This is a petition about passing anti-scab labour legislation. Basically, the idea is to protect the rights of workers to withdraw their labour. When you’re not able to withdraw your labour effectively, when they’re using replacement scab workers, that means that that work continues and the employer doesn’t feel the pressure to come back to the negotiating table. It creates more conflict on picket lines, as well.

For example, I’m sure, at picket lines, they’re going to want to have this sort of thing in place. The AGO, for example, is using replacement workers; I’m sure those workers would prefer to have it.

There are signatures from Sault Ste. Marie, Brampton, Georgetown, London, so it has strong support across the province.

I support this petition.

They also urge people to support bills such as the one that I tabled, Bill 90, the Anti-Scab Labour Act.

So we could pass this into legislation—very similar that was done at the federal level because of the NDP there.

The petition is titled “Keep Our Community PHO Labs Open.” This is, unbelievably, more than 9,000 signatures for these petitions—only some of them are here—in a very short amount of time.

Basically, what they’re concerned about is, there was a recommendation or suggestion that maybe six of the 11 Public Health Ontario labs would be closed. These are the people who do the medical testing, and most people know them from the water testing. The worst crisis was Walkerton, but people have water testing done all the time, especially in rural areas where they have manure that can affect it as runoffs. It’s very important that these are kept open. It would create inequities in rural areas and northern areas.

As well, in pandemics—I know that we always think of COVID-19, but H1N1, for example. Any time there’s an uptake in medical testing of that nature, these smaller public health labs do the runoff of large organizations like Ottawa and Toronto when they can’t keep up to it, which keeps all of us safer.

Like I said before, there are 9,000-plus signatures on this. It’s a very important issue. I’m very happy to hear the Minister of Health say that there is no conversation about closing it—she says “at this time.” So I just want to ensure that she knows how important this is to people right across the province.

I support this petition. I’ll give it to page Lyra for the table.

Basically, what they’re talking about is the high level of tuition in Ontario—the increases of over 200% for undergrads and almost 250% for grad students. The median debt for grads is around $17,000. It’s costing a lot of money to go to school.

As well, there were changes made to OSAP which resulted in about a billion-dollar cut to assistance to students to be able to afford to go to school.

What they want out of this is ultimately to have accessible and free tuition, going to school. They want an increase in grants instead of loans.

And they want to, as well, legislate students’ right to organize. That was a bill that was challenged and lost in court, when they had removed the right for students to organize, but they don’t want to have to challenge this in court on a regular basis—and have it legislated.

I do support this petition. I think it’s very important that our students have accessible access to post-secondary school so they can be successful in the future.

I’ll affix my signature and provide it to page Shylah for the table.