Wow. Do you know what’s highest in history? Homelessness rates right now—that’s what’s the highest in history.

But back to the Premier: A little over a week ago, on a Friday afternoon right before the constituency week, the government dropped their annual funding announcement for schools. That should have been the first clue; right, Speaker? Dropping a major announcement at the last minute on a Friday afternoon. The government thought they could pull one over again on the people of Ontario. They thought that if they gave it a different name, showed some kind of new calculations and rebranded it, they could confuse you.

I’m sure the Premier and the minister thought that they had outsmarted everyone and avoided accountability, but it turns out they weren’t so clever, Speaker. In fact, it’s the same cuts again and again, just under a different name.

My question to the Premier is, does this government refuse to adequately fund school programs that are needed by the most vulnerable of our students, and why?

This year, public funding is $2 billion lower than was expected. That’s only accounting for the current status quo, to keep things the way they are, which is pretty darn terrible right now. It’s not even including the additional funding that schools need to address the worker shortage, the student mental health programs, the school violence. This government thinks that that’s just good enough.

So to the Premier: Why does he think that “just good enough” is good enough for our kids?

Interjections.

The Minister of Education has pile after pile of applications for capital builds for schools, while kids are sitting in portables, and they are collecting dust on his desk.

The government has made a habit of stashing away so-called contingency funds to give them free rein on spending. We see this over and over, and we’re seeing it again with $1.4 billion allocated for “planning provisions” that is not accessible to school boards. Core funding isn’t really core funding if it isn’t actually available to our schools.

So to the Premier: Is the government disguising this new slush fund under education funding to hide the massive cuts to public education and our schools?

I want to thank the member for Spadina–Fort York for your comments. I really appreciate that you took this opportunity to speak specifically about ODSP and OW and the doubling of ODSP rates. And I want to thank you for taking me out with you on food deliveries during the pandemic. Actually, I’m sure you would be pleased to have others join you at some point. I think we met some of the folks that you mentioned.

But I wanted to mention one other thing: My experience in working with people in my community who are on ODSP is that the other piece of this is that ODSP is punitive, as you pointed out, but also how often ODSP is clawed back and, in many cases, quite arbitrarily, and how often people who are on ODSP have to fight and fight and fight, and how few of the case workers can stick around for more than a year because they can’t handle the pressure and how depressing it is to be constantly clawing back on people’s already meagre payments.

I wonder if the member would care to comment on that and also whether this 5% really—what that’s actually going to look like in terms of impact on the lives of the people he was mentioning.