To my colleague the member for Ottawa Centre: One of the things that we heard at committee is that there are two basic essentials for policies to be effective. One is the direct engagement and involvement of those who are directly affected by a policy, to be involved in the development of that policy, and the second is the resources to operationalize a policy, to implement it. I wondered if the member sees either of those two criteria included in the bill.

Thank you to my colleague the member for Ottawa Centre for his remarks. He spoke about the financial crisis that is facing our post-secondary sector and the consequences for teaching faculty. Many of those faculty positions are filled by contract faculty who have very precarious job security—no job security, actually—very precarious employment, lack of benefits etc.

One of the things that we heard in committee is the same thing is happening in the mental health services offices on campus, the same thing is happening in the equity and diversity and inclusion offices on campus. They are terribly understaffed because universities and colleges don’t have the resources. Has the member been hearing that in his community as well?

I appreciate the question from the member for Markham–Thornhill. The testimony that we heard from those students was very powerful. It was very difficult to hear, and it is entirely, completely unacceptable that they have those experiences on our campuses and don’t get an appropriate institutional response.

The difference between your side of the House and our side of the House is that we don’t think this legislation is the way to improve things. We need to appropriately fund anti-racism and anti-hate initiatives on campus to ensure that students get the support and the response that they deserve when they experience racism or hate.

Thanks to the member for Kitchener–Conestoga for that question. Interestingly, the committee heard almost nothing about that aspect of this legislation. Because it makes sense. It does make sense. Students need more financial transparency.

But one of the interesting things that we did hear from a number of the students is the stress that financial pressures create and the impact on their mental health when they worry about being able to find housing, about food insecurity, about keeping up with the rising cost of living.

So yes, they need transparency in terms of knowing how much those costs are going to be. They need tuition that is affordable, but they also need access to student financial aid that will help them attend colleges and universities in this province.

It’s not the way to conduct the anti-discrimination training that has to take place across campuses. So we need to provide the resources. We need to involve those who are living this on a daily basis in developing an appropriate policy response and then implementing it—

Having the minister unilaterally dictate the contents and topics of mental health policies on campus is not going to support the students who don’t know where to go, often because those services are so understaffed that they don’t have the staff to run them.

Thank you very much, Speaker. There are very real concerns about allowing any minister, any party, to dictate contents of such vital policies, to define what constitutes racism and hate on Ontario campuses. It should not be allowed. The government shouldn’t be going in that direction, challenging institutional independence and undermining the legislative framework in which our universities exist.

There were also concerns raised about freedom of expression on campus and what kinds of protections will be put in place to ensure that freedom of expression is not restricted by whatever policy the minister decides to put in place.

There were concerns about possible conflicts between the policy that’s dictated by the government and the Ontario Human Rights Code and the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, because there has been some debate about if the charter applies on campuses. In Alberta, there was a court decision that said, “Yes, the charter does apply on those campuses.” That’s one of the reasons that we brought forward an amendment to specify that the charter of rights has to apply with the policy that the government is bringing forward.

Going back to what we heard from people who appeared before the committee about what a better approach would be to strengthen institutional responses to racism and hate on campuses, they talked about widespread, funded anti-discrimination training, cultural competency programs, reporting mechanisms. All the while, they emphasized the critical importance of involving marginalized voices in the development of any policy that is implemented.

I want to now talk a little bit in my remaining time about some of the amendments that we brought forward and, in particular, Speaker, in the context of today, as we watch the devastation—the humanitarian catastrophe—that is continuing to unfold in Gaza. As we see students across the province who are calling for an end to the violence, we moved an amendment that anti-Palestinian racism be explicitly included in the bill.

Some of us in this chamber will remember, back in 2017, the Liberal government of the day brought in the Anti-Racism Act. Initially, the Liberal government’s legislation referred only to anti-Black racism, anti-Indigenous racism and other forms of racism. But there was all-party consensus—given the circumstances of the time, given the passion that members brought to the debate on that bill—about the need to name anti-Semitism, the need to name anti-Islamophobia. There was agreement across party lines that the bill would be amended to do just that: to talk about those four forms of hate—anti-Semitism, Islamophobia, anti-Black racism and anti-Indigenous racism.

