I appreciate the opportunity to rise and to speak on behalf of the great people of Toronto Centre.

As I was listening to the Minister of Education’s debate remarks, I couldn’t help but feel that if this chamber was actually filled with parents and students, what a tragedy it would be for them to come out to this House and to have the Minister of Education essentially vilify them. If you were a family, parents and students living in urban centres, that would hurt double as much, because he did take aim specifically at families and students living in urban centres, and specifically downtown Toronto.

As a parent from downtown Toronto, I can tell you that my worries are the same as every other parent in Ontario. I want to make sure that my kid and all children in Ontario have access to a high-quality public education. It’s absolutely critical for us to invest in education because that’s a great equalizer for every student, every child in this province.

It really goes to the heart of the values that this government believes in. Will you be investing in education to support our students? Will you be investing in the education system to ensure that teachers and administrators have the resources that they need in order for them to deliver the high-quality education that every student deserves?

The motion is actually very simple, Speaker. The motion is simply asking the government of Ontario to substantially increase the funding for public education in Ontario so that every child receives the high-quality education they deserve, regardless of their family’s income. What could be more Canadian in Ontario than that?

But the government is doing exactly the opposite. For six years they’ve had a chance to increase funding to ensure that education receives the resources to allow success in Ontario, and they’ve done exactly the opposite. They have been defunding education, less and less every single year. They’re leaning right in to shrinkflation, which means that your money is buying you less every year in households across Ontario, and the same thing is now happening in the government’s coffers. Classrooms are oversized—30, 31, 32, 34, 38 students in a classroom. Now put in five or six students with developmental delays, global delays, autism and you’ve got a recipe for disaster, which is why we are hearing from educators, principals, parents and students themselves that the rise of violence is across Ontario.

These are choices being made by the government, choices that can be reversed if the government prioritizes student education as they say they do. But we know they don’t, because if they did they would put their money where their mouths are. Otherwise, they’ll stand up and they will insult the opposition, they will vilify unions and teachers, as they have done so on and on again, because they’re scapegoating them for their failed government policies.

Speaker, I’m just going to end by sharing a story very quickly from Chelsea, who is a teacher of grade 8 students in my community. She wants the government to understand that teachers are drowning. They are not successful at this moment because they’ve been underfunded, and the burnout is high. As much as they love their job—and they do, Speaker—they can’t hold on forever. They’ll be forced to walk away if this government doesn’t reverse its course. The stakes are too high. I hope they consider.

It’s always an honour to rise in this esteemed House to speak on behalf of the great people of Toronto Centre.

I’m here, as we all are, to debate government Bill 180, the budget bill. Obviously, it’s a bill that actually sets forward the spending priorities of the government; it also, as in every budget, lays out the priorities and the values of the government of the day.

I think that we have all heard quite a bit of debate now about the things that the government is interested in doing, but I want to dial back, Speaker, to the time of the pre-consultation budgets.

When those pre-consultation sessions were rolling out across Ontario, Speaker, as a Toronto representative, I must note once again in this House that the city of Toronto, the capital of this province, was deliberately excluded from the budget pre-consultations. That means 2.8 million people. The financial heart, the cultural capital of the province was not at the table. We had to go elsewhere in order for our voices to be heard. This is a city that generates over $430 billion of GDP for the province and the country, and it just is absolutely mind-blowing that we didn’t have our own pre-budget consultation date here in the city.

But we did hear from a number of other stakeholders, including Toronto stakeholders that had to leave the city to be heard. We heard from many different communities and stakeholders, and I want to just highlight that some of the concerns that was brought forward to us at the hearings have to be read into the record one more time, Speaker.

We heard that now in Ontario, life is harder than ever before. The cost-of-living crisis that faces us requires real solutions, Speaker. We have a housing crisis that’s gripping every single household and ripping apart their budget. That’s making life extremely difficult for families. So we are looking for solutions in this budget that address the needs of hard-working, struggling Ontarians. That’s what I was looking for when the budget was released. That’s what Ontarians were looking for as well.

Let me tell you, Speaker, what Ontarians told us during the pre-budget consultation. Let’s also think about what Ontarians are asking and speaking about after the budget was released.

They said that the government should invest in proactive solutions to Ontario’s publicly funded and publicly delivered health care system and provide immediate support for community mental health programs and support for community health care coverage. That needs to be expanded under OHIP.

They also said that we need to make meaningful investments in order for us to combat the devastating impact of worker burnout and stress for workers impacted by the understaffing and under-resourcing of many different programs that are government-funded.

We also heard from Ontarians—and this was at every single budget session—that this government needed to directly invest in the creation of affordable and supportive housing. It’s not good enough to just leave it to the free-market forces expecting the for-profit developers to meet our needs when it comes to social as well as rent-geared-to-income housing.

