I just want to join my colleagues earlier who welcomed the guests who are on the front lawn: 6,000 advocates for public health care.

I know my friend here from St. Catharines has been an advocate for it, as have many people in this House, but in the community, what I’m being told is that the direct cost of unplanned pregnancy between people aged 15 to 29 is $381 million and that what we need to do as a province and as a country is give people more control over their reproductive health and that universal access to contraception is a key way to do it.

I note that the federal government has made some inroads thanks to the federal NDP and the hard work of Jagmeet Singh and that team to move in this direction, but I encourage the House to listen to the people who have signed this petition, particularly the Canadian Federation of Medical Students, who are doctors in training, asking us to move on universal contraception for everyone in the province of Ontario right away.

Resuming the debate adjourned on May 29, 2024, on the motion for third reading of the following bill:

Bill 188, An Act to amend the Child, Youth and Family Services Act, 2017 and various other Acts / Projet de loi 188, Loi modifiant la Loi de 2017 sur les services à l’enfance, à la jeunesse et à la famille et diverses autres lois.

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 rise this afternoon and speak to a particular concern I have with this bill. My colleagues have talked about it. When we spend $20 million-plus on advertising that is not persuasive, that does not reflect the government’s record, what are we missing an investment on? Well, Speaker, I spoke this morning in question period. I asked a question that was not answered about the fact that Metrolinx, a public agency of this government, is following their example. They spent $2.5 million on an ad that insulted transit riders as Metrolinx continues to fail in its record to build transit. I think that’s because the government set the example.

But what could we have done with $2.5 million? Well, Speaker, back home, primary care clinic founders in the market for folks with mental health and addictions and their families, they proposed a clinic that would cover 10,000 people, that would help some of our most struggling neighbours in need. They got $2.5 million. That’s the amount of money we’re talking about.

But if I were to say in this moment we’re living in right now—because I think there’s a role for government advertising—what kind of government ads do we need right now? I am hearing consistently from neighbours back home about their heartbreak and the heart-rending situation they are seeing in Gaza right now. They would like this government to affirm, like the federal government did last week, that the Geneva Conventions are being broken right now, that a million and a half Gazans are starving in Rafah as they are awaiting a military invasion. I would like to see billboards, I would like to see ads from this government, saying they see those people suffering, they support the fact that we need an immediate ceasefire, we need to help those people in the region. That is the billboard Canadians are waiting for, not some self-congratulatory message.

Human rights is core to the province of Ontario. It should be something we all care about. That’s the ad that we want: a ceasefire right now.

Back to the minister: For folks watching at home, there’s a reason why you didn’t get an answer to that question today. The sad thing is, public transit construction in Ontario has been hijacked by a self-serving, overpaid bureaucracy led by a million-dollar man, Phil Verster, that this Premier and that minister will not hold to account.

Are we going to hear another speech, after my supplementary question, about wonderful transit projects to come in 10 years, or is this government finally going to hold a corrupt bureaucracy to account and fire Phil Verster?

I want to thank the Minister of Public and Business Service Delivery for that hour lead on Bill 153. As he mentioned, this has been something we’ve been looking at in committee, but as legislation evolves we ask questions. That’s our job.

I do have a question for the minister. I had occasion, on my route down to Toronto, to talk to some of the great people who work in the gas sector that maintain the pipelines. They’re members of Unifor. They told me a few startling things that this legislation doesn’t address, and I’m wondering if the minister would be open to amendments.

They told me that Enbridge at the moment is not obliged to let the province of Ontario and its regulatory authorities know about any compromises in its entire gas pipeline infrastructure in the province of Ontario. I was also told that, in the United States, this is a live discussion there, with many countervailing legal suits going on from municipalities concerned, because methane leaks, as the minister said, are extremely dangerous for workers and extremely dangerous for communities.

Is the minister mindful of that, given that he talked about health and safety, about amendments to this bill that would require all operators of underground infrastructure to disclose compromises—

Thanks to my friend from Niagara Centre. Public transit, particularly in Brampton, biggest and busiest: 115% capacity right now. What is this change going to mean for the good people of Brampton who want well-funded, operationally sound public transit?

I want to thank the member for her remarks.

I’m thinking about the implications of the government that, in its budget last week, announced no new money for operating public transit in the province of Ontario—just commitments to these trains they’re building that may happen at one point somewhere. We know about them in Ottawa. They don’t tend to work very well when they’re built by the consultants this government likes.

A 16-year-old, sadly, tragically lost their life this past Saturday, and people have been sounding alarm bells that we urgently need money into public transit so the transit system works well and is safe.

I’m wondering if the member has any comments about how we can make sure that the public transit system that we do have actually works well and is safe?

From your perspective, where should the money be going? Should it be going into operating transit for the TTC? Should it be going to helping folks who are homeless get access to safe, affordable homes with wraparound supports?

Give these folks, who seem to be fixated on trains that have not been built yet and are late, an idea of where the money should be going to.

My question is to the Premier. Good morning, Premier.

A private, for-profit surgical clinic is operating for the second time this Saturday at the Riverside Campus of the Ottawa Hospital from 7 a.m. to 5 p.m. Meanwhile, there is a long backlog of orthopaedic surgeries—over 2,000—to members of the public who are waiting for the public health care they were promised. This is another example of our public operating rooms being closed to the public who paid for them but open to the profit of a select few.

A question to the Premier: Will this government get public operating rooms fully up and running for everyone?

Interjections.

It is a sad day when there are nurses in this building who work very hard for us every single day, we ask serious questions about the attack on the funding of our public hospitals, and we get talking points back.

What we know in Ottawa today about this clinic is that nurses are being offered, inside our public hospitals, twice the salary to work in these for-profit, private clinics. We know it’s going to get harder to keep nurses in our public system as a result of your efforts to hand over these surgeries to for-profit clinics.

A serious question, Speaker: Is this government going to invest in our public operating rooms instead of selling them off or renting them out?

Back to the minister, actually, because it was the minister that answered the question from Toronto-St. Paul’s, but I didn’t get an answer.

The minister said yesterday in this House—she was asked why Metrolinx was directed to withhold information from my colleague from Toronto-Danforth and my colleague from Toronto Centre about the Ontario Line. She told this House in her answer that that was an unacceptable act that she did not condone.

But what we just learned from CityNews is that this has happened again. Information has been withheld from the public about the Eglinton Crosstown LRT at the direction of this minister and at the direction of the Premier. Speaker, why is this minister demonstrating a pattern in this House of withholding information to the public about transit systems? We need an answer to the question this morning.