It’s my pleasure to rise to speak to our opposition day motion. The member from Niagara West kept repeating, “If you see it, you do it.” That’s their motto. They saw the Liberals doing partisan ads, pretended like they didn’t support it and have now gone on to do it themselves, so I guess he’s accurate: If you see it, do it.

Speaker, I would like to rewrite some of the ads that the government has put out. It starts with, “What if we told you there’s a place where it’s all happening? And what if we told you, you already live here?” Between those lines there’s a lot of fluff about the government.

Well, Speaker, what if I told you there is a place where over 800,000 adults and children accessed food banks last year, an increase of over 38%; a place where food banks were visited nearly six million times; where 2.3 million people don’t have access to primary care physicians; where emergency departments are being closed, all around the province; where for decades we have First Nations communities that are still on boil-water advisories?

What if I told you that there are 588-day wait-lists in my community for children to access mental health supports and parents are being forced to surrender their children to the children’s aid society, hoping for their children to get help?

What if I told you that 200,000 Ontarians are waiting years for access to social housing, more than 7,000 people in Windsor-Essex on our wait-lists for affordable housing?

This is the reality of the province of Ontario. And what have we, the people of Ontario, told the government? That you already live here, and the people of the province need you to stop spending tens of millions of dollars on advertisements to say that you’re doing great when the reality is the people of the province need you to spend that money on the supports and services that they need.