It’s always a good thing to get up in the people’s House and talk about public education.

This is the question I want to ask in the three minutes I have this afternoon: I wonder how often the minister over there thinks about the people we are losing every day in our public schools. And I’m not just talking about the staff who may decide to leave. I’m talking about the kids who are excluded from class. I’m talking about the kids who feel like they don’t belong in our schools. And why? Because they need more support.

What’s on the chopping block right now back home? Special education.

Albert Einstein, high-school dropout—how many other wonderful minds, even if they aren’t geniuses of that calibre, are we prepared to lose because this minister can’t figure out what inflation means? This minister can’t figure out that the amount of money you spend in 2018 is not what you need to spend now to at least keep things moving. It’s a wilful refusal.

The question, again, I will ask rhetorically now is, who are we losing as this minister decides to throttle the funds of public education?

I will submit to you, Speaker, we are losing autistic kids, we’re losing dyslexic kids, we’re losing kids with anxiety disorders—kids who are brilliant, compassionate, wonderful people, who need help at that stage of their life. We stand at risk of losing them.

My friend from Thunder Bay–Superior North has the role now, but when I had the honour of being the disabilities critic in this province, the amount of disabled adults I talked to who had interacted with the corrections system, who had a hard time holding down work because they felt like they weren’t smart enough and they were told and they felt like they weren’t worth anything—the staff in our public school system stand ready and stand prepared to help those kids, but they can’t do it at a ratio of 24 to 1, or in JK, like 32 to 1, when half the class are on individual education programs. It’s an impossible task.

If one actually is a Conservative, I would like to say that an important thing you’re concerned about is waste. So how many kids and how many people in our system are we wasting wilfully because we refuse to invest in them?

We’ve got $600 million for a parking garage for a spa, or we have billions in potential money that we hand over to real estate speculators and real estate investment trusts, but we do not have money for disabled kids, and we do not have money for the staff who are prepared to help them.

Who are we losing? That’s my question this afternoon.

If we vote for this motion and we say as a House that public education requires investment kept up with inflation, then we are speaking the honest truth and putting our faith in the staff and the kids who deserve our help.

I thank the Leader of the Opposition for putting this on the floor.

I want to thank my friend from London North Centre for his remarks this morning and for his work, and the member for Sudbury—for their work in making sure that educational opportunities are afforded to people who have interacted with our child protection system.

I wonder if the member could take any of the time now in this exchange to talk a little about any stories—we can leave the names out—of which you’re aware, where people who had interacted with child protection followed Jane’s proud example of using that opportunity to make Ontario a better place. I hear you loud and clear. That’s what we should be doing with the treasury in this province—we should be using it to make sure people can have an opportunity. So tell us about those.

Speaker, if I’m understanding your comments correctly, given the government has proposed code of conduct changes provincially, I’m talking about a trustee who has been on the receiving end of a lot of hate. So I’m going to continue down this path, Speaker, because I believe it to be important. But I believe I am sticking to the spirit of what my colleagues are proposing here.

Proton Mail took action. This government could engage them as well. They could engage people who believe in good, corporate responsibility, inclusive learning environments, inclusive behaviour, but you didn’t that. You dropped this on a Sunday without talking to anybody about it. That’s not the way you deal with hate in our classrooms. It’s not the way you mitigate and deal with conflict. That’s my point.

Speaker, if we want to move forward in having positive education in our system—let me recap—what do we need? We need actual funding to go into our schools, and that has to keep account of where we’re at with inflation. Right now, we are $2.5 billion short, and who suffers? Disproportionately, students with disabilities.

The minister talked about the Right to Read report launched by the Ontario Human Rights Commission. I agree with him—a profound and important report—because I had the chance to meet with those advocates around dyslexia as well. But moving into a phonetic reading curriculum, thinking about embracing what they are talking about, requires systemic changes to the curriculum, not only in the classroom but at the educational development level for teachers and education staff in colleges and universities. That requires money. We can’t continue to ask staff and we can’t continue to ask school boards to burn into reserves and do more with less.

