Mrs. Lisa Gretzky: It’s my pleasure to rise and add comment to my colleague’s 20 minutes on Bill 70. She did a very, very thorough job of highlighting some of the major issues in this omnibus bill, things like schedules 16 and 17, which should not be in a finance bill.
I’m going to read a portion of a quote directly from a ministry email; the member from Oshawa read it as well. It’s the piece that says, “Reduce the burden of unnecessary processes such as routine inspections.” Then I’d like to read something else from her notes that came directly from a Ministry of Labour inspector: “Ministry of Labour inspectors have written thousands of orders to contraventions. Thousands of health and safety contraventions to which orders are written by health and safety inspectors on proactive field visits. Thousands of violations. Thousands of contraventions. Thousands of orders.”
That piece represents thousands of potential workplace injuries, thousands of potential workplace deaths, thousands of workers who could be so seriously injured, they will never work again and cannot provide for their families—thousands of families who could face not having their loved one because this ministry has stripped oversight and feels that routine safety inspections are a burden.
I give this to the ministry—to the government—to think about: What kind of a burden is it for an employee who is injured on the job? What kind of a burden is it to someone who has lost a limb? What kind of a burden is it to a family that has lost a loved one because you have stripped oversight?