School boards in Toronto are facing a funding shortfall because of this government’s failure to properly fund education in Ontario. The Toronto District School Board is short $27 million. Parents often contact me about how this underfunding is affecting their kids’ education.

I think of Adhi. His son is in a developmentally delayed class at Clinton school. His son has been attacked twice by another child. He has been scarred physically. The school knows they need another skilled educator in the room to keep kids safe, but they don’t have the staffing allocation.

I think of Janice and Christine at Kensington. They’ve just learned they will have a grade 4/5/6 class for this coming year. That means a teacher will have to explain three different classes all day, every day. That’s a very difficult task. It means that older kids will sit there in the class and be bored, and it means younger kids will sit in the class and feel completely overwhelmed.

Stories like this come into my office every single week. Every school is having to do more with less, year in and year out.

The TDSB has asked the ministry to fund schools properly and to account for the extra costs they must shoulder because of provincial and federal directives, because of COVID, because of inflation. How does this ministry respond? How does the minister respond? They look the other way.

I want schools to be properly funded. I want our kids to have an excellent public school education. The TDSB is asking for a new funding deal, and I support these requests, and I hope the ministry and the government support these requests as well.

I would like to thank the member from Toronto Centre for the question. I’m going to start with the last half of the question first: What are we doing? We are working towards having more housing and helping with the affordability crisis. We are and have been incredibly successful at making sure there are more jobs for people, because that is the absolute best way to support a family: for people to have good-paying jobs and be able to manage that.

But more specifically, we have invested $3.8 billion in the Roadmap to Wellness. That has an increased focus on children’s mental health, and that continues. We will continue to help to improve. Some of that is education. Some of that is working with the kids directly. All of it is to try to improve the overall situation for children across the province.

One the most egregious things that we learn about is when people that are empowered and entrusted to take care of a child have abused that. This bill will help to address that because of the regulations, because of the monitoring requirements that are built into this particular bill. This is not a particular funding bill. Our budget was a particular funding bill, and we continue to provide more and more funding into these programs to make sure that they are supported. I hope the members opposite would consider supporting the budget to make sure that that funding that they keep asking about is there.