All three parties in the legislature put aside partisan differences this week to honour the province’s Muslim community — but not before a bit of partisan jockeying got in the way.

Islamic Heritage Month bill gets unanimous consent, eventually

After three attempts last week, the New Democrats achieved the unanimous consent they’d been seeking to have the legislature declare October Islamic Heritage Month. NDP leader Andrea Horwath announced Thursday her party had secured the approval of the Liberals by having the bill re-introduced by London-Fanshawe MPP Teresa Armstong — this time with a Liberal and PC co-sponsor. (MPPs Shafiq Qaadri and Raymond Cho, respectively.)

“They would have preferred, rather than us having passage of the bill ourselves, they wanted to be named as co-sponsors,” Horwath said. “The Conservatives were happy to move forward with it, but the Liberals were concerned that they weren’t named on the bill.”

The Islamic Heritage Month Act passed speedily through second and third reading on Thursday morning.

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The Liberals denied that they had obstructed the bill’s passage simply to ensure they could share the credit, with House Leader Yasir Naqvi saying the NDP were “playing politics” with his faith.

Tories say Ontario Lottery and Gaming “wasted” $308 million

The Tories charged the government had “wasted” $308 million on changes at Ontario Lottery and Gaming, which oversees gambling in the province. The agency has been working on “modernizing” its operations since 2012, when then-premier Dalton McGuinty was looking for ways to boost revenue for the government without raising taxes.

“After more than two years, the government abandoned their plans to modernize OLG, but not before sticking the Ontario taxpayers with another hefty bill,” said PC finance critic and Nipissing MPP Vic Fedeli.

OLG announced last month it was abandoning efforts to find a privately-owned firm to take over lottery operations, but the move to privatize the casino operations — already happening in eastern Ontario — is continuing, as is an expansion of online gambling.

Changes coming for doctors and teachers

Education and health care are the government’s two biggest budget items, and this week saw changes proposed for both. The Liberals introduced Bill 37, the Protecting Students Act, which would strengthen the disciplinary process for teachers accused of abusing their students. Bill 37 would also impose new and harsher penalties for anyone found to have sexually abused a student or having committed a “prohibited act involving child pornography.” The administrative penalties for teachers are separate from any civil or criminal penalties they might face.

Minister of Health and Long-Term Care Eric Hoskins also introduced the Bill 41, the Patients First Act. Bill 41 (like Bill 37) was originally introduced in the spring sitting, before the legislature was prorogued. It would abolish Community Care Access Centres and give their responsibilities to Local Health Integration Networks, with the intent of streamlining the health care bureaucracy. (CCACs currently coordinate home and community care services such as nursing and physiotherapy; LHINs run the province’s hospitals.) The law would also health care professionals to share information amongst each other more easily, so a patient won't need to repeat her medical history as she sees multiple specialists.

Doctors are wary of Bill 41, however. The Ontario Medical Association says it “provides sweeping powers for the Minister of Health and LHIN CEOs to impose decisions on local patient care.” In June, when the bill was first introduced, the group Concerned Ontario Doctors said the bill risked setting medical practices by “popular votes or arbitrary budgetary constraints” instead of science.

Public Accounts released late — and with a deficit disagreement

Treasury Board President Liz Sandals released the public accounts for the 2015-16 fiscal year — the detailed statements of what the government spent where. There were, however, a few hiccups. The Liberals missed the deadline set out in provincial law for making the books public due to a disagreement with Auditor General Bonnie Lysyk over how to account for surplus payments to public pension funds. The government says they’ve historically been considered assets, meaning they can be counted against the government’s “net debt.” The auditor general says that practice needs to stop since the government doesn’t have access to the money once it’s in a public pension fund.

The end result: two competing estimates of the government’s debt and deficit were released this week. The government put the province’s 2015-16 deficit at $3.5 billion, while the auditor general says it was $5 billion. Even Lysyk’s accounting shows a deficit $700 million lower than the most recent projections. By Thursday, in order to meet their legal requirement to produce the public accounts, the government had provisionally agreed to file the accounts with the auditor general’s preferred numbers and has booted the whole dispute to the Public Sector Accounting Board righto settle on a final number.

