I enjoyed the remarks from the member from Thornhill. I particularly liked hearing about the member describing herself as one of those politicians that will actually do a shift at a homeless shelter and help hand out blankets and food. I love to hear those stories. I’m wondering if, from her experience, she could—and it was the Anglican church, if I’m not mistaken, that you had volunteered at with the blankets and the food—the Anglican church in your community?

Speaker, what I’m going to rise in this place and defend all the time is community safety. The member can engage in any number of culture-war statements he wants, but what I’m going to ask him and what I’m going to ask every member in this House is: What does that accomplish by the day’s end? What does that actually accomplish? Will it bring back the lives we’ve lost of first responders? Will it bring back Sergeant Mueller? Will it bring back Carl Reinboth? Will it give people a new lease on life, or is it just about scoring points on Twitter?

I’m not here to score points on Twitter. I’m here to fight for my community. I’m here to make sure that we do right by people living in crisis, and comments like that? It’s just performance. I’m interested in actual solutions. Believe it or not, Speaker, I’ve found that there are times members of this government will do that. I invite this member to talk to those members of this government, because those are people actually engaged in serious work, not games.

I began my life as a community organizer, Speaker, in this city, working with the great Jack Layton to make sure people didn’t freeze to death on the streets of this city and got access through a housing-first program. We convinced a Conservative mayor, Mel Lastman, to invest millions of dollars in a housing program called the Streets to Homes program, that the city currently has, which needs another tranche of reinvestment.

But there are solutions that exist, Speaker. We don’t have to keep throwing money at the problem in ineffective ways and putting people in difficult situations. We can and must do better.

I’ll be honest in my response to what the member has said. I’m not interested in playing culture war games in this place when it comes to community safety, and I would invite the member opposite to consider the same. We can try to play “gotcha” politics in this place by using catchphrases, or we can make the community investments we need to make to keep our community safe. I talked about specific investments we can use to make the community safe. I note the federal Conservative leader was playing similar games in the House of Commons yesterday in question period.

We have to be driven by evidence. We have to be driven by effective solutions that work. The case I was making this morning that I didn’t hear any evidence or response to from that member—I hope I hear it in debate—is, are we making the right investments, are we helping first responders and are we helping neighbours in crisis? Those are the pertinent questions.

Housing, supportive housing, and support for people with mental health and addictions—I heard the associate minister of the government yesterday praise those initiatives, and I’m glad to hear that. I’m glad to hear that, in this place, we’re following the evidence and not the culture wars.

I’m glad the program’s working for your community. Jury’s out for me on whether I’m going to support it. I need to make sure there’s enough money in the bill to support all communities.

We need the government, we need the public to make sure we incentivize and figure out ways to help people get housing. It doesn’t always mean cranes, either. Supportive housing can be repurposing existing rental stock, supportive housing could be wrapping services around places like rooming houses, but we can’t do that on $800,000 a year with the Homelessness Prevention Program, and we can’t do that with the limited resources currently allocated towards public and non-profit housing in this province. We need much, much more.

In my remarks on the budget this morning, what I would like to do is continue the conversation in this chamber we’ve been having about community safety. As I do that, I’m mindful of the fact that this is a challenging moment in our province, certainly challenging in eastern Ontario back home.

Today is one of the days that we are going to be remembering Sergeant Eric Mueller, who was tragically killed in Bourget, Ontario. I know members of the government are going to be going to the funeral service today. I’m glad they are. I just want to say from my perspective, as an eastern Ontario politician, days like this are hard. But I want us to think about how we preserve community safety and honour Sergeant Mueller and his family.

I also want to be thinking about Carl Reinboth. Carl Reinboth was a street outreach worker from the Somerset West Community Health Centre, one of three terrific community health centres we’re blessed to have in our community, who was tragically killed as well in a truly tragic accident—a gentleman in a psychotic episode.

We miss Carl. We miss Sergeant Mueller. We miss all people who devote themselves to public service and first response. There are so many first responders, Speaker, and today I just want to begin my remarks on the budget thinking about community safety by paying respect to Sergeant Mueller and to Carl.

What I want to ask, Speaker, is a rhetorical question, before I get into some details on two aspects of what the government has proposed in this bill: How do we keep each other safe? It’s a rhetorical question I asked in my community column last Friday. We publish a newsletter every week online—I know a lot of members do—and I asked community members to give me their two cents about what we could do as a province to keep each other more safe. I got a lot of comments back from people remarking on the amount of neighbours in our community in Ottawa who are suffering openly in the street, living in the street.

What we know is that, in Ottawa at least, there are 1,400 people in Ottawa every day who are homeless, about 8,000, if you think about the city in the course of the year, who interact with that position and find their way out one way or another. What we know is those neighbours—and they are neighbours, Speaker—who are living on the street are disproportionately drawn from certain communities as opposed to others. About 2.5% of our city in Ottawa are Indigenous, but 24% of the homeless population are Indigenous. About 6% of our city are Black Canadians, but 21% of the people who are homeless on the street are Black.

