Ottawa residents are desperately feeling the lack of primary care options. The Ontario Medical Association calculates that Ottawa needs at least 171 more family doctors in order to meet current demands. But we’re also seeing family doctors closing up practice because the conditions have become unsustainable, and unfortunately, 40% of family doctors say they are considering retiring in the next five years.

My constituents are upset, and I get it. It is incredibly frustrating, but also scary, not to have a doctor or a nurse practitioner you can turn to when you’re sick or have questions or just need a prescription renewed.

What’s even more concerning is that we’re seeing this shortage in the context of funding cuts for emergency care at the Queensway Carleton Hospital. The Queensway Carleton’s emergency department is one of the busiest in the whole province. Patients are routinely waiting hours to be seen—sometimes even just to be triaged—and yet the government is cutting funding to the Queensway Carleton ER. By April, we will be down 10 physician hours every single day in the ER. So 150,000 Ottawa residents don’t have a family doctor and have no option but to go to the ER, and now they’re going to have to sit and wait even longer to see a doctor there.

This is no way to run a health care system. It’s time for the government to take the crisis seriously and make the investments needed to make sure that every Ontario resident gets the primary health care and the emergency health care they need when they need it.

I’d like to welcome the members of the Ontario Principals’ Council who are here today: Greg Arkwright, Amy Johnson, Jeff Maharaj, Hillary Howe, Daisi Dina, Peggy Sweeney, Ralph Nigro, Nadine Trépanier-Bisson, and my neighbour in Ottawa Patsy Agard.

Welcome, and I apologize, on behalf of the members, for the challenges you faced in getting into your House today.

I’d also like to welcome, from Ottawa West–Nepean, Model Parliament participant Sophie Brin.

We’re here for this late show debate tonight because this government just won’t take seriously the conditions in our provincial schools. Students, parents, alumni, teachers and advocates have been raising concerns for years. They’ve been trying to get meetings with the minister or the deputy minister but have been stonewalled. Journalists have reached out to get answers and have gotten the blow-off from the ministry.

So earlier this week, I asked the minister what it’s going to take for him to act. Sadly, Speaker, the students, the families, the teachers who are waiting for answers still did not get any. These schools serve children who are deaf, blind, visually impaired and deaf-blind. These are some of our most vulnerable students in Ontario. They deserve more attention and care, not less. But these kids are being forced to learn in horrendous conditions, conditions that no parent in Ontario would find acceptable for their children, and these schools are under the direct control of the Minister of Education. He could change things today if he wanted to.

The minister said he needed to introduce Bill 98 because school boards weren’t doing a good enough job so he needed to have more say on how schools are run in Ontario. Well, here are the schools that he oversees personally, and look what kind of shape they’re in: serious allegations of abuse, discrimination and neglect; severe teacher shortages—in fact, 17% of the teaching workforce—crumbling and unsafe buildings and children not getting access to the facilities and services they need to learn life skills safely; safety plans that are so absurd that when I tell people about them they think I’m joking because they can’t believe that any serious school in Ontario would do this. That’s the minister’s record.

Let’s look more closely at what’s happening in these schools on the minister’s watch. Students are travelling up to an hour and a half to school by bus, but because supervision doesn’t begin until the school day starts, they’re left waiting outside for half an hour when they arrive. They don’t have access to a bathroom, so some students have had to resort to urinating outside. Because they communicate with their hands, they have no option but to take their gloves off even when it’s minus 15 outside. Once they’re allowed in the building, students are being forced into large classes that exceed safety regulations because the teaching workforce has been reduced by 25% over recent years and there are not enough occasional teachers to fill gaps when teachers are sick or on leave. In fact, there are so many staff shortages that students are frequently arriving at their classroom to find a note on the door stating there is no teacher for the day and they’re to go to the library instead. Teachers who provide specific support, such as the special education resource teacher or the oral language teacher, are being pulled from their assignments to cover classrooms instead. If there’s an emergency during the day, a hearing teacher needs to be alerted because there is no way for a non-hearing teacher to call for help, and many of these teachers are non-hearing teachers.

At Ernest C. Drury, such emergencies were initially dealt with by requiring the classroom teacher to leave the room in the middle of an emergency and find another teacher or student to hand a card to. After this system was criticized as ineffective by an inspector from the Ministry of Labour, the school implemented a new system which requires classroom teachers to ring a cowbell, which obviously no deaf or hard-of-hearing student or teacher can hear.

Following a violent incident at one of the schools in December 2022, the Ministry of Labour flagged that student safety plans had not been updated for years. One of the reasons they weren’t being updated was because the special education resource teacher was being called upon repeatedly to fill in for classroom teachers.

Students are also not getting assessments. When the chief psychologist resigned in 2022, he stated in his resignation letter that senior management had removed all of his clinical duties and prevented him from explaining to parents why their children weren’t getting assessments. He further said he was forced by senior management to prioritize care to children whose parents had hired a lawyer or complained to their MPP.

I could go on, Speaker, with another five minutes of disturbing stories about what’s happening in these schools. But let me just conclude with a question. Why, if the minister thinks things are so great in these schools, is the government facing three new lawsuits only a couple of years after the province paid out $23 million to settle two class action lawsuits? Does the minister think that a lawsuit is a sign of success?