It is now time for Oral Questions, the member from Nipissie. Well, thank you very much, Speaker. My question this morning is for the Premier. I'd like to acknowledge a dubious anniversary today, Premier, that no one outside of the Liberal Party is celebrating. Two years ago today, you as campaign co-chair put in place an expensive Liberal seat-saver program. Of course, I'm talking about the cancellation of the Mississauga power plants. It's their anniversary today. Let's call it the crowning achievement in a career of Liberal self-interest. Well, I'll tell you, Speaker, who's not celebrating today. It's the Ontarians who've seen their taxes and their hydro-rate skyrocket because they simply did not care what it cost to win those seats. We've learned, Premier, that you've spent $275 million to cancel the Mississauga power plant. Would you take this opportunity to tell Ontarians what it cost to cancel the Oakville power plant? Thank you. Thank you very much, Mr. Speaker. Before I am going to answer the question, but before I do that, Mr. Speaker, I want to thank all of the women from the legislature who attended the Habitat for Humanity bill yesterday, the women bill. And I want to congratulate the member for Huron Bruce for winning the hammering contest. Awesome. Mr. Speaker, yes, and she's in the leader's chair today. You win a hammering contest. Look what happens. Here you go. Mr. Speaker, I think it's important to recognize that the issue that the member opposite raises is one that we all agreed on, that every party in the legislature agreed, Mr. Speaker, that the siting of those gas plants was not what it should have been. So, in fact, Thursday is a two-year anniversary of the leader of the opposition's promise, Mr. Speaker, to move those gas plants. So we implemented the promise that all of the parties in the legislature had put in place, Mr. Speaker. Thank you, Speaker. I know you don't want to talk about your cancellation of Mississauga, but we also know that you have been given a draft copy of the auditor general's findings on Oakville. Will you tell us what it cost to cancel the plant or will you continue in a long line of liberal operatives who have dodged, deleted, and destroyed documents? And while you're at it, will you please tell us when the overdue documents will be turned over? These are the ones that your team was to turn over to us. Our committee lasts September 12th. Your energy minister, his deputy, the IESO, and the OPA have all failed to turn over their documents on September 12th. Premier, your operatives are all risking contempt.  Will you order those documents to be turned over to our committee today? Thank you very much, Mr. Speaker. And I know that the government house leader may have something that he wants to say on this, but I will just say, first of all, we do not have a copy of the auditor general's report. And so no matter how many times the member opposite suggests that we do, we do not have a copy of it. And when we do, Mr. Speaker, obviously it will be available. I do not have the draft report. I do not have the draft report. I do not have the report. I have seen neither. So Mr. Speaker, that's in answer to that part of the question. On the other issue, I just want to outline what has been provided. 135,000 documents have been provided to answer the questions that have been asked. 95 hours of testimony. Thank you. Thank you, Premier. Final supplementary. Thank you, Speaker. So let's recap where we are. On this second anniversary of your cancelling the Mississauga Gas Plan, you spent at least $585 million of Ontario taxpayer and rate payer money, and we're not done yet. You won't tell us the cost of the Oakville cancellation, even though you already know it, and you won't turn over the documents that were due two weeks ago. Furthermore, you won't expand the mandate of the Justice Committee to allow us to talk about influencing the Speaker's office. Your buzzwords are not... It's a question. I caution the member, and I ask again, a reminder to all members, we do not comment on an already ruled-upon issue. Thank you. Reward that question. Premier, your buzzwords are not open and transparent. They're clam up and cover up. You're not fooling anyone, Premier. We want answers on Oak... Excuse me, excuse me. The member will withdraw. I withdraw, Speaker. We want answers on Oakville. We want an expanded mandate, and we want our documents now. Thank you. So, I came into this office, Mr. Speaker. I said that we were going to open up the process and we were going to provide answers to the questions that were being asked, and that we were going to provide the documentation. That is what we've done, Mr. Speaker. As I said, 135,000 documents have been provided. 95 hours of testimony, Mr. Speaker. 55 witnesses, and that goes on. And counting. 32 motions, Mr. Speaker. There has been a lot of work done to determine exactly what the issues were surrounding the relocation of the gas plants. I asked for the Auditor General to look at both the Mississauga and the Oakville plants, Mr. Speaker. I thought that it was important that both plants be... both situations be looked at, so that's why we are getting a report, Mr. Speaker, on the Oakville plant, and we don't have that report yet, so I do not know the deliberations or the conclusions of the Auditor General yet, Mr. Speaker. But our process in this has been to provide the answers to the questions that have been asked of what we've been doing. Thank you. No question. The member from Renfrew and Nipissing County. Thank you very much. My question is for the Premier. Premier, it's been two years since the McGindy-Winn Liberals canceled the Mississauga gas plant in the middle of the 2011 election, and it's been a year of its opposition. It took months of obstruction from your House Leader before a committee was finally able to look into the scandal, and since then you've taken every opportunity to undermine its work. You've sworn repeatedly that all the documents have been turned over. But here we go again. Another deadline passed two weeks ago, and we're still waiting for 20,000 pages of documents. Premier, are you ready to admit and that you're hoping if you stall this long enough, it'll just go away? Mr. Speaker, the opposition just came off a policy weekend, and there's a lot of bluster criticism. Their job is to oppose, but it's also their job to provide policies. They issued a white paper a number of months ago dealing with privatizing Ontario power generation and the nuclear fleet. Well, what the Toronto Sun, that liberal newspaper that Toronto Sun had to say, was that who that should keep in mind the last Tory government in Ontario that tried to do that with electricity generation, promised it would lead to lower rates. Mr. Speaker, instead it led to the exact opposite. Race skyrocketed amid rapid Tory patronage on the conspiracy. As a reminder to everyone, when I stand, your mice get turned off and the time stops. And comments while I'm trying to speak are not helpful at all, including trying to shout down the member from trying to answer. And I would ask everyone to have that same dignity that everyone is deserved when asking a question and when answering a question. And I will remind you again, when the questions get put, I'm still hearing noise from the side that's putting the question, and when somebody I'm hearing heckling from the side that's putting the answer. It's not conducive to this place. Please finish, you have a wrap up. Thank you. So the liberal newspaper that Toronto Sun said, instead it led to the exact opposite. Race skyrocketed amid rapid Tory patronage and the Conservatives faced with rising public fury, abandoned the scheme leaving a financial disaster in their way. Thank you. I'm going to go back to the Premier. Premier, sometimes you've got to put your money where your mouth is. It's not enough to say you want the committee to do its work. You also have to direct your liberal operatives to stop obstructing. This afternoon, after repeatedly refusing to testify in the lead-up to the by-elections, we will finally be hearing from the Minister of Energy's former issues manager, Mr. Ryan Dunn. When staff at the OPA withheld the bill and given the orders, when we asked witnesses who were responsible for the lobal and inaccurate cost of cancelling the gas plants, again, Mr. Dunn's name was invoked. Premier, if a miracle does occur and Mr. Dunn remembers who in the Liberal Party ordered him to obstruct the work of the committee, will that person be fired today? Mr. Speaker, we appreciate the fact that they're going to continue to criticize. That's part of their job. It's also part of their job to be clear in their own policy. Mr. Speaker, the leader of the official opposition seems to change his mind daily when it comes to win contracts. At the Association of Municipalities of Ontario, he said he would not rip up existing contracts. Yet just the other week at the international clowing match, he seemed to see the party, Mr. Houdaq's hidden agenda. What does he mean? Is he going to cancel existing contracts? Yes or no? You guys have to be accountable for your policies. Final supplementary. Minister certainly is an expert on win because that's what we're getting from over there. Premier, by refusing to hold Liberal partisans to account for their actions, you're daring less than five other witnesses as being a key player in the Liberal Party strategy to withhold documents and obstruct the work of the committee. If he comes before committee this afternoon and claims not to know anything and that sworn testimony by other witnesses has been false, you will be sending a strong message about your kind of leadership. Under a Kathleen Wynn government, Liberal partisans can destroy documents, ignore members' privilege and mislead the public. I'm concerned with the way in which it's being used. You can say something on the side that tries to and say the same thing, so I'm going to ask the member to withdraw and I'm also going to ask the member to refrain from using personal names. As I will remind the government side members for using the refrain from using names, we always refer to members either by their title or by their writing. Member will finish his question, please. I withdraw and all members will stand on the head to thank them for a job well done. Question? Before you became Premier, you stood for something more than that. