to have a view that is evidence-based and public. Soon, through systems like iCorridor, all the data—my friend from Windsor–Tecumseh and my colleague from Ottawa–Vanier will be able to go online and look at how we’re modelling a truck tunnel in Ottawa. How would that work? What would the ridership be? Should we have a toll on it for trucks? How should we finance it? That will all be transparent and will be built into future budgets.

My friend from Windsor–Tecumseh will be able to go on and see some of the challenges we’ve worked on together with the Windsor-Essex parkway, and how it’s progressing. Is the remediation program working? How is girder replacement going? Are we on track? When are we opening new roads? What will the capacity be? What are the opportunities? What’s happening with land values? How will this line up with the plaza and the new president’s bridge that will give Windsor a phenomenal trade corridor? What would the ridership be? What is the mix of trucks? What are the economic opportunities?

How does it integrate with land use and transportation planning? How is that parkway foundational, in very specific ways, to growing the Windsor economy? What kinds of logistics businesses? How do we mesh our land use and transportation policy?

We will actually look at: Should we build a highway extension or a subway or a GO line? We will be able to measure what the densities are, whether it will create the densities. We know that building a freeway is sometimes less expensive than building the same number of kilometres of subway, but we know that a subway moves many more people per kilometre much faster. So if you’re measuring a subway compared to a freeway and you’re measuring it based on how many people it will move at what cost per person at what speed, all of a sudden, sometimes the subway comes out with a much smarter result.

If you can actually measure that—as we know from the American experience in San Francisco and Milwaukee, freeways often diminish property values and reduce employment intensity, where subways and rapid transit systems increase employment intensity and land values in their surrounding areas and have an uplift in tax value.

As a matter of fact, that’s how the Embarcadero replacement and the Milwaukee freeway system were replaced, based on tax increment financing, another fiscal tool that this government gave to municipalities that allowed them to use the future value on their tax base created by a new infrastructure investment and borrow money against that future tax revenue to pay for it. ICorridor will actually allow us to have the data to actually allow large and small communities to use these new financial tools.

The other thing we’re doing: $13 billion creates a heck of a lot of jobs. So far, our infrastructure investments to date have created 600,000 jobs. Our next year, couple of years, spend will create over 100,000 new jobs. Remember, according to the Canadian Manufacturers and Exporters association, we will have 800,000 skilled jobs. Ontario already has a job recovery that’s the envy of the world. We’re at about 170% job recovery from the recession, which means we have many more jobs created than we had even at our peak.

The UK’s recovery is around 43%, and the UK decided to disinvest in infrastructure for a period of time and take a tax-cutting disinvestment strategy. It has resulted in the United Kingdom not having a job recovery, which is interesting, because the Conservative government did exactly what the official opposition is asking us to do: cut taxes, attack public sector pensions, and reduce the capacity and quality of government services. What happened in the UK is a pretty abject model of a complete economic failure: no job recovery and an economy that is a bit in the dumpster. We don’t want to do that.

What the UK is doing now is investing $24 billion in two subway lines alone in London. Why is the UK doing that—the British government, the Conservative government? Because they’ve now decided to do the exact opposite, which is to not reduce spending and to be focused most on strategic infrastructure critical to their economy for creating jobs and building the financial services sector. So the UK government has completely reversed itself and is now moving into some of its biggest spends, the biggest spend it’s ever made in the British public transit system in London ever: $24 billion is obviously a huge investment

But we’ve got to do a better job than that, Mr. Speaker. We can’t simply spend money; we can’t simply spend money smarter. We can’t simply integrate land use, transportation and economic policies. We’ve got to do more.

We’ve been working with the construction trade unions and with the construction industry to produce a jobs formula, because right now, if you’re Ameresco or you’re Bondfield or you’re the operating engineers or the Steelworkers or the Carpenters’ Union or LIUNA, or any number of those unions or those businesses, you’re collaborating together right now, Mr. Speaker, and investing massively. I don’t know if you’ve ever been to the operating engineers’ or the ironworkers’ or LIUNA’s or the carpenters’—you pick a union. They all have amazing training centres.

And their completion rates—I know my friend from York South–Weston has been a huge champion of this and of the Hammer Heads program, which opens up these apprenticeship opportunities to young people; I want to thank her for being such an advocate, not just for infrastructure but also just for understanding how this transforms the lives of young people.

Those companies and those unions spend a heck of a lot of money training people to fill those skills for those 800,000 jobs we will be creating over the next 24 months. Right now, they are being created and right now, according to the private sector, they’re being created.

But when they bid for our contracts, they’re carrying that cost. And those companies that have unions that don’t make these investments and those companies that don’t make these investments kind of get a free ride because they don’t have all the additional costs of training that those companies, those entrepreneurs and union leaders do who make those investments. We’re going to start recognizing that. As a matter of fact, we’re going to look at how we maximize the apprenticeships, whether they’re pipefitters or carpenters or engineering students or planning students.

For registered apprenticeships and for all the skilled and professional and design trades, we want to maximize the amount of jobs, because we are determined, as a government, that we cannot simply leave a new hospital in the community. We can’t just leave a new parkway in Windsor. We can’t just twin the highway in Kenora. Those projects have to leave hope behind. Those projects have to leave skills behind. Those projects have to leave jobs behind.

They have to leave a generation of younger workers and they have to leave a generation of middle-aged workers who have lost their jobs and who are trying to get the skills to get back into the economy, or to grow an economy, to buy a house, to buy boots, to buy pants, to buy a car, to get a Metropass or a bus pass, to do all the things that rebuild our economy. We must leave skills, hopes and economic security behind when we do infrastructure.

Mr. Speaker, this builds on the legacy of our college programs. It builds on the legacy of our apprenticeships, and our unions are delivering 70% completion rates, the best completion rates I know of. Our colleges are doing excellent work. Our businesses are doing excellent work. We are rebuilding Ontario road by road, brick by brick, job by job. No one else I can find has 170% job recovery. There is no other regional economy right now I can find in the world that is projecting, by its private sector, 800,000 skilled jobs.

So how do we use our infrastructure spending, our college and university system and all the things that we are building to build those skilled jobs, to make sure the skills are there so those jobs are not unfilled? Because there would be nothing more embarrassing for us in Ontario than having the success of creating 800,000 jobs and then not being able to fill them. It means doing things differently.

My colleague the Minister of Training, Colleges and Universities has shown remarkable leadership with the Minister of Economic Development, Trade and Employment, and the Premier and the Minister of Finance.

We have this remarkable partnership now with Bombardier at Downsview, where we’re putting a subway. Why are we putting a subway there? Because our aerospace cluster is there. York University is there. We’re going to put a subway there, but we’re also putting a college in the workplace. They have to replace 5,000 workers. The average age of their workforce at Bombardier is 56—my age, Mr. Speaker. Maybe in this business—my friend Monte Kwinter inspires me; my friend Hazel McCallion inspires me—we have a little more longevity.

But if you’re an aerospace engineer, maybe you don’t want to be an aerospace engineer at 94. We also have to add 3,000 people to that workforce, because the Q400 aircraft and the new Bombardier aircraft are just taking off—literally taking off, the pun fully intended.

So integrating and using the infrastructure we build in our colleges, moving that into the workplace, putting our subway there, getting the private sector to retrain its workforce keeps those Bombardier jobs here. That is the kind of thing we know, economically, retains manufacturing jobs. Also, Bombardier is a beehive of activity because there are hundreds of small, specialized companies—in green fuels, in information, in on-board software systems—that supply that company.

As a matter of fact, the relationship between infrastructure and a high-growth economy is quite remarkable. What we know is that 5% of our businesses—just think about this, to understand how much the economy has changed: 5% of our businesses are generating 50% of our jobs. Just think about that: 5% of our businesses generating 50% of our jobs, 480,000 jobs.

Some 240,000 of those jobs in the last couple of years have come from companies that are less than five years old, mostly being started by young people off platforms like the Digital Media Zone at Ryerson or VeloCity at the University of Waterloo, where students graduate not just with their degrees, but they graduate with their incorporation papers in their other hand, starting their company—because we now have financiers who make capital available to students in their undergraduate years, starting their companies. Xtreme Labs did not exist five years ago; my friend Sunil started it.

The platforms they work on—they now have 1,200 employees in my constituency, 1,200 employees. Average age, 26; average income, $80,000 a year. Five years ago, the company didn’t exist. Sunil hasn’t even had his 30th birthday yet. This is the new economy. These are the people—5%. They could be in Cochrane; they could be in Thunder Bay; they could be in Domtar. As my friend Thomas Friedman often writes in the New York Times, this is the new economy. You can plug and play anywhere. But it’s challenging, because the manufacturing economy, while it is doing extraordinarily well, is not employing the people it used to.

We can’t quite get our head around that, about why the manufacturing economy is doing well but seems to be employing fewer people.

I want to tell you a very brief story, because I think there’s a need for a higher level of economic literacy—and I’m directing this comment particularly at the official opposition, who I hope will respond to it. Because I’m confused by their economic policy—not confused in the sense that I don’t know what I’m doing, but confused in that I don’t understand the rationale behind it. In 1983 and 1984, in Pittsburgh, something terrible happened in 24 months. When we think of Pittsburgh, what do we think about?

Mr. John O’Toole: Steel.

Hon. Glen R. Murray: Steel, right? We all think about Pittsburgh as steel, a city of 600,000 people. There were 104 steel mills in January 1983, 104 steel mills in Allegheny county. By December 1984, do you know how many steel mills there were in Pittsburgh?

Hon. Michael Chan: None.

Hon. Glen R. Murray: Zero. My friend Michael Chan, the Minister of Tourism, Culture, Sport, heritage, Pan Am Games and a whole bunch of other exciting stuff, was right. But you know, what’s interesting—I mean, just think about that: In less than two years, 104 of 104 steel mills closed. Because they couldn’t get the iron ore? No. Because their energy prices were high, which they were? No. Essentially, the globalization of the economy made Pittsburgh a place where you could no longer make steel competitively. The emerging state capitalist countries—Brazil, China, Singapore—were all emerging with state-financed capitalism that really challenged the western European and North American economy.

So what’s happening today? What’s the steel industry like in Pittsburgh today, after it lost everything and for 15 years had no steel production? Would you believe that Pittsburgh today produces more steel than it ever has in its history? Just think about that: Pittsburgh today produces more steel than it ever has in its history. How many steel plants do you think there are in Pittsburgh today? Anyone want to take a guess? This is participatory debate, if you want to join in. There are two. Those two steel mills look more like boutique hotels. They don’t have big, ugly smokestacks.

They make more steel than the 104 steel mills used to make in the early 1980s. When those 104 steel mills closed, 143,000 people lost their jobs. So if you’re an MPP from Windsor or from Hamilton or for an industrial community, or Sault Ste. Marie, go to Pittsburgh. If you’re one of those politicians thinking that the road back to economic recovery and jobs can be done by manufacturing alone, go to Pittsburgh, because you know how many people are employed making more steel than Pittsburgh ever made in even the highest, dirtiest days of its steel industry? Do you know how many people make steel in Pittsburgh, Mr.

Speaker? Anyone want to take a guess?

Mr. John O’Toole: Seventy-five?