And it particularly disturbs me at a time, Speaker—I was getting ready for debate this morning and I was surveying the ways in which in our larger economy, which our school boards and our schools are part of—there is an incredible amount of wealth sloshing around out there. Since 2019, profits in the oil sector have increased globally by 1,000%—

The issue here is school boards don’t run on reserves. School boards run on funding. Governments send that funding to school boards from revenues that they draw in from a variety of sources. One of them is taxes from individuals and companies.

My friend from Peterborough–Kawartha, I think, knows that. But in a context where energy companies are making out like bandits and a Conservative government in England is prepared to set in a windfall tax for energy companies, why does this government—

Interjection.

What I’d tell my friend from Peterborough–Kawartha is the government is shorting our public schools, and they could be allocating funds to help them. That’s not going to come out of thin air; it comes from a government, like a Conservative government in England, that will actually find the resources to fund schools well.

You want them to do code of conduct processes well, you want them to do math and education well, you want them to do shop classes well—it doesn’t come from thin air. It comes from a government with the courage to ask people who have to share. We got a lot of people hoarding wealth and shorting our public education system.

It’s really too bad you don’t have the courage to do that. It’s really too bad you don’t have the courage to ask people who are super wealthy—because back home in Ottawa Centre, there’s a lot of affluent folks. When I knock on their doors, they say, “Joel, if the government of Ontario would ask me for a special levy on my company to pay for public services that my employees support, I would do that.” But these guys are only interested in one thing: cutting taxes, attacking public services and making our communities worse.

It’s a pleasure to rise and attempt to engage the government here on this education bill. I have to, though, take a step back, because one has to ask the question: When a government makes simultaneous announcements in the same area, what’s actually going on? On Sunday—this past Sunday—the education minister talked about this bill, but at the same time released the funding announcement, as the member for Ottawa West–Nepean mentioned in debate earlier this morning. Why do that? People are busy enough. Parents are busy enough. Kids who are working in our public school systems, attempting to be the best students they can be, are busy enough. As we await information about what this government’s plans are for our public education system, why release two things on the same day?

I have a theory, Speaker, and its doesn’t go to motive. It’s a theory about why a government would do such a thing. I think it’s because there’s some bad news here. I know we’re going to have a debate, in the questions and answers to my time this afternoon, about what that news is. I think it’s bad news.

Here’s why. I heard the education minister this week in debate get up and describe the funding announcement this week and this bill as a net positive thing for students and a net positive thing for our schools. But what the member for Ottawa West–Nepean said very clearly this morning is that the proof in the pudding always shows up at a school board level. It always shows up at a school board level when the people charged to actually oversee the schools at a local level look at the details about staff allocations, look at the details about resource allocations, and figure out what they’re going to do with what the government offers.

This is what we’ve learned at the Ottawa-Carleton District School Board. After burning through reserves, based upon previous cuts from this government, they are staring down the probability of $10 million to $13 million in cuts going forward. That’s not a net positive, as I see it. Here in the great city of Toronto, the Toronto District School Board has done the same assessment, and after burning through, I believe, as much as $70 million in reserves, they are now looking at $64 million in cuts. I know the education minister likes to talk about math and the importance of training up kids at math, but the math that I was trained to use myself leads me to believe cuts are not a net positive thing.

These 2,000 staff positions the minister talks about: As I read through the details of my colleague’s presentation of what the minister presented, what I understood is that these aren’t necessarily assigned to a particular occupation. They’re math coaches, as I understand it, Speaker. If you were to take those 2,000 positions and put them across the entire school systems of all the boards that we have, you wouldn’t even be sprinkling a meaningful amount per school. So if the minister truly wants kids to win and succeed, win and be the best person they could be, why would he be sprinkling such a paltry amount of resources by way of staff?

This is what I know from actual math. If the government had simply kept pace with inflation, according to the Bank of Canada—an actual, statistical source of data, unlike this government—they would be spending $2.5 billion more this year in education. That is what would be required just to keep pace with inflation.

Now, what happens when we don’t keep pace with inflation? What happens when school boards get shorted? What happens is, ultimately, staff and students get shorted. Sadly, I hate to tell you, Speaker, the people who are often at the top of the getting-shorted list are students with disabilities.

I want to talk about a few stories, one of which comes from home and that has had some modest progress as recently as today, thanks to a family who is tireless in advocating for their child, but I think it will help give the government some sense about when they propose enhancements, but deliver cuts, who suffers.

