Thank you for the opportunity to speak to the 2023 Ontario budget motion on behalf of my constituents of St. Paul’s. I understand that this is the biggest budget in Ontario’s history as well. This budget comes at a time when Ontarians need to see investments in them more than ever. Things aren’t okay, and too many folks are struggling. People in Ontario are facing unprecedented struggles. Young people are stressed out about their futures. The past year has been marked by the highest inflation seen in decades. The very basics of food and shelter have shot up in cost while, of course, wages have not.

Given the scale of what’s facing our province in 2023, this government should be doing more, not less, especially a government that withheld more than $6 billion in Ontario contingency funds, saving it for a rainy day. Well, guess what? It’s pouring in Ontario. People need infrastructure and transit they can rely on, housing they can afford, not tenants forced to spend 50%, 60% or more of their salaries for rent, not mounting the school repair backlog and fast-tracking us towards the worst climate change.

This budget hasn’t read the room. It’s not responding to the pressing items concerning folks in St. Paul’s and the rest of the province. For our community in St. Paul’s, we’re often hearing about housing concerns from everyone: lower-income earners and middle-income earners are still having to make strategic choices at the grocery checkout; artists, teachers and education workers; folks working in social services; cashiers; people on ODSP and OW; students and seniors on fixed incomes. I’ve even had some conversations with folks who work for the Ontario government about their affordability concerns. It’s not an easy time for most.

In St. Paul’s, our community is made up of more than 60% tenants. Where are they in this budget at a time when the average one-bedroom in the GTA is costing more than $2,500 a month?

Last night, I joined some tenants at 55 Brownlow, who are fighting to stay housed, for their sign-making party. Yes, rather than resting after a long day’s work, there they were, having some juice and chips and whatnot, making signs to remind this government that housing is a human right, that you cannot put profits of greedy developers—this government’s friends, it appears—over people. They’re being demovicted. One tenant has lived there for over 40 years. She’s a senior, and she doesn’t know where she will go.

These tenants want to be guaranteed first right to return. They want guaranteed rent control and a guaranteed rental replacement. They, like I, do not want to see their fully functioning and safe building torn down to make space for expensive condos few can afford. Will this Conservative government hear their demands? Will you repeal Bill 23, your Conservative housing bill that does not guarantee real rent control and that threatens municipal rental replacement bylaws?

To afford a one-bedroom rental in this current market, an individual or a household has to bring in roughly $100,000 a year—more than that. This is simply not sustainable or obtainable for many of the young families, single-dwellers and also the newcomers struggling to make St. Paul’s home. If some of the highest-income earners in the city can’t afford it, what about those on ODS-Poverty and OW? It’s important to note this government does not double ODSP or OW—not even close. Let’s be honest. Even with a doubled ODSP and OW rate, good luck to someone in Toronto, in St. Paul’s, anywhere really, to be able to afford a home.

We need real affordable housing. MAID, medical assistance in dying, should never be where unhoused or precariously housed people on disability have to turn. Government should never make it easier for people to find death than to find a home. MAID has its purpose, mind you, but this should never be it.

And this Conservative government pats its wealthy selves on the back about a 5% increase. Ask my community member Shaun on Winona—the 5% is pennies. Recipients aren’t even allowed to use the 5% where it’s most useful for them in their budget. Even the 5% comes with strings attached.

The ODSP/OW rates simply are not enough. The Liberals froze the rates for years, legislating poverty, and then offered people a 3% increase as an election promise in 2018— that’s what I’d call a little too late. Then this Conservative government slashed the 3% in half, giving people just 1.5%. Tell me, were people on ODSP/OW not worth the investment?

And let’s not pretend this issue started in 2018, or even with the Liberals. Former Premier Mike Harris’s Conservatives cut rates by 20%. That was unconscionable. But hey, he’s living high off the hog now, cashing in on the for-profit long-term-care home cash cow, where roughly 5,400 elders perished due to this Conservative government’s chronic underfunding and understaffing. I still live with the stories I heard of people’s elders dying in their own feces, covered in urine, rodents, bugs. This Conservative government should never have let that happen.