Hon. Glen R. Murray: You’re very close; it’s 300. Is that important? Yes. Because steel is still the biggest source of GDP and economic growth for Pittsburgh. As Mayor Tom Murphy, who’s a dear friend of mine and who just retired from politics down there—a good Democrat—said, “Steel is our most important export. It is incredible for our GDP. It is essential to my city, which is now only 300,000 people, but it is not a big job creator anymore.

And the tool and die and the spinoffs—critically important.” But he says, “We no longer look to steel to be our big employer, because if we still,” as he put it, “if we needed 143,000 people to make that much steel, we still wouldn’t have a steel industry.”

And the challenge—when General Electric came back with its appliance industry to Wisconsin—it used to employ 40,000 people and now employs 4,000—they were incredibly disappointed. They produce more appliances in Wisconsin now than ever before but they do it with less than 10%.

My family, as you know, are miners in Sudbury. That’s where most of my folks are. My uncles all went down in the mines. When I was a kid in Sudbury, 10,000 people worked at what is now Vale Inco. Today, 200 go underground and 2,000 people work at Inco there. Most of them work on computers; they don’t go down. All my uncles died in their 50s of respiratory illnesses.

This new industrial resource economy is highly robotic—highly. So why are we so much more successful than almost every state and every other province? I want to go back to those 5% of companies, because the manufacturing recovery has recovered those other jobs. The other half are service industries. They’re public sector jobs. They’re our teachers. There are manufacturing—15,000 more jobs since the recession in the auto sector. But you go to UOIT—and to my friend the MPP from Durham: great school. It’s one of the good things your party did when it was in power.

You go to UOIT and you learn automotive robotics and software, Mr. Speaker, and then you go and work at General Motors. You do not drop out of high school in grade 10 to get a job on the GM line, because those thousands of jobs that many of our friends who are now 45 and 50 and for whom those jobs were there aren’t there. Go and talk to General Motors.

Do you remember the bailout, Mr. Speaker? This government made an investment in private sector infrastructure. We bailed out Chrysler and GM. And what did they do?

Interjection.

Hon. Glen R. Murray: Well, you didn’t learn anything, then, my friend from Durham, because what did they do with their money?

Mr. John O’Toole: They didn’t pay off their pension deficit, that’s for sure.

Hon. Glen R. Murray: What did they do with their money?

Mr. John O’Toole: They basically—

The Deputy Speaker (Mr. Bas Balkissoon): Minister, I would ask you to speak through the Speaker and not get into dialogue.

Hon. Glen R. Murray: I’m provoking my friend.

What they did with their money, Mr. Speaker, was quite interesting. They modernized their plants. Why did Ford not need a bailout? Because Ford had already modernized its infrastructure. Ford did and survived the 2008 recession because it modernized its industrial infrastructure.

It’s interesting now, because the challenge for ArcelorMittal, which now has a plant in Brazil that actually generates energy—as you know, ArcelorMittal in Hamilton is our largest industrial steel user.

So to do that, we have to think about energy infrastructure in a new way. We have to build in an innovation economy, and those high-growth companies mostly being run by new Canadians, disproportionately, South Asian new Canadians and middle-aged women in their forties, fifties and sixties who got tired of the glass ceiling and the bureaucracies of the large private sector companies, who quit, created their own companies and sell their services back to those companies at twice the pay—running their own company and busting the patriarchy of male-dominated hierarchies. Bravo. Women are some of our biggest entrepreneurs, creating a lot of those jobs.

So how do we ensure that those jobs are not just concentrated—as they are in too many countries—in the big cities? How do we make sure that Oshawa diversifies? How do we make sure that Cornwall, Dryden, Kapuskasing, Chatham and Echo Bay—because if you can plug and play in this new easily distributed community, you need all kinds of infrastructure. You need water and sewer systems that demonstrate Zenon technology from Hamilton and demonstrate Trojan’s technology from London, that you can go into our water treatment plants and see the very best of Canadian technology at work.

One of the things this bill does is it builds the kind of cultural infrastructure to give Sudbury the quality of life that it needs to maintain a culturally diverse and exciting community, so that Sudbury doesn’t have just great roads and sewers and great infrastructure and good highways, but we have excellent cultural infrastructure. We’re going to hire architects and designers to design our roads so that when there’s a new bridge in Kenora, it’s a spectacular new bridge. We’re going to get a spectacular new bridge in Windsor to go with the spectacular new parkway. We’re now going to involve designers and architects in that, because that’s important.

But, Mr. Speaker, I kind of love this House. I think it’s a huge privilege to be a parliamentarian, and, from all three parties, I have lots of friends in this House, and I really enjoy them. Many of them are here today. We were talking about Herb Epp and about how wonderful it is when we actually just get to share ideas. I’ve often said my favourite hours in this House are Thursday afternoons, because we all get to be friends. Party labels fall away, and we can actually talk about bills that each of us have passions for.

I hope that you will see this bill as a non-partisan piece; I hope that every member will feel comfortable bringing their ideas to that. As we go to committee with this, I think there’s a good platform. I think this bill is a good bill; I think it can be a better bill.

We have the Thunder Bay Consolidated Courthouse. Just go and see: That is one of the greenest buildings. It’s an amazing piece of infrastructure.

We put a law school into Thunder Bay so that now legal work is going to happen in the north. Northerners don’t have to come south when we open up the Ring of Fire, when we do the twinning of the highways. All that legal work and expertise in resource management can now be trained there.

Fanshawe College’s Centre for Digital and Performing Arts provides one of the most sophisticated digital platforms in the world in London–Fanshawe. I know the member there is a champion of it, and the previous member. This is really exciting stuff. People in London, which has a great arts and cultural scene, are now going to be able to take that digital into the virtual economy. Again, it will help accelerate—we want those 5% of businesses to be 10%, and we want them all across Ontario.

The Niagara Health System’s new St. Catharines hospital site is creating a cluster to support an aging population and keep seniors working well.

The Union shed revitalization, where we brought architects and engineers—which will now be a requirement on those major projects, not just serendipitous luck—go and see it. It is a marvel. The busiest transportation hub in North America, soon to be connected with the Union Pearson Express, soon to have our major transit hub down there for buses and GO: This is going to be one of the great welcoming portals. When you arrive at Union Station now, you’re going to know that you’re in a fabulous province. This is our biggest gateway to the entire transportation network that connects the entire province. It is spectacularly beautiful.

I want to just close up, Mr. Speaker, with—I have a little more I want to say about this. I’m sorry. I worked hard for this bill. You’re not cutting me off. Because I want to talk about something that, from when I lived in Toronto in the 1970s and 1980s to today, I’ve always been in awe of, and it’s three gentlemen who, if I could, I would dedicate this bill to. They’re three Ontarians who I think were geniuses, and they came from three different professions: R.C. Harris who, 100 years ago, actually in late 1912, became the public works commissioner in the city of Toronto. You’ll know the R.C.

Harris water treatment plant. If you haven’t seen it, when they have Doors Open, go and see it. It’s actually open to the public and you can see all the technology, because when they built it after the Great War, they wanted to showcase the technology there. We haven’t done that since 1945 when we opened that plant.

Every single new type of water technology—you should be able to go in. We should bring people from China, from Brazil, from Abu Dhabi, so they can see our best technologies. We are the world leaders. We have our agency WaterTAP, which uses infrastructure investments to provoke new investment. We make better water membranes, ultraviolet light treatment. We are the world’s leaders in clean water technologies, but we don’t have a place to showcase it.

You can go to Singapore and see Ontario trilliums all over the new water plant, because their entire integrated water-sewer treatment plant is done with Canadian technology; we use Singapore to sell our Canadian technology and companies into Asian markets. We need to do the same here.

This bill will put that kind of innovation both in our procurement policies and that. But R.C. Harris did that in 1945. We didn’t do it since. This year is the 100th anniversary—the 100th anniversary—of a referendum that finally passed after several tries to build what I think is the most powerful symbol of what this bill will do and why this bill is the equivalent of Bill Davis’s college bill. It is the infrastructure equivalent. The Prince Edward Viaduct—does anyone know where the Prince Edward Viaduct is? We don’t often call it that; it was actually renamed afterward. It is known as the Bloor viaduct, if you like that. It was R.C. Harris’s dream.

He had been public works commissioner in the city for less than 12 months, the referendum passes, and he decides to do something that’s never been done before. He says, “We’re now going to start requiring architects to be involved in building public works.” So he puts out an RFP, and Edmund Burke—not the philosopher, but the great Canadian architect who built what we now call the Bay, the old Simpsons store, which introduced curtain walls for the first time in Canada; a very innovative guy—got hired; an engineer.

I want to say to the engineers who feel slighted—I think some of them do, because we didn’t put engineers in big headlines in this—we love engineers. You’re written into more pieces of legislation than any other profession, save doctors. So to my friends at PEO, know that you are being celebrated in this Legislature.

There was a guy named Thomas Taylor, another great Ontarian. The two of them came together to build what they wanted to be the definitive 20th-century project. They were concerned about creating value and making it beautiful. So they put together the idea of putting in a subway platform. Remember, this is 1913. There were no subways in Toronto; there weren’t any subways in Canada. This was the kind of vision that John A. Macdonald had when he built a railroad across wild prairies, through mountains to a fishing village, to build a nation on it. This was the kind of vision that built this country.

It wasn’t until 1966 that the subway tracks finally got laid on that platform that had been waiting 50 years for the train to arrive. That kind of vision, of integrated transportation planning, thinking about the best way to move people along the Danforth—eventually it was going to be rapid transit, so let’s plan for it and build the infrastructure anticipating it. Let’s plan our roads with our subway and public transit system. That’s what this bill does. Let’s actually get architects and designers so that we’re planning to design and engineer the very best and bring professions together to create value.

Let’s integrate land use planning and look at value, because the entire expansion of Toronto on the other side of the Don Valley only happened after that. The tax base of Toronto started growing exponentially as a result of that piece of infrastructure. Because it was so well planned, it created a whole new amount of land available at low cost for massive expansion into Riverdale and some of the most beautiful neighbourhoods, Greektown, and a cultural dynasty that is part of the brand and part of our quality of life.

You know, Mr. Speaker, there are going to be people who will say, “This is ridiculous. If you put architects there, you’re going to drive up costs.” When I was mayor of a city to the west of this province, we introduced something very similar. We started requiring a value-based rather than a cost-management approach. The tax base of Winnipeg was starting to grow by 5% per year. The vacancy rate in downtown Winnipeg in the historic centre was over 60%. At the end of this and a series of fiscal reform policies, the vacancy rate was about 8%. The tax base had grown exponentially.

The mill rate in that city dropped by 11%. Taxes were being cut by 2% per year, and the actual amount of money the government had was growing rapidly, because we were building the tax base based on infrastructure investments, and we were able to reduce the tax burden.

So this may not sound like fiscal policy, but we really do believe—as do the Conservatives in the UK, who have reversed themselves and are now investing in this—that infrastructure creates jobs, improves our quality of life and eliminates the $6 billion to $11 billion that we’re paying for in lost economic productivity from congestion. And properly planned—based on evidence, transparent and public—it will actually expand our tax base growth for both our municipalities and provinces.

I know it’s hard to imagine in Toronto that you could actually see 2% annual tax cuts. If you ran for mayor today and said, “I’m going to promise to cut taxes by 2%,” they would think you were some right-wing loony-tune of some sort. But that has actually happened in cities that have actually done that. If you look at London first and the partnerships in London, these infrastructure investments are contributing to higher property values and increased density.