What I hear from community service providers, when they talk about folks who are chronically underhoused, chronically homeless, and folks who for whatever reason, for whatever trauma they are carrying around with them, as people have told me, live their lives in plain sight all day, all times of year—what life is like for them. People who wrote me after my column last Friday were saying they were noticing alarming behaviours that researchers tell me are linked to the toxicity of the illicit drug supply in our streets, alarming behaviours that are linked to the mental health crisis in our community.

Ana from old Ottawa South wrote me about a neighbour she knew who had been assaulted outside a coffee shop and is still in hospital after receiving several injuries, including a face fracture that people believe may not fully heal. I also know of another neighbour outside Hartman’s grocery store—you know Hartman’s, Speaker, in Somerset West, at Somerset and Bank—who was just walking to get her groceries and encountered a neighbour in significant psychotic duress and was assaulted as well.

In each of these situations, what we know is that the first-response capacity we have in our community is overtaxed. What do I mean by that? What I mean by that is, at the moment, what the Ottawa Police Service tells our community is the cost of interactions with homeless folks in our community—there are about 60,000 interactions per year—is $25 million. But if we think about the amount of money we are spending taking police first responders into interactions with homeless neighbours, when those are the exact folks we need when there’s a pileup on the 417, the exact folks we need when we have a major weather event like the wind storm that hit our community last May—the police so aptly and efficiently and effectively ensured our safety in that moment for neighbours trapped in their homes. They were terrific. Police are the ones who have the responsibility, with the monopoly on the use of force, to keep us safe in moments of significant public duress and safety.

What police officers in Ottawa Centre tell me is that they don’t want to be the first point of response for 60,000 interactions with folks who are chronically homeless. In fact, I hear again and again from our community officers that they feel the province and the city could do a lot more to support them.

I want to talk about some of those community services—because in the budget, with the Homelessness Prevention Program the government announced, the increase of $202 million, we have opportunities for the province to invest—that have been making inroads to deal with those 60,000 interactions and to take our police into a direct public safety response, instead of constant interactions with neighbours who live with trauma and who are homeless.

I want to talk about the Salvation Army in Ottawa, who maintain several vans that are fully equipped to deal with any number of needs homeless neighbours have. It could be a pair of socks, it could be a cup of coffee, it could be a first aid interaction, or it could be a ride to a home or a shelter or a drop-in facility that our city maintains. The cost of that program, which runs from 11 a.m. in the morning to 3 a.m. at night, seven days a week, is around $500,000 a year. I mentioned that the cost of asking our police force in Ottawa to interact 60,000 times a year is $25 million. What the Salvation Army tells me is, for them to staff up with an additional van could be half the cost of the allocation they currently have—$500,000—and what that would make is a meaningful difference in the lives of people who are living and struggling with trauma, and it would also follow the advice of officers I’ve spoken to who want that help.

I also want to note the Somerset West Community Health Centre, who maintain several programs, and I want to name a couple that could benefit from what the government has announced in this budget. They have a crisis outreach program that was operating during the pandemic—and it’s operating now—that doesn’t just deal with situational responses in neighbourhoods. When there’s a homeless neighbour in crisis interacting with a small business or another resident and that person, that business doesn’t feel safe, they can call the Somerset West Community Health Centre. They’re proactive: This outreach program goes into rooming houses, goes into supportive housing, goes into low-rental, and visits neighbours sleeping outside in the street, to get them the support they need, for a cost of $315,000 a year. If we invested another $226,000 a year, what the Somerset West Community Health Centre tells me is, you could employ a full-time nurse practitioner and a dedicated community worker for this program. And I can tell you, those folks would save lives. They would make sure people found out where they could go to get a decent meal at one of our community kitchens. They could connect, perhaps, spiritually, if they’re Indigenous, to some of the fantastic Indigenous cultural organizations we have in our city, or spiritually if they have faith of other kinds. Speaker, $226,000 compared to $25 million is a significant difference.

I also want to say that every time we give someone an opportunity to do something other than end up in a paramedic ambulance, a police cruiser, a jail or a mental health bed in a hospital, we don’t just achieve dignity for the person; we achieve something stupendous for economic circumstances for the province. It is cheaper and it is more efficient for the government to take aspects of this $202 million and its Homelessness Prevention Program and put it into direct community services. I’ve worked already with members of this government to connect them directly to leaders in our community who can put this money to good use.

In the last minute I have, I just want to mention one other thing, and that is the housing allocation that Ottawa has received. What we know is, we have an increase of $800,000 with the Homelessness Prevention Program allocation for our city. We were on track to expect $16 million to $17 million. What that would have done is create 54 units of supportive housing in our city. So, working with organizations like Salus, Options Bytown, Somerset West, Carlington Community Health Centre, Sandy Hill Community Health Centre, I’m pleading to this government to make sure that Ottawa receives a good allocation here, because if we don’t, what we’re going to have are more criminal justice interactions with police first responders, which is not what neighbours are telling me we need to make sure we can give people dignity, give people respect and—let’s hope, for the most part, after the prayer we had this morning—a new lease on life.