Our Ontario NDP official opposition is calling for an immediate doubling, at least, of ODSP/OW. The program must be revamped and matched to inflation so people aren’t constantly being plunged further into poverty. We would redevelop the system by co-designing it alongside people with disabilities.

We are in an indisputable housing crisis of an unprecedented magnitude. Meanwhile, this budget is actually cutting the overall funding to the Ministry of Municipal Affairs and Housing by $124.4 million. As this government talks about their plans to build, I wish to remind them that Ontarians don’t need help in 10 years or whenever this government’s supposed 1.5 million homes are being built—a number they aren’t even on track to meet, with their housing starts projected to be even lower next year.

Where are your solutions for today, for this moment? This budget has missed this moment. And similar to this Conservative government’s terrible track record with costly, over-budgeted and chronically late P3 contracts that have made transit projects like the long overdue, over-budget Eglinton LRT construction in my community—you can’t keep making promises that will come years from now, conveniently outside of your term as government. Promises years down the line aren’t promises people can depend on today.

Conservatives slashed real rent control. That means more unhoused. It means more people, including survivors of gender-based and intimate partner violence, living in unsafe and undignified housing because they’ve got no other options. Instead of helping, the government is propping up housing profiteers looking to push tenants out of their rent-controlled units so they can profit from vacancy decontrol with new unsuspecting victims. It’s why this government must pass our “rent control for all” legislation, as well as our rent stabilization bill demanding rent control on all buildings and rent transparency, where the new tenants pay what the last tenant paid.

Through the dead of winter, the tenants at 64 St. Clair West went without heat for a whole week under the property management of Briarlane Corp. Electrical shutdowns, water shutoffs, removed laundry access, constant construction noise, noise pollution—this contravenes tenants’ rights as per the Residential Tenancies Act.

This government’s lack of real affordable housing is also fiscally irresponsible. Preventing homelessness is a fraction of the cost of reacting to it. Studies show that investments in social housing end up being about one fifteenth of the cost of institutional responses to homelessness, like prisons and hospitals, and about one seventh of the cost of emergency shelters.

A recent Star article showed that last year, nearly 5,000 unhoused people came through the doors of St. Michael’s Hospital’s trauma centre, and 15% of those were simply because they had no other place to go. Without any real strategy in place, hospital staff were giving out backpacks with gift cards to 24-hour food services just so that unhoused people could stay warm and fed overnight. Those are the figures out of just one hospital of many in this city and more across the province—hospitals in Ontario where ER doors were often closed; surgical suites left dark; nurses leaving in mass exodus because of, again, the chronic underfunding of our public health care system, a plan put in place by this Conservative government to create a health care crisis so they could sweep in with their grand plan of privatization of health care.

Health care costs will continue to surge if the homelessness crisis isn’t addressed. There must be a housing-first approach across this province that recognizes housing as the social determinant of health and the human right that it is. Conservatives cannot continue to attempt to balance budgets on the backs of the most vulnerable in society. We need real investment in a comprehensive housing strategy that includes social, supportive transition housing, more assisted living housing and co-op housing, all of which have been proven to make housing affordable for all Ontarians and to ensure their dignity remains intact. This budget includes no new funding, it appears, to build new social housing or even protect what is existing.

For co-op housing, the Co-operative Housing Federation of Canada has called this budget “a missed opportunity to create affordable co-op homes” as a way to meet the housing needs of low- and moderate-income households.

I see the benefits of co-op housing in my community when I think of the fine folks on Melita, for instance, where co-op housing has offered folks affordable and dignified places to live, including seniors, intergenerational families, young families and people on fixed incomes, who have said they would otherwise be forced to leave their communities without it. In our home, we have nine co-op buildings and about 596 units of co-op housing, and we’d be open to welcoming more.