Elliot Legault is a high school student in the city of Ottawa. His family lives in Ottawa Centre. Elliot Legault is an autistic adolescent. He’s non-verbal, but what his behavioural analyst determined at the school board level and to the family is that Elliot has an incredible amount of gifts to give and bring, not only for himself but to his class.

But what happened in the pandemic is interesting. Because there was so much virtual education happening—special education was still going on in person, so Elliot, actually, during the pandemic, was one of those few students who got the benefit from schools being relatively open so he could, as is his wont, get up and walk around and explore and experience learning in a very interactive way. It’s a necessity for Elliot; it’s a necessity. So the pandemic, oddly enough, was a positive thing for Elliot as he was grappling with his learning journey in his high school.

But when people came back from virtual learning, things were very different for Elliot. There were obvious tensions with other students. Getting up and walking around are not necessarily understood by other students as part of Elliot’s learning journey and could be understood as disruptive, and conflicts could be created. The only way those conflicts get mediated is with trained people in the classroom. That is the only way those conflicts get mediated. So the Legault family advocated for their son and went as far as the autism program at Children’s Hospital of Eastern Ontario, and made a proposal, successfully, to have CHEO-based resources allocated to their son’s high school to make sure staff could figure out how to quickly mediate conflict as it was happening so it didn’t spiral out of control, so a classroom didn’t have to be cleared.

That’s incredible. I think about the amount of parents who have the capability to figure out all those avenues of advocacy where they can connect with the children’s hospital to the high school to the staff, but they accomplished all those things. But when people came back, those resources were time-limited. The CHEO resources were not there forever. They were gradually withdrawn, and staff were told, “Okay, here we go. We have all these students coming back in the high school now, and you’re going to have to figure out a way to help Elliot without an EA today.” That was often the response: “You’re going to have to figure out a way to accommodate Elliot without the ability to move around, to go in the hall and walk back and forth, and keep him in the classroom.”

You can tell it’s a ticking time bomb of a problem. A conflict is going to happen. A classroom is going to be cleared. And surely enough there were a couple of incidents. Sadly, the Legault family was dealing with the situation that I was first presented with back in the fall of Elliot’s high school education being reduced to two hours of learning a day—two hours. What does that mean for his dad, Steve, and his mom, Carrie? What it means is, Carrie is the full-time, stay-at-home educator. Carrie is not allowed to pursue her professional employment because we do not have the requisite staff to be able to help Elliot in Elliot’s learning journey—quite frankly, not just Elliot’s: It’s everybody’s learning journey when you have a mixed environment and kids learn how to interact with different kids who learn differently. So the Legault family is told by fiat that their son is only entitled to two hours of education a day.

I was made aware of a mom recently in Durham who just recently found out that her seven-year-old son has not been allowed outside for recess since October—since October. Why? Because staff worry that he is a flight risk. Staff worry that there is a conflict brewing at any corner, and they do not have EA resources, so the child stays inside for recess.

This is what happens. This is what happens when you short public education, and it doesn’t go away by talking about 2,000 staff who are math coaches who magically might be able to present themselves to a classroom one day and help Elliot or help this seven-year-old I’m talking about. It doesn’t.

So then the problem in this bill, as I understand it, gets even more complicated, Speaker, because in a context where this government is proposing enhancements to funding, enhancements to staff, but actually cutting the ability of school boards and schools and staff to provide that support, they’re blaming school boards for improper governance. I would never say, Speaker, that there aren’t problems at a school board level, certainly as there aren’t problems in this building with how we interact and make decisions. There’s always going to be, and you have to have good governance processes to hold people accountable, absolutely—absolutely. But beginning with the supposition of negativity is a problem.

It also concerned me, Speaker, that the Ottawa public school boards’ association—I might have gotten the acronym wrong—the body that’s responsible for bringing together the school boards to advocate here was not consulted on this bill. They found out about it in the media. Can you imagine, Speaker, for any one of us, if we were presented with a project of law a constituent wanted us to embrace, and that constituent just took to the media and said, “My MPP is lousy because they don’t care about my issue,” but we’ve never been consulted on it in the past and someone just holds forth and questions our integrity? We would be outraged, wouldn’t we? We would feel like we were being disrespected. But that is precisely what this government is doing to school boards right now.

