Our government, under the leadership of Premier Ford and education minister Lecce, is committed to providing state-of-the-art learning environments for students. I’m honoured to rise today to recognize a significant investment from the Ministry of Education of $16 million in my community of Oakville North–Burlington, which will be used for the expansion of Oakville NE #5 public school. This will result in the creation of 138 additional student spaces, helping working families in my fast-growing community. This investment is part of a historic $1.3-billion commitment, the largest single-year funding commitment in the province’s history to get more shovels in the ground faster and to build more schools.

This investment will build 16 new schools and school expansions across the province, create more than 27,000 new student spaces, and 27 of the projects will create more than 1,700 child care spaces.

Since 2018, a total investment of $142 million in Oakville North–Burlington will build five new schools and add over 4,000 student spaces and 352 child care spaces.

I’m so proud of the work our government is doing in my community and across the province as we prepare students for a future with good-paying careers.

Our teams have been working with many of the airports in those northern communities, and I can assure the member that we’ll continue to work with them, as the province has provided a commitment to 100% of the remote funding on an operational side: $14.5 million every single year.

We’ll continue to ensure those issues that have been raised by that member with respect to some of the flooding are taken care of and that we work together to ensure that those are fixed so we can continue to support that vital piece of infrastructure in our north. I look forward to working with the member on that specifically.

I appreciate the member opposite’s question, and I appreciate our shared commitment to building more transit in the province. I would note, it would be nice if the government would help municipal transit operational funding as well and reinstate the 50% operational funding so we can have reliable, affordable transit.

But what I’ll say is, in addition to having transit-oriented development and allowing more density around transit nodes, which I support, I would challenge the government to ensure that a certain percentage of those are deeply affordable homes. Because we absolutely need to increase supply, but we also need to increase the supply of homes that people can actually afford. Housing Now Toronto was actually at Queen’s Park today for their lobby day, asking us to ask the government to do exactly that as the Ontario Line is built.

Two, I’m also concerned because you have a number of regions—and I think Waterloo region is a great example of this—where regional planning has shown how they can meet their housing targets without sprawling onto farmland, for example, which is so critically important to the region’s economy—

We are in an unprecedented housing crisis. And to the credit of some members opposite, they have talked about the need to push back against “not in my backyard” in this province if we are going to address the housing supply crisis. It feels like, with this bill and recent comments from the Premier, the government is backtracking on that commitment. And right now, I believe we would need an all-hands-on-deck, full-on mobilization to say “yes in my backyard,” legalizing fourplexes, legalizing—

Because let’s face it: Farming contributes $50 billion to Ontario’s economy. We need to protect the asset base, which is the farmland that generates all that wealth, while we support the farmers who farm that land.

The bill says it’s cutting red tape to build more housing. Then let’s cut red tape to build more housing by making fourplexes legal in the province. While we’re at it, let’s go beyond fourplexes. Let’s make it legal to build six- to 11-storey buildings along major transit lines as well—two key recommendations in the government’s own Housing Affordability Task Force. I don’t know why the government—