We have half the construction cranes right now in North America hard at work in the GTHA and other parts of Ontario. So we now have to build the infrastructure to keep up with the 49 towers that are going up. That means that if we’re not actually doing that, we will have worse congestion.

Toronto is such a successful region. It’s going to grow between now and 2031 from six million to nine million people; that’s a 50% increase. In the last 10 years, Toronto and Ontario have been so successful that we have added 32 million square feet of office space to the greater Toronto area alone. To give you an idea of the scale of that, Calgary only has 32 million square feet of office space. If you think Alberta’s doing well, well, this province has added the equivalent amount of the entire commercial office space in Calgary—added that—to the Toronto economy in the last 10 years alone.

We are growing and booming, and to keep that job creation and that investment growing, we have to spread it across. Not all boats are rising equally. Our attention is in Windsor, in Thunder Bay, in Cornwall, in Ottawa and in small, rural communities with our rural infrastructure programs, which are critical because we can’t simply have a recovery in one part of the economy.

I will wrap up with that. I look forward to an engaged debate and the ideas of our friends in the opposition parties. I thank you for your patience, Mr. Speaker, and thank you for the privilege of being able to introduce the debate on this bill.

The Deputy Speaker (Mr. Bas Balkissoon): Questions and comments?

Mr. John O’Toole: It’s a pleasure to respond to the Minister of Infrastructure this morning in his leadoff remarks on Bill 141. Later on, through you, Mr. Speaker, I’m going to seek unanimous consent to stand down our critic’s lead, Mr. Klees’s lead, this morning with the privilege and at the leisure of the House. I’ll seek that later.

But many of the comments the minister said this morning are quite visionary and I would say very thoughtful and provocative—he oftentimes is provocative. Really, when talking with our critic—we caucused this bill this week—we could see light in this and vision, and much of it would appear to have been almost stolen from some of our white papers, Paths to Prosperity. I’m not trying to create conflict here in any way, but imitation is the finest form of being flattered. Mr. Klees mentioned that, and I probably will use that in my remarks a little later on.

There was quite an interesting

article this morning, as well, about the minister. It says, and I’m just reporting here right out of the media: “Glen Murray’s High-Occupancy Toll Cookies ... chocolate congestion.” It’s quite an interesting

article about cramming a lot into a little space, crammed full of goodness.

I think in the response when he mentions the job recovery plan—it’s a response to the wonderful ideas they’ve had on Infrastructure Ontario. I might want to challenge a bit of that, but I appreciate his remarks on giving a shout-out to UOIT. UOIT is, of course, the university that was founded when we were in government. I think it was the right thing to do, to transform the auto economy of the Durham region into something quite different. I’ll have something to say about that, because you didn’t get the job done on the nuclear part.

The Deputy Speaker (Mr. Bas Balkissoon): Questions and comments?

M me France Gélinas: It was rather interesting to listen to what the member had to say. He talked about what infrastructure could do and what infrastructure should do for economies, for communities, for families, but none of that is in Bill 141.

Bill 141 is kind of an easy read—even a pretty light read, I would add. It continues this wrong-headed philosophy that P3s—private-public partnerships—are the way to go. I would tell you that for most of the hospitals that were built under this system, it has not brought anything good. All it does is that the government, our taxes, pay a humongous premium for them to assume risk, but those big conglomerates don’t assume any risk whatsoever. They pass it on to the little guys who live in Ontario. The multinationals get the 30% to 40% premium for assuming risk, but they don’t take any of the risk.

The system is set up so that they will subcontract and subcontract, and it’s the little guy at the end that takes all the risk. If, God forbid, it flops in a major way, it’s still the taxpayers who are on the hook.

This is still a philosophy that is supported by this bill. If you look at the opportunities in the north for growing our communities through infrastructure projects, most of those projects are still bundled in a way that, rather than building a bridge in Nickel Belt, you have to build 10 bridges through the north. Nobody in Nickel Belt is able to bid on those jobs, but this is what Bill 141 will continue to do.

The Deputy Speaker (Mr. Bas Balkissoon): Questions and comments?

Mrs. Laura Albanese: I’m pleased to respond to the Minister of Transportation and Infrastructure. I would like to compliment him, first of all, for introducing this bill and also for his speech.

I believe that this bill has a lot of key components that will be very important for the future of Ontario—first of all, the guiding principles it will have to take into consideration. Those include the demographics, the economic trends, advancing the use of new technologies, as the minister mentioned. There is also protecting the environment and considering the impacts of severe weather. I think, for example, of the flooding we had in Toronto and Mississauga on July 8 and the difference a bill such as this could have made to all the infrastructure, all the homes that were damaged during that flooding.

It will consider also the life cycle cost of the project, which is very important, especially for our municipalities, and maximizing the tax base growth.

It will also consider skills training and apprenticeship. I believe that’s a very important piece of the bill, because it would employ apprentices in the construction and maintenance of the projects. As the minister mentioned, I’ve been a great supporter of the Hammer Heads program that has been created by the Central Ontario Building Trades. For those who don’t know, this is a skills and employment program within the construction industry that offers apprenticeship career opportunities to youth from underserviced neighbourhoods in our communities. I represent some of those neighbourhoods.

This is making a great difference in the lives of kids who would not have had this opportunity if it were not for programs such as Hammer Heads.

There are also community benefits agreements.

The Deputy Speaker (Mr. Bas Balkissoon): Questions and comments?

Mr. Rod Jackson: I’d like to thank the minister for his comments. They’re certainly well taken. We certainly do have a lot of infrastructure issues throughout Ontario and indeed throughout the country, I think. It’s recognized that many municipalities, especially my own—I know that in Barrie there’s a huge infrastructure deficit that needs to be addressed, and in a sustainable way, too.

I know that as a city councillor in Barrie, we struggled quite often with making sure our infrastructure kept up with the growth of that city. As many of you in this House know, the city of Barrie has grown very rapidly and had some very extreme challenges with its infrastructure, and has done some very unique things, actually, where infrastructure is concerned, as far as prioritizing what infrastructure needs to be fixed in order of importance, not necessarily in order of its visual state.

Also, we have a lot of issues with transportation locally, whether it’s the 400 and interchanges that need to be addressed—and are being addressed, albeit I think a little too slowly in many cases—but also with local transportation infrastructure with our bus routes and even our GO train, which has had increased service over the years. Actually, we’re quite happy to see some increased summer service that I think shows that there is the capacity in the city for GO to expand further in the future and get more people off the road.

The one thing, though, that I would stress and hope is addressed in a wholesome way eventually—right now, it’s kind of addressed in nebulous ways, if I can put it that way—is sustainable funding for municipalities. A lot of the time, it’s really difficult for municipalities to have a long-term plan for their infrastructure because they really don’t know what’s coming from year to year or how the funding is going to happen. It changes from time to time, from year to year, and it really puts cities like Barrie in a very difficult position as far as creating their budgets, where they do have a significant infrastructure deficit going forward.

The Deputy Speaker (Mr. Bas Balkissoon): Minister, you have two minutes.

Hon. Glen R. Murray: Thanks very much to all my colleagues who did that.

Yes, the employment piece is extremely important. Helmets to Hardhats and those programs are particularly critical.

My friend from Nickel Belt raises that point: We are not assuming that everything is going to be AFP. As a matter of fact, we are now evaluating projects in the north. In the north, if you’re doing large highways, which involve multiple components, sometimes AFP makes sense, other times it doesn’t. So we’re going through this lens, and this bill I think will allow us to have a more sophisticated and critical look at AFPs, about where they work and where they don’t. I think we don’t want to take an ideological position for or against them but look at practical evidence. So I take your point and will assure you that those concerns are registered.

I want to also thank my friend from Durham. I think I agree with him on the training to do that. My mother always said to me that if you don’t worry about who gets credit for things, a lot more gets done, so I’m quite happy to share the ideas and the credit on that.

My friend from Barrie makes a very good point, because it’s actually interesting. Mayor Lehman and the council that he was part of I think have done a very good job. They’ve increased their transit capacity by 30%, working with us and the province. We’ve enhanced GO services, as the member for Barrie pointed out, and I know he’s been a champion of that. That’s important. Some 30% of people who live in Barrie work in Barrie. Mayor Lehman and I are trying to integrate transportation and land use and economic planning because the best way to reduce infrastructure costs is proximity, not connectivity.

So the more people who live and work and play in Barrie—if we could get that up to 60% and increase Barrie’s economic base, that’s a lot better investment than widening the 400 highway wider and wider until it looks like the 401. So part of the strategy is to actually have proximity and complete communities where people can live, work and play, and don’t need to commute at all, which is why planning is so important.

Mr. Speaker, and to all my colleagues, thank you. I hope there will be a spirit of non-partisanship in improving this bill, and I look forward to their ideas and their partnerships.

The Deputy Speaker (Mr. Bas Balkissoon): Further debate.

Mr. John O’Toole: First, Speaker, I’d like to seek unanimous consent to stand down the one-hour lead by our critic on this file, Mr. Klees.

The Deputy Speaker (Mr. Bas Balkissoon): The member for Durham has requested unanimous consent to stand down their lead. Agreed? Agreed.

The member for Durham.

Mr. John O’Toole: I’m privileged to be here this morning and to respond to the minister in two minutes but also have a little longer to dwell on it.

I should say this: that in the spirit of co-operation—and he had a couple of zingers during his remarks. So I’ll start with the zingers and finish off on a more harmonious note. The one is, I think the word “sustainability” is used frequently. Now, my

interpretation of sustainability, and the member from Barrie mentioned it as well, is that sustainability, in its simplest form, is enough for everyone forever. That’s what sustainability is: enough for everyone forever. This means we have to change the rules of how things are shared, and if you look at Ontario or Canada, in the context of the world, with 32 million or whatever people—cities in China are larger. If you look at the western hemisphere, we’re all pretty well off really, to the greatest extent, even South America, Central America, Mexico’s an emergent economy, Brazil etc.—the US struggles—Ontario and Canada.

And there are less than a billion people in the western hemisphere. There are more people in India than all of the western hemisphere. We all have two cellphones, two cars, a home, a cottage—I’m generalizing, of course. We’re pretty well off. We use a lot more energy per capita; we use a lot more everything per capita. There may be some reasons, weather-wise and all that kind of stuff—that’s the good way to put things into context in a globalized sense.

When you look at books talking in the visionary terms that Minister Murray speaks of, it’s important to put the context around these things, how we share the resources of the world, because there’s a finite amount of stuff. If you look at Friedman’s book on globalization, really, there are three themes in it: the world is hot—global warming; flat—digitalization; and crowded—seven billion people with not enough to eat, and 20% of them don’t have enough every day. So that’s the context.

When we look at ourselves, we look within the sectors of the economy: We look at the public sector, the private sector and the business sector. This is my second zinger, and it is meant in humorous terms, because you’d say it if you were here: In Ontario, my experience has been over the last 10 years—how do you create a small business? You start with a large one and keep taxing it and hacking away at it until it no longer exists.

Basically, I worked for 31 years with General Motors, and prior to that, I worked with IBM. I saw the whole industry change, and he’s right. He’s saying that whether it’s Pittsburgh or even, for that matter, Oshawa—when I was there, I at one time was a computer guy and then I was in personnel, labour relations, and then in salary and bonus administration, and then eventually manager of an area of a plant. At that time, I think there were 22,000 employees. Now we’re looking forward to the 2016 agreement, when we end up with this agreement of the 2008 bailout, and whether or not General Motors will be in Canada.