And this is five years later, after the Anti-Racism Act was passed in 2017. We are at a time when circumstances are demanding that we name anti-Palestinian racism. This was brought to the committee by several of the deputants who talked about the importance of naming anti-Palestinian racism. The deputant from NCCM talked about anti-Palestinian racism as, “The dehumanization and denial of the equal dignity of Palestinian people.”

Nothing would be lost, Speaker, by acknowledging this form of hate and racism that is being increasingly experienced across this province. But the government voted down our amendments to include anti-Palestinian racism.

We also included, as I think I had mentioned earlier, a requirement for consultation to take place with students, educators, staff members, experts, community members on the development of a student mental health policy as well as the anti-racism-and-hate policy.

We moved an amendment, as I said, to increase the transparency around the policy that the minister is going to bring forward by requiring regulations through the Lieutenant Governor in Council about the process for policy development, what kind of training is going to be provided etc., and again the government voted that one down as well. They’re quite happy to have the minister dictating behind closed doors, determining what’s going to be in these policies with no transparency and no involvement of those who are directly affected.

We moved an amendment to ensure that the legislation complies with the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms.

We moved an amendment to ensure that the policies are reviewed regularly, every two years, to ensure that they respond to the changing needs of campuses in this province.

Unfortunately, Speaker, every single one of our many amendments was voted down by this government. As a result, we can’t support this bill. We cannot support this bill because it ignores the presentations that were made to the committee about what a government that was serious about supporting the mental health needs of students on our post-secondary campuses would do. It ignored the feedback that we heard about what is needed to actually respond in a meaningful way to incidents of racism and hate on campus. As I said, what that involved, most of all, is funding. It’s funding to do the training, it’s funding to hire the staff, it’s funding to deliver the services, and this bill came with no additional commitment of resources except for that $57,000 per institution for mental health—nothing for anti-racism and hate, and we can’t support this bill in the third reading vote.

That’s right.

This one was about the racism and hate policies. She said, “These policies work best ... when they actually come from the different communities that” are involved, “when they are organic and come up through the different governance structures.” She pointed out that when you engage people in the policies, they “have more buy-in,” which means the policies are much more likely to be effective. And that’s the big problem with this ministerial directive, with this unilateral dictate about what has to happen on our campuses and what has to be in the policy.

Not only is the legislation silent on any process of consultation at the local level with individual colleges and universities, but as I highlighted earlier, there was absolutely zero consultation with the sector about this legislation overall. So when you think about OPSEU, they represent 45,000 workers at 24 colleges and 16 universities; CUPE represents 30,000 university sector workers; the Council of Canadian Universities represents 23 public universities; Colleges Ontario represents 24 public colleges; OCUFA represents 18,000 faculty, academic librarians and academic professionals. OUSA, the College Student Alliance—these are organizations that are the voices of students across the province, and yet none of them—none of those organizations—had any kind of conversation with the ministry in advance of this bill coming forward. None of them were asked, “What do you think? Is this a good idea to impose new policy requirements on our post-secondary institutions?”

Another concern about this unilateral approach, this dictating of policy through ministerial directive—with, I might add, no information about what consequences will be imposed if the minister deems that a college or university has not adequately complied with the ministerial directive. There are lots of concerns about what the consequences are, and kudos to the students from OUSA and a number of student unions who appeared before the committee, because one of the recommendations they made was that the consequences should not ever involve withholding funding because it is entirely counterproductive when you have students in crisis on our campuses who can’t access mental health services, who don’t feel supported when they experience racism and hate because of the lack of resources on those campuses. It is entirely counterproductive to then withhold resources.

The minister, when I asked her what the consequences are, sidestepped the question, wouldn’t give me a response. We moved an amendment to remove the minister’s ability to impose financial penalties on institutions, but of course the government voted that down.