The market on its own will not solve the housing crisis. This government cannot keep repeating the same mistakes over and over again and expect a new outcome.

Similar to housing, schools are in crisis. School boards are in crisis. According to the TDSB, rates of violence and lockdowns are at new heights as a direct result of the mental health crisis our children and youth are facing. Meanwhile, less than 10% of schools across the province have adequate mental health professionals to support their students, courtesy of this government. Instead of ensuring every Ontario school has all the mental health supports they need, the government refuses to reimburse school boards’ COVID-related expenses, expenses that were prescribed by their own government and Toronto Public Health to keep our kids safe.

The government has got to do better. When school boards drain their reserves, it prevents them from hiring the very mental health professionals we need to keep our schools safe. It’s why I got petitions from ETFO, the Elementary Teachers’ Federation of Ontario, signed by hundreds of my school community members from our ward 8, begging this government to “stop the cuts and invest in the schools our students deserve.”

Is this government suggesting that my community members are liars, or making up the concerns and challenges they have about the government spending?

The 2023 budget means school boards will be forced to cut hundreds of staff to overcome deficits, at a time when we should be adding more supports—more social workers, more psychologists, more teachers and more education workers—to lower ballooned class sizes.

Clearing the deficit of the TDSB—one they incurred, again, for pandemic-related costs—is not optional. It should be mandatory. This would cost $64 million. That is less than one tenth the cost of the gifts this Conservative government has given to its wealthy corporate buddies through corporate tax cuts.

Teachers and education staff are doing too much with too little to get students where they need to be. With this budget, the next school year will only get worse without any commitments to increase the number of teachers, education workers and school staff.

I also want to say that investing in education is an investment in our economy. Research shows that for every $1 invested into public education, we see $1.30 return back to our economy. This also works in the opposite direction, too. The same study, by Aimee McArthur-Gupta, completed for the OSSTF, shows that just a 3% drop in high school graduation, as a result of this government’s underspending, adds $3.8 billion in costs to our budget over the next 20 years.

Access to excellent education is a social determinant of health, and health is top of mind for many in St. Paul’s. The health budget is $300 million less than expected. This is likely only going to get worse as this government continues to say no to 10 permanent paid sick days and is cancelling their lousy temporary program at the end of the month.

Speaker, paid sick days are a proven, effective strategy to ease pressure on our health care system by preventing the spread of COVID and other infectious diseases, I might add. This government has said no to workers and no to Ontarians almost 30 times, if I’m not mistaken, when it comes to asking for paid sick days.

This budget’s failure to answer to social determinants of health, like stable housing, meaningful poverty reduction and adequate investment in education and preventative health care, will only widen the gap between the haves and the have-nots. We’ve got to keep our health care system a publicly funded health care system. Government cannot line the pockets of shareholders and support the upselling of unnecessary goods to vulnerable seniors while also reducing OHIP-covered eye checkups for seniors 65 and older, from once every 12 months to, I believe, now once every 18 months.

All Ontarians need assurance that when they need health care, they’ll get it, with no hidden fees or added charges, with no pay-to-play schemes that mean they’re left waiting as those who can afford it jump the line. People in Ontario, regardless of their status, need assurance that their health care remains their human right. It is why this government must keep coverage in place for all uninsured people in Ontario.

I stand firmly with the Healthcare4All Coalition and some of my constituents who were just outside on the lawn of Queen’s Park today, demanding that the government not cut the program that is scheduled to be cut tomorrow. Rather than giving gifts to “independent health facilities,” the government must do all it can to support our publicly funded system, so folks can get fast, excellent service without financial barriers.

As I mentioned earlier this month, this budget removes the $5 million in COVID recovery grants for arts and artists. This is while it only maintains the $60-million Ontario Arts Council budget, another drop in the bucket for this government, as mentioned in an article from the Globe and Mail. Realize that even if the government had maintained it at $65 million, due to inflation, that still would have been a cut.