So I want to invite this government, if they’re listening, to redo this process. If you’re actually interested in code of conduct policies—proper code of conduct policies that will help make sure that when there is a complaint about staff behaviour or trustee behaviour amongst each other—I want the government today in debate to confirm that they will consult with public school board authorities, consult with employee groups and parent organizations, put in as much effort as they did into the physical and health education curriculum of 2018. Do you remember that, Speaker? They went out on the road with that, and they found out from communities that their approach was wrong. I want them to put a similar amount of resources and effort into the issue of code of conduct.

I’ll tell you why, Speaker. There’s a disturbing story from my own community that I take to heart, that not a day when I walk into this place do I not think about. A very prominent trustee in our community for the Ottawa-Carleton District School Board is Dr. Nili Kaplan-Myrth. Dr. Nili Kaplan-Myrth runs a family health organization. She’s a family physician with an incredible pedigree and reputation in our town. Why? She was one of the primary health care providers during the pandemic that brought the immunization wave, the wave of mass immunizations that happened in our community, particularly for essential workers: people working in grocery stores, warehouses, trucking, the occupations that were essential, but they weren’t health care. It was Dr. Nili Kaplan-Myrth that came to be known as a major organizer in our community for her work on mass immunization. Her efforts immunized over 15,000 people. They were called “Jabapalooza” efforts. They filled up entire streets—the Fourth Avenue where her clinic is based, the Common Ground family health organization clinic. You could see the street; she worked on it with the city. The road was blocked off, with people backed up for a long way, because they were scared about going to work if they weren’t protected through immunization; they were scared about passing on a virus to an immunocompromised loved one.

Dr. Nili Kaplan-Myrth came to be known in our town for being a leader because of her work in the pandemic. And then, because of her experience in public advocacy, she decided, “I want to serve the public more.” So she ran to be a trustee of the Ottawa-Carleton District School Board in the very area where her clinic is based.

Trustee Kaplan-Myrth is also the first—to my knowledge, at least—elected Jewish trustee we have had in the Ottawa-Carleton District School Board in a long time. And sadly, given what we have seen in some quarters of social media, she has been subjected to a tremendous amount of hate and anti-Semitic vitriol—constant. It’s gotten to the point, Speaker—I want this said for the record. I won’t read the text of the emails Trustee Kaplan-Myrth has received, but it’s gotten to the point where every single day she’s receiving a death threat from anonymous email accounts. That’s not an exaggeration—every single day. That is what she is dealing with.

So what has her approach been from advocacy to change the Ottawa-Carleton District School Board? On January 18, 2023, she went to the Ottawa-Carleton District School Board with a proposal to hire a Jewish equity coach, because there had been a number of disturbing incidents of anti-Semitism in schools and because of what she had experienced herself. The board unanimously adopted that approach, and the Ottawa-Carleton District School Board has set in motion by which schools can start to grapple—led by leaders in our Jewish and this Jewish equity coach—with dealing with the issue of anti-Semitism. Something to do—they didn’t ask for the government’s help in this. Trustee Dr. Nili Kaplan-Myrth led that effort.

So what I would tell this government if they want to revamp code of conduct processes is to talk to Dr. Nili. Talk to Trustee Nili. Talk to advocates in other school boards who have had to deal with awful incidents of hate in the classroom and awful incidences of hate that they’ve received as elected officials and ask them for their advice, because your provincial code of conduct will be better from those engagements. I’m happy to send along all the contact information I have from the rather ugly chapter that continues to unfold in our city.

I also, for the record, want to shout-out Proton Mail. Why, Speaker? Because Trustee Kaplan-Myrth approached Proton Mail—which if people don’t know about, it’s an encrypted form of email you can sign up to. This is where a lot of the hate for Trustee Kaplan-Myrth has come from: sources that can’t be traced. And this company, when Trustee Kaplan-Myrth reached out to them, was horrified at the hate being spread out from their platform, and volunteered—

My question is for the minister.