They also told us that we needed to invest in public education at consistent and appropriate levels so that our post-secondary institutions as well as our public institutions would no longer have to come cap in hand every year with a request. Therefore, they wanted a government that was going to partner with them in a respectful manner. They said that this government needed to repair the formula for post-secondary education to ensure that Ontario keeps pace with its counterparts across Canada.

They also said—and this is very important, because we’re going to have a moment very shortly in this House to allow the government to correct the record. They also said that the government of the day needed to adopt the Renfrew county inquest recommendations—86 recommendations directly directed at the Ontario government. The first recommendation, which costs you absolutely nothing, is to declare intimate partner violence an epidemic so that this government would be able to address the problem with the same type of urgency and focused intention.

Speaker, I mentioned that this government would have an opportunity to correct the record because on April 10, in two days, this House will have a chance to debate it. This government will then have their opportunity to go on the record and adopt the Renfrew county inquest recommendation.

We also heard from community members and advocates and Ontarians about the need to double the ODSP rates. Right now, in this moment in time, we are legislating poverty and condemning people to a life of hardship through acts of government. We need to be able to reverse that as soon as possible. You can even say, Speaker, that as people choose medically assisted suicide, that is a form of social murder.

We need to protect and invest in Ontario’s libraries, museums and cultural institutions while recognizing their vital importance as economic drivers—very basic what I would call value propositions that allow us to build this budget.

Budgets, as we know, are going to be confidence bills. As the government likes to taunt, “Is the official opposition going to support us?” Well, you would get support if it was adequate, if there was adequate funding. It’s very difficult to support a bill that says we have confidence in the government when there isn’t enough to work with.

So across the province, we heard from health care providers who shared very practical solutions to the many challenges to our health care system. Speaker, as we all know in this House, it has been said time and time again that 2.3 million Ontarians do not have a family physician. This number is going to swell alarmingly to 4.4 million by 2026, in two short years, unless swift action is taken.

The average family physician spends about 40% of their work week on administrative tasks that pull them away from other patients. The recommendation from the Ontario Medical Association is to provide efficiency initiatives to reduce non-clinical work and to improve access to care for patients. It’s something that this side of the House and the official opposition strongly supports, and we would absolutely put that into play if we were the government of the day. But we actually put that in play by putting the motion before this House so that this House could adopt that and move towards reducing the administrative burden on family physicians so they can do more and actually help the patients that they desperately want to help.

Speaker, we also heard from physicians as well as nurses who work in emergency departments, and what they have shared with us is that they are seeing massive closures in unprecedented manners. And this is largely due to a shortage of nurses, nurses who are leaving the field at unprecedented rates due to burnout and to overcapacity struggles. Closures and long wait times caused by understaffing result in delays or misdiagnoses, leading patients to return to the emergency department in much worse shape. This is shameful. We are a very rich province. We can certainly do better. But we are not going to be able to meet the problem with the actual solutions if the government has its head in the sand.

The Registered Nurses’ Association of Ontario emphasized that in implementing staffing ratios, there has to be a minimum nurse-to-patient ratio. It’s the only way to address retention. If no action is taken, Ontario will suffer a shortage of 30,000 nurses—a staggering 30,000 nurses—by 2028. Also, closing the wage gap that nurses experience and closing the private clinics, which we know that the ONA has claimed and reported is undermining the public health care system. All of this is setting the way for privatization, something that this government is blatantly, intentionally dedicated to, and they’re not even hiding it anymore.

I want to speak about the need to ensure that we can provide funding that is stable and reliable for safe consumption sites. I represent Toronto Centre, known as the downtown east, and I can tell you that my community is hit very hard. We have safe consumption sites, Speaker, that are funded largely, 100%, by private donations. Safe consumption sites are a continuum of care in the health care system and you cannot help people if they keep dying, especially if there is a solution to reverse that horrific trend. The province needs to step up and do it quickly in order for them to save lives. Right now, they are not.

In northern Ontario, there are only three safe consumption sites and only one of them is federally funded. I’m not sure what this government is waiting for, but it’s clear to me that those who are living with addictions are not their priority. But they are family members and I can tell you that that is the priority of the families.

Mental health is a massive concern for Ontarians. We are facing a mental health crisis and the official opposition has been ringing this bell over and over again, saying that we are willing to work with you on solutions to address the problems that are being caught downstream. They are being caught in ER departments. They are being caught by our hard-working police officers. They are being caught in our school system and they do not have the resources and the skill set to address this problem.

