After seven and a half months of heartbreak, of horror and tragedy for Palestinian and Israeli communities, I’m going to ask a question, Speaker: Does anybody in this House or in our country or around the world feel safer? I certainly don’t feel safer. I didn’t feel safer when I woke up this morning to learn that 45 people were killed in a refugee camp: people living in tents, women and children.

Do I think a new generation of orphans is going to lead to peace? No, I don’t.

Do I think shooting up a Jewish elementary school in the middle of the night in this city of Toronto is going to lead to peace? No, I don’t.

Do I believe the UN’s special rapporteur on the right to adequate housing, Dr. Balakrishnan Rajagopal, who recently said that concerted global action is needed right now to stop the government of Israel in pursuing its relentless bombing campaign, a bombing campaign which is continuing despite the International Court of Justice telling Israel that we need an immediate ceasefire?

I want to tip my hat to the students across this country. The students and faculty and staff have been our moral conscience, and I want to call upon the University of Toronto and the University of Ottawa—all of the campuses—to work with those people of conscience so Canada speaks for peace and tell every single person in the Middle East that Canada wants a Good Friday Agreement in Israel. That happened 35 years ago for the Irish, and it can happen for Palestinians and Israelis if we’re prepared to fight for it.

I want to thank the member for his remarks. I’m wondering if he could elaborate for us—because he and I both share a city where a number of our residents don’t feel safe right now. They’re talking to us through our community offices about not feeling safe on campus. I’m wondering if the member could give this government some advice about what it can do.

I note that the blue-ribbon panel had asked for $2.5 billion in additional funding from this government. Most of the mental health supports on post-secondary campuses in Ottawa Centre are struggling, with wait-lists in excess of six months for mental supports for students. So I’m wondering what the funding message could be to this government to make sure that people do feel supported and safe on campus.

Is that something you think this government should change and is it something you’re committed to change?

As I understand Bill 166, now at third reading before this House, this is about making sure that there is accountability and student supports available to people on our campuses. As I mentioned in the Q&A with the member for Ottawa South, I am being contacted increasingly—our office is—by students, staff and faculty on post-secondary campuses who do not feel safe. So the timing for this bill is fortuitous. But what I want to say in the time I have, Speaker, is that the focus of the bill, in my opinion, is misplaced, and certainly the applications and the resources that I’ve heard the government say will arrive with this bill, I think, at the moment, at least, are not going to the right areas.

Again, just speaking as someone who has taught at post-secondary institutions, I want everybody, if you can, to put your mind in the mind of a 38-year-old university professor, who, on June 28, 2023, was attacked by a 24-year-old student who walked into a hall at the University of Waterloo. The first thing that 24-year-old asked the professor was, “What’s being taught in this class?” And when the professor said to that 24-year-old student, himself a student at the University of Waterloo, that it was a gender studies class, the student pulled out two large knives and proceeded to attack the professor. The only reason the professor wasn’t critically injured is that she resisted, but two other students in that class of 40 got up to try to resolve the matter.

I’ll never forget that day and the reporting that came out of the University of Waterloo, because I have had situations—not violent situations in class, but I have had situations in classes where I’ve taught where tempers have flared and people have jumped to their feet and you thought altercations were going to break out, because, frankly, that is what post-secondary education should be about: It should be about exploring ideas, even when passions flame, even when things can get difficult in the classroom. Because I want to believe that that’s what our colleges and universities should be doing: They should be challenging us to think about our place in the world and how we use the skills that we have. But I have never encountered a situation like that, Speaker.

I wish I could say that in recent years it’s an isolated situation. But we also know that the same pattern that police studies and court evidence has shown was present in the mind of this 24-year-old student, who was asocial, who was troubled, who openly disliked Pride events at the University of Waterloo and who would regularly intervene in campus online groups, spewing hatred against queer and transgender groups on campus. The same pattern repeats itself with a college dropout in London, Ontario, on June 6, 2021, who, on the third occasion, he’d marshalled—he’d tried to marshal the courage twice before, but on the third occasion managed to run down an entire Muslim family. I asked myself in the aftermath of this, as we’ve had so much debate and reflection, given the terrorism charges that were laid against this 20-year-old, what can we do through post-secondary education to make sure that people who have fallen so deep down those rabbit holes of hatred that they would see Muslim neighbours as somehow a threat—what are we not doing on campuses?