The pandemic had a disproportionate impact on the arts and culture sector. This is especially true for small-to-medium grassroots organizations and independent artists, who were subject to regulatory unfairness by this government, unfairness that kept their work on hold through pandemic restrictions while, frankly, larger organizations that were able to have the minister’s ear were allowed to carry on.

I addressed this last year in a letter to the Minister of Health—oh sorry, the Minister of Labour; I wrote letters to the Minister of Health as well—to the Minister of Labour, as well as to the former Minister of Heritage, Sport, Tourism and Culture Industries and the Minister of Health, to which I never heard back from the ministers on, by the way.

Research has suggested that the full recovery of the arts and culture sector will take between four to six years, yet this government is already cutting their recovery fund. Speaker, the arts and culture sector is an economic powerhouse, contributing some nearly $3 billion to our GDP and over 300,000 jobs. That’s not even accounting for its positive impact across sectors, including on mental health and tourism, easing pressure on an overrun system—art as a tool in education. Its creation of beyond culture industries: to boost tourism, hospitality, tech and trade work. The contribution of local artists and culture, however, is not a given; it requires investment for it to work.

In response to a petition I made and circulated demanding no cuts to OAC funding, we received thousands of signatures in a matter of days from many artists and cultural workers—some new to the industry, some decades deep—who are fearful of their ability to stay in their creative industry. This government talks endlessly about attracting investment and creating jobs. Right now there are close to 400,000 jobs in this province that are unfilled. How do we make it work? How do we attract folks to stay in Ontario? We invest in the arts.

The past year has seen rates of people moving away from our province to another at a 50-year high. Folks, and especially artists and cultural workers, are exhausted from moving contract to contract through gig work, and they’re facing the highest cost of housing they’ve seen. We don’t need them going to Quebec. We don’t need them going to BC. We need our artists and cultural workers to stay right here in Ontario.

But I’ll tell you, some of these other provinces recognize the value of arts. In Quebec, for instance, they’ve increased the arts funding by 60% to $200 million. I assure you, Ontario artists deserve to also be looked at and acknowledged, and it cannot only end with film and TV. It has to include everyone.

I fear this budget has not addressed the moment. Budgets are value statements. They are decisions, and this government has to ask themselves who and what matters to them, and who and what doesn’t matter to them, based on the decisions they’ve made in this budget. Take a moment and listen to the rallies. See the disenfranchised faces of people here in Queen’s Park, day in and day out, in the gallery and on the front lawn, protesting for fair wages and safe working conditions, health care, education, housing, clean drinking water, clean air, fair elections, democracy, climate justice—you name it—ending poverty, ending racial discrimination.

You might not have to listen to me. Who cares? I’m just one person. You might not choose to listen to the Ontario NDP official opposition. But the hundreds of thousands of people—the hundreds of thousands of people—who have shown up on the lawns, who have signed the petitions begging this government to do better since 2018, they can’t be wrong. They can’t be all wrong.

My question is to the Premier. A parent in my riding got in touch with our office after an email circulated asking parents for donations to pay for paper towels and soap for the classroom. This is while the recent FAO report forecasts a historic $6-billion spending shortfall within the public education sector alone over the next six years. That’s money that could be used today by this government to fix and save our schools during today’s crisis.

How is it acceptable that families, many of whom are already facing the worst affordability crisis in this province’s history over the last 40 years, are being asked to pick up the bill for public education because this government refuses to?

The fact that our education sector is reliant on bake sales, philanthropy and volunteerism is a system failure, not a solution. What about schools and parents who cannot afford to raise hundreds, if not thousands, of dollars? This is inequity in action. This is, frankly, stacking the deck against our students.

The question is back to the Premier: Will this government commit to increasing education spending to ensure students have everything they need, including hygiene—health and safety basics during a pandemic—to thrive in the classroom, without turning to struggling families to cover the government’s shortcomings?