In fact, some of the information that I hear now is that the new Camaro and some of the newer vehicles could be in Mexico or South America and even Michigan, because Michigan now is fighting the consequences of a fractured Detroit economy.

Some of those factors are part of that globalization issue—where is it cheaper to make stuff?—which is an unfortunate challenge. Even if I look at the great success stories of Canada in the recent past, BlackBerry—Research In Motion—I remember when the teachers’ pension fund had a huge chunk of that, plus I remember they had a big chunk of Nortel, and if they’re not quickly and nimbly moving out of those technology sectors that are disappearing, where are we in this kind of sustainable economy inventing the future?

Now, when I look at how work is created today—and you said it—it’s plug and play. I agree 100%. I have five children. Three of them work in Hong Kong, England and the Isle of Man. That’s the future. When I look at these pages—the world is digitally connected. The best place to do banking and commerce—my son-in-law is a securities lawyer—is London. The time zones all work, whether you’re working with Brazil, Hong Kong or Russia. That’s the central place where they can connect 24/7, because of the Greenwich mean time, I think.

That’s what he has told me, anyway, and actually his three major clients are Russia, Brazil and India. I’m not sure who does what, but he works from home. It’s all online. He’s doing a couple of things, building contracts with various players, and also the financing rules.

But that’s the new economy we’re really talking about, which raises the question, relevant to Bill 141, of what kind of infrastructure we need. We need the digital infrastructure, and rural Ontario is struggling now with connectivity.

Even now, in my riding, for instance, the smart meter—it’s not a slam on Minister Chiarelli, but in my riding we’ve gone universally with the smart meters, which aren’t smart, by the way. They’re time-of-use meters. With a smart meter—I have one—I can phone my cottage and turn on the hot tub. They’re connected to the circuit.

Hon. Madeleine Meilleur: Oh, you have a hot tub at your cottage.

Mr. John O’Toole: No, I’m not kidding. You can turn on stuff from your phone. Just phone a number, put in a code, and it turns it on. That’s a smart meter.

This time-of-use meter was the way they doubled the price, but also they’re doing the billing at the time of consumption, which is important. What they’re trying to do is flatten out the demand curve. The demand curve in electricity is very high in the mornings, flattens out to around 15,000 megawatts, and goes very high in the evening. They’re trying to make it around 18,000 megawatts so that they don’t need to have all these peaking plants; just run it all flatline on nuclear, I hope.

The reason I say this: In the rural parts of Ontario, where they don’t have good connectivity and we’re using a smart meter and the signal is not too strong, what time did they actually use the electrons? They’re getting a blended bill. They don’t know whether it’s blended at the five-cent rate or the 10-cent rate. I have written to the minister on it. It’s not a matter of finger-pointing; it’s the matter that one size does not fit all.

When you’re looking at infrastructure and you’re looking in Toronto and the GTA congestion, it’s tragic and it’s a drag on the economy. We all get that. But there are other solutions that needed to be put. And I would say that, a good example—and I’m in London frequently. Hong Kong has a marvellous transit system. If you want to get to the best jewellery stores, the best restaurants, you have to take the subway. The subway is all developed this way. The subway is the third dimension of development. We’ve got on-the-ground, we’ve got up-in-the-air and now we’ve got under-the-ground. It’s three-dimensional development. Underground in Hong Kong is incredible.

Here’s another example of where we went wrong. The Presto card, which should be examined by the public accounts committee, under Metrolinx, I suppose, is wildly overbudget and completely uninteractive. I understand it was quite a sluggish mess to get the TTC to sign on to it in the first place about the smart card. I have a Presto card. I do use transit. I come to work on the GO train. Here’s the issue: Over there, they have a cash card. You can buy a coffee, a newspaper, take a taxi, take the ferry and go on the subway, all with the same card. You can load that card at Mac’s Milk.

All the receipts somehow get transferred to my bill and somebody that was charged gets paid for providing the service, whether it’s the paper or the bus or the taxi. It’s all handled seamlessly. Now we’ve got the Presto card, which is non-interactive. Do you understand? You have to line up in some queue, or the system is down so you can’t load it.

Hon. Glen R. Murray: It has that capacity.

Mr. John O’Toole: It’s not. Anyway, we could go off-line. I use it and I’m frustrated with it, because sometimes I want to charge the card. I’ve got it set up now that it automatically flips $50 a week into the card, so I don’t have to line up anymore. But when the system goes down and stuff like that—and I do have the app on my phone, which was developed by Ryerson.

I know that the new economy is here. I just wonder, out loud here—this isn’t in any white paper, but I’m talking to a visionary, and I mean that quite sincerely—I would wonder why anyone in law or banking would be coming to Toronto to work. Why?

Interjection.

Mr. John O’Toole: No, why? The future—the minister knows this. What major companies are doing today—and I know this personally. Rather than having the big headquarters where they’re paying $50,000 in taxes, plus the utilities and all the stuff, they call it “hotelling.” They rent a floor in a hotel. They write it all off. There’s no capital tied up. It’s all operating. Mondays, they have the advertising group. Accounts payable are on Tuesday; accounts receivable on Wednesday.

The rest of them are plugged and played, have a card with a smart card in it, and they can log on to secure networks and do whatever it is, marketing or planning or product development or whatever they’re doing, and no capital or real estate are tied up. They come together for socializing reasons, really, and team-building, as opposed to working in compact quarters, being frustrated for two hours of commuting time saying, “What is going on here?”

Today we have the OSSTF here, which is wonderful. My wife is a retired teacher. My daughter is a high school vice-principal in England—the one I mentioned—and was educated here, of course, at Western and at Lakehead University. So I’m just saying that how we deliver education is going to change profoundly. It isn’t about the answer today—Columbus sailed the ocean blue; it’s not about that. It’s learning how to get the information. Where is the data? Google it or how—it’s totally different.

I’m over 70, so it’s totally different. When I was hired by IBM, it was all unit record. There was no digital format. It was all mechanical. Binary was the system that—everything was a switch: yes or no. It still works that way today. We just don’t see the background behind some of the algorithms that drive the things that happen in front of us on the screen. But everything’s going to be changed by it. As I said, why would somebody working at a high level in banking or finance—think about it—be coming to a cubicle in Toronto, spending two hours getting there, two hours getting home, and maybe the system could be down or whatever? So I think that will be done differently.

I think Hansard here could easily be transcribed by voice recognition, and it probably is. They’re working on it in Ottawa. I know that. My son’s a federal member and tells me this is what they’re doing. Other parts of the country do it differently.

Every single thing we do will be renewed. I think some of the futurists talked about it being the third wave or the fourth wave or whatever, but I think we are moving there, and we need to build the infrastructure that’s required.

Now, I look at transit. Transit’s important. Anyone who talks against it is not thinking about it. How we implement it is what’s wrong. To get the gas money provincially—not federally—you had to actually have buses. So everybody’s got all these buses running around with nobody in them most of the time. In my riding, now we’ve got double-decker buses on the—what do they call it?—the Pulse system, and the minister’s here. In some respects, it works.

Now, if you’re going to run something in the public sector seven days a week, 24 hours a day, every job takes five people. That’s the numeracy around 24/7 jobs. For every job, it takes five people. Let’s take if we’re going to implement 24/7 fire protection in every community in Ontario—completely unsustainable in the current way we do it, because the response legislation and regulations say there has to be five people on the truck to make it work right. Now, how are they going to pay for that in Norwood or Hastings where they have no industry? Their tax base is pretty much residential tax.

I just moved about three years ago. My taxes were $7,500. I was living in the country. I had a well and septic. I paid for it. I didn’t pay for the pipe coming up to my house. My taxes were $7,500. Holy smokes. I said, “The way it’s going—well, it’s only going up by the cost of a coffee a day.” Well, it turns out a coffee is five bucks a day; times 300 days—do the numbers. So it’s only going up by the price of a coffee a day.

That’s overly simplistic, because if you look at the math behind that, I figured my tax is going to be $10,000 within six years. Here’s what I figured: It was soon going to cost me $1,000 a month to own my own house. That’s not paying heat and hydro and all that kind of stuff—

Mr. Percy Hatfield: The hot tub.

Mr. John O’Toole: Well, that’s why I have a smart meter: You can turn it off.

I only say that as examples of trying to do things the way we’ve done them is probably the wrong solution.

Now, I’m going to put a couple things more on track here. There’s a couple of very interesting reports. I know the minister’s big on Roger Martin’s book. It’s worth a read. He’s, I think, the dean of the Rotman school of business, Martin Prosperity Institute at Rotman’s. This has pretty informative graphs, where we are on GDP per capita.

I would say the Canada-EU free trade agreement is very important. I think there will be sectors that will have to be restructured or—we don’t want people to be out of work, that’s for sure. I’m not sure what the jobs would be.

Remember how I started this: Enough for everyone forever. That’s sustainability. It’s important that we understand that. You can’t have some people making $100,000, and then a big gap, and then people making $20,000. What’s that about? They can’t even afford the taxes on their house, the transit, the electricity—that’s the biggest single complaint we get today. In fact, that’s one of the reports I want to make reference to. It’s important for all members to get it. We all got it; read it.

The other one is a report for a call to action by the Canadian Manufacturers and Exporters. I will get into something a little bit more substantive here. These are all generalizations, much in respect to responding to the creativity of the minister himself. He did give a shout-out to UOIT, University of Ontario Institute of Technology. That university was set up with a different governing structure originally. It has since gone back.

I want to shout out—Tim McTiernan is the president of the university: a great person, a wonderfully respected academic and a very thoughtful person. He was dean of innovation at the University of Toronto before he came—a very appropriate partner and leader in the community. We look to the academic institutions to be the visionaries for building these new economies we keep referring to. That’s short term, by the way, to the pages here.

I worked for a company for 30 years. That’s all finished. I’m sorry. When that collapsed, so did the whole idea of pensions, when companies don’t want the liability. So today, the jobs of the future will be—and there’s been books written: People Without Jobs, Jobs Without People, Miner’s book—a very important book, too.

What I find interesting there is that most of the jobs—companies themselves, BlackBerry, Research In Motion, whatever, won’t last beyond 10 years. The technology will supersede them. The investor will yank out the value part, sell it off to a larger company, mergers and conglomerates. That’s how it’s working today. So the jobs will be contract, bonused and tenured somehow.

I guess it’s depressing to some extent, but rather than making $50,000 a year for 10 years, you’ll probably make $500,000 in two years, and you’ll really be at the high point of your life, much like athletes today. They get $10 million, and then they’re done work at 30, 33 or something. And I don’t even agree with that. It comes back to what I said before, the division of how the tax rules work so that everyone gets to share in it.

But I think people, in the execution of their dream and their talents—whether it’s music, art, electricity, whatever it is, their real reward is the pride of doing it, like a reward of some sort. Hopefully, it’s money and food and things like that. Then, I guess, you look at these rules that I’m talking about, employment and how people are rewarded and how they transfer from various parts of the world to do what it is they do.

I think when you look around in the culture we live in, it’s happening without us really having a plan in place because of the diversity. People are demanding different types of food. There are different types of entertainment, different types of religions and events that are new and exciting to them and maybe reminding them of where they came from, and I think that’s all great. It enriches our lives as long as we’re comfortable with ourselves. I think that’s important.