And then, again, something that’s less known about the Quebec City mass shooting on June 27, 2017, is that that 27-year-old—and purposely, Speaker, I’m not naming the perpetrators, because I’m not interested in giving them any infamy, because I know that’s one of the reasons why they committed their lethal acts. I’m not going to name them—was a political science student at Université Laval and had been known in his class, on his campus and online to specifically target Muslim neighbours—to specifically target them, to at least a few times walk around the Sainte-Foy mosque. And for the 40 people that he found worshipping on that day and the six fathers and brothers who are dead as a consequence of those lethal actions, I again ask the question for this House posed by this bill: What are we doing on campuses to reach hatred and diminish it before it manifests in a lethal act? I think that’s a very important question.

When I looked at the blue-ribbon panel that the government amassed to give it advice on what to do with colleges and universities, and when I listened to the member for London West, both in this House and at committee, ask questions—worthy questions—we kept coming back to a similar theme: We aren’t putting the faith in the resources in colleges and universities to make sure that students, staff and faculty have access to the resources they need when they’re in a troubled mental health state, when questions and difficult circumstances pop up. We are not providing the resources necessary.

The blue-ribbon panel asked for $2.5 billion; the government has given the post-secondary sector $1.2 billion, so half the ask. I know at Carleton University, as I said earlier in the question to the member from Ottawa South, there is often at least a six-month waiting list when students ask for urgent mental health supports on campus—six months; six months when you’re exhibiting behaviours that suggest that you could harm yourself or perhaps others.

So what we’ve done in the city of Ottawa is, through our community health centres, created a program called Counselling Connect: that, within 48 hours of intake—that’s the goal—it gets people access to three psychotherapy sessions that are culturally appropriate and as fast as possible. The goal is within 48 hours of intake. I know this program right now is helping over 700 people in the greater city of Ottawa. Some of those folks are students. That would make sense. That program, Counselling Connect, costs community health centres in our city, who are strapped for cash, believe me, $600,000. But I want to believe that if Bill 166 wanted to provide the supports to students, staff and faculty on our campuses, it could partner with an organization like Counselling Connect. That would have real impact to make sure that people got the help they needed when they needed it.

Speaker, I’m also mindful of the fact that this bill is before the House at a time when many of our neighbours, many of our citizens, are mobilizing—understandably, given the horrors that we are seeing in the war between Israel and Hamas. I know the members opposite, the minister—the Premier has openly asked for encampments that are cropping up on university campuses to be dismantled, that they believe these encampments to be embodiments of hatred.

What I want to encourage my friends opposite to consider—because I visited the encampment at the University of Ottawa, I visited at the end of the workday here the University of Toronto encampment. While I may not agree with everything I’ve seen and everything that’s written down, I can honestly say that I have never seen better organized, empathetic young people trying to ask decision-makers in this country to do what they can to create more tolerance, peace and understanding. I am amazed. When I walked into the encampment at the University of Toronto, I had to go through almost a 10-minute interview intake. So I was aware, as a politician, that I was not to be photographing or videoing people. If I wanted to conduct media interviews on site, I needed to contact them first. It was their encampment and there were rules around how I behaved and how I treated others. On this site, there was an Indigenous part—I believe it’s still there—with a sacred fire. I was blown away by the level of organization. The consistent message that I heard at least from students saying: “We want to be a voice for peace. We want Canada to be a voice for peace.”

So I am discouraged, I’ll be honest, when my colleagues in this House are asking for these encampments to be dismantled, without reckoning with that message that I hear loud and clear. I heard it at home and I heard it across the street at the University of Toronto. I would like to think that that is exactly the kind of message that should be embodied in our programs on campus: a greater understanding of each other; that we aren’t intimidated by each others’ symbols. We’ve had the debate in this House about the Palestinian kaffiyeh not being permitted in this chamber.

We have to see each other for our whole person. When heinous and horrible acts are committed with cultural symbols or religious symbols, we don’t hold an entire culture accountable for that. We hold the individuals responsible for that. So I actually, earnestly, want my friends in government to hear that message. I want them to think about what is happening on campus across Canada—it’s not a threat; it’s an opportunity.