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Minister of Energy. Yes, again Mr. Speaker, they are really tremendous critics and we hear them day in and day out but they're coming off a policy conference Mr. Speaker and they needed to verify some things there and they haven't done so. You know, the leader of the opposition came out with a new policy several weeks ago to support industrial energy rates in the province of Ontario and he said he was going to fund that by cancelling renewable energy, remove that from the grid Mr. Speaker. Well, we did some calculations and the calculations show that the 4% of renewable energy that's in the grid, there's no way it can support any industrial program and once again, their numbers just don't add up. You analyze the whole platform and none of their numbers will add up Mr. Speaker. It's time to wait and see on their policy. We know they're good critics now they can't stand for anything that's clear, concise, all adds up Mr. Speaker. New question? The leader of the third party? Thank you, Speaker. My question is for the Premier. Last spring, New Democrats pushed hard to make life more affordable for drivers facing the highest auto insurance rates in Canada. Is the Premier still committed to delivering results for drivers Speaker? Yes Mr. Speaker, and I've made that clear in a number of instances when the leader of the third party has asked me that question. I've made it clear that reducing auto rates was something that was very much on my radar Mr. Speaker. Before I came into this office, I wanted to make sure that there was no government to reduce auto insurance premiums. Mr. Speaker, that's our target. We are working with the industry to get the costs out of the industry so that those average costs of auto insurance premiums can go down. That's our commitment Mr. Speaker. Thank you. Supplementary? Well Speaker, two years ago Ontario's Auditor General noted that part of the formula used the word to justify. Now the Liberal government promised a cut of 25% to insurance companies return on equity. Did that happen Speaker? Minister of Finance Mr. Speaker? So Mr. Speaker, the leader of the third party is talking about the ROE reduction that was incorporated but it's not the measure that's going to make the difference here. What makes a difference is us getting at the anti-task force recommendations on fraud. It's working closely with a very competitive insurance industry in the province of Ontario which I may say have now come forward initiating reductions publicly on insurance rates both cooperators and CAA have made reference to that. We have encouraged the public to shop at various other insurance providers who have come forward with reductions and the industry has noted that even prior to us coming forward with our policy and initiations to reduce rates that they did decline by 0.4% even prior to us making those calls. Mr. Speaker? Well Speaker, while the Minister of Finance loudly promised a major reduction in the House last spring, when the time came for action the Liberals quietly backtracked in the dead of October. The Liberal Government promised to take a stand for drivers and in the end they didn't keep that promise. Does the Premier think that that's delivering results Speaker? So Mr. Speaker we have been working on reducing auto insurance rates for a number of years. We are the ones that actually initiated the anti-task fraud task force. We are the ones that introduced legislation 2004 to reduce insurance rates which by the way, neither party have been able to achieve during the time that they were in power. We will continue to do what's necessary and work with the opposition as well as all others in our province to get those rates down and I'm pleased to say that the actions that we have taken are now proving to show results Mr. Speaker. Thank you. Back to the Premier Mr. Speaker, in hearings last week New Democrats pressed for details on this issue and Government bureaucrats admitted that this broken promise would create a barrier to lowering rates and getting the 15% reduction that the Liberals promised but drivers aren't seeing. Does the Premier agree? No Mr. Speaker I don't agree because we made a commitment in our budget that we would work with the sector to reduce auto insurance and that is what we're doing Mr. Speaker as the Minister of Finance has said we established the anti-fraud task force we're implementing the recommendations Mr. Speaker we need to get those costs out of the system in order for the average auto insurance rates to go down Mr. Speaker rates are not increasing on average in fact on average rates are going down Mr. Speaker that has already happened. Reductions for individual drivers will be different depending on a number of factors driving record Mr. Speaker so the members of the third party know Mr. Speaker that even the 15% reduction is an average reduction across all the drivers in the province Mr. Speaker that reduction is spread across the province so we are working to make sure that we hit those targets and 15% reduction is the target that we're aiming for Mr. Speaker Supplementary? Drivers were promised relief and the government should be putting a plan into overdrive they're shifting into reverse instead Christine from Mississauga she tells us this I received and I quote I received my insurance renewal this summer and it has not gone down it has gone up by $60 per month I've had to take a second part-time job just to afford a car and now with this latest even higher increase I really don't know how I will be able to keep going after backtracking on yet another commitment to drivers what does the premier have to say to people like Christine Mr. Finance well thank you Mr. Speaker so let's be clear members within the NDP have actually written on this issue and cited the following we cannot truthfully say they've broken a promise in reference to what we are doing here in the government I've already stated very clearly that as a result of the initiatives that we've taken rates have been going down in fact rates went down by .3% even prior to us making the call while the member may want to talk about individual issues we are talking about the industry average and we are citing and noting that both cooperators and CAA have already made a pledge to bring it down we are providing new licenses for medical clinics and fines already being levy and we provided new powers to FISCO so that we can enforce and ensure that those savings are transferred to the public and the public have means and ways to go to make those complaints official so that we can make sure that they are all being protected Mr. Speaker I have no hesitation in standing in my place right now and saying the government broke their promise are reducing would take the tough steps needed to bring down rates instead the liberals did break that promise drivers were told the government would heed the advice of the auditor instead the liberals ignored that advice speaker drivers were promised that rates would go down instead many drivers with clean records are seeing their rates climb drastically does the premier think that this is delivering results Mr. Speaker so Mr. Speaker achieving reduction in the premiums is giving results achieving reductions in their claim cost is enabling those premiums to go down and the member is making reference to ROE at a benchmark of 11 or 12 percent the fact of the matter is those insurance companies are receiving much less at about 3 percent the issue and there is a hotline for the very for an individual who feels that they're being discriminated against or cause to receive harm there's a hotline that they can call to ensure that they get the best value and the best results but Mr. Speaker for the member opposite to suggest that we haven't maintained or kept to our promise that the facts are we are delivering on those results we have initiated the changes we provided more power to fiscal and we are working on the very initiatives to champion and protect consumers new question the member from Cambridge thank you Mr. Speaker my question is for the premier premier we know that your government is fond of having conversations when they suit you but you ignore conversations when they don't for example the house is well aware that your government didn't care about conversations when it came to siding power plants and communities that when it comes to email conversations between background political operatives about how to spin the power plant scandal and intimidate members of this legislature there are conversations aplenty when the premier was called to justice committee earlier this year she said she wanted to be open and accountable for all conversations but now in the position to act she prefers to not have these conversations with the committee to find out about this intimidation this has been dragging on for months premier can you tell this house right now that you will expand the scope of the justice committee to investigate these kinds of interrogations we've addressed this several times in the house and I think your ruling has been clear but Mr. Speaker you know I couldn't help but listen to the opposition earlier talk about anniversaries and today actually Mr. Speaker is the anniversary of a press release put out by Jeff Yannis on Saturday September 24th and this is what it says Mr. Speaker the only way to guarantee this power plant does not get built is to elect a Tim Houdak Ontario P.C. government Tim Houdak government will cancel this plan and Mr. Speaker in a few days from now we're going to have another anniversary of the famous YouTube video where we got to see the leader of the opposition end up and say that if he was elected premier it would be the end of that plan Mr. Speaker so it would be done done done Mr. Speaker why the premier loves a good conversation the government house leader is a man of a few words and I find it passing strange Mr. Speaker that the premier ducks behind the hedges she sends her house leader out to take the fire on September 18th our house leader called for unanimous consent to expand the scope of the justice committee and the government house leader said no on September 19th the member of Whitby Oshawa called for unanimous consent to have conversations about developmental services and the government house leader said no and just yesterday the member from Tim Houdak James Bay called for unanimous consent to expand the scope of the justice committee again and the government house leader said no he sat there while we asked for unanimous consent to expand the scope of the justice committee again and said no no no the people of Kitchener better than a doctor no premier will you look to your left lock eight feet over to your house leader and have a conversation about accountability in your government Mr. Speaker I will look to each individual members now I would ask also the government side not to do any more Mr. Speaker let's talk about accountability on the other side of the house here April 16th four opposition candidates invited to testify at the justice committee including PC candidate Houdak is asked to testify he declines back up and church and also declined we then invite PC candidate Mary Ann DeMonte Whalen she accepts in a schedule she calls back a few hours later to cancel May 2nd Yannisick church and DeMonte are called to testify Yannisick tells the clerk to stop calling and the other two do not respond May 7th Tim Houdak is once again invited to testify thank you your question the member from Trinity Spadina my question is to the minister of transportation and infrastructure yesterday we all were at the site of politicians from all three levels of government fighting to claim political credit for a subway extension in Scarborough the people of Scarborough aren't interested in which Rooster can crow the loudest they just want good public transportation I don't blame them for thinking that all three levels of government laid an egg on this issue but Scarborough residents deserve results not a freshly had transit plan every year does the minister really think this is the best way to plan transit for the people of Scarborough Mr. Speaker next week the ministry of transportation the ministry of infrastructure the growth secretary and Metrolinx will release some of the most detailed data and metrics on ridership impact job creation and evaluation of roots the I corridor tools that have been developed by the ministry are arguably the best in North America this government will let the evidence speak for itself on ridership access job creation affordability and impact and I think once people see the evidence it was interesting that when I read the TTC report there wasn't even a ridership projection Mr. Speaker we're not a government that wants to build subways they're going to be running empty or the end