On Saturday, I was at the Earth Day cleanup in Liberty Village, and I was talking to a couple who had a little three-year-old girl. I said to the three-year-old girl, “Hey, you’ve got a firefighter’s hat on, and there’s a fire truck over there. Is that your fire truck?” She looked at me, and she looked at the fire truck, and then she said, “Yeah.”

I want to thank the Liberty Village Residents Association, TPS division 14 and the firefighters for coming out and cleaning up Liberty Village.

I also want to thank the St. Lawrence Neighbourhood Association and Friends of Berczy Park, the Garment District Neighbourhood Association, the Waterfront BIA, the Toronto Island Shoreline Cleanup and A Greener Future for organizing Earth Day cleanups across Spadina–Fort York. You’ve made our riding a little bit greener and a little bit cleaner over the weekend.

I also want to note that on Earth Day, Ontario Place for All released a study that showed that the mega spa on the waterfront is estimated to emit 100,000 tonnes of carbon, and a similar Therme spa in Manchester is estimated to consume the same amount of gas per hour as 3,000 homes in a year, the same amount of electricity per hour as 7,000 homes in a year, the same amount of water per day as 5,000 homes in a year.

As we enter this climate emergency, building a tax-subsidized, giant glass-dome mega spa on a bird migration route without an environmental assessment is an environmental disaster. So we are asking the government, in the spirit of Earth Day, cancel the mega spa on the waterfront.

I’ve read this petition in the House before. It’s to save the Minden emergency room—or actually, to reopen the Minden emergency room. We’ve been reading these for well over a year now, ever since it first came out that the emergency room in Minden was going to be closed. It was a horrific decision to make. It’s the nearest emergency room for thousands of people and the next nearest one is in Haliburton Highlands.

The petition talks about how Haliburton’s health services board of directors, without consultation with the affected people, with the affected communities, closed the emergency room on June 1, 2023. What we’ve heard since then is about people not being able to get the care that they need when they need it. That’s the model of this government.

One case was a girl at a summer camp who had a fishhook stuck in her eye and had to travel 20 minutes from Minden to Haliburton in order to get emergency service. There was another case where a person died of cardiac arrest five minutes out from the Haliburton hospital. If the Minden emergency room would have been open, they would have received care 15 minutes prior to that because they were going from Minden to Haliburton.

So this petition asks the government to reopen the Minden emergency room, restore the funding and provide the funding that’s needed. It will save lives. We’re coming up to the summer season right now, so I will add my voice to this. Save and reopen the Minden ER because it will save lives this summer.

It’s an honour to stand up and speak on Bill 188. It’s a bill about taking care of children in foster care. This is an issue that’s pretty near and dear to me. A good friend of mine was raised in foster care. When she was 11, she and her sister were removed from their family because the father was sexually abusing them. She ended up in foster care, and she was being shuffled from foster care home to foster care home with all of her possessions in a garbage bag.

By the time she was 14, one of her friends on the street realized that she needed some money, so he gave her some speedballs to sell and a gun to protect herself, so at 14 she was standing on a street corner with a gun and selling drugs. The next decade and a half of her life was just one horrific nightmare, but somehow, she came out of it and she’s a wonderful mother. She’s an advocate for children. She’s a counsellor to young children. She has taken her pain and turned it into purpose.

If anybody’s interested in reading a book, the book is called If You Played in My Playground, and it’s about growing up in downtown Toronto. When I read the book, I was shocked because I had no idea that things like she describes happened in the city of Toronto. It’s amazing how different our realities can be from somebody you sit next to and the nightmare that they might be living with.

Getting foster care right saves lives, and we’ve seen that over and over again.

In 2022, the Aboriginal Peoples Television Network and Global News launched an investigation, and the reports in the investigation showed pretty clearly that for-profit care providers were terribly abusing their charges, the children in their care. Hatts Off was one of these large, for-profit residential care providers. The media investigations included details about one young First Nations woman who had run away, and her disappearance was not reported in a timely way by the provider, and she became a victim of human trafficking.

This should not be happening. The most vulnerable people in our society are children in care, and as a government, as a society, we have a responsibility to make sure that they get the best care that’s possible.

On the other hand, these for-profit corporations look at these children not as charges, not as a huge responsibility, but as the words they actually use to describe—particularly First Nations children from northern communities. They get paid more for looking after those children. They call them cash cows, and they describe them as being the bread and butter of their business model.

One First Nations social worker visited a First Nations child in one of these for-profit homes, and the child asked the social worker, “Are you here to rescue me?”

What’s happening to children in some of these homes is absolutely appalling.

There’s one company called Connor Homes; it has been under investigation by children’s aid societies. The report said that the group homes run by Connor Homes in eastern Ontario were kept in a state of disrepair, and the kids in care were left with few resources, while the owners amassed personal fortunes in real estate holdings.