I look at two stories, and I will end with this from home, from the University of Ottawa. In the first story, I’m going to be protecting the student’s identity because she fears reprisal. We’re going to call her Miriam, for argument’s sake. Miriam is an arts major, a Palestinian student. She recounted to me an instance where a colleague in her class, who had served in the Israeli military—serving in any military is an honourable thing—had said in class that he believed every Gazan needed to be eliminated for the goal of peace to be achieved. She was stunned, absolutely stunned—mouth-dropped-open stunned. The gentlemen identified himself as a professional sniper and talked openly about how he believed that what he was doing was contributing to the cause of peace. She was stunned. She filed a formal complaint, and the response of the human rights office, sadly, at the university was to say, “Do you need counselling?” Do you need counselling?

Again, our classrooms should be places of vigorous debate where people of different perspectives should be able to hold forth, but the kind of open anti-Palestinian racism—like open anti-Semitism, open Islamophobia—open forms of hatred that I am seeing on our campuses, where so many neighbours are falling down these wells of hatred, we have to provide the mental health resources and training to the campuses so they can respond. If we don’t do that, what we don’t respond to—which seems uncomfortable in a class on one day—could be a lethal event that we respond to later, and, frankly, we saddle the first responders who are there with the trauma of having to witness that, not only the people who live through it.

I also want to talk about Dr. Yipeng Ge, who has been a public advocate, who is a medical resident at the University of Ottawa who is suspended for his social media posting on Palestinian human rights—suspended. He was not given the grounds for his suspension for a week and a half, he was just told that he was not to go to the medical school anymore. This is a medical professional who has travelled the world, worked in refugee camps, seen horrible things, helped people in incredibly difficult circumstances, given an arbitrary suspension.

When Dr. Ge approached us, I simply listened, I tried to get a sense of how the university was dealing with the matter and I said to him, “What do you want from me?” He said, “Joel, I would love it if you would engage the university, love it if you would talk to them.” I said, “Sure. The University of Ottawa are my friends. We work together all the time.” I’m sad to say that there has been no public apology offered to Dr. Ge. There has been no public comprehensive investigation. He has decided—and this is really one of the more shameful things I can remember in recent history, at a very difficult time—not to go back to the University of Ottawa, even though his suspension has been lifted and he’s allowed to, because he feels like his integrity has been questioned and he feels like the people responsible for castigating him for his beliefs have not been held accountable.

I would welcome the government’s interest in making sure that there are student supports, that we do hold campuses accountable. I think it’s worthy. I do see the rise of hatred on our campuses and I want to be part of the solution to deal with it, but we can’t do this in an arbitrary manner and we have to make sure that the resources are available at a local level that people can seek help.

Again, I just want to be as clear as I end: I am not saying that the way we deal with this is that we label people as being hateful and we segregate them and we marginalize them. No—I am actually encouraging a strategy of dialogue and conflict resolution here, modelling what we want to see between countries in the world at a local level through the campuses. The most skilled conflict resolvers, mediators, that I’ve met at a campus level do precisely this all the time, but we ask them to do a lot with very little budget. I’ll end with that.

I’ll say that the bill is coming to the House at a very opportune time, fortuitous time, but I think its focus needs to be ensuring that you at least meet the demands of the blue-ribbon panel—the $2.5 billion—and that we have some trust and collaboration with our campus partners. When we feel they have misstepped and they haven’t done their due diligence, as I think is the case with Dr. Ge, then we make sure that the province does insist that due process is followed at the campus level. I thank you for your attention.

Last Thursday, I left Ottawa at 6:30 in the morning on my bicycle, bound for this place. We called it the #SafetyRide. Our goal was to get here in four days, and I’m proud to say we made it, with the support of colleagues and friends along the way. We stopped in Kingston, in Brighton, in Oshawa, in Scarborough, and we ended here on the front lawn of the Legislature. Our goal was to hear from people and families about vulnerable road users and to talk about our private member’s bill we’re working on: Bill 40, the Moving Ontarians Safely Act.

Speaker, as we stopped in community after community, we heard stories that I will never forget. I talked to Anita Armstrong about her daughter Serene, who is now 14 years old and will live the rest of her life with a critical brain injury after being hit, as she crossed the street in Ottawa, by a driver who fled the scene. We met with Jess Spieker and Meredith Wilkinson, two cyclists in this great city of Toronto who have critical, lifelong injuries after being hit in our streets. I talked to Chris, a paramedic, who was responding to an emergency at the side of the road and whose paramedic bus was hit by a driver who was driving recklessly.