of the world so if people see it that's the only way to implement a policy application for our city of Scarborough this is a strategy for tax dollars and we'll choose the options that meet the needs Mr. Speaker this isn't about a politician it isn't about a game it's about not waiting 40 When will the Minister stop freelancing, stop the chaos, stop drawing lines and dots on a map and focus on getting transit billed for Scarborough? Mr. Speaker, I have one question. When will the member from Trinidad's party read the map and realize it hasn't changed? And I've never pulled out a pencil or a crayon or changed a daughter and I on a map. It's the same map. The member from Scarborough, from Scarborough Guildwood, all the way to Don Valley West will tell you that the line is the same. Other governments have changed lines and have not written checks. This government is committed to two things, not changing the lines on the map and writing checks. We are the only government investing in a significant way. $50 billion in the big move, 15 projects across the GTA. Mr. Speaker, 19% of that is funded by the government of Ontario. And it's been the policy of a Liberal Party in this province, Mr. Speaker. Thank you. Thank you, Speaker. My question today is for the Minister of Economic Development, Trade and Employment. It's regarding Ontario's auto sector, which is a vital part of our economy, both across the province of Ontario and locally in my constituency of Oakville, where the Ford plant is located. I know the auto sector is an important part of the economy, a significant employer in the province of Ontario, and it's an integral part of Oakville's local economy. Speaker, it's important we continue to create and retain jobs across the province and we need to ensure that we're supporting key sectors like the auto industry. These are very competitive times globally. Ontario has proven that it can compete on the global stage, and we remain one of the top auto producers in all of North America. With last week's announcement in my writing, many of my constituents are asking what this announcement actually means for the local economy. Will the Minister please update the House on what our government's recent announcement at the Ford plant means in Ontario and to the auto sector in this province as a whole? Thank you. Minister of Economic Development, Trade and Employment. Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Thanks to the member from Oakville as well for this great question. He joined the Premier and I last week for this announcement. It's an exciting time, Mr. Speaker, for Ford Canada. As the member mentioned, our government, as did the federal government, made a $70.9 million investment to support Ford's overall investment of more than $700 million in this province. This investment will secure 2,300 high-quality jobs at the Oakville plant as well as the numerous and many thousands of spin-off jobs in the supply chain leading into that production and help Ford quite frankly build one of Ford's nine global platforms in Oakville. This will position the facility to be among one of the top tiered platforms for Ford in the entire world. It's great news for our auto sector as Ontario produces right now more vehicles than any other jurisdiction in North America. And in fact, we're on track for a record sales year this year. Thank you, Mr. Secretary. Thank you, Speaker, and thanks to the Minister for that update. Auto workers in Oakville and across the province should continue to see the strong commitment our government has and continues to make in the auto sector. But there's still some concerns from my constituents about overall growth in the auto sector. We know Ontario as a province has fared far better than many other jurisdictions in North America, our economies back on track, having recovered all of the jobs that were lost during the global economic downturn and much more. But despite investments like this, having a good job to wake up to and to go to every day is what's going to keep this province strong in the long run. So Speaker, through you to the Minister of Economic Development, Trade and Employment, what is our government doing to support the continued growth by helping to create good, meaningful jobs in Ontario's auto sector? Question? Thank you. Thank you, Mr. Speaker. And I want to commend, first of all, the hard-working employees at the Ford plant in the auto sector right across this province. Mr. Speaker, it's important that Unifor was there as well. This is a great example of the partnership between both levels of government, the private sector and our labour friends. Mr. Speaker, the sector is responding very, very well. In fact, since the bottom of the recession, we've added more than 13,000 new jobs directly to the auto sector in this province. And of course, in St. Catherine's recently, General Motors announced that they were adding 50 new full-time employees at the St. Catherine's plant. These are full-time positions, as I mentioned, at the powertrain facility there. And they are being filled under the terms of the local agreement with their Unifor partners. There are also a number of other investments through the Southwestern Ontario Development Fund, Armo Tua, North American Stamping Group, and Linnamar, who produce the parts and materials that are sold through these auto manufacturers and are keeping our province, Mr. Speaker, strong and thriving. Thank you. Thank you. New question? Member for Lakeshore. Mr. Speaker, my question is for the Premier. Before I ask the question, no Premier, I would like to just clarify one matter. The mistake with the gas plants wasn't taking them down. It was building them in their first place, and only your government did it. Well, Premier, here we are on another beautiful day. You've had all night to think about it. Perhaps you've even been able to have a conversation with the Minister from Winnipeg. Oh, sorry. Let's talk about it. One time is one too many. One time is one too many. The next time I hear it, I'm going to move on to the next question, so the member will withdraw and then use the proper title. Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I will withdraw that. At any rate, what I would like to know is whether you're now in a position to join with the federal government, the City of Toronto, the TTC, the residents of Scarborough, Tim Hudak, and support the transit plan passed by the Toronto Council and get on with the job. Thank you. The Minister of Transportation will want to speak to the supplementary, Mr. Speaker, but just let me reiterate what I said yesterday, which is I am very pleased that our government has been investing in transit since we came into office. I'm very pleased that we have put $16.4 billion into transit, Mr. Speaker. Lines being built at this moment, Mr. Speaker, across the GTHA. And I'm very pleased that our $1.4 billion for the Scarborough Line, Mr. Speaker, has leveraged the engagement of the federal government, Mr. Speaker. Now it's up to the Scarborough, Mr. Speaker, and I'm very pleased that the opposition has come to the party, Mr. Speaker, this late in the game. Premier, the score is still 64 to nothing. Nothing. And now for the third time, will you please tell me when you plan to open a subway station? Now, maybe you can't tell me the exact day or month, but could you please at least tell us the year? Mr. Speaker, it's interesting that it took six months, and yesterday we had a first discussion between a federal and a provincial transportation minister in Ottawa, which went very well. So I think now having six months of being nice got us nothing. Turning up the heat got us more press releases and more time with federal ministers. And I said that from now on, we should be able to keep that conversation chilled so that we can actually get work done, which is finally happening after six months, Mr. Speaker. The second thing, Mr. Speaker, we are building more subway stations, digging more tunnels than any time in the modern history of Ontario. We will shortly, within the next day, the problem, Mr. Speaker, is almost all the members over there weren't part of that era of subway building. They were famous for their era of subway closing, cancellation, and going in. And, Mr. Speaker, we can measure now. Thank you, Mr. Speaker. New question? The member from Toronto, Danforth. Thank you, Mr. Speaker. My question to the Minister of Energy. Today, Ontario's Environmental Commissioner stated that when it comes to energy conservation, quote, there's not been much provincial policy activity to talk about. One glaring government failure on energy conservation is its commitment of hundreds of millions of dollars to refurbish the Darlington nuclear power plant. Before it's even considered the energy conservation alternatives. Why is the government putting expensive nuclear power expansion just before cheaper energy efficiency? Minister of Energy. Mr. Speaker, the critic from the third party will know that we have issued a conservation paper as part of the long-term energy plan review called Conservation First. And, Mr. Speaker, it is going to revolutionize conservation in the province of Ontario. There will be a policy in place when it's adopted which says if it can be done cheaper by conservation, then that will happen before we do generation. It's responsible, it's revolutionary, and it's going to make a significant difference. And coincidentally, Mr. Speaker, we have done some significant conservation already under the old policy from the 2010 plan. And that is 1,900 megawatts we've conserved since 2006. That's like taking 600,000 homes across the grid, Mr. Speaker. Thank you. It's an interesting answer. Today, the Environmental Commissioner was clear that it's cheaper to conserve energy than to build new power plants. The government knows this. The minister knows this. In the summer, it released a discussion paper he mentioned entitled Conservation First. But even as it consults on this paper, it's allowing Ontario power generation to spend hundreds of millions of dollars on nuclear expansion projects. Why is the government undermining its Conservation First policy by proceeding with this nuclear refurbishment? Mr. Speaker, this government supports nuclear energy. What about the power? The opposition party supports nuclear energy. Today, it's over 53% of the generation is from nuclear. It has served this province well. It's going to continue to serve us well in the future. Mr. Speaker, we have willing hosts in this community for nuclear power. It's a tremendous boost to the economy. Mr. Speaker, nuclear energy is clean. It's renewable. It's cheap. It does the job. And above all, Mr. Speaker, as I mentioned yesterday, nuclear energy is extremely safe. We have the best, safest power plants in the world, and we're going to continue to use them. Question from the North Southwestern? Well, thank you, Mr. Speaker. My question is for the Minister of Municipal Affairs and Housing. For most Ontarians, their homes are their sanctuary, providing a sense of comfort and security. But for women who are victims of domestic violence, their homes can be a prison that they are often afraid to leave. And when they make a decision about whether they should take their children and leave this often dangerous and potentially life-threatening situation, the decision becomes even more difficult, especially when they have no place to go and no one to turn to. Mr. Speaker, through you to the Minister, I and I'm sure this whole House would like to know what the Ministry of Municipal Affairs and Housing has done to help out these women and