I talked a bit about the Pittsburgh scenario. That’s a case where technology can actually change how we do things, and that’s an important lesson. We can do more with less. So, when we look at organizations where people say, “I’m going to be here for 30 years. There’s a vertical ascent in my pay and benefits, and the last three years qualify me for some kind of factor in my pension. Maybe my productivity’s actually going this way,” you’ve got to look at some of these changes.

People who are really firing on all cylinders should be rewarded, and I think the best way to do it is bonusing, because it doesn’t affect these other legacy entitlements. Bonusing for somebody who’s really making an effort, whether it’s for the music class, the art class or the football team, I’m all in favour of.

Now it doesn’t fit into these—you’ve got 15 years and here’s where you are on the grid, and this is what you should get, and forget all the other achievements. I think that’s poor, and it doesn’t incent innovation. Some people may want to take the creativity of their life and apply it to their community, in volunteerism, or in their family. I think how we do things has to change, and some of our entitlements have to change along with it.

I talked, for instance, about the 5% creating 60% of the jobs. He’s right on that because, really, a lot of these small businesses are flexible and focused. I met some of the people who have been lobbying this week with the environmental group on Bill 91—very innovative people, inventing filters and other kinds of products that deal with environmental issues or just the air we breathe. They’ll make probably a fair amount of money over a short period of time, and they do create jobs.

They create training in those jobs by passing on what they’re bringing to a product that may exist to improve it and make it better, and the people who may be there for a short period of time may pick up some of those skills or knowledge to be innovators themselves.

I think the one small part that I wanted to get to—

The Deputy Speaker (Mr. Bas Balkissoon): Thank you.

Second reading debate deemed adjourned.

The Deputy Speaker (Mr. Bas Balkissoon): This House stands recessed until 10:30 a.m.

The House recessed from 1014 to 1030.

WEARING OF BUTTONS

The Deputy Speaker (Mr. Bas Balkissoon): The Minister of Children and Youth Services.

Hon. Teresa Piruzza: Mr. Speaker, I believe you’ll find that we have unanimous consent today that all members be permitted to wear these red buttons to remember the victims of violence against women.

The Deputy Speaker (Mr. Bas Balkissoon): The minister has requested unanimous consent. Agreed? Agreed.

INTRODUCTION OF VISITORS

Mr. Bill Walker: It’s my pleasure to introduce Bonnie Cameron, a teacher at West Hill, and Krista McCormick, an ed assistant. They’re in the members’ west gallery—great members from the great riding of Bruce–Grey–Owen Sound.

Mr. Percy Hatfield: I’d like to introduce a friend of mine with the Ontario Secondary School Teachers’ Federation. Martha Marucci has joined us in the west gallery as well. Martha, welcome to Queen’s Park.

Hon. John Gerretsen: Would you please help me welcome two individuals here who are with the OSSTF: David Mathers from Kingston, and John Fenik from Perth. They’re in the east gallery. John is also the mayor of Perth.

While I’m on my feet, on behalf of Bill Mauro, the member from Thunder Bay–Atikokan, I would like to introduce the following OSSTF members from northwestern Ontario who are in the members’ gallery as well. We have with us Sue Smith, Pat Gibbs, Duane Roen, Paul Caccamo, Maria Gavin, Buzz Grebenc, Carlos Santander-Maturan, Stephen Wilson and Joshua Spencer. Let’s welcome them.

Mr. Todd Smith: It’s a pleasure to welcome two high school teachers from Centennial Secondary School in Belleville, members of the OSSTF, Keith Sled and Jason Bremner, to the Legislature today.

It’s also a pleasure to welcome the family of one of our page captains today, Morgan Beatty, from Tweed, in Prince Edward–Hastings. She has her mother, Leslie Beatty, here as well as her brother, Isaac Beatty, and her grandparents Peter and Donna Sullivan. Welcome to the Legislature.

Ms. Helena Jaczek: I would like to welcome the family of page Jonathan Yapeter. They’re here in the east members’ gallery. The parents are Janny Simarno and Yimmy Yapeter.

Mr. Victor Fedeli: I would like to introduce Jared Hunt, who teaches at Widdifield Secondary School in North Bay; Glen Hodgson, who teaches at Parry Sound High School; and Kerri Renaud, who is a child development counsellor at Chippewa Secondary School in North Bay. Welcome.

Mr. Taras Natyshak: I want to welcome all of our OSSTF representatives today, who are here to talk about the future of education in the province of Ontario. We welcome them, thank them for their ongoing dialogue with members of the assembly and look forward to talking with them in our respective offices today.

Hon. Mario Sergio: I’m delighted to welcome to Queen’s Park the parents of page Ana Chu Wong: her mom, Huang Xing Bo, and her dad, Da Cai Cao. Welcome to Queen’s Park.

Mr. Rob E. Milligan: It gives me great privilege to stand here and introduce the family of page captain Payton Smith, the daughter of my good friend Todd Smith, the member for Prince Edward–Hastings: her mother, Tawnya Smith, sister Reagan Smith, and her grandparents Dennis and Carol Hubble, as well as cousin Alex Calderon. Welcome to Queen’s Park.

Ms. Dipika Damerla: I’d also like to welcome all of the OSSTF members. Thank you for a great breakfast. In particular, I would like to recognize the OSSTF members from Mississauga: Brian Grandy, Mike Bettiol, Mary Arseneau and Katherine Petrick. Welcome.

Mr. Jeff Yurek: I’d like to introduce Sherry Zarins and Andrea Stevens-Lavigne from the lung association, and three constituents of mine: Judy Legg, Sandra Gibbons and Rose Gibbons. Welcome to the Legislature.

M me France Gélinas: J’ai de la grande visite aujourd’hui. C’est M me Ginette Lefebvre qui est venue me voir, de mon comté. Elle fait

partie de la Fédération des enseignantes-enseignants des écoles secondaires de l’Ontario. Je lui souhaite la bienvenue ainsi qu’à tous ses collègues.

Hon. Jeff Leal: In the members’ east gallery today, we have OSSTF members from the wonderful riding of Peterborough: Gary Fenn, Dave Warda and Janie Kelly.

Mr. Monte McNaughton: I’d like to welcome OSSTF members from Sarnia–Lambton, Lambton–Kent–Middlesex and London: Steven Lynch, Blair Middleton and Hendrikus Bervoets.

Mr. Steven Del Duca: I’d like to welcome Ghozal Amin, the sister of my executive assistant, who is here in the east members’ gallery.

Mr. Norm Miller: It’s my pleasure to welcome Glen Hodgson here today from the Near North District School Board, an OSSTF rep and teacher from Parry Sound.

Ms. Catherine Fife: It’s my pleasure to welcome Sherry Freund, Diane Flewwelling and Rob Gascho from OSSTF K-W.

Hon. Brad Duguid: I’m pleased to welcome the Ontario Undergraduate Student Alliance here today, with executive director Rylan Kinnon, Thomas Pritchard and Allison Williams from Queen’s, President Amir Eftekarpour and Patrick Whelan from Western, Adam Garcia from the University of Waterloo, Roland Erman from Brock University and Chris Fernlund from Trent University in Oshawa.

Mr. John O’Toole: I also would like to welcome and thank the teachers from Durham, members of OSSTF. I spoke with a couple, especially Karen Littlewood, who’s from the riding of Durham.

Miss Monique Taylor: I would like to welcome my dear friend Alexander Brown, who is here today with the OSSTF teachers. I know there are teachers from Hamilton here also, but I haven’t seen them in the House yet, and I’m expecting my dear seatmate behind me here to welcome them.

Hon. Tracy MacCharles: I too want to welcome all the reps from OSSTF, of course, but I’d also like to specifically welcome the students from West Hill Collegiate Institute in Scarborough, my alma mater. We have Kasi James-Aikins, Des-Ree Brown, Robert Ehmke and their teacher, Mike Stevens. These students won an opportunity to have lunch with myself and MPP Hunter from Scarborough East. These students correctly identified the year of my graduation from West Hill Collegiate.

Mr. John Yakabuski: I would like to welcome representatives from my riding with the OSSTF, Jeffrey Barber and Jared Hunter, who are joining us today.

Ms. Teresa J. Armstrong: I’d like to extend a warm welcome to the two OSSTF members I met in the London area. Thank you to Blair Middleton and Hendrikus Bervoets for coming to meet with me today.

Hon. Charles Sousa: It gives me great pleasure to welcome Greg Vezina and Kathy Vezina, who are here in the Legislature on behalf of the Mississauga Waterfront Festival to support children’s programs. Thank you for being here at Queen’s Park.

Mr. Jim McDonell: I want to welcome today two members from OSSTF that I met this morning from my riding: Del Jones, and from Alexandria in north Glengarry, Francinna Collard.

Mr. Paul Miller: I also have members of the OSSTF here: Anthony Marco from Hamilton, Chantal Mancini and Lyla Miklos.

Hon. Liz Sandals: I’d like to welcome Paul Elliott, the president of OSSTF, and all the executive members of OSSTF and all the staff members of OSSTF who are here today, and all the education workers from all over the province.

Mr. John Yakabuski: Speaker, I’m actually correcting my record. It is Jared Hunt who is here with Jeffrey Barber today.

Hon. James J. Bradley: I would like us to join together in welcoming, from the District School Board of Niagara and the Niagara Peninsula OSSTF, Daniel Peat, Lindsay Chase and John-Paul Cote.

Hon. Reza Moridi: It’s a great pleasure to introduce a hard-working volunteer and community activist from my riding of Richmond Hill, Gazal Amin, sitting in the members’ gallery over there.

The Deputy Speaker (Mr. Bas Balkissoon): Thank you, and good morning, all.

ORAL QUESTIONS

HYDRO RATES

Ms. Lisa MacLeod: My question is to the Minister of Energy. Minister, good morning. On Monday you released a 33% to 50% rate hike on Ontario families and small businesses. When I asked you two days ago what the impact would be from the gas plant scandal in Mississauga and Oakville, you said it hadn’t been included yet. Then, after question period you had to retract that statement and correct your record.

What is clear is that this government doesn’t know what its energy policy actually means to the people across this province. That’s why, earlier today, I put forward a substantial motion asking your government to go back one year to provide us all documents with respect to the gas plant cancellation and its impact on the ratepayer base as it is seen in the long-term energy plan.

The question is simple: Will you co-operate with the committee to ensure that those documents are in our hands within six weeks from today?

Interjections.

The Deputy Speaker (Mr. Bas Balkissoon): Sit down, please.

The Minister of Energy.

Hon. Bob Chiarelli: Mr. Speaker, the member for Nepean–Carleton is on another wish hunt—W-I-S-H. She’s wishing that her imagination comes true. The information that was provided in committee and provided to the Auditor General was quite clear, and she chooses to misconstrue it. “Misconstrue” is not unparliamentary, Mr. Speaker, because I actually looked it up in the dictionary. The word “misconstrue” means “to fail to understand the true or actual meaning.” And there are a number of synonyms.

The others synonyms are “to misapprehend, to misconstrue, to misinterpret, to mis-know, to misperceive, to misread, to miss, or a mistake.” I would choose the word “mistake,” because the chair of the OPA was at committee. He showed the calculations on the costs, and they actually amount to $1 to $2 per year over 20 years, Mr. Speaker. She doesn’t want to admit it. She chooses to misconstrue it and she wants to obfuscate the truth.