Speaker, the unfortunate reality is that the number of pedestrians and cyclists and other vulnerable road users being killed is not going down. Today, statistics bear that 20 vulnerable road users will be brought into emergency room departments after being struck down by a careless driver. We have to change our laws, and I urge members to support Bill 40.

Either the member from Mississauga–Erin Mills or the member from Whitby can answer this question. I paid attention to what they had to say very seriously because, like everyone, I care about community safety.

I want to bring to the floor of the House a matter we’re dealing with in Ottawa Centre this week. We’ve had notice that people who do not like queer or transgender neighbours are coming to Broadview Avenue, the site of three public schools, and they’re going to protest and attempt to harass children on their way to school. So we have been working proactively with the police in our community and neighbours who are disgusted with this kind of behaviour.

What I don’t see in the bill proposed, and I hope to see it, are proactive resources that can make sure, as the member for Toronto Centre said, that our police are not responding a great deal to situations where mental health workers could help. They could respond to actual incidents of unsafety, and we could have them there in significant numbers.

Can the members enlighten me: How does this bill make sure people in a community like mine will be safe when they need to be safe?

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.

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

As Gabriel Magalhaes was dying in the Keele Street subway 11 days ago, many people in his community were there to hold his hand. Among them was a transit worker who people don’t know because that transit worker didn’t want media attention. But transit workers take their jobs very seriously and among us in the gallery, as our leader said, we have many here today, from all over Ontario. Thank you for coming. They are the eyes and ears of our system, but their positions right now are being cut because we are not putting enough money into operational funding for the transit system. Speaker, my question to the Premier: Why aren’t we doing that?

What’s happening here in the city of Toronto—for subway cars, there normally were two positions. There was a conductor and there was a guard. The guard looked to ensure the safety of the platform. The TTC is cutting that guard position. It was a guard who saved a four-year-old girl at Coxwell subway station not long ago when they wandered onto the tracks. It was the guard who made sure that the conductor knew the subway train had to be stopped. Under this government’s cuts for this year in operational transit, people are less safe.

My question to the minister: Why did you not deliver on the $500 million that transit workers need, and can we not just call them heroes; can we make sure that their workplaces are safe so everybody gets to work or home safely?

I think I understand my friend’s objection to my remarks as not having a link to the government’s budget bill. What I’m attempting to establish, over the next 16 minutes, is that we as a Legislature—not just this government—have a responsibility to ensure adequate funding is put into our transit system to ensure people’s safety. I think it’s important that we’re all aware of the gravity of the matter. I apologize to the member if some of the issues that I’m talking about here, in all honesty, are hard to hear, but they are happening on our transit system, and I will endeavour over the next 15 minutes to make the link to the investments this place needs to make in our transit system to ensure people’s safety.

Speaker, I’ll continue.

On January 21, 2023, a 24-year-old TTC operator was shot with a BB gun while waiting for her shift to begin in Scarborough.

The next day, four teenagers were charged with swarming and violently beating two other TTC operators.

On March 4, 2023, Waterloo Regional Police Service was notified of a man following a woman off a public transit bus with the intent of sexual assault. Three similar incidents happened the following week.

On March 24, 2023, a 19-year-old in Barrie with no fixed address assaulted a bus operator. The operator, to this day, remains on disability leave. The assailant was released to the community without any supports.

On March 25, 2023—an incident many people in this House will know well—Gabriel Magalhaes, 16 years old, died in hospital after being stabbed by someone as he sat on a bench at the TTC’s Keele subway station.

On March 27, 2023—the incident I recounted, in our city of Ottawa, at the Rideau LRT station.

Then, most recently, on March 31, 2023, a man was robbed at knifepoint by two suspects at the TTC’s Coxwell station. He was not injured.

It bears repeating that hundred of thousands, millions of people—if you think about how many people used public transit in the province of Ontario over the last few months—have used public transit without experiencing violent, graphic incidents like these, have worked in the system, but I want to believe that our goal in our public transit system is zero injuries, zero accidents, zero assaults. That’s our goal. It’s the TTC’s stated goal. It’s OC Transpo’s stated goal. Most municipal transit authorities say the same thing.

People are alarmed, moms and dads are alarmed, neighbours are alarmed at what is happening in the transit safety system. Unfortunately, too often, people think that the answer to dealing with violence in our transit system is simply a criminal justice response; that this is matter of very violent people who need to be locked up and kept away from the public, and that will resolve our problems in public transit. Experts I’ve had occasion to speak to recently dispute that case.