families in their time. Question? Thank you. Minister of Municipal Affairs and Housing. I thank the member for asking this important question. Our government believes in providing safe and affordable housing for all those in need. And yesterday afternoon we actually had a chance to put that belief into practice in a practical way when the Premier and the Minister were responsible for women's issues and the member from the Etobicoke Center, I know she was there at 6.30 in the morning building a house for Habitat for Humanity and we were there to participate with many members in the House to provide housing for six families with access to affordable housing and housing that they will own. And we believe that having a place to call home is the first step in realizing new opportunities and it's the first step to a better quality of life. Our special priority policy requires service managers to place victims of domestic violence to just save affordable housing as quickly as possible to potentially saving the lives of those vulnerable women. Thank you, supplementary. Well, thank you, Mr. Speaker and I would like to thank the Minister for that answer. Habitat for Humanity built some homes for new Canadians in my writing of York State West and a few years ago I participated in the build and it was a great experience. Our government's protection of vulnerable women and families is very important and I'm sure the Minister will agree that all Ontarians need safe and affordable housing when a senior, a young adult and families unsure of where they will go to spend the night they are more likely to fall through the cracks and not receive the services that they need. I understand that earlier this year the federal government has announced that they would continue their cost sharing agreement with our government for another four years. Mr. Speaker, through you to the Minister could she explain what work has been done with the federal government to ensure that all levels of government continue to work together and invest in Ontario's most needed. Thank you, Minister. Thank you, Speaker. I am very grateful for the member for asking this question because I believe we have a shared obligation a moral imperative as legislatures to stay at the table and to work to deliver affordable housing to Ontarians in need because the reality is that a healthy housing market serves all Ontarians and makes our province stronger and our government has been working with our federal partners to begin the invest in affordable housing program which is a 50-50 cost sharing agreement that will guarantee over $480 million of new funding over four years and though our government welcomes the recent announcement of the federal government to extend its commitment to affordable housing the fact remains that the federal government its contribution to social housing will evaporate unless they continue and decide to return to the table. I continue to ask and urge parties opposite to stand with our government to ask the federal government to commit to stable and predictable funding for all our housing providers over the long term. Thank you. A member from Burlington. Minister, in January we learned that hundreds of key recommendations to prevent the deaths of children in custody were ignored by government agencies. Now we are left wondering if children continue to be in danger because ministry approved policies and procedures are not being followed. On May 27th and August 16th of this year as part of a three-year performance review your ministry issued 12 directives to Chatham Kent Children's Services. Among them all CKCS child protection workers were ordered to review the provinces child protection standards and all CKCS supervisors were ordered to receive clinical supervision training for an approved trainer within 90 days. That was May 27th 120 days ago. How many of those employees have completed their training? Good question. Minister of Children and Youth Services. Thank you, Speaker and with respect to the CAS accountability and CAS directives that have been issued our ministry is working very closely with that particular CAS and have been working closely with that staff and with that director to ensure that our mandate, our objective of ensuring that all children under eight is maintained and that is our goal and is what we will continue to do across the province with all our CASs. Thank you, Supplementary. So, Minister I'm not sure why you put a 90-day deadline and that's now 120 but anyway you have said that young people in the child welfare system are your priority. Your government talks about the right care at the right place at the right time but you've given the public reason to question these claims. Isn't it better to train child welfare employees before a crisis occurs rather than after? Good question. Thank you, Minister. Thank you again and further to that speaker again we are continuing to work with that particular Ministry of that particular CAS of course our staff are trained when they're out at our agencies working with our children across the province we will act on anything that comes forward and we did act in that situation in terms of doing a review and determining what recommendations and directives needed to come forward and we will continue to do that again for our communities and our neighbourhoods and our families to ensure our children are kept safe and that is absolutely our goal at that CAS and at CASs across the province. Thank you. Thank you, Speaker. My question is for the Premier. I think the Premier would agree that we're sick, our ability to eat fresh, healthy and carefully prepared food in the hospital can do wonders for patient morale and for recovery. The patients at Scarborough Hospital have been benefiting from an innovative and much lauded program that brings fresh Ontario food into hospital rooms. All that's about to go out the window with the forced merger of Scarborough Hospital and the Rouge Valley Health System. Does the Premier believe that this innovative program deserves to become another budgetary casualty? Mr Speaker, I know that the Minister of Health and Long-Term Care is going to want to comment in the supplementary on this particular issue, but I want to make a general comment wearing my Minister of Agriculture and Food Hat because I think that the Local Food Act is the framework within which we want to promote exactly what the leader of the third party was talking about. Thank you, Mr Speaker. Well, Mr Speaker, once again, the Premier is good at conversations and talking, but not very good at talking. Mr Speaker, I don't know the specifics of this particular contract situation, but what I do know is that the Local Food Act is the mechanism whereby we want to promote exactly what the leader of the third party is talking about. Thank you, supplementary. Mr Speaker, once again, I know that conversations and talking, but not very good at actually getting things achieved. This government brags about transforming healthcare and bringing local food to Ontarians, but instead of supporting Scarborough Hospital for transforming patient menus with healthy meals made with ingredients grown in our own backyards, the Health Minister is working at cross-purposes, Speaker. She's sitting on her chair again, focused on damage control rather than on patient care. Now, this is actually a chance for the Premier to walk the Walk Speaker and not just talk the talk. Will the Premier stop the plug from being pulled on this valuable local food-based nutrition program? Thank you, Premier. So, Mr Speaker, my understanding is that there is no final merger at this point. That is a discussion that needs to be made. So, we need to let that roll out. And one of the reasons that the transformations that are happening within the structure of LINZ is working is because they are local decisions. And so we need to let that happen, Mr Speaker. But what I want to reinforce, Mr Speaker, is that the local food bill will support and promote exactly the kind of initiative that the Leader of the Third Party is talking about. I made a million dollar local food fund, Mr Speaker, that is going to allow institutions and businesses and groups to promote local food and find ways of making sure that people get more local food on their plates. So, Mr Speaker, we are completely supportive of what the Leader of the Third Party is talking about. We want local food to be available in institutions. And if the bill is passed, Mr Speaker, which I hope it will be, then we will be able to operate within that territory of local food. Thank you. Thank you, Speaker. My question is to the Minister of Tourism, Culture and Sport. During this summer in our Scarborough community, my colleague, the member of Scarborough Southwest, and I were visited by the Minister where he toured the West Scarborough Neighborhood Community Center, a community organization providing valuable community services to children, youth, families and seniors. We had a wonderful time playing basketball with some young people that day. Our government understands the importance of healthy, active lifestyle and thus strive to integrate physical activity, recreation and sport in our lives and in the lives of our children. We also understand the importance in providing opportunities to allow people to engage in community sport, recreation and physical activity. Speaker, through you to the Minister, can he please explain what our government is doing to ensure that all Ontarians have access to sport and recreation opportunities? Thank you. Thank you, Speaker. I want to thank the member of Scarborough for the question. Yes, I did go to West Scarborough for that basketball game with the kids. Unfortunately I did not score one basket. Mr. Speaker, I'm delighted to share that our government made it a priority to increase opportunities for participation in sport and recreation activities for people of all ages and all abilities. This is why in January 2013 my ministry launched the Ontario Sport and Recreation Committees Fund program in order to encourage lifelong physical activity as a result and hence community engagement. Speaker, the funding allocation for this year's program is over $7 million. The fund is a short-term core-sharing program available for project address, committee lead and promote physical activity. Thank you, Speaker. Thank you, Minister, for that response. It is always great to hear about how our government is improving the quality of life and creating better opportunities for Ontarians. Building a foundation of lifelong physical activity for healthier lifestyle is important to our government. This fund will definitely be beneficial to the provincial organizations that apply for the funding. However, the local sport and recreation organizations are important as well. The people in my community of Scarborough-Gildwood want to know what this funding program will do for them. Speaker, through you to the minister, what is the Ontario government doing to ensure that small local organizations have access to this fund? Thank you, Minister. Thank you. Thank you, Speaker, again for the question. Speaker, I'm going to say that this fund, the Ontario sport and recreation committee fund supports over 130 provincial, regional and local projects all across the province including group works for seniors, aquatic fitness and skating just to name a few. Local surface sports and municipalities can also apply for funding to support local projects over a period of over two years. This fund addresses small local organizations and in fact, the west Scarborough neighborhood committee center will receive support through the Ontario sport and recreation committee fund program. Supporting local committee programs are accessible to everyone and assist people in staying active. It's part of Ontario government's efforts to support local projects. Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Thank you, new person. Remember some last technical notes. Thank you. This morning as to the Premier. As you know, your government has managed to pass just one piece of legislation since February. Last week you met with our leader, Tim Who-Dak. To come to order and allow the question to be And I would ask that the question be put without interruption and the answer be put without interruption. Please. Premier, last week you met with our leader to seek support in passing nine of your hand-picked bills. One bill that was not included was Bill 69, the Prompt Payment Act, a bill that has broad support from all three parties in this House because it is vitally important for Ontario's small and medium-sized construction firms. The Prompt Payment Act is also supported by stakeholders such as the Council of Ontario Construction Association and the Ontario Road Builders Association. Premier, if you do the work, you should get paid. Do you believe this or is there some other reason why you didn't include Bill 69 and your personal wish list? Thank you very much, Mr. Speaker. I believe that the piece of legislation that the member opposite is talking about is the member of Vermont's bill. I'll say this, Mr. Speaker. I'm very pleased that the PC, the opposition has agreed that there are some pieces of legislation where there is enough common agreement that we can move ahead and we can move those to the legislature. You know, Mr. Speaker, the reason that I asked for the meeting with the leader of the opposition and the leader of the third party was just that, was to say, I think there are some pieces of legislation where we've got all party agreement or we've got enough agreement that we can move them ahead. I'm very pleased that the opposition has agreed to that, that they were going to be working together, the House leaders are working together, and I'm pleased that the legislature is working as it should in the Minority Parliament, Mr. Speaker. I was just going to recognize the member for supplementary, but there were people on his own side that was preventing me from understanding that you would hear me when I said supplementary. And as soon as the answer gets started, we hear the same thing. So I'm asking the member to put his supplementary question without interruption, and I'm asking for the answer to be heard without interruption. Please. Thank you, Mr. Speaker. And Premier, that kind of answer simply won't cut it. The construction industry employs over 400,000 men and women approximately 6.5% of Ontario's total workforce. Many of these people are in small and medium-sized firms. Prompt payment legislation already exists in the majority of US states, in the UK, in Ireland, the EU, Australia, and New Zealand. Premier, over 50% of your caucus was hand-picked by you to join your ever-expanding cabinet, and I'm willing to bet your cabinet colleagues always receive their payment promptly and on time. With all three parties supporting prompt payment legislation, is it because the MPP from Bond is not one of your cabinet insiders that you haven't bothered to move forward with his bill, 69? Sure. Or do you simply not believe in the principles of prompt payment? I agree with you. As much as that might be fun and frivolous and filled with jocularity, it's still an interruption of the House. And I also want to remind the member from Renfrew Pembroke, Nipissing Pembroke, that you can actually make a disruption in the House without even saying anything.  So, you know what I'm talking about. Thank you very much, Mr. Speaker. So the list of bills that the leader of the opposition and I talked about, and that the leader of the third party and I talked about, were some initial bills that I thought there was enough common ground on that we could get some movement, Mr. Speaker. But there are lots of other pieces of legislation where I think that we can work together. Obviously, the member opposite has identified another piece of legislation. I'm sure the member for Bond is very happy to have the support. And so I think there are obviously more areas of common interest. So I look forward to getting the pieces that we've identified and then moving on to other pieces of legislation. In fact, we're suggesting a couple of other pieces. The employer health tax exemption and the Waste Reduction Act. Those are areas where I think we can find agreement as well, Mr. Speaker. There's lots of work to be done. Look forward to working with the opposition on it. The member from, it's far blank. Canora Rainy River. Thank you, Speaker. To the Minister of Natural Resources. Minister, yesterday the Ontario government unveiled a fall colours campaign encouraging people to travel Ontario. But in my riding alone, seven parks have already closed for the season and that does not include the northern parks that were permanently shut down by this government last year without any notice or consultation. And what's worse is that all 10 of the suggested routes in your tourism guide are in southern Ontario. And the guide also encourages people to stop in at their travel information centres although this government has already shut those down too. Minister, did you even consider northerners when this fall colours campaign was even put together? Thank you, Mr. Speaker. And as a northerner, certainly we consider the priorities and interests of northerners on this side of the house. With respect to the parks, Speaker, it's very, very clear that our commitment to managing the 334 parks in the province of Ontario is an incredibly important priority to our government. The member opposite is well aware that in last year's budget with respect to the fiscal challenges that we're facing in the ministry and the transformation efforts that were being made, a number of parks were converted to non-operational status. It didn't mean they were closed. It meant that there would not be staff present and individuals could still explore those parks and have that opportunity. In the recent year, Speaker, we've been able to develop partnerships with four communities to reopen and create the operational status again at four of those parks which we are certainly very pleased with. There are ongoing efforts to continue to work with communities to reopen parks or to create the operational status designation. And I look forward to working with the member. Thank you, supplementary. This year, the MNR closed seven parks across the north permanently. And I agree that northern parks are beautiful and that they should be enjoyed, but this government has locked the gates. It's shut down travel information centres across the northwest and replaced them with an app that doesn't have our content and doesn't work in the north. We have traveled Manitoba signs dotting our highways. And now it unveils its tourism strategy in black and white. Travel Southern Ontario. Minister, is this what your government means when it tells us, trust us, we have a solid tourism strategy for northern Ontario? Speaker, I hear the bluster from the member opposite. The reality is that the government is committed to ensuring that we provide positive experiences and opportunities for everyone across this province, whether it's in northern Ontario or southern Ontario. As the member is well aware, there was a decision that was made last year with respect to the operational status of our provincial parks. And I'm very pleased with the partnerships that we have been able to deliver on. The parks in the province operate at 82% cost recovery. We are still not recovering the level of funds that go into the investment that we make in Ontario parks. We're continuing to make our parks more accessible with our online registration for camping and other opportunities in our parks. We're continuing to look for new ways to support our parks and programs like Learn to Camp in Ontario parks and Learn to Fish. So, Speaker, I certainly hear the member opposite's concerns. We are concerned around these issues as well in ensuring that Ontarians have a great experience in our parks. Speaker, thank you very much. My question is for the Minister of Natural Resources. Minister, I'm aware that your ministry announced in July of this year that you are rebuilding the fire attack base in Armstrong, north of Thunder Bay, a major capital investment from your ministry into Northern Ontario. Armstrong is a small community, and I'm pleased that this investment was made by your ministry and by our government. Not only will this investment, and it's interesting that we have this question now just following on the heels of the last question, not only will this investment from your ministry be an essential safety measure in enhancing Northwestern Ontario's firefighting capabilities, it will also secure local jobs in the community. Speaker, could the Minister of Natural Resources please explain for the members of the House how this major investment from this ministry in Northern Ontario to the forest fire base will improve firefighting capabilities in our region? Thank you. Minister, thank you. I want to thank the member from Thunder Bay out of Coken for this important question, and he's certainly correct. We made a very significant capital investment in three fire bases across the province, one of which is in the members' area. Armstrong is in dire need of being upgraded as a number of their buildings are more than 50 years old. These buildings will be demolished and new ones will be built. The upgrade in Armstrong is one of three important investments that the ministry is making. Specifically, we're investing $47 million into enhancing firefighting capabilities in three communities. We're also investing in Sudbury at the airport. The facility is in need of upgrade there as well. And in Halliburton at the Halliburton-Stanhope Municipal Airport. At the center of it, Speaker, these investments are not only about bricks and mortar, but about investing in people and ensuring that these courageous men and women have the resources and tools they need to do this important and dangerous job. Thank you. I want to quickly advise the House that the motion passed on June 5, 2013 with respect to the legislation establishing the Financial Accountability Officer, Bill 95, has an anomaly with respect to the timing of the Legislative Assembly Committee to report the bill after it completes clause by clause consideration. In the absence of any other instruction from the House to do otherwise, it will make sense for the committee simply to follow what normally happened in any committee on any bill. That is, that the committee report the bill at the first available opportunity following completion of clause by clause. Therefore, the committee will report the bill tomorrow afternoon during routine proceedings if it has finished clause by clause consideration at that time. If not, the bill will instead be reported on Thursday afternoon during routine proceedings. The timing is relevant because the reporting of the bill triggers an immediate two-hour debate on third reading of the bill. I hope that's clear. We have a deferred vote on the motion for third reading of Bill 14 in act to amend the Cooperative Corporations Act in Residential Tendencies Act 2006 in respect to non-profit housing cooperatives and to make consequential amendments to other acts. Carling the members, this will be a five-minute bell. Yes, would the members take their seats, please? Members, take their seats, please. Thank you. On September the 23rd, Mr. Nackley moved third reading of Bill 14.  