The Deputy Speaker (Mr. Bas Balkissoon): I’ll ask the minister to withdraw.

Hon. Bob Chiarelli: “Obfuscate the truth”? Yes, I withdraw.

The Deputy Speaker (Mr. Bas Balkissoon): Supplementary?

Ms. Lisa MacLeod: It is very clear that the minister still doesn’t understand the implications of his long-term energy act and its cost on the rate base in this province. He doesn’t seem to understand that it is a job killer. He doesn’t understand that he actually has to respond to this assembly. That is why we put forward a very sensible, substantive motion to prove to the ratepayers of Ontario that that government stole $1 billion of their money and misspent it and lied to them.

Interjections.

The Deputy Speaker (Mr. Bas Balkissoon): Sit down, please. Order.

I would ask the member to withdraw.

Ms. Lisa MacLeod: Withdrawn.

The Deputy Speaker (Mr. Bas Balkissoon): Minister?

Hon. Bob Chiarelli: Sometimes the best defence is a good offence, Mr. Speaker, and we’re seeing a tremendous offence here from the critic. What she’s trying to not talk about is the comment of her leader from a couple of days ago. When the Leader of the Opposition was asked if he could promise lower electricity rates, he said, “The answer is no on that.” So I would like to know what your policy is on rates. How high will you let rates go? He’s very, very clearly on the record. And it wasn’t only the Leader of the Opposition—

Interjections.

The Deputy Speaker (Mr. Bas Balkissoon): Member for Simcoe–Grey, come to order.

Hon. Bob Chiarelli: —it was the leader of the third party who said the same thing.

Mr. Speaker, in the next supplementary I’m going to provide some other useful information for the public.

The Deputy Speaker (Mr. Bas Balkissoon): Final supplementary.

Ms. Lisa MacLeod: Listen, the problem is credibility. There’s a massive gap between what this minister says and actual fact. He’s the only Minister of Energy in the province’s history who instead—

Interjections.

The Deputy Speaker (Mr. Bas Balkissoon): Stop the clock.

All of you are making it most difficult. I have to hear the question, and I will try to hear the answer. We’re not doing very good for a Thursday.

Question.

Ms. Lisa MacLeod: Thanks, Speaker. It is very hard to try and speak over the hollers of the Liberal Party because of their credibility—the credibility that they have lost. They have mismanaged $1.1 billion of people’s money in this province. They chose—

Interjections.

The Deputy Speaker (Mr. Bas Balkissoon): I would ask you to withdraw, again.

Ms. Lisa MacLeod: Withdrawn.

Minister, you don’t know your own energy plan. You don’t know where the $1.1 billion went. You don’t know where the 300,000 jobs went. You’ve made a mess of this file.

Will you commit to the committee to work with them to ensure we get the facts, not constant contradictions from you and all of your bureaucrats? Will you commit to that today so I have that information in my hands in the next six weeks, yes or no?

Interjections.

The Deputy Speaker (Mr. Bas Balkissoon): Stop the clock.

Hon. James J. Bradley: No teacher-bashing today.

The Deputy Speaker (Mr. Bas Balkissoon): The Minister of the Environment, come to order.

Interjections.

The Deputy Speaker (Mr. Bas Balkissoon): Is this quiet enough?

Minister.

Hon. Bob Chiarelli: Mr. Speaker, let’s look at some facts. According to the National Energy Board—

Interjections.

The Deputy Speaker (Mr. Bas Balkissoon): Stop the clock.

I can stand here all morning.

Minister.

Hon. Bob Chiarelli: Mr. Speaker, according to the National Energy Board, these are the price increases that are projected over the next 20 years for five of the larger provinces, and these are 20-year projections: Alberta, 3.7% per year; BC, 3% per year. That’s 60% over 20 years. In Manitoba, it’s 3.2%; Quebec, 3%. Again, that’s 60% over 20 years. In Saskatchewan, it’s 3.3%. Our long-term energy plan, over 20 years, projects the cost increases to be 2.8%, Mr. Speaker. We’re better than all of those other provinces for the next 20 years.

MINING INDUSTRY

Mr. Norm Miller: My question is to the Acting Premier. Acting Premier, it seems your government is particularly good at writing press releases, but very lacking in following through on what they promise. When you proclaimed, “Thousands of Jobs Coming to Northern Ontario,” from a press release issued on May 9, 2012, with regard to the Ring of Fire, your government failed to deliver. It is clear now that there was no concrete plan to back up this empty promise.

Only weeks ago, you rushed to announce that a development corporation had been established. I don’t disagree with the concept, although you’ve been talking about the Ring of Fire for years in throne speeches, budgets and economic updates. So Acting Premier, if you’re really serious about creating jobs, shouldn’t your government have created this development corporation four years ago?

Hon. Charles Sousa: Mr. Speaker, I appreciate the question because it speaks about something critical to the province of Ontario and, for that matter, to all of Canada. The Ring of Fire and the development of the chromite deposits, one of the largest in the world, is critical to the livelihood of every Canadian, not just Ontarians. We have taken actions, and we have put forward the development corporation as well as put forward a number of stakeholders, partnering with aboriginal and First Nations communities as well as the Métis Nation to ensure that we have access to these chromite deposits.

A number of proponents are interested, and we’ll continue to work with them. We need all forms of government on board to make this happen. It’s one of the reasons the Premier is now in Ottawa.

The Deputy Speaker (Mr. Bas Balkissoon): Final supplementary?

Mr. Norm Miller: Acting Premier, well, so far you’ve failed miserably on the Ring of Fire.

Acting Premier, your lack of answers on the development corporation is troubling, so it does appear to be yet another empty press release.

And before you go looking for money from the federal government, don’t you think you should have a plan of your own? A transportation link for the Ring of Fire is critical to the success of the project and for the First Nation communities in the area. Now that Cliffs has pulled the plug on the Ring of Fire, are you talking with other miners in the region, including Noront, who has their proposed east-west connection?

Hon. Charles Sousa: Mr. Speaker, as noted, the province of Ontario has been taking leadership on the issues around developing the Ring of Fire for some years now. We have recognized the importance of this development for all of Canada.

We must make note: The member opposite feels it’s not necessary to engage the federal government on this critically important issue. They should be at the table from the start, and they have not—in fact, I find that it’s all but passing strange that infrastructure projects on a national level are made in British Columbia—they’re made in the Northwest Transmission Line of British Columbia—they’re made in the lower Churchill hydroelectric project in Labrador, they’re made in Alberta, and they haven’t been made in Ontario.

It is critical that we get all orders of government on board. Ontario has been the only level of government that’s taken that leadership. We will continue to do so, and it’s why so many other proponents are still interested in making that development happen.

The Deputy Speaker (Mr. Bas Balkissoon): Supplementary?

Mr. Norm Miller: Again to the Acting Premier: I didn’t say you shouldn’t engage the federal government; I said you should have a plan before you engage the—

Interjections.

Mr. Norm Miller: We know the Premier is in Ottawa today meeting with the Prime Minister. We know you like to blame the federal government for your failures, but it’s your government that is sending all the wrong signals. Mining companies are suing your government. In fact, one is currently in court for over $100 million for not fulfilling your duties.

Acting Premier, thousands of potential jobs are at stake. We have cleared the decks here in this Legislature. You have had plenty of time to work on this. When are you going to get your act together and show us your jobs plan for the Ring of Fire?

Interjections.

The Deputy Speaker (Mr. Bas Balkissoon): Sit down, please.

Acting Premier?

Hon. Charles Sousa: They have cleared the deck—they’ve completely cleared themselves of any plan whatsoever.

Over the course of what they’ve discussed has been a very regressive system. I say to the member, what happened to the progressive nature of the Conservative Party on that side of the House? You have not put forward a positive plan to support jobs in our province.

We will continue to invest in the skills of our people to promote the Ring of Fire. We’ll continue to invest in infrastructure projects to enable projects like the Ring of Fire to come to fruition. We’re investing while you’re suggesting we should make cuts all across the board.

In fact, we know, when we speak to other stakeholders and so forth, they make note of the fact that Ontario is an attractive place to invest in because of the investments that we’re making in our future and because of the way we’re stimulating economic growth and attracting that investment to Ontario, including the Ring of Fire.

HYDRO RATES

Ms. Andrea Horwath: My question is for the Acting Premier. People in Ontario haven’t seen a raise in years, but electricity bills are going up by 40% to pay for growing private power deals. People are telling us that they think the Premier just doesn’t get it. Can the Acting Premier explain to people why the Liberal government is more interested in their own political power than in getting power bills under control?

Hon. Charles Sousa: Mr. Speaker, it’s necessary to invest in transmission, it’s necessary to invest in our electricity integrity, and it’s something that has been neglected and was neglected for many years.

Fortunately, our government has now built well over 20 new power plants in this province. We will continue to invest in infrastructure to support that integrity in our electricity system, to maintain our competitiveness in the future. That requires a mix of all products.

The member opposite makes claims about the pricing. That’s exactly why we need to have a long-term solution, provided by the Minister of Energy, to support that competitiveness in the future, which is now as competitive as any of the Great Lakes states and other provinces—

The Deputy Speaker (Mr. Bas Balkissoon): Thank you. Supplementary?

Ms. Andrea Horwath: Liberal power schemes have padded the profit margins of private interests and left people and businesses in this province with the bill. Whether it’s the $150 million that people are paying to US hedge funds for the Mississauga gas plant cancellation or the hundreds of millions wasted on the Oakville gas plant, the fact is that private power interests are watching the cheques roll in while people are worried about the bills rolling in.

Can the Acting Premier explain why the Liberal government doesn’t seem to care that people are worried about making ends meet?

Hon. Charles Sousa: Mr. Speaker, we’ve taken a number of steps to support consumers by providing the clean energy benefit. We’ve taken steps to provide clean energy in this province as a result. The member opposite has yet to show us their plan.

In fact, they have denied any support for nuclear. They are opposed to refurbishment of 50% of our base supply as it stands now. They haven’t supported the green energy initiatives to provide for another 30,000 more jobs, not to mention cleaner energy, and they have yet to decide how it is they want to promote and provide for that integrity, because we need to invest in infrastructure and distribution.

They have also opposed those initiatives. Those are critical for our long-term competitiveness and to ensure that both consumers and industry have reliability of power in our province.

The Deputy Speaker (Mr. Bas Balkissoon): Final supplementary.

Ms. Andrea Horwath: The Minister of Energy said that it’s just “a fact of life” that the bills keep going up. The fact of life is that people can’t afford the bills that keep going up. Every month when people open their power bill, they’re feeling squeezed, and no matter what they do the bills keep getting bigger and bigger. Does the Liberal government not get how important this is to people, or do they simply not care?

Hon. Charles Sousa: The NDP are supporting and promoting the elimination of private investment in our province; that’s essential for Ontario and for our competitiveness, and that would create thousands of jobs. They want instead to create an energy superbureaucracy that doesn’t encourage investment in Ontario.

In fact, it’s Ontario’s hybrid system, a mix of both publicly owned and private investments, that help drive our economy and create tens of thousands of jobs for Ontarians. We must always consider the implications of creating jobs in our province. That’s what this is about.

