When I look at this budget, my first impression is that it doesn’t make it much easier for people to get a doctor. It doesn’t make it easier for our kids to get a good education. It doesn’t make it easier for people to rent or buy a home that they can afford.

To the member for Guelph: When you’re looking at how this budget is going to impact the residents of Guelph, what’s missing?

I am proud to be here today, standing up in support of our motion to ask the Ontario government to fund school boards for pandemic-related COVID expenses. It is extremely important.

Our kids and parents have just gone through an incredibly hard three years. The impact of those three years is being felt today. I see this. I am a parent of two children who go to the Toronto District School Board system. I regularly communicate with parents, principals, teachers and students about their experience at schools and what they’re seeing and experiencing. What is very clear is that learning outcomes for math, STEM, reading, writing—we’re behind. When it comes to mental health, behavioural issues, violence, we are also falling behind. Our kids are struggling.

That is especially true for children with special needs. We regularly work with parents who have kids with autism who are in the school board system, and they are having huge difficulties getting access to school, being able to stay in school for the entire school day and have the additional supports they need—the educational assistants they need—to ensure their kid can be the best that they can be.

It has been a very, very hard few years, and it’s been good to hear my colleagues remind me and other parents that compared to every other school system in North America, our schools were closed the longest. It’s hard to think back at that time, raising two children during the pandemic and thinking about how many days my partner and I got up in the morning and thought: How are we going to get through today and work full-time and teach our kids?—knowing that there are over a million families in Ontario who are experiencing what we were experiencing, and many of them are not as lucky as us. It’s been a hard few years.

And so you would expect this government at this time to acknowledge and recognize that parents and teachers and students have had a hard time and invest in our schools. But that is not what we saw in this budget. What we saw in this budget is cuts. There are a lot of fancy numbers when you look at it, but when you actually look at what the school boards are showing us right now—because I’ve gone through the Toronto District School Board’s estimates for next year and they’ve been very clear about what they’re seeing. What they are projecting is a loss of 522 staffing positions. That is what they are projecting will be cut: lunchroom supervisors, elementary schoolteachers, secondary schoolteachers, social workers, child and youth workers, caretakers. That is what is going to be cut.

The TDSB is early in its budgeting process compared to other school boards, but now we are also seeing other school boards come out with their numbers as well, and they are seeing the same thing. The Toronto Catholic District School Board is looking at cuts: 122 staffing positions. The Ottawa-Carleton school board is also looking at cuts. And we will be seeing that again and again and again as school boards get closer to finalizing their budgeting process. This is not the direction that we should be going when we’re talking about school boards and the fundamental human rights that our kids have to a good education. This is not the direction that we will be going.

What I fear—and this has been mentioned earlier—is that the government is looking at doing what they did with health care and they’re looking at doing the same thing with education, where they create a crisis, where they cut, and as a result, people are motivated to go to the private system because they want a better alternative, when a better solution is to invest in the education system that we have. That is what we are calling on you to do today, starting with this very pragmatic motion, which is to cover pandemic-related expenses that school boards experienced in the past, that they had to cover, and the pandemic-related experiences that they are looking at continuing to deal with this year.

I support this motion; I urge you to vote for it. I will also be working with parents, with educators and with the school systems to ensure that this government treats school boards and students and teachers with the respect that they deserve, and that will translate into funding so that our kids can get the education they deserve.

Education workers make our public schools great. They clean our yards. They maintain our buildings. They supervise our kids at lunch time. They clean our classrooms. They help our youngest kids and our kids with disabilities. We know them by their first names. They are part of our school community.

Education workers earn an average of $39,000 a year. Many work two jobs to make ends meet. Some have to go to food banks because their pay doesn’t go far enough, especially in this inflationary crisis we have. Many are leaving the profession.

I want our kids in class. Everyone wants our kids in class. No one wants a strike. That is why our schools need to receive the funding that they need so our kids can get an excellent education. That is why this government needs to stop violating the charter-protected rights of all workers, stop this bullying behaviour and get back to the negotiating table. That’s why this government needs to use the surplus that they have in their budget to negotiate a fair contract with workers, because that is the right thing to do for our kids, it’s the right thing to do for workers, and it’s the right thing to do for the people of Ontario.

I’m Jessica Bell, the MPP for University–Rosedale, and I rise today to speak about the government’s budget. A budget is not just about numbers; it’s a moral document because it affects our lives. It tells us who the government cares about and who they don’t. Here are a few things I noticed when I read through the government’s budget and how it affects the University–Rosedale community.

Number one: Education funding falls short. I recently looked at the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives’ analysis of education funding and the state of education funding in Ontario, and the reason why I had to go to an outside source is because the government does not provide a clear indication of how they’re spending their money and when they’re spending their money. So we have to go to outside sources and our Financial Accountability Officer to get that data. Their assessment is that, over the past five years, the amount of funding that now goes to each student has dropped by $800 a student when you factor in inflation and enrolment. They looked at how much that affects each school, and they calculated that the average high school has lost $600,000 in funding over the last five years. This budget is part of that process.

It’s a reason why there is not going to be enough funding to hire enough education workers to help kids catch up and grapple with the learning loss that they face because of the pandemic. There’s not going to be enough funding for the community nurses and the mental health professionals and the social workers to help kids who are struggling, who need extra support. There’s not going to be enough funding to hire education workers and teachers in order to decrease class sizes to ensure that our kids get additional time with a teacher to help them learn how to read and write and excel at math.

It is a tragedy that we are not investing more in our public education system, because it is good for our kids, it’s good for our future, it’s good for women and parents in particular, and in the long term, it’s good for our economy.

I also notice—number two in this budget—the issue with health care funding. This government loves to talk a good game about how much funding they’re putting into health care and how many nurses are supposedly going into the system, but the reality is, in my riding of University–Rosedale we have critical care units at Toronto Western who cannot take new patients at certain times because they have staffing shortages. We have issues at SickKids, where they have a shortage of 15%. They’re short 15% of staff, and they’re short funding. And this is the pre-eminent hospital for children in Canada. We have issues where Toronto Western’s emergency room was at risk of closure—the MPP for Davenport raised this issue in the Legislature—because there wasn’t enough staff. That’s unbelievable that that is happening.

Number three, what I noticed in this budget: I deeply care about our response to climate change and how we can adapt and mitigate to climate change. There’s nothing in this budget that will seriously address the climate crisis that we face. There are no significant funding programs for energy efficiency, for building resilient cities, for funding transit operations so that we can improve the service and lower fares on the thousands of transit routes that operate across Ontario today. There is nothing in there.

There is funding for future transit projects, that will one day—2030, 2032—be built. But there’s also a huge amount of funding for highway projects that we just don’t need. Highway 413 and the Bradford Bypass will not save commuters time, and they will cost upwards of $10 billion. That money should be invested into our health care system, into our education system, and it should be invested into climate change programs so we can adapt to the crisis that we are facing.

There are many other issues that I see with this budget. The minimum wage is not going up fast enough. It should being $20 an hour, because $15.50—with inflation at 7%, with rent at the rate that it is today—is not enough. It’s not enough to live on. And the social assistance rate increase of 5% is really an insult to the people in this province who are living on Ontario Works and Ontario disability. It is locking them into poverty, when they should be helped, not hurt.

I urge this government to do more for the people of Ontario and bring forward a budget that invests in education, in health care, in mitigating climate change, in investing in public infrastructure and to helping people who are struggling get a leg up.