On September the 23rd, Mr. Nackley moved third reading of Bill 14. All those in favour, please raise one at a time and be recognized by the clerk. Mrs. Jeffrey? Mr. Bradley? Mr. Ger modal. Mr. 와ATHLEW. Mr Barolucci? Mr. Forest SUZmed? Mr. Coal? Mr. McNee-Kan, Mr. Chan, Mr. Purruta, Mr. Murray, Mr. Shirelli, Mr. Sergio, Mr. Nakri, Mr. Zimmer, Mr. Bulkasen, Mr. Bulkasen, Mr. Albanese, Mr. Dixon, Mr. Dixon, Mr. Dixon, Mr. Hunter, Mr. Fraser, Mr. Del Ducat, Mr. Del Ducat, Ms. Wong, Ms. Daumarla, Mr. Crack, Mr. Manga, Mr. Clark, Mr. Wilson, Mr. Harna, Mr. Hardiman, Mr. Fidelli, Mr. Zellius, Mr. Yakibusky, Mr. Miller, Perry Sound, Muskoka, Mr. Cleese, Mr. Barrett, Mr. McNaughton, Mr. Holliday, Ms. Jones, Ms. Monroe, Mr. Chetley, Mr. Tull, Mr. Bailey, Mr. Jackson, Mr. Smith, Mr. Harris, Mr. Thompson, Mr. Sherman, Mr. Yurek, Mr. Scott, Mrs. McKenna, Mr. Walker, Mr. Leone, Mr. McDonnell, Mr. Pettipies, Mr. Milligan, Mr. McClaren, Mr. Nichols, Ms. Forster, Ms. Forster, Mr. Beeson, Ms. Horvath, Ms. DeNovo, Mr. Marquesi, Mr. Prove, Ms. Taylor, Mr. Nadeshka, Mr. Tabbins, Mr. Sayer, Mr. Miller Hamilton, Mr. Stoney Clee, Mr. Vantoff, Mr. Schein, Ms. Armstrong, Mr. Mantha, Ms. Fyfe, Mr. Hatfield, Ms. Sattler. Opposed, please rise one at a time to be recognized by the clerk. We're going to start from by our class and be entitled as in the motion. The member from Kitchener-Conestoga on a point of order. I just want to remind members of the Blackbird Experience Reception today at 5.30 in Room 230. I encourage you to sign up online and attend later this afternoon. Thank you, Speaker. That's not a point of order, but I wish to see everybody there. The member from Renfrew, Nipissing, Pembroke on a point of... Mr. Speaker, thank you very much. Earlier today during the question period, and I want to make it very clear, Mr. Speaker, I would never be challenging a ruling of the Speaker, but I do ask for your consideration of a clarification on this point. In during question period, I recognized the government as mentioning, which we have had previously in this House as a standard practice, saying the McGinty government, the Harris government, the Mike Harris government, the Bill Davis government, the Dalton McGinty government. I only in question said, under a Kathleen Wynn government, and you ruled that I could not use the member's name. I was not referring to the member's name in any particular way other than to identify the government, and it has been the practice of this House to allow that. Otherwise, we are going to have a very difficult time in debates going forward, even being able to recognize governments of the past to be able to designate them as being the ones responsible or for any particular action. I do accept the member's premise that it is clarification and that it does not challenge the Speaker. I accept that. I am also going to endeavor to seek counsel from the table. I am concerned, and I want to use this as a moment, a quick moment to explain to the member. I'm a little bit on a crusade to have us all refer to members' titles and to their writings. I will take your point of order in consideration, and I believe we may be able to come to an agreement on how that's going to proceed, but I want to use this as a moment to reflect on what we have been doing and maybe we can probably put some of that to rest, but I do accept what the member is saying as clarification. I will seek counsel, report back to the member sharply, but I do caution him that I'm looking for changes of how we're doing things, and it might even include that, but I don't want to make that pre-judgment until I seek counsel from the table. I appreciate it. Thank you. There are no further votes. This House stands adjourned until 3 p.m. this afternoon and the reminder of the members of Female Persuasion to meet us at the front door.


Every year at hotels all over the world, scientists from every field in science flock to these giant academic conferences. They're like Woodstock for geeks in that field. Scientists go to these conferences to learn about the new research going on in their field and to share the work they're doing with everybody else and to drink and hang out with friends from other universities who they don't get to see very often. So it's like a big social knowledge update for the whole field and at most all of these conferences there's something called a poster session. And poster sessions are where researchers share findings that didn't fit into bigger sessions or bigger presentations. Scientists take some new research findings, some new truth about the world and they try to explain it on this giant poster. These poster sessions are one of the main ways that scientists share knowledge with each other and they have the potential to be this really great experience for both the person presenting the poster and the person walking around looking at all the posters. But in reality, scientists have mixed feelings about poster sessions. A lot of us go into poster sessions feeling like kind of optimistic and then we come out feeling like disappointed and underwhelmed. And here's why. First, here's what it feels like to present a poster. If you're going to be the person presenting the poster, you're first thinking like, oh, this will be great. I'll put all this work that I'm really passionate about on this big, beautiful poster and people will walk by it and be like, oh, cool research. I'll be like, oh, you think so? Let's talk about it. And then we'll have this really engaging conversation where like, I learned things and they learned things and other people will walk by and be like, oh, great research and they'll get to learn what I'm doing. And I'll feel like I'm getting to share what I'm doing with the world and with other scientists. And sometimes like very, very rarely, you will get like half of that experience, but that's the best case. Most of the time you're standing by your poster all eager while people just walk by you and don't even look at your poster as if you don't exist, while you try to like stare them down out of desperation, like, please someone, respond to my work. And then the whole hour of the poster session goes by and no one is even, not even not just engaged with your poster, but no one has looked at your poster.  And then you think, maybe my research wasn't that interesting anyway, and that was a complete waste of time. Now, here's how it feels to attend a poster session. The experience of attending a poster session and walking around trying to learn from all the posters can be even worse than it is for the presenter. Okay, it's not worse than it is for the presenter. Nothing's worse than presenting a poster session, but it's still pretty bad. Again, you start off with very high hopes. You picture yourself walking through and like breathing in all the latest research in your field, learning stuff you never thought to think about before and really just like getting more enlightened as a scientist and getting all new ideas for the stuff you're doing. But it never, ever works out that way.  And their posters are just like walls of incomprehensible text that you can't interpret very quickly. So what you do is you kind of like avoid the too intense eye contact of the presenters while trying to quickly and surreptitiously scan the titles of the posters trying to get an idea of one or two you might want to check out. And the title of the poster just sort of gives you a general idea of what the study did, like the research question they asked, not even the answer. And it's kind of abstract and a little too technical, but if you can get the general idea, then maybe you engage with the poster and try to get closer and try to figure out what they did and try to learn something. So you found a poster that you're kind of interested in and you walk up closer to get a general idea and scan it and read it and try to learn the core insight from it. But while you're doing that, the desperate presenter who's standing like two feet away from you and staring at you notices you looking at their poster and they're like, any questions? Any questions? Let me know if you have questions. And then you feel like you want to be polite so you talk to the presenter. And maybe you have a pretty good conversation and you learn about what's on the poster and you eventually learn that key punchline of the study after you've asked a bunch of follow-up questions, but you end up staying at the poster longer than you need to, even past the point of learning what you wanted from it, because you're in a conversation, you don't want to be rude or just cut the presenter off. But meanwhile, like this is taking a lot of time. You usually have less than an hour to browse all the posters and that's if you showed up on time, which you didn't. So the minutes are going by while you're having this conversation and doing all these social niceties and trying to figure out a polite way to exit the conversation. And usually after just one of these conversations, you realize that time is limited and you've got to like skim harder and avoid eye contact harder. So you breathe through the rest of the posters, maybe stop it one more, but you're really, really desperately skimming now. So you're forced to adopt this strategy where you spend a lot of time at one or maybe even two posters, maybe even past the point where you've gotten the insight you wanted. And then you've used up most of your time. So you have to skip around and breathe through the rest of the posters and barely even read the titles. And then you leave the poster session feeling a little disappointed and uneasy, but still trying to convince yourself that it was productive. Like, oh, I'm super glad I spent 35 minutes talking about that one poster that I wasn't even super interested in. That was a good use of my time. It was. I'm sure there was nothing on any of the other posters that was remotely relevant to me. So like the point is you may have had one good conversation or two maybe, but you didn't really learn as much as you had hoped to learn from the whole session. And you wonder what insights you might have missed on all those other posters you didn't have time to get to.   But there's something much more sinister going wrong here. And that's that when you're walking around trying to learn from this poster session and you're only able to interact with one or two posters, you're missing all the insight from the posters you had to breeze by and skim. And these missed insights are all like part of your field. You're supposed to know all of this stuff. A lot of them probably apply to the scientific problems you're wrestling with in some direct or tangential way. And you're missing them. You're only getting like one or two points before time runs out and you got to leave. So not only are poster sessions kind of a lackluster experience for everybody involved, but they're also really inefficient at transferring knowledge to people walking through the poster sessions. And that means it's slowing down the learning. It's slowing down scientific progress, which is actually holding the human race back in a non-insignificant way. That sounds like hyperbole, but I actually mean it. Maybe the research in your field isn't very important. And I'm in psychology, so I get that. But if you're studying something that people are suffering from, like cancer or Alzheimer's or MECFS, like one of those misposters could contain some finding you hadn't thought about that triggers a moment of insight that helps you cure that disease sooner than you wouldn't have if you had missed that poster. And all of these missed insights are happening in mass in every single field of science right now. This isn't just a design frustration. This is a serious problem and a serious opportunity. I think a lot of these problems come down to the way we approach designing academic posters. So let's see if we can fix that. Okay, so here's how the poster design process works. If you can call it a design process. Six months before the conference, you write an essay talking about your research findings that you want to put on your poster. And then you submit that to the conference. And then hopefully it gets approved. And then you're happy because that means your school will pay for your travel. And then you forget about it for like five months until about two weeks before the conference.   