Maintaining competitiveness and reliability is essential, not just for consumers, but for industry. In fact, I’ll quote here from the Canadian Automotive Partnership Council: “The highest priority for large industrial consumers is access to reliable electricity infrastructure”—something Ontario didn’t have during the brownout era of Mike Harris as well.

ENERGY CONTRACTS

Ms. Andrea Horwath: My next question is also for the Acting Premier. Every time the Liberals had a chance to get the hydro bills under control, they chose to help out private power companies instead. After 90 minutes at the gas plants committee, the Premier couldn’t explain why she signed an arbitration agreement that the Auditor General said gave the upper hand to TransCanada. When the Premier had a chance to get a better deal for Ontarians, she chose to be a good Liberal, and not rock the boat.

Does the Liberal government even care that the Premier helped TransCanada get the upper hand over Ontario families?

Hon. Charles Sousa: Minister of Energy.

Hon. Bob Chiarelli: We have three priorities, and they’re equal priorities, in managing the energy system: one is reliability, two is clean, and three is affordable. We spent $31 billion over 10 years making it reliable, from deficit to surplus, and making it clean, from dirty coal to clean energy.

There are pressures on prices as a result of that $31 billion of investment, but what we have done to transition is to create some support for the people of Ontario by creating the Ontario Clean Energy Benefit, a 10% discount; the Ontario Energy and Property Tax Credit, saving qualifying individuals up to $963 per year, with a maximum of $1,000 for qualifying seniors; the Northern Ontario Energy Credit; the Low-Income Energy Assistance Program; and the saveONenergy Home Assistance Program.

That party voted for some of these supports for the people of Ontario. They should be ashamed of themselves.

The Deputy Speaker (Mr. Bas Balkissoon): Supplementary?

Ms. Andrea Horwath: Talking points simply don’t help people pay the bills. With this government, instead of asking whether there’s a business case for nuclear refurbishments worth millions and millions of dollars—billions, in fact—the government instead has a long-term energy plan that makes it clear that they’re blindly charging ahead no matter what the cost is going to be.

Does the Acting Premier even care? Is he even interested in how much this is going to cost Ontarians?

Hon. Bob Chiarelli: I answered this question yesterday, to her critic. She wants us to tell the public what it’s going to cost for the first stage of refurbishment before we’ve entered into the procurement. We’re going to tell all the bidders what our estimate of the cost is—that will totally destroy the competition on the price. It’s totally irresponsible. The question is premised on an irresponsible idea to tell the world what the cost is going to be before the procurement. We won’t do it that way.

The Deputy Speaker (Mr. Bas Balkissoon): Final supplementary.

Ms. Andrea Horwath: The Liberal power plan should be called the Liberal political power plan. When the Liberals realized that they could get a good deal on the Oakville plant but it would have to be in the news, or they could spend hundreds of millions more and get it done on the QT, what did they choose? They chose the expensive route that helped them politically. When the Premier wants to make splashy announcements to help their friends in private nuclear—who just happened to throw a $100,000 fundraiser for them—all of a sudden, Ontario is plunging into a nuclear refurbishment without even knowing what the final price tag is going to be.

Will the Acting Premier admit that the long-term energy plan is in fact just a Liberal political power plan?

Hon. Bob Chiarelli: Refurbishment is going to generate 25,000 jobs, both from Bruce, which is a private company, and from OPG, which is a public company. We have a hybrid system, and it works extremely well.

But the reality is that the NDP want to create an energy superbureaucracy instead of encouraging competitive investment in the economy in Ontario. The fact is that Ontario has a hybrid system, a mix of both publicly owned generation and private investments, that drives our economy.

Does the leader of the third party know the job creation structure from refurbishment? No. As I asked you on the Thunder Bay question, do you have any evidence? You don’t have any evidence and you don’t have any research to back up your questions. Please come forward with a plan. Tell us what your plan is.

ONTARIO COLLEGE OF TRADES

Mr. Garfield Dunlop: My question is for my colleague the Minister of Training, Colleges and Universities. Minister, you have said over and over again that a major part of the job of the Ontario College of Trades is consumer protection. If that is so, can you explain to me why College of Trades enforcement cops would be investigating a complaint on who is responsible to unload pipe off a truck at a construction site?

Hon. Brad Duguid: I appreciate the question from the member opposite, and I also understand the fact that—look, he never supported the College of Trades when we brought it in, and I expect that it’s going to be hard to convince him to support it now.

But every time an enforcement officer goes out there to ensure that our tradespeople’s professions are being respected, preserved from that underground economy, we can’t have this member coming at us every single time.

We know that you don’t support the consumer protection that the College of Trades is bringing to ensure that consumers, when they hire somebody to do a job that requires skilled trades, know that that person is qualified.

We know that you don’t support the skilled trades sector taking a self-governance approach and governing themselves. For some reason, you don’t think skilled tradespeople are as qualified as the other 44 regulatory bodies across the province. So we know where the member is coming from. We know that at every turn he’s going to try to discredit the College of Trades.

They’re doing a good job. They’re out there doing the job they’re supposed to be doing to ensure that we have a vibrant skilled trades sector—

The Deputy Speaker (Mr. Bas Balkissoon): Thank you. Supplementary?

Mr. Garfield Dunlop: Well, that was quite an answer.

So, Minister, I have a letter here from LIUNA Local 1089 to Bob Onyschuk, director of regulation enforcement, in which he explains that two Ontario College of Trades enforcement officials have nothing better to do than investigate a complaint by UA Local 663 about LIUNA on “whose job it is to unload pipe on the construction site.” Is this for real? Are we kidding here?

Every day, another horror story comes to my office about the Ontario College of Trades. This nonsense does not protect the public or protect the trades in any way, shape or form. It is simply a waste of taxpayers’ money, and the membership money is nothing but a bloody tax grab.

How long are you going to stand by and put up with this nonsense? It is out of control, and a moratorium should be placed on further action until after we abolish it, when you have the courage to call an election.

Interjections.

The Deputy Speaker (Mr. Bas Balkissoon): Sit down, please.

The Minister of Training, Colleges and Universities.

Hon. Brad Duguid: My question is, how long is the member going to rail against an organization that is cracking down on the underground economy? How long is the member going to rail against an organization that has reduced ratios between apprentices and journeypersons by 14, when his government, when they were in power, did zero reductions in ratios? They’re proving their worth, Mr. Speaker.

How long is this member going to rail against the fact that skilled trade workers in this sector have the right, the opportunity and the wisdom to govern themselves a heck of a lot better than that sector was governed when his party was in power? This party continues to attack organized labour. We see it in their right-to-work approach. They’re going to reduce wages for everyday, ordinary skills people and all Ontarians, and union jobs.

We take a different approach. We’re going to continue to rebuild our economy. We’re continuing to support skilled trade workers and we’ll continue to support unionized workers who are working really hard—

The Deputy Speaker (Mr. Bas Balkissoon): Thank you. New question.

CHRIS MAZZA

M me France Gélinas: Ma question est pour le ministre des Finances.

In December 2011, the Minister of Health asked the Ministry of Finance to conduct a forensic audit at Ornge. We know that this audit found serious financial irregularity and a significant discrepancy in terms of Dr. Mazza’s reported and actual pay. The Minister of Health decided not to read the report. Did the Minister of Finance take the time to read the forensic audit of Ornge?

Hon. Charles Sousa: I applaud the Minister of Health for taking the initiative to order this forensic audit the moment she was aware of some of the discretions that were occurring. She immediately did so. She brought forward the forensic audit. Finance went in there, as well as some of the officials, to do the controls, and found some things. And that was sent to the OPP. Those initiatives are under way and we will certainly make every effort to provide as much information as possible to the OPP to enable them with that investigation to go forward. That is what has been taking place.

The Deputy Speaker (Mr. Bas Balkissoon): Supplementary?

M me France Gélinas: I’ll take it that means that he did not read the report. Yet he is responsible for managing the financial affairs of our province. The minister is also responsible for the sunshine list, and his ministry’s audit found that Dr. Mazza’s salary was actually three times higher than what was reported on the sunshine list. The serious financial irregularity at Ornge continues to astound us all and it casts a doubt on the integrity of all financial disclosures.

Can the minister tell us why, like the Minister of Health, he did not want to know just how much money Dr. Mazza was making, why he was not interested in learning from the financial wrongdoing of Ornge and why he is not interested in making sure that it never happens again?

Hon. Charles Sousa: Mr. Speaker, that’s the furthest thing from the truth. The moment we found out what was happening at Ornge, the moment that agency went rogue, in effect, we went in and we clamped down. We took corrective action. The Minister of Health completely removed the board. We removed Dr. Mazza from his role and we provided proper oversight.

Subsequently to that, we’ve actually implemented greater measures of transparency and accountability and oversight on all agencies, and we’ll continue to do that. We must make clear that the issue before us was unique, and his actions are the reason why the OPP and the police are investigating. We will continue to be as open and as transparent and provide the proper oversight on all the broader public sector to ensure these initiatives and these issues never happen again.

TUITION FEES

Ms. Mitzie Hunter: My question is to the Minister of Training, Colleges and Universities. As a former University of Toronto Scarborough campus student and a proud representative of Scarborough–Guildwood, a riding that neighbours the UTSC campus, I know that flat tuition fees are a huge issue for students. I’ve heard about this from many of my constituents.

I also know from personal experience, Speaker, that not every student takes a full course load. Many take fewer courses to account for a part-time job or other personal circumstances. Yet many students across the province taking as little as two thirds of a course load are currently charged the same tuition as a student taking a full course load. This is an issue that student leaders have been raising for some time and is an essential issue of fairness for our students and their families. We must do everything we can to make post-secondary education more accessible and affordable for them.

Speaker, through you to the minister, what is the government doing about this ongoing issue of flat tuition fees?

Hon. Brad Duguid: I want to thank the member for her question but, most of all, for her inspired choice of schools. I’m a UTSC grad myself.

I agree that fairness for students should be top priority for this government. I’ve often said, and we’ve often said, that we must see our post-secondary system through the eyes of our students. That’s exactly why we announced today that we’re moving forward with our commitment to tackle flat fees for undergraduate students.

This new policy will ensure that university students across the province taking less than an 80% course load will be charged on a per-credit basis. This will be fairer to students who, for whatever personal reason, choose to take less than 80% of a course load but are charged for that full course load.

At the same time, universities that adopted a flat-fee approach will need some time to adjust, because there’s a revenue impact for them. So we’re going to give them about three years to phase this in.

I want to thank the student leaders who are here today. I want to thank student leaders who have brought this issue to our attention. We’re pleased to respond on their behalf.

The Deputy Speaker (Mr. Bas Balkissoon): Supplementary?

Ms. Mitzie Hunter: Thank you to the minister. It’s important to hear that this government is taking the initiative to tackle flat-fee tuition billing in Ontario. This will make a difference in the lives of students in my riding and help make post-secondary education more affordable, making it possible for more young people to pursue post-secondary goals, like the students here from my riding and from West Hill Collegiate.

But, Speaker, flat fees are not the only issue facing our post-secondary students when they pay their tuition fees each year. Many students are relying on financial assistance, and they face fee deferrals or late charges when their tuition fees are due, prior to receiving their OSAP funding.

Speaker, this just isn’t fair to those students receiving financial assistance. Students are being hit with late charges when they have no control on when their OSAP is received. Can the minister outline any actions he plans to take to address this unfairness?