I listened with rapt attention to 40 minutes of platitudes. But in the real world, at the Ottawa-Carleton District School Board, we know that there are $10 million to $13 million of cuts being proposed with this minister’s performance. In the real world, what that will mean for students with special needs, who are at the top of the chopping block, unfortunately, are fewer autism classes—at least two in the city of Ottawa. I want to mention Steve Legault, whose son, profoundly in need of supports, is only entitled to two hours of education a day. That’s what the Ottawa-Carleton District School Board, sadly, has had to do because of a lack of staff supports. And this minister, despite the rhetoric, is continuing a regime of austerity that will make the Legault family’s life worse.

So, Minister, I would like you to deliver a message to the Legault family. Are you going to make sure that you’re going to make the Ottawa-Carleton District School Board whole and they won’t have $10 million to $13 million of cuts, or aren’t you?

No, but they capped the hard workers at Carleton University who are on strike right now against this government. Let’s be very clear: That’s not what a friend does.

But I tell you what an actual friend does, Speaker. An actual friend goes to someone in crisis and lifts them up. That’s what I saw in this great province last November. I saw a purple tide of custodians, ECEs and EAs and library techs and receptionists that had enough of this government’s spin. There are some days when I’m in this cham-ber and I hear the education minister talk, and I think that member is going to spin so hard, he’s going to leave the ceiling of this building and end up somewhere on the Gardiner Expressway. It’s unbelievable.

If you believe the minister, Speaker, you would think that our education system is properly funded. But here’s what the member for Ottawa West–Nepean just told us earlier in this debate: We are losing 21 critical positions in the Ottawa-Carleton District School Board. So when they say, “We’re a friend of public education; we’re coming to help,” I think about the health care debates we’ve been having in this place. Friend to nurses: Have we heard that before? We know that in 2022, there were 158 emergency rooms that had to close because of the cuts of this government.

We have to reckon reality with rhetoric. We have to reckon the espoused friendship with that person’s actions in this place. Speaker, I want to tell this government through you, you are no friend of the education system if you stand in this place, talk about people wanting bailouts while you make their schools harder to work in and harder to study in. You are no friend.

I also want to say this, Speaker. I’ve had occasion to work with a dad of an autistic child back home. His son goes to high school. In the pandemic, the school that this young adult went to accommodated this son and was helping him figure out a way to explore that classroom, because there was a lot more space in the school because so many kids were at home learning virtually. There was a lot of hard work put into accommodating that child. Moreover, that dad, Steve, reached out to our children’s hospital to bring in specialized autism expertise to make that successful.

Guess where we’re at with Steve’s son now, Speaker? Last I heard, the school has said that because of interactions, now that everybody is back, now that there’s a lot of stimulus, now that it’s tougher for Steve’s son to get by in the school, that he is only entitled to two hours of high school a day—two hours. This minister talks about all the great work they’re doing for students with special needs, but for Steve’s son—two hours of education in the province of Ontario. You are no friend to that family. You are no friend to that son. Nor are you a friend to the thousands of kids in the legacy autism program who need as good an opportunity as everybody else.

Speaker, I don’t call them students with disabilities; I call them students with superpowers who have so much to offer and give. But you are not helping them. You are no friend to them. You are no friend to the staff if you make their workplaces hard to live in.

I encourage the folks watching this debate at home: Judge this government by how they vote. You’re not a friend to public education if you make education worse.

I’m very happy to be rising for this motion this afternoon. I would like to believe, when I hear the government members talk and talk about themselves being friends of education, that they know what a friend actually does. We on this side of the House don’t judge our friends by what they say; we judge our friends by what they do.

Let me tell you something that’s happening in our community at home right now in Ottawa Centre, Speaker, because I want to believe that some of the great kids in our high schools right now will go on one day to post-secondary education, and some of those kids might choose Carleton University. But guess what? Carleton University is on strike today. And do you know why Carleton University is on strike today? They’re not on strike against that university administration; they’re on strike against Bill 124, legislated by this government, which arbitrarily capped wages at 1% for the last three years. Did they cap their own salaries? Did they? Did they cap the salaries of their deputy ministers, who they pay handsomely to drive their policy? Do they cap any special interest group favouring the Conservative Party at any single point? Do they cap them?

Interjection: No.