And then you get like really idealistic.  You open a blank PowerPoint file and you get started.  And this is going nowhere.   So you desperately email one of your senior grad student friends and they're like, no problem. I got you covered. Here's a poster design I always use. It was handed down to me by Susie. Oh, you never got to meet Susie. She was one of the senior students that graduated before you got here. It was like four years ago. Susie was amazing. Anyway, this is the design I always use. It works for me. Hope it helps. And you're like, great, great, great, great, great, that's perfect. And what you're really thinking is like, I don't have time to be original here. I just got to get this done to the printer. And it's my first year of grad school or whatever. And I'm kind of afraid of looking unprofessional or looking like I don't know what I'm doing. I don't have really time to think this through. So what do you do in times of uncertainty? You mimic. You copy somebody else and that makes you feel safe. So you open up your friend's template and then whatever is on that old hand-me-down poster design, you copy. Like whatever they did, you do. If they had their entire introduction paragraph, copy and paste it into this tiny box in the corner, then that's what you do. You take your entire introduction paragraph and you put it in that little box. If they display like their full table of correlation coefficients that don't all really relate to like what their central points are, then that's what you put in. You put in all your correlation coefficients. That uses up space. And then what you end up with is this monstrosity of a wall of text poster with like copy and pasted bits of your essay squeezed into these templated old boxes with like your school's faded header on top from its 25-year-old branding scheme.  And some part of you is like, is this legible? Like nobody can read this. But that part's very quiet. The very much louder part is like, good. It looks great. And it looks great because it looks like I did something. It looks like I spent longer on this than the rushed hour that I actually spent on it. Now, if you have a little extra time on your hands, you may be able to listen to that. Let's make this a little more readable voice. And if you have that kind of time, maybe you like add a nice graph or turn one section of text into bullet points or something like that or add a picture. And I've done this. When I first started my PhD program, I tried to take an extra hour with a poster and improve the usability of it a little bit. So here's one of my first posters. I had like a sew-what box and icons and pictures for everything. But it's still just a wall of text in the same old format. And then there are these like unicorn posters. These are the posters that you see one of at every conference if you're lucky and they're beautiful. They're like infographics and they're designed by either like professional applied firms or grad students who were designers before coming to grad school or they use templates or paid somebody. And these infographic style posters make you feel completely inadequate.  That's a good poster. But they're still not like there's still just a wall of pretty things you can interpret very quickly. And their cardinal sin is that they expect people to be up close and reading them. The cardinal sin of every poster I've seen, including the posters I've designed myself, is that we assume people are going to like stand there and read our posters in silence for 10 straight minutes, following the order of the sections we laid out. And when we design them, we're sitting up close to them reading them in order. So we designed them for that kind of user experience for a context that's really different from how people actually read posters at poster sessions. Really the accurate way to design your poster based on how they're actually used would be to project your PowerPoint file on a wall at like full size and walk past it over and over again and improve the design for the experience of learning while walking by. But none of us do that. Like, watch, here are beautiful infographic style posters. They're going to move past you at walking speed. Try to read them. Did you catch anything besides the title? Did you even catch the title? To learn anything from the infographic format, you have to walk up and spend a lot of time with it because that's what infographics are designed for. They're designed to sustain your attention while you're right up next to it for 5 to 10 minutes reading it on your own in silence. Infographics aren't the right goal for scientific posters because we just don't spend that much time with most posters. If anything, a billboard is a better design analogy because those are designed to transmit information as you move past them. So what should an academic poster look like? I think an ideal academic poster should accomplish three goals. First, we want to maximize the amount of insight transferred to attendees in the poster session. If you're attending a poster session, we want to make it easy for you to interact with every poster in some way so that you could conceivably learn the insight that every single poster in the session has to offer in less than 50 minutes. Second, we want to keep the good stuff. We still want to leave time for having good conversations and getting deep insight about any single poster if you want to. And third, we have to accomplish these goals in a way that is as lazy or lazier for grad students and scientists to create posters with the new design, under time pressure, and with no free mental bandwidth. Even if this new approach to designing posters cures cancer faster, if it's not easier for scientists to create than what they're currently doing, it'll never happen. So we have to make it easy so that it's both the right way to do it and the fast way to do it. So let's get started. Okay, so let's get into the right frame of mind here. We're going to start things off with one of the most famous quotes in all of design. Here it goes. Perfection is not when you have nothing to add. It's when you have nothing to take away. Good designs start with something very, very minimal, like a core thing, and they work from there. So that's what we're going to do. And for that core thing, we're going to follow the biggest, most reliable rule in all of usability research. You put a lot of effort into what people need to know. And then you include the stuff that's nice to know last punchline first. So here's a blank academic poster. What is the minimum need to know piece of information that should go on here if we could only put one thing on it? Well, that's probably like the main finding of the study, right? So we need a finding. I'm going to use a real finding for my friend Jacob study. Jacob very bravely sent me his poster and let me use it for the video. Thank you, Jacob. And you probably can't tell from this poster, but Jacob study is actually really cool and important. But that coolness and that importance is lost in this traditional academic poster format. So we're going to take this and we're going to redesign it. And we're going to start by grabbing the main finding, the core takeaway of this study and putting it on our blank poster. So let's see, what's the main finding of this study? What's the main finding? So this is the problem I'm talking about. It's taken me way too damn long to find the main takeaway from this study, which is pretty representative of the problem here. And that has nothing to do with this poster. Every poster in science is like this. Okay, so after reading this entire poster, I think the main finding is this bit right here. We found consistent differential validity for some non-cognitive measures for predicting international student GPA, specifically with SJTs, continuous learning, social responsibility and perseverance. So let's put that on the poster. And then we're going to change the background color. You can use your school's color if you want to, but I think it would be extra efficient to use colors that prime people's expectations about what type of poster they're about to see because they'll notice the color first. Like we could use green for empirical studies because they're the most common, blue for theory, red for methods, and yellow, the most attention-getting color for that rare and wonderful intervention study. So this is already better, but it sounds kind of technical to anybody who doesn't specialize in the subfield that this relates to, which is selection or hiring decisions, which is fine for an academic paper where people can go back and look up terms they don't know. But we don't have that kind of time. People are walking by in five seconds.  And research on usability writing shows that plain language is interpreted faster and gets people's attention better. So the most efficient thing we can put on this poster is actually a plain language version of our main finding. So we're going to say, for international students, perseverance and a sense of social responsibility are extra important for predicting first year GPA. Now this kind of makes sense, right? Now you're getting this whole story popping into your mind. But what if we're presenting a poster and somebody comes up and asks us a question we don't know the answer to, like give me your full list of predictors and all the correlations. What about those figures and tables that give us that sense of safety and the ability to answer questions? Well, for that we're going to add something called an ammo bar. Ammo bar is just going to be a column on the right side or whatever side you plan to stand on. And you're going to copy and paste all of your miscellaneous figures and tables and stuff that you need for answering questions into that bar. You're not going to spend any time worrying about the design or layout of the section because it's just for you to use. Treat it as your scratch board. Make it as ugly and as fast as you can. It's just there so you can point to things when somebody walks up and talks to you. Now, what if you're already talking to somebody and you're showing them things in your ammo bar and somebody else walks up and wants to learn more about your study but doesn't want to interrupt you? Well, for them, we're going to add a sidebar on the left. We're going to call this our silent presenter bar. In the silent presenter bar, you're going to do all the stuff you normally do on an academic poster, but you're going to worry about the layout of it a little less. Go ahead and follow the old intro methods results format. Copy and paste bits of your essay or add bullets and graphs if you have time. Just sort of give people an overview of the paper as if they