It’s also not accurate to attribute all of the transit violence I named—and I did not name a complete list—to simply folks struggling with unmet mental health needs or folks who are homeless. Many of the incidents of violence in our public transit systems have happened with people who, for one reason or another, see transit riders and transit operators as easy targets of violence.

So what can we do? I want to make the case in the time I have this morning that what we absolutely must do is put money into the operational budgets of transit systems. Let me give you a very concrete example that comes to me by way of the great people who operate the TTC systems, who are members of the Amalgamated Transit Union Local 113.

Subway cars operating in the city of Toronto historically had two major positions per car. There was a driver, and then there was another position known as the guard. The guard would be that person—if you’re on the subway platform—who’s looking out the window, ensuring that the doors are safely closed, that there’s nothing wrong happening on the platform, but, also, the guard’s job is to monitor general well-being of the platform itself. If they see a problem, they have the capacity inside the subway car to immediately notify the TTC constables, who are represented by the Canadian Union of Public Employees, and the two units work very well together. Unfortunately, given the fact that operational funding has dramatically reduced in the TTC system, that guard position has been cut by the Toronto Transit Commission. So transit operators, in some cases, are—the only source of support in a critical incident could be that one person who is operating that subway; the window opens temporarily. Yes, there are emergency buttons you can push, but the operators of the system tell me it’s not sufficient, and I trust them.

I also know that budget 2023 that the government just introduced allocated only $80 million—on a provincial budget offering of over $200 billion—for operational funding for our public transit systems. There is a link between that underinvestment and the inadequacy of funds available for the guard position on subway cars or other crisis response people who could be made available to help neighbours in crisis.

What could we do? There’s a lot we could do. The first thing we can do, as I’ve tried to do in recent weeks and months in my capacity of transit critic, is talk to the folks who know what’s going on. Foremost for me are the workers who fix, operate and maintain all of our transit infrastructure. They have been telling me since the fall of last year that we are at risk of multiple critical incidents in public transit in Ontario. Sadly, incident after incident has taken place, and we have not been able, yet, at least, to convince the government to prioritize money into operational funding for public transit—but money, also, that would not just be for reinstating positions like the guard position that I was talking about; money that would work hand in hand in a city like Toronto with crisis response that is appropriate to the situation.

Let’s talk about what happened to Gabriel Magalhaes, the 16-year-old who lost his life after being stabbed at Keele station. Gabriel’s mom, who I’m sure many of you have seen, has had the bravery to speak publicly about her grief and about what should be done. I want to read into the record words that she expressed to the CBC’s Adrienne Arsenault in a poignant, candid interview. Andrea is a nurse, and this is what she said:

“We need to start talking about violence, the root causes of violence. I know it comes down to the social determinants of health. It’s not an easy solution. We’re not talking about adding more police force” or “locking people up.” We need to ask the question, “What are the root causes? Why is this happening? Why is a person homeless? Why is a person not able to access care, access supports? ...

“I came from ... a very violent country, Brazil. Why did I move away? I wanted a better life. I see the violence escalating. I read about horrible things ... on the TTC. I feel deeply when I hear those things, but you never think it’s going to happen to you.... I would like people to try to put themselves in my shoes, in my husband’s shoes ... a beautiful ... shy boy, but he had dreams. He had goals....

“I’m a nurse. I had a clinical placement in mental health hospitals. As a society ... we love to blame one person ... ‘You picked up the knife.’ But could this have been prevented ... from the beginning?”

Then, she went on in responding to a question from Adrienne Arsenault about folks in our profession, Speaker, who are elected officials offering our thoughts and prayers. To that, she said:

“I’m going through” stages of grief, “but that makes me angry—so angry. Because when they want votes, they promise everything, but how about action? How about what really needs to be done? Empty words make me mad....

“Don’t live with fear.” We need to use public transit. “But can’t we please ... make effective change, so we can all be able to go outside and be able to breathe and feel safe? I feel like this is still an amazing city; we can do better.”

I agree, wholeheartedly, with every single word.

I think that’s why the Premier, as I understand it, called Andrea personally.

But as she implores us to realize that we have to go beyond empathy—although empathy is the important first step. If we’re hearing from transit authorities, workers, riders, administrators who run the system that we urgently need more operational funding, right now, to deal with this situation in a multi-faceted way, we have to revise what we propose in budget 2023 and unleash a lot more revenue.

