I wanted to welcome a couple of young model parliamentarians: Colesen Lebrun, who is from Kingston and the Islands; Yanick Proulx from Nickel Belt; and a few others I have been meeting this morning.

Welcome to your Ontario Legislature, in which you’ll be debating and using this chamber on Friday.

The Premier boasted last week that the funding for post-secondary education announced on Monday would be “fabulous.” It’s not fabulous; it’s famine. The funding just proposed is less than half of what the government’s own blue-ribbon panel recommended. In turn, that recommendation, under a mandate to be fiscally responsible, only partly restored what this government has allowed to erode away with inflation.

On Monday, the minister was repeatedly asked how her “fabulous” announcement was even an adequate response to her own blue-ribbon panel. The minister fell back on blaming Ottawa for her government’s mismanagement. And then we learned yesterday that they did not attend meetings with their federal counterparts.

Mr. Speaker, when will they get it done right and deliver adequate funding for Ontario colleges and universities?

Recently, we learned that the PCs and the Minister of Colleges and Universities have been hosting, over the last few years, fundraisers attended by many officials of for-profit private career colleges that have boomed under this government.

Only after the federal government took the drastic step of capping international student visas, a month ago, did this government put a moratorium on new public-private partnerships and begin a review of international student programs.

Why did the Conservative government hold back and let the situation get so completely out of hand?

When they’re under criminal investigation by the RCMP for the greenbelt scandal, how can we take seriously the Premier’s words at a news conference—“No one can influence our government; no one can influence any minister at all”?