So these for-profit homes are getting tax dollars to look after these children, but instead of looking after the children, the children are left in rundown homes while they amass a fortune.

One of the staff members from Connor Homes said, “You knew that (the owners) had the money but it wasn’t in the home(s).” He said that they’re—actually, sorry; this person is not being identified for fear of reprisal. He said, “The kids didn’t see that money.”

So the solution that came out of this report and what the child advocates were saying is that we need a fundamental change in the system—and the first recommendation they said was to take profit out of caring for kids. A for-profit corporation exists to make profit; it doesn’t exist to look after children. If a corporation existed to look after children, it wouldn’t be for-profit. That was the first recommendation. So one of the biggest disappointments of Bill 188 here, which this government is introducing, is that it doesn’t get rid of the for-profit care model.

There’s a long history coming up to this legislation, and I’ll just quickly go through it. In 2008, the former government created the Ontario child advocate office. This was to be an independent office for children and youth, including those with disabilities as well as Indigenous children and youth. Irwin Elman, the first director of the child and youth advocate office, was motivated by a case that some people will remember was in the media in 2008. A little girl, Katelynn Sampson, seven years old, was horribly abused, and she was killed by her foster parents, who were charged with murder in her case. There were a number of changes that were recommended, that came out of the inquest into her death, including whistle-blower protection, and a second bill, Bill 57, called Katelynn’s Principle Act, and these were both introduced by my colleague from Hamilton Mountain in 2015 and 2016. So, almost 10 years ago, she introduced this legislation for whistle-blower protection, and it’s finally in this bill. So there are some good things in Bill 188, and the NDP will be supporting this bill, but we would like to see a lot more because what’s at stake is the lives and well-being of children.

I would say also that one of the biggest mistakes this government made was, in 2018, they shut down the child and youth advocate office. The argument was that they were trying to reduce the deficit. The Conservative MPP at the time who was the child and youth minister—and I can’t remember what riding she’s from.

Nepean, okay, Ottawa-Nepean—

When she got to be the minister, she was in charge of actually breaking down and closing the child and youth advocate office, and she said that she would be responsible, she would be the greatest child advocate that they could have. What we saw and what I mentioned when I started my speech was the Global News and the APTN investigation which shows that the abuse in foster homes is continuing. So the question is, does the member from Nepean actually take responsibility for all of the abuse that’s taken place, in part because of the loss of the child and youth advocate office?

I’ve only got a minute and a half left and I want to get to the solutions that we’re proposing. What we would like to see in this bill is getting rid of for-profit delivery. There should be no profit in looking after children. Profit should not be the motive. If you are going to dedicate yourself to looking after children or dedicate a company to looking after children, the children’s welfare has to be the first and only priority.

We also need to restore the child and youth advocate office. That’s an important thing to do. And we need to, as my colleague from Ottawa—

Interjection: Ottawa West–Nepean.

I think this bill—as the members opposite have said, there are some good things in it, but it does not go nearly far enough. With this bill, if this is the only action this government takes, there are going to be many more children like the one I started the story with, who are in foster care, who end up in very, very dangerous situations.

There were 200 complaints in 2023 to the Ombudsman’s child and youth unit by children in care. When the child and youth advocacy office was in play, they received an annual 2,000 cases per year. So there’s 1,800 fewer cases reported to the Ombudsman’s office than there were to the child and youth advocacy office. And the question is: What is happening to those children?

What you’re saying about high-needs children—high-needs children require a lot of care, and depending on the needs of those children, it can be very expensive to look after them. The funding for those children is simply not there. You cannot ask a family to take on a high-needs child and dedicate themselves to that if it’s not possible to do it and if the child needs more care than what’s possible to deliver, especially if the funding is not there.

One of the other recommendations coming out of this for this bill is an increase in funding, particularly for the care of high-needs children.

That the government is expanding that to include ECEs and other professionals who are in care of children, that makes good sense. But at the same time, the government needs to provide funding and also restore the children and youth advocacy office so that those children have an advocate on their side when things happen.

I hear the member’s passion in this, and absolutely, we must end for-profit child care. There’s a litany of abuse that’s been happening. There’s the reports that come out about what’s been happening, that these for-profit child care providers are generating profits, that they’re actually making money on this, on the backs of these children, and they call the children “cash cows.” They’re accumulating real estate assets from the taxpayer dollars that are supposed to be going to children’s care.

We need to get the profit out of child care, foster care. We need to make sure that all organizations that are looking after children, that their first and only responsibility is the care for those children, not for generating profits for their owners.

We’re seeing it also with Chartwell, the seniors’ home in Mississauga that’s being shut down. We’ve got 200 seniors being evicted because this company, a real estate investment trust, wants to renovict those seniors so they can make more profit. It’s appalling. The government should not be supporting, either for children’s care or seniors’ care, for-profit corporations.