First off, we’ve worked very hard to ensure all children are in school for the next three years with stability. Children with special education needs are the ones with the greatest exceptionality, are the ones who need stability in schools, and our party alone stood up and delivered deals with every teacher union, providing some stability in their lives.

We also increased the funding for special education. We’re talking about an increase of nearly $540 million since 2018, $125 million more this year compared to last year—3,500 additional EAs in school boards, as reported by our school board associations.

Mr. Speaker, we know there’s more to do. It’s why in this year’s budget we announced additional funding for additional staffing in addition to supports for co-op education to help ensure these young individuals are able to put their talents to work in the labour market and seek employment and build skills.

We’ll continue to be there every single year to increase funding, staffing and supports for our kids with the most exceptional needs in Ontario.

I think the priority of parents in this province is that governments land deals that keep the kids in class, and that’s exactly what the government has done—not a peep from the New Democrats or Liberals who couldn’t do that when they were in government. We signed deals that provided stability.

The first principle of your question is that you’ve got to keep kids in front of their teachers, focused on the basics of education, which is why we hired 7,500 more education workers. It’s why we hired 3,000 more teachers. It’s why we just doubled the funding to build more schools in this province for families in Toronto and the smallest towns and villages of this province.

We are investing more in public education than at any time, but we’re doing it alone. When we brought forth a budget that added billions of investments to publicly funded schools, Liberals opposed that investment. When we hired thousands of additional teachers to help our kids get back on track, you opposed the investment.

But, Mr. Speaker, we’re not going to rely on the opposition to do what’s right, we’re going to continue to go back to basics and demand better for the people of this province.

Get off this ideological aversion to leveraging people with experience and stand up for what’s right: qualified educators in the classrooms of Ontario.