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.