were going to be standing there and reading it silently, but in one to four minutes, not 10 to 15. These sidebars are key to this design because with the ammo bar and the silent presenter bar together, we really have almost as much information on this new design as we had on the traditional design. It's just arranged much more efficiently. But what if somebody wants a lot more information, a lot more than you can even put on your poster and doesn't have time to read it or talk to you? These are the people that sometimes like snap pictures of your poster. Well, for these people, we're going to add a QR code that links to your full paper and a copy of the poster. These QR codes look scary, but they are stupidly easy to create. Just Google create a QR code. You'll do it in a second and every phone can read them. Like if you take out your phone right now and take a picture of this QR code on the screen, it'll automatically know it's taking a picture of a QR code and follow the link. So this last QR code feature lets you snap a picture of any poster and instantly get a copy of the whole poster and the paper. So now with this QR code option, we're actually providing an option to get even more information than traditional designs allow for and doing it in a way that lets attendees choose how much information they want to get instead of being flooded in design. This is called the principle of progressive disclosure. So here's our final design. Now, there are more things we could do with this. Like if you have a really important graph or an image that needs to go in the center, you could move the QR code over. It only needs to be about five inches big to be read. You could also add your own creative flair with images and stuff. But for now, let's look at the design in its simplest form. Let's look at a before and after. So in the next screen, a few real academic posters are going to move past you at a walking pace. See how much information you can absorb. Now try these same posters you just saw translated to the new design. Now, this is going to be a little unbelievable and jarring at first, because when people see this, they don't believe that these clear findings came from the posters they just saw, but they did. This is how detached current scientific poster design is from actually communicating what you need to know. Here we go. You absorbed more, right? You got the gist of probably every poster. If you wanted to know more, you could still walk up and talk or read the silent presenter bar or just scan the QR code and keep walking. So this new design meets our goals. It helps transfer insight more efficiently by leading with the main finding and making it big and obvious. And in plain language, you can still walk up and have good conversations with people. And for our third goal, and I hope you can tell from looking at it, but this approach is way easier for grad students to create. You can create this poster design at much less time than you're spending on your current method. So let's look at the presenter experience. Now everybody who walks by looks at your poster at least, because looking at your poster is less effortful and it's more rewarding to look, which is already an improvement. And now people who walk by can engage with your poster quickly by snapping a QR code, which still makes you feel good if you see somebody do it. And you still get those conversations, perhaps even more of them, because your hook is better. And now look at the attendee experience. You get that feeling of breathing and insight as you walk past, and you have more options as an attendee to choose your level of engagement with posters you're interested in. You don't have to get trapped in a conversation to learn something from a poster. And look at how it could accelerate learning. You can conceivably walk into a poster session with this design and learn something from every single poster instead of just one or two. If every scientist in every field used a design like this instead of the crappy old wall of text template they're using right now, it could accelerate insight and discovery and be more fun for everybody. The reason I spend a year of my life making this cartoon instead of publishing papers like I'm supposed to be doing is because I really think that if everybody uses a design like this, we could accelerate the pace of science. We could cure all diseases slightly sooner, and that's everything to the people suffering from them. I really believe in this design. I know it's jarringly different than what you're used to using, but for what it's worth when actual designers design posters and billboards, their first advice is to keep it simple and be comfortable with negative space, which this design really does. Also, we're going to do a validation study on this new design. So if you're a researcher and you're up for participating in a study to help validate this design, get in touch with me, send me an email or hit me up on Twitter. I'm at Mike Morrison. So please try it for yourself, even if you want to hack it up a little and make it your own, and let me know how it goes. There are links below to download PowerPoint templates for these designs, including example posters. I'm going to use this design at all my conferences going forward, and lots of people here in my PhD program are going to try it out too. So try it and please let me know how it goes for you. Now we'll retweet any poster selfies you send me. Thanks for watching.


I am Sam Vaknin and I am the author of Malignant Self-Lover, Narcissism Revisited. How can one negotiate with an abuser without incurring his wrath and rage? How meaningful are contracts signed with bullies? How can one motivate the abuser to keep his end of the bargain, for instance, to actually seek therapy and attend all the sessions? And how efficacious is psychotherapy or counseling to start with? One thing is sure. It is useless to confront the abuser head-on to engage in power politics. Get rid of sentences such as, you are guilty and wrong and I am the victim and right, or my will should prevail. Such utterances are decidedly counterproductive and unhelpful, and they could lead to rage attacks and a deepening of the abuser's persecutory denusions bred by his humiliation in the therapeutic setting. Better at first to co-opt the abuser's own prejudices and pathology by catering to his infantile emotional needs and by complying with his wishes complex rules and arbitrary rituals. And here is a practical guide on how to drag your abuser into treatment and into a contract of mutual respect, a cessation of hostilities, assuming, of course, that you want to preserve the relationship. First of all, tell him that you love him and emphasize the exclusivity of your relationship by refraining initially and during the therapy from anxiety-provoking acts. Limiting your autonomy is a temporary sacrifice, and in all circumstances make it a permanent feature of your relationship. Demonstrate to the abuser that his distrust of you is misplaced and undeserved and that one of the aims of the treatment regimen is to teach him to control and reduce his pathological and delusional romantic jealousy. Number two, define areas of your common life that the abuser can safely and without infringing on your independence utterly control. Abusers need to feel that they are in charge, the sole decision makers and arbiters. Let him to define, preferably in writing, what he expects from you and where he thinks that you or your performance are deficient. Try to accommodate his reasonable demands, but ignore the rest. Do not at this stage present a counterlist. This will come later. To move him to attend couple or marital therapy, tell him that you need his help to restore your relationship to its former warmth and intimacy. Appeal to thoughts of your own which you want fixed, so as to be a better mate. Appeal to his narcissism and self-image is the omnipotent and initiate macho. Humor him for a while. Involve your abuser as much as you can in your life. Take him to meet your family. Ask him to join in with your friends, to visit your workplace, to help meet in your car, the symbol of your independence as far as he is concerned. And his advice on money methods and career steps. Do not hand over control to him over any of these areas, but get him to feel a part of your life and try to mitigate his envy and insecurity. Number five, encourage him to assume responsibility for the positive things in his life and in your relationship. Compliment the beneficial outcomes of his skills, talents, hard work and attitude. Gradually, he will let go of his alloplastic defenses, his tendency to blame every mistake of his, every failure or mishap on others. He will cease to regard the world as hostile and out to get him. Number six, make him own up to his feelings by identifying and naming them. Most abusers are divorced from their emotions. They seek to explain their inner turmoil by resorting to outside agents. They say, look what you made me do, or they provoked me. Abusers are unaware of their anger, envy or aggression. So mirror your abuser gently and unobstructively. Ask him, how do you feel about it? Or, when I'm angry, I act the same as you. Or, would you be happier if I didn't do it? Number seven, avoid the appearance or the practice of manipulating your abuser, except if you want to get rid of it. Abusers are very sensitive to control issues. They feel threatened, exploited and ill-treated when manipulated. They invariably react with aggression. Treat your abuser as you would like him to behave towards you. Personal example is a powerful proselytizer. Don't act out of fear or subservience. Be sincere. Act out of love and conviction. Finally, your conduct is bound to infiltrate the abuser's world defenses. React forcefully, unambiguously and instantly to any use of force. May clear where the boundary of civilized exchange lies. Punish him severely and mercilessly if he crosses this boundary. Make known, well in advance, the rules of your engagement and your relationship. Rewards and sanctions. Discipline him for verbal and emotional abuse as well. Though less strenuously than for physical abuse. Create a hierarchy of transgressions and a penal code to go with it. As the therapy continues and progresses, and as progress is evident, try to free the rigid edges of your sex roles. Most abusers are very much into metasal and eugenic, gender-casting. Show him his feminine size and make him proud of them. Gradually introduce him to your masculine traits or skills, and make him proud of you. This essentially is what good therapists do in trying to roll back or limit the offender's pathology.  They compliment the narcissist, challenging him to prove his omnipotence by overcoming his own disorder. They appeal to his quest for perfection, brilliance and eternal love and his paranoid tendencies in an attempt to get rid of counterproductive, self-defeating, dysfunctional behavior patterns. By stroking the narcissist's grandiosity, therapists hope to modify or counter cognitive deficits, thinking errors, and the narcissist's victim stance. They contract with the narcissist to alter his conduct. Some even go to the extent of medicalizing the disorder, attributing it to hereditary or biochemical origin and thus absolving the narcissist from guilt and responsibility and freeing his mental resources to concentrate on the therapy. But is therapy worth the effort? What is the success rate of various treatment modalities in modifying the abuser's conduct, let alone in healing or curing him? About this in one of the next videos. So my advice, stay tuned.