I know the government has an unallocated contingency fund of $4 billion. I hope I persuasively made the case this morning that some of that money needs to go, right now, into our operational funding for public transit, so nobody’s loved one faces the kinds of consequences I talked about in the speech I made this morning.

I had occasion at committee to see the Minister of Infrastructure present on Bill 69—and I think this is a related point. The minister made the point in her presentation of saying it’s a priority of the government to utilize surplus government-owned buildings in the province of Ontario, and that that was one of the motivations for Bill 69. I was shocked to learn, as I prepared for that committee, that the Auditor General put out a report in 2017 noting, believe it or not, that there were at that point 812 unused, vacant government of Ontario buildings that we heat, that we electrify. The minister named that as a major problem the government wants to address.

I want to submit, for the purpose of the budget bill, that were the government to say today, after hearing what I had to say and listening to experts in the transit sector, “All right, we’ve missed something; we do need to allocated money into operational funding for transit,” I guarantee you the first thing that crisis workers will say—the great Streets to Homes program the city of Toronto has, that was often the first group of folks who will show up to help TTC constables, to help TTC staff. If someone in a mental health crisis is in a subway station, or on a bus, streetcar or train, the Streets to Homes program will greet that person in crisis, sit them down, put their arm on their shoulder and say, “Are you having a tough time? How’s it going?” They’ll talk it over with coffee. They are skilled de-escalators. But do you know what those crisis response workers don’t have? They don’t have access to shelter space or transitional housing to refer people to. So guess what happens? You de-escalate somebody in one moment, but then an incident goes on to happen later.

We’re in a province where, as of five years ago, there are 812 vacant public buildings that, I want to believe, experts in crisis response and transitional housing—because I’m going to guess a lot of those buildings are in this city. We can repurpose and reutilize those spaces so you can find some temporary homes for people, wrap some supports around it, with their consent, and get them started on making a better life.

One of my gateways into politics, when I was a graduate student in this city in the 1990s, was helping the great Jack Layton when he was a city councillor fight for programs just like this. What motivated Jack to act was the gaudy spectacle of homeless folks freezing to death near his home. He felt compelled to act, as a city councillor, and he knew there was money in the country, in the city and in the province to address it. To his credit, the then mayor, Mel Lastman, initiated a program that, as I understand it, eventually grew into the Streets to Homes outreach program that the city has.

But now everything old is new again. Now we’re in a situation where, yes, the city of Toronto and other cities can demand that homeless encampments be taken down. But people don’t disappear. The housing and homelessness crisis that we have in this city doesn’t go away.

If, in polar climates, which our country has—January and February; we’re both from Ottawa, Speaker—you push people out of an encampment, where are they going to go in a large city like Toronto or Ottawa or London or Windsor? They might go on a bus. They might go in a subway station. They might be living with unmet needs. And that’s when accidents happen.

I want to believe, as I believed then, that an ounce of prevention is better than whatever one would think a pound of cure is. Locking people up and having a very harsh criminal justice response to situations like the ones I’ve talked about this morning is not going to get the outcomes we need.

Speaker, I just want to be clear: I am not saying that people shouldn’t be held accountable for their actions—absolutely not. There is no justifiable case for violence. But as Andrea Magalhaes said in honour of her son, if our goal is actual community safety, then we can achieve community safety. But it requires the right smart investments. It requires an awareness, as she said, as a nurse, of the social determinants of health—and it requires us prudently using the money given to this place.

The government has proposed a budget of over $200 billion, $80 million of which was allocate to transit authorities for operational funding. If we can get to what advocates told me they needed for this upcoming year, $500 million—and I know the government was made aware of this; I know the finance minister was made aware of this; I know the Minister of Transportation was made aware of this. If those investments could go directly into partnerships with community agencies who work directly with folks at risk, either at risk of reoffending—they’ve offended before, or if there is a recidivistic risk, or if there is a behavioural risk due to traumas that person grew up with—that is money well spent. That is us, as Andrea said in her comments, moving beyond thoughts and prayers.

I don’t think any of the families of folks who suffer violence that I’ve named in my speech this morning want to hear thoughts and prayers anymore, as important as that empathy is. They want this place to act.

The good news is, we have the resources to act, we have the expertise to act, and we can act, but we have to do it.

That’s how budget 2023 can be improved.