Hon. Brad Duguid: I’m pleased to report that we announced earlier today as well that we’re removing this unnecessary burden to students across the province. In fact, we’re making significant improvements to the process in which students pay for their tuition.

Our new policies will ensure that all students will be able to pay tuition in per-term installments, without paying deferral fees or interest charges. Tuition deposits will be capped and applied against tuition fees, not on top of fees owed. Students’ tuition fees will not be due before the beginning of August, and students receiving financial aid—and this is one of the important pieces—will not be charged late fees and will not be expected to pay tuition until their OSAP assistance arrives.

Mr. Speaker, we’ve listened carefully to students, and, again, I want to acknowledge the voices that we’ve heard of our student leaders who are here today and across the province. We’ve heard their voices. We’ve continued to respond to their concerns, and we’re very, very pleased and we should be proud of the input that they’ve had in public policy in this province.

HYDRO RATES

Mr. Todd Smith: My question is for the energy minister this morning. The monthly hydro bill at Sigma Stretch Film in Belleville in January 2011—that’s about two and a half years ago—was $143,000. Today, the monthly hydro bill is $325,000. It’s a company that employs 123 people in my riding. By the time, Minister, your 42% rate increase kicks in, the monthly hydro bill at Sigma is going to be $461,000 a month. That’s an increase all thanks to the Liberal energy plan. Last month, your government gave Sigma a $237,000 grant, which will cover about half a month’s hydro bill by 2017.

Minister, the management at Sigma admits it’s less expensive to do business in New Jersey than it is in Ontario. When is your government going to stop picking the pockets of Ontario businesses? Admit that you’ve screwed up our electricity system so badly that we can’t recover—

Interjections.

The Deputy Speaker (Mr. Bas Balkissoon): Order. Sit down, please.

Minister.

Hon. Bob Chiarelli: Mr. Speaker, I’d like to deal with some facts. Ontario’s industrial rates compare favourably with other jurisdictions despite—

Interjection.

The Deputy Speaker (Mr. Bas Balkissoon): Member for Northumberland–Quinte West, you’re warned.

Hon. Bob Chiarelli: —what the Progressive Conservatives claim. Industrial rates in northern Ontario are among the lowest in Canada and lower than 44 American states. Industrial rates in southern Ontario are lower than in Alberta, Michigan, New Jersey and California—you mentioned New Jersey—and align with states like New York, Virginia and Tennessee.

Mr. Speaker—

Interjection.

The Deputy Speaker (Mr. Bas Balkissoon): The member for Stormont–Dundas–South Glengarry, you’re warned.

Hon. Bob Chiarelli: —as an example, for an industrial consumer with a demand of five megawatts per month, our 2010 LTEP, long-term energy plan, had projected that, in 2014, they will be paying $109 per megawatt hour. Under this current plan, the industrial consumer will pay $87 per megawatt hour in 2014. That is a significant reduction.

They don’t know the facts. They don’t know the file. They are spinning the public, and these are the true facts that—

The Deputy Speaker (Mr. Bas Balkissoon): Thank you.

Hon. Bob Chiarelli: —an independent third party, Mr. Speaker.

The Deputy Speaker (Mr. Bas Balkissoon): Thank you. Supplementary?

Mr. Todd Smith: Minister, the Liberal wind turbines continue to spin, but nobody in Ontario is buying that Liberal spin. Nobody in Ontario is buying that.

Last week, you climbed up on your high horse and told the Ontario people that it was their responsibility to understand why your government has turned the lowest hydro rates in North America into the highest in all of North America. For months, Hydro One—and I’ve written you a letter on this—has been forcing Upper Canada Minerals—that’s an employer of almost 30 people in the Madoc and Bancroft area in centre and northern Hastings—to use what they call “dirty” power, made up of your intermittent power sources, your wind and solar.

It’s causing fluctuations in their power rates, and it’s doing damage to their very expensive equipment and slowing down productivity. The problems occurring at Upper Canada Minerals show that your rhetoric about improving the hydro grid is nothing but a Liberal illusion.

Minister, after driving up rates and now having problems with the grid, when are you going to finally admit that you failed? Why don’t you stand up today and resign?

Interjections.

The Deputy Speaker (Mr. Bas Balkissoon): Order. Stop the clock.

Interjections.

Mr. John Yakabuski: Todd’s offering you some good advice over there.

Hon. James J. Bradley: We need Konrad Yakabuski in here.

The Deputy Speaker (Mr. Bas Balkissoon): The Minister of the Environment and the member from Renfrew–Nipissing–Pembroke, come to order. When I stand, you’re supposed to stay quiet.

Interjections.

The Deputy Speaker (Mr. Bas Balkissoon): The members from Northumberland–Quinte West and Stormont–Dundas–South Glengarry, maybe because of the noise you haven’t heard me. You’ve both been warned.

Minister.

Hon. Bob Chiarelli: Mr. Speaker, I really want to refer this to the Minister of Economic Development, Trade and Employment.

Hon. Eric Hoskins: Thank you, and I appreciate the referral.

Mr. Speaker, I can’t believe what I’m hearing from the member from Prince Edward–Hastings. He knows that, last month, I had the proud opportunity to visit Sigma Stretch Film announcing a new investment from the Eastern Ontario Development Fund—

Interjection.

The Deputy Speaker (Mr. Bas Balkissoon): Minister of Rural Affairs, come to order.

Hon. Eric Hoskins: —he was there at the company with me for the announcement. In fact, it wasn’t the first investment, it was the second investment that this government has made.

I can tell you that among manufacturers in the province that I’ve visited, this is one of the most successful, promising companies. He doesn’t have to take my word for it. He simply needs to talk to the company—

Interjection.

The Deputy Speaker (Mr. Bas Balkissoon): The member for Prince Edward–Hastings, you asked the question.

Hon. Eric Hoskins: —in just about 10 years, they’ve gone from a company of eight employees up to now, I think, they’re at about 120—

Interjections.

Hon. Eric Hoskins: They’re doing fantastic. The export market is growing. It’s a beautiful example of advanced manufacturing.

I don’t know where he gets his information, but he’s definitely not talking to the same company that I visited just a few weeks ago.

Interjections.

The Deputy Speaker (Mr. Bas Balkissoon): Thank you. Sit down, please.

New question. The member for Timmins–James Bay.

Interjections.

The Deputy Speaker (Mr. Bas Balkissoon): Stop the clock.

Interjection.

The Deputy Speaker (Mr. Bas Balkissoon): The Minister for Rural Affairs, I’ve asked you to come to order more than once.

Member for Timmins–James Bay.

HYDRO RATES

Mr. Gilles Bisson: My question is to the Minister of Energy. Across northern Ontario, people are hopping mad in regard to what they’re going to see their hydro bills increase by with the announcement you made on Monday in your long-term energy plan. It is not good news for citizens to hear that their hydro rates over the next three years are going to go up by 33%, and we’re getting a lot of response.

I’ve got this particular person, Andrea Heward from North Bay, who writes, “I am a homeowner, I work full-time, and I am disabled.… Electricity is very important in my day-to-day living.… I have an electric wheelchair that has to be plugged in on a daily and nightly basis … so I can go to work the next day without having to worry about the battery. I am paying $3,600 a year in hydro minimum, I only make $32,000 per year, which means I am paying more than 10% of my annual household income in hydro.”

She can’t afford to pay her hydro bill, Minister, and you’re raising the rates. How do you see that as being fair to Mrs. Heward in North Bay?

Hon. Bob Chiarelli: As I said earlier, Mr. Speaker, we have made very significant investments in the system in order that it be reliable and it be clean, and that put pressure on rates.

As a result of that pressure, we took some transitional steps. That includes the Ontario Clean Energy Benefit, which takes 10% off the bottom line on the bills. The Ontario Energy and Property Tax Credit saves qualifying individuals up to $963 per year—it probably applies to that person—with a maximum of $1,097 per year for qualifying seniors. The Northern Ontario Energy Credit saves families up to $210 per year and individuals up to $137 per year. In addition, we have the Low-Income Energy Assistance Program and the saveONenergy Home Assistance Program.

These are cumulative, Mr. Speaker. That particular electricity consumer can access all of these programs, and I assume most of them will apply to her.

The Deputy Speaker (Mr. Bas Balkissoon): Supplementary?

Mr. Gilles Bisson: Minister, I think this consumer knows very well how to apply, and that’s including that she’s having to pay her hydro bill.

I have another email here from Donald Bates from Thunder Bay, who says, “I have been living at my current address in Thunder Bay, Ontario for the past 10 years. I have over the past 10 years purchased new appliances all” of which are “energy-efficient and have installed ... energy-efficient lights. Each year, my energy consumption has been” going down.

However, for years now, he has been preached to by government to conserve, “yet the more I conserve, the more I” pay.

So I say to you again, Minister, people across the north are hopping mad that no matter what they do, no matter how they try to prepare themselves, no matter how much they try to conserve, their hydro rates have gone up, and now they’re going to go up another 33%. How do you square that off as being fair for people who need hydro on a day-to-day basis for their life?

Hon. Bob Chiarelli: Speaker, the announcement of the long-term energy plan several days ago provided the opportunity for a lot of people to express their opinions on the plan. One of the questions that was asked of both the leader of the third party and the Leader of the Opposition was, “Could you promise to lower electricity rates?” The answer from both of them was, “No.” So I’d like to know what the plan is. Mr. Speaker, they have no plan.

The reality is that when you compare the rates for a 20-year period that have been revealed by the National Energy Board, Alberta’s 20-year projection is 3.7%; British Columbia, 3%. That’s 60% over the 20 years, Mr. Speaker. Ontario’s, under this long-term energy plan, over 20 years, is a 2.8% average increase. That’s an improvement over our plans in 2010. It’s progress. Plus, we have all those other support programs for members of the public.

EDUCATION

Mr. Shafiq Qaadri: Ma question est pour la ministre de l’Éducation, l’honorable Liz Sandals.

For those of us who value quality, publicly funded education, including so many of Ontario’s teachers who are here with us today, it was reassuring to witness earlier this week the passage of Bill 122, the School Boards Collective Bargaining Act, which passed second reading after 14 hours of debate.

As one of the earliest educational philosophers, Plato, said rather a long time ago, one of the measures of a society is the care it devotes to its youth. In that spirit, the Wynne government has worked tirelessly and perseveringly to rebuild our commitment and relationships with our partners in the education communities. We all aspire to move forward with a common purpose to improve student achievement and ultimately build a more prosperous and just society.

Can the minister please inform this chamber: What are the next steps for moving this important piece of legislation through the parliamentary process?

Hon. Liz Sandals: Thank you to the member from Etobicoke North for raising this important question. I, too, was extremely pleased to have Bill 122, the School Boards Collective Bargaining Act, pass second reading this week.

This is an important step forward in how we work with our partners in education, some of whom are joining us here today. I know that many of my colleague MPPs will be meeting with representatives from the Ontario Secondary School Teachers’ Federation today to talk about how we can all work together to build on the progress we have made in student achievement over the past 10 years.

Part of this is ensuring that we provide the education sector with a clear process, with defined roles for the parties as we approach the next round of collective bargaining. The next step is to send Bill 122 to committee for public hearings and clause-by-clause examination and then hopefully back to the Legislature for third reading. I look forward to support from members so t