Yesterday, I spoke about Amy Owen, who took her own life on April 17, 2017, in an Ottawa group home. She was relocated from her home at Poplar Hill First Nation. When I think about what could have been added to this bill to give Amy a shred of hope—it was services, it was support. She begged for help repeatedly. That’s what the APTN investigative journalism has uncovered in Amy’s tragic story. She begged repeatedly for help, but we were not there to help her.

I want to reflect on the fact that it is 2024 and we have a child protection system that continues to fail kids—particularly Indigenous kids—in need.

To the member’s question: We need to stop failing those children, and we need to make sure there are preventive resources ahead of time, so every community in this province has the capacity for people to heal. More punitive measures are not going to solve that problem.

When I consider what Cindy Blackstock has said about this from an Indigenous perspective, it involves us doing right by our reconciliation treaty obligations. We’re failing those, too. Insofar as there are purposeful measures done by the federal government to this day that continue to underfund child protection in communities and allow people opportunities to heal—I believe that is a major failure that not only our province but the federal government has to share.

I would also say that in a context where one out of every seven kids is going to school hungry; in a context where so many people, as the member knows very well because she has spoken about it many times, cannot find housing, particularly supportive housing to go to when you’re trying to flee a context of violence—that is also a situation in which our housing policy impacts our ability to help children who are most vulnerable.

We need to do a lot more to make sure people can feel safe.

One of the things that I particularly support in this bill, given the work that was done by the chief of staff to the minister from lived experience, is the fact that folks who have interacted with the child protection system can now feel absolutely no penalty to speak their truth. It’s remarkable, when you think about it from a legal perspective, that we’re asking people who have interacted with the child protection system to sign away their charter rights of expression. That is a remarkable thing, and I commend the minister and I commend this bill and I commend his chief of staff for bringing that forward, because it was unconscionable that that was allowed to happen in this province.

Do I support harsher penalties and more oversight of agencies falling afoul of our rules and regulations? Absolutely. But what I would like—listening to the advice I’ve received for the debate—is for us to be harder on the preventive end. When I heard the member for Kitchener Centre, who worked as a social worker before she came into this place, that’s what she said—she said that social workers are leaving the child protection system on the non-profit and public side because of what they’re seeing and because of the lack of compensation and support.

So there’s a lot we can do on the preventive side, in my opinion—to answer the member’s question—to make sure that those tragedies don’t happen and to make sure that people don’t fall down the hole of neglect that, sadly, exists in our child protection system.

Sometimes we can be penny-wise and pound foolish in politics. Sometimes we can think we are saving money on the front end, but we don’t realize all the things we are losing as a consequence of eliminating the office of the child advocate, which we have done.

So while I am happy with a lot of the thrust of this bill and what it does positively to make sure that the resources are given to the youth who need the help, bringing back the office of the child advocate and bringing resources right to the community so youth could speak their own truth to heal is critically important.

I thank you for the question.

I’m really pleased to be able to speak on housing today and to speak in support of our motion.

Housing as a commodity or an investment is very problematic. It has cut so many people out. It has created inflated prices. It has allowed the disappearance of affordable housing to short-term rentals. It’s kicking seniors out of their homes. Two hundred seniors are losing their homes as we speak. It’s pricing seniors in Ottawa out of the market. It is dire and not how we should be providing housing for people or thinking about housing. So I’m very much in favour of the idea of housing Ontario and, really, the importance of building mixed housing and the importance of having these low-cost loans.

In the case of Thunder Bay, we have two projects: Suomi Koti for seniors. We don’t even need public land. They have the land. If low-cost loans had been available, if this government actually had something to support not-for-profit housing, Suomi Koti would already be half built by now. Giwaa On Court is another example of a rebuild of the post office. No need for public land, but they need affordable financing in order to build. It’s still on stall. Both of these projects were presented to the government. There’s been zero support, and I’m so looking forward to the implementation of our bill because these projects could actually be built, and that would be 104 units available immediately in Thunder Bay.

Co-ops: we have a long history of co-op housing in Thunder Bay. In fact, co-op everything. We’ve had co-op bakeries, co-op food buying groups. Castlegreen Co-op has been there. It is still there, and it is still a prime place to live; Superior View, newer co-op housing. What is wonderful about this co-op housing is that they are mixed income.

So we have problematic low-income housing that has wound up being a magnet for the gangs coming to the city. But when you are able to move out of there and into a co-op, where you’re no longer ghettoized, with many people who can’t afford a place to live, then you actually can become part of a community and it really doesn’t matter that you don’t have a ton of income. Those programs have been very successful, and they have moved people into those safer environments, and we really need that.

I’m thinking of another co-op which is Centre francophone de Thunder Bay, another co-op. It’s deep-rooted in northwestern Ontario.

Modular housing: There’s lots of talk of this, but we have to remember that there are different standards of modular housing. Some of them will keep to the current building code, but there’s modular housing available that goes well beyond this and is actually designed for different climates. It’s designed not to off-gas so that people with environmental sensitivities can live with it. It is designed to not have mold, a problem that is in many homes on First Nations’ communities because they were poorly built and poorly thought-out. So again, there are many, many rich opportunities available to us.

Finally, the idea of fourplexes: Why is this such a frightening notion? I’m quite sure I lived in a fourplex in Toronto. There’s lots of them around. There’s lots of them in Thunder Bay. This is not a frightening thing. It’s not suddenly an eight-storey monster in the middle of nowhere.

I will end my remarks there by saying there are solutions. There have always been solutions if you’re not afraid to embrace them. Public land or private land, but affordable financing, and we can get that housing built.