Agencies that provide mental health care in Ontario are looking for multi-year funding to stabilize, sustain and build the sector. They are literally at a crisis point and they have been for years, but pretty soon, the runway is going to be gone. They have asked the Associate Minister of Mental Health and Addictions to consider the plight of the families, and this same message would go to the Premier and to everyone sitting on the front bench in cabinet. They have asked them to put themselves into the shoes of those families, to empathize with their pain about what it feels like to surrender a child simply because their community lacked the appropriate mental health supports.

I have a son who is just about five years old. I do everything I can to provide care for him; my partner and I both do. It would break my heart if I couldn’t care for him, and that’s exactly what’s happening to families right across Ontario, because they’re not getting the support from this government. Speaker, we all know about the alarming, damning statistics and the backlog with the Ontario Autism Program. We are not seeing this government do enough, nor are we seeing them coordinate and lead on these files, and we desperately need to.

Cities cannot experience the download of mental health and other social services and that this government asks that cities and neighbourhoods pick up the tab, but that’s exactly what they’re doing when they passed Bill 23 and then promised that they were going to make these cities whole. By on one hand stripping away their ability to actually raise the revenues they need, and then at the same time underfunding and defunding the mental health system, you downloaded it once again. We saw this with the Harris government, we saw this with the McGuinty government, and now it’s happening with this Conservative government.

We’re also facing a demographic tsunami. This is where individuals who are 65 and older are going to become, at some point in time, a sizable portion of the population. Right now, it sits at 20%. By 2031 it will be 25% and by 2040 the population of individuals who are 80 years old and over is going to double. There is no planning in this budget, or anywhere else in this government’s priorities, that says that they acknowledge that this problem is here and that they’re ready to work with the sector and to hear from families to come up with the solution. Things are only going to get worse if the investments and, just as importantly, the leadership coordination and the partnership with the sectors are absent.

Seniors can live safely in their communities—many of them can. They also want to live productively in their homes, but they will need to have those supports. Whether it’s home care or other types of care that allow someone to continue to live independently for as long as they can, all of that takes time and all of that takes resources. But most importantly, Speaker, it takes workers and it takes coordination.

It’s important for us to address the wage and benefits gap when it comes to workers who are paid in community support services. What we’re seeing is that that sector in particular—dominated by women; dominated by racialized women—is grossly, grossly underpaid. And that’s not unintentional. I believe that is intentional, and they know it as well.

I have to talk about housing, because it is not possible for us to have an opportunity to pass the budget in Ontario in the grips of a housing and affordability crisis and not talk about what this government is doing to address the housing crisis. They should be using every legislative lever in their portfolio, in their hands, to address the housing crisis. Whether it’s vacancy decontrol, whether it’s rent control, whether it’s the building of new RGI units, whether it’s new subsidies, whether it’s new legislation to prevent rental demovictions, all of that is just a snapshot of some of the arsenal that they can use, and they are using none of it.

So they’re not serious about addressing the housing crisis. There’s really nothing in here that says that they’re serious about meeting the needs of low-income and moderate-income individuals in Ontario, because if they were, some of those tools I talked about, the policy changes that are within the power of this government—they could do that, but they’re choosing not to.

The housing sector, especially the non-profit housing sector, sees that, and they know they do not have a partner in this government. Regrettably, they know that they’re in this all on their own. So who are they turning to? They’re turning to the federal government, they’re turning to their municipalities, and both of those government partners are saying, “Where’s the province?”

What we’ve seen, Speaker, is that every single year, we have the association of interval and transition houses who make a request to have a $60-million investment to offset the services to ensure that their workforce is stable. They do this every single year. And what we also heard during the pre-budget consultation is that other housing sector partners come to the province with the same request every single year. It’s astounding that we have a government that’s not willing to work with the non-profit sector, to actually support them to expand deeply affordable housing for Ontarians to meet them where they are needed.

Education is a very important topic that this House has direct purview over, and since 2018-19 funding for education has fallen to an alarming $1,200 per student—peanuts—leaving us a laggard in Canada. Chronic underfunding creates a significant impact on the quality of education—the ability of hard-working teachers, education workers, administrators and trustees to deliver the resources and supports that students need.

Speaker, I was recently at the Toronto District School Board. I was outside of their building as the trustees were grappling with a massive budget deficit. They were put into a most impossible situation: Cut services to balance their budget or run a deficit—a symbolic deficit in this case—to send a message to the government that they will not play their game anymore.