Cabinet makes peace with the financial accountability officer

As the government had a public fight with one accountability officer, they ended another. Premier Kathleen Wynne signed an order-in-council requiring government ministries to comply with requests for information by the Financial Accountability Officer Stephen LeClair. He had complained earlier this year that ministries were stonewalling his requests for documents, which he said was likely the result of “political direction.”

The order-in-council requires staff to provide the FAO with any documents the office requests as long as cabinet has made and announced a decision on the matter in question, even if the issue might come back for debate again in the future.

LeClair was very pleased with the announcement, saying the move will make his work substantially easier and improve the public’s access to his office’s analysis, since he’ll no longer have to spend weeks and months fighting ministry staff for the information he needs.

The one drawback to an order-in-council is that it could be reversed by a successor government. The Ministry of Finance would not say this week whether it would look to strengthen the order-in-council with changes to the financial accountability officer’s legislation.

Question period

The Treasury Board’s failure to table the public accounts on time — and the ensuing public argument with the auditor general — added some variety to question period, as the government continued to deal with the perennial topics of energy prices, the sale of Hydro One and services for people with disabilities.

PC treasury board critic and Nepean-Carleton MPP Lisa MacLeod accused the government of trying to “bully” Lysyk into changing her numbers and called on the government to accept the AG’s numbers unconditionally.

NDP finance critic and Kitchener-Waterloo MPP Catherine Fife noted that, in the unaudited numbers the government presented early in the week, several agencies were simply missing.

The PC representative for Elgin-Middlesex-London, Jeff Yurek, also asked about expenditures under the Ministry of Natural Resources and Forestry’s “special purpose account” — which is intended to fund programs for anglers and hunters, but has instead apparently been spending money on housing and psychologists.

Bills and motions

The following government bills were debated:

Bill 2, Election Finances Statute Law Amendment Act: The government’s bill to reform election campaign fundraising would impose stricter limits on raising money as well as regulate third-party advertisers. It passed second reading 51-40 and has been sent to committee.

Bill 7, Promoting Affordable Housing Act: This bill would make a number of changes to the province’s land-use planning rules as well as the rules for tenants and landlords with the overall goal of increasing the supply of affordable housing. It’s at second reading.

Bill 27, Burden Reduction Act: This wide-ranging bill has 17 different sections aimed at streamlining regulations of companies and courts, as part of the government’s goal to make it easier to do business in Ontario. Some laws would be repealed outright, and the government would allow more convenient forms of communication (such as phone or email) for some purposes. It’s at the second reading stage.

Bill 28, All Families Are Equal Act: This bill changes the rules dictating who may and may not be listed as a child’s parent on provincial documents, allowing LGBT couples who use assisted reproductive methods to give birth the same rights as heterosexual couples who have children. It is at the second reading stage.

The New Democrats had an opposition day this week, in which they called on the government to halt the sale of shares in Hydro One as well as the privatization of municipal electricity utilities such as Toronto Hydro. The motion was defeated 15-57 with both Progressive Conservatives and Liberals voting against.

The following private member’s business was debated on Thursday:

A motion from Bob Delaney (Liberal, Mississauga-Streetsville) called on the government to work with municipalities to ensure drinking water is fluoridated “so that all Ontarians, to the fullest extent practicable, are protected with municipal drinking water fluoridation.” The non-binding motion passed on a voice vote.

Bill 17, Saving the Girl Next Door Act: This bill from Laurie Scott (PC, Haliburton-Kawartha Lakes-Brock) changes existing laws to further strengthen the prohibitions on human trafficking. If passed the law would declare February 22 as Human Trafficking Awareness Day, add new legal penalties for anyone convicted of human trafficking, and add human trafficking to the charges that would require a person being listed on the sex offender registry. The bill passed on a voice vote and was sent to committee.

Bill 36, Albanian Heritage Month Act: This bill from Shafiq Qaadri (Liberal, Etobicoke North) would declare November Albanian Heritage Month. It passed on a voice vote and was sent to committee.

Queen’s Park This Week is TVO.org’s weekly roundup of key events at the Ontario legislature. For more coverage of provincial politics, watch TVO’s archive of the most recent question periods at Queen’s Park.