We enjoy great privileges in being elected officials, and one of them is when the community reaches out to us and touches us personally.

I want to thank the students from Hopewell public school and their teacher Ms. Vorobej, who are hopefully watching this right now—hello, everybody—for touching my heart about an issue I was unaware of before your leadership, and that is the health of Ontario’s boreal caribou.

These students at Hopewell public school did a module last semester where they talked about the fact that of the 51 populations of boreal caribou in Canada, 37 of those populations are deemed not self-sustaining. What it means for our pristine and beautiful north is that the species of the boreal caribou, an iconic species for Ontario, are literally poised, potentially, for extinction. I note that Ministers of the Environment in this current government and previous have made this a priority, and I note that the federal government has said that Ontario needs to have the strategy that they deem to be acceptable by this month, April 2024.

I want to thank the students from Hopewell public school who wrote me personal notes and who helped collaborate with me in a letter to Minister Andrea Khanjin that I will be hand-delivering this morning, because that is what citizenship actually is. Citizenship is when you use your voice to speak out to people in our profession, to send a message, to care about someone you’ve never met.

Bless you, students at Hopewell public school. Thank you for your leadership. Let’s work together to protect the boreal caribou.

I’m rising this morning to talk about a subject that’s on our minds a lot in this House, and that is mental health, particularly youth mental health.

Speaker, I had occasion, recently, to meet with a bunch of parents who are very concerned with the mental health of their children in high school. We’ve just lived through a difficult two and a half years of folks having to learn on their own. What I’m hearing from parents and what I’m hearing from high school students is that many don’t feel a sense of belonging; many are feeling they’re in a difficult place. And I don’t want to trivialize that. I don’t want to tell people that things are going to be better overnight. But what I do want to tell people is that in Ottawa, we have community services to help people with their mental health.

Next Friday, on May 26, at 4 p.m., at 464 Metcalfe Street, we’re going to be bringing together community providers who will give youth opportunities to volunteer, opportunities to plug into services, to feel like they belong.

So I invite you: If you want to plug into your community more, if you want to make your community a better place—or if you already are—join me and other community mental health advocates to find out about who you can meet, where you can belong, because you are loved for who you are. We need to make our province a better place, and we’re having an argument about that in this building. But on the way there, the services that our grandparents fought for—you deserve a right to access them, to make our festivals great, to make our athletics great, to make our arts community great.

Youth, we need your help, so join me on May 26. I can’t wait to see you.

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.

It’s always good to hear my friend hold forth in this place.

Question: NIMBYism—I hear this a lot from my friends in government, but I want to recount a story and get the member’s reaction. Back home there’s a community association that is actually contesting a development. It’s not for affordable rental housing or commercial development; it’s five embassies that are going to be crammed into the Mechanicsville neighbourhood. They’ve contested the person leading the development, the National Capital Commission. They didn’t want to be granted status, but they wanted to keep their green space; most of the community members here are low-income folks that live in big buildings.

I guess I want the member to reckon with what happens if we prevent the right of residents to rightfully contest development that’s not in the community interest.

As the member for Toronto–St. Paul’s said so eloquently, the community organizations that are really the pioneers on shoestring budgets—you talked about it at the outset, someone engaged in specific efforts at male counselling. I was wondering if you could just elaborate on that, because I’m aware, with the Portapique massacre in Nova Scotia, that the inquiry into that has brought Nova Scotian therapists out in new and creative ways to try to reach perpetrators, to reach men to actually enrol in these programs, and they’ve had a high success rate. But I’m wondering if you could talk about that community organization that you know in Toronto–St. Paul’s and what they need from the government.