That’s not the only school board in Ontario that’s struggling to make ends meet. Every school board is struggling. We’re hearing this from every union and association that represents educators. We’re hearing this loudly from parents—loudly from parents—when they are telling us that class sizes are too large, that their children cannot be successful, and if their children have special needs, God help them, because this government is not going to, and it’s heartbreaking. I sit in this House, and I have the privilege of being able to work in this House, so close to the solution, and I can’t reach it, but our members across can do something about it. I know they’ve heard from their constituents about the same problem because their constituents have reached out to me, telling me that they tried to talk to their MPP or the Minister of Education without much success.

Speaker, in the 30 seconds I have, I just want to say that for Ontarians who are looking for a budget that will work for them, this budget clearly does not. If you’re looking for a family doctor or better access to one, it’s not going to help you. If you’re a young person looking for housing, you’re not going to see anything in this budget for you. If you’re struggling with the cost of living, which most Ontarians are, there isn’t enough in this budget to make it work for you either.

I’ll tell you, Speaker, that we have resources and we have ideas. We need to work together, but we can’t do it if the government’s not willing to step forward. Thank you.

I want to start by wishing everyone and all the members in this House and all Ontarians a very happy Black History Month. Today, I have been given this distinct honour of delivering the remarks. I want to be able to speak about Black excellence and the incredible Black communities and the Black leaders who call Ontario their home.

I want to start by recognizing the incredible work done to pave the way for today’s Black leaders, leaders in this House who have stood before us, such as Zanana Akande, Alvin Curling, Lincoln Alexander, Rosemary Brown and so many more. I want to recognize the former president of the Ontario Black History Society, Rosemary Sadlier, as well as the leadership around her, who lobbied the many levels of government to get Black History Month finally recognized by government and institutions right across Canada. And who can forget—who can forget—the Honourable Dr. Jean Augustine, the very first Black woman to serve as a federal minister of the crown and member of Parliament in Canada?

In my riding of Toronto Centre, we have an incredible number of communities, including those who live and identify as Black residents and Black people. They truly represent the very best. They live in neighbourhoods such as Regent Park and Moss Park and they are thriving; they have a very diverse Black population. Black residents are at the forefront of organizing for community benefits for their neighbourhoods as they undergo tremendous revitalization.

They are also leaders for incredible grassroots organizations such as Youth Gravity, which empowers young people to become leaders; Shoot for Peace, who promote non-violence and unity through photography and the arts; and Mothers of Peace, a very important peer-led organization which is very close to my heart. They are a grassroots group of mothers in the neighbourhood who came together after a horrific summer of gun violence in our community, which affected so many families. They carry out school supply drives; they create education opportunities, work with community partners, support social enterprises and organize respite opportunities for their members. Their work is a model for positive community building and I am in absolute awe of them.

I also want to give a shout-out to the neighbourhood of Little Jamaica in my colleague’s riding of Toronto–St. Paul’s. Little Jamaica is a thriving and culturally rich neighbourhood full of small, family-run businesses serving uniquely Jamaican products to the community. But the community of Little Jamaica has been struggling for years. The core of the business district is along Eglinton Avenue, so it’s safe to say that you probably will know what I’m about to say.

The businesses of Little Jamaica have been hidden behind construction hoarding board for 13 years as the Eglinton LRT is being built and then rebuilt and then repaired. Their businesses have suffered tremendously and some of them have closed under this uncertainty. They’ve received, unfortunately, not enough government support, and definitely not enough respect from Metrolinx. This government needs to do so much more to support the community through the strains of these closures, as well as the flooding and pandemic impacts that this community has faced. But through all of it, the community is resilient. I am so encouraged, and I want to encourage all of you: Every single one of us should be visiting and supporting Little Jamaica and we should all go out to all our respective communities right across our ridings to support Black-owned businesses.

There is so much critical work being done by Black folks in communities to uplift marginalized voices. My friend leZlie lee kam and other Black and queer seniors are working so hard, Speaker, to address the issues of homophobia and transphobia in long-term-care spaces, which is vital to make sure that queer and trans elders don’t have to go back into the closet as they enter the long-term-care phase of their life.

As we talk about Black history, we also need to talk about today’s Black realities and Black futures. I want to give a shout-out to Black CAP; African and Caribbean Council on HIV/AIDS in Ontario; Friends of Ruby; Supporting Our Youth; Pride Toronto, especially their Sankofa fest celebrating Black artists and performers. I want to thank them for all the work that they do in Toronto Centre day in and day out.

We cannot celebrate Black history in Ontario without recognizing today’s Black realities, that black students are being left behind also in overcrowded and underfunded schools; when Black girls and women, including Black trans women, are most susceptible to gender-based violence and misogynoir; when Black men and boys are overrepresented in foster care, youth detention centres and jails; when Black maternal health is overlooked and intentionally deprioritized.

Next week, Speaker, is Black Mental Health Week. I want to take this opportunity to thank—