The problem with ministerial directives is really around the lack of transparency. That’s why, as I said earlier, I referred to the model of the order-in-council process, a regulatory process to generate the policy requirements that were in place with the sexual violence and harassment policies that were mandated on campuses. That was the benefit of doing an order in council, because at least there is some kind of public process. Draft regulations are posted publicly. There is an input period. It would provide at least a little bit of transparency into what the minister is going to be requiring in these policies. That was a recommendation, certainly, of the Council of Ontario Universities. But unfortunately, when we introduced an amendment to provide that kind of transparency, the government voted it down.

The other big problem—and I did mention this earlier—when you have ministerial directives dictating policy is that it undermines the institutional autonomy of both colleges and universities. But in the university sector in particular, it undermines the legislated self-governance of universities and the importance of ensuring that our post-secondary institutions, our universities, are free from political interference.

In particular, I want to acknowledge the Coalition Against Political Interference in Public Research and Education as well as the Invest in Post-Secondary Education Inter-University Coalition for their submissions to the committee, because they emphasized that the independence and integrity of academic research and education is recognized internationally as a cornerstone of democracy. We should be doing everything we can to maintain that independence and that freedom from political interference of our post-secondary institutions and not allow this overreach by the government to move forward, which is what we see in Bill 166.

It was interesting, Speaker, back on April 19, when the Premier addressed a media conference and told the reporters who were there that he personally thinks that the government should not get involved in affairs of university governance, he said, “It’s really up to the dean to govern his”—he didn’t say this—or her “own university.” He said, “I think we shouldn’t get involved in that.” Even the Premier recognized the inappropriateness of using government legislation to interfere with the autonomy and the independence of our universities in this province.

I want to quote from one of the deputants who talked about the consequences of allowing the government to start determining what universities are going to do or what universities are going to say. What happens when the government is pulling the strings at our academic institutions is that the research that comes out of those institutions can no longer be trusted, because is the research being directed by the government because they want to achieve a specific end, or is it truly independent research that has integrity and trustworthiness that we can use to advance the public interest? There’s a big concern when you start interfering with institutional autonomy, and in particular when you challenge the legislated framework in which universities in this province exist.

This was an enlightening quote from Fred Hahn from CUPE, who pointed out that not only does this result in bad policy, but it also represents a degree of political interference that, quite frankly, no matter who was sitting in government, no matter which party of which political stripe, no politician should be able to dictate these kinds of policies at academic institutions in our province. It opens the door to whoever is in government, whoever is the minister of the day, setting out in dictates how hate and racism should be defined and how mental health should be addressed on—

Interjections.

Yes, in class. In Queen’s University in 2019, there was a Pride flag stolen and death threats.

So, yes, there is a need to strengthen these services on campus. But again, the big question is, does it require a new ministerial directive for a new policy to be put in place that will be dictated by the minister? I would say that we heard from many of the deputants that the answer to that question is no, that what is needed, again, is funding to support the education, the training, the efforts that are already under way on our college and university campuses to deal with racism and hate, because our post-secondary campuses in this province have to be places where people feel safe, but where they feel that they can freely express their opinions on issues so long as it does not cross the line and become hateful.

We do know, as the minister said, that many students are not reporting racism and hate on campus because they feel that there won’t be an adequate response. But what you need to be able to respond adequately is staff. You need fully staffed and funded equity and diversity offices to do the follow-up that’s necessary and to engage in that broad-base campus training to improve safety of our campuses and make sure that all students feel safe.

Again, just as with the mental health policy, what we heard from the people who appeared before the committee was not that colleges and universities lack racism and hate policies, it’s that they lack the funding to appropriately deliver these policies that will support students.

What happens when you don’t have that adequate funding? I want to share a couple of quotes from deputants who appeared before the committee. One said, “Our equity, diversity, inclusion and justice offices are just as depleted as the mental health units in this sector. For example, having two EDI staff in a campus with a student population of 20,000 students is equivalent to treating a deep wound with a Band-Aid and no antibiotic cream.”

You have to appropriately fund the offices that have the expertise to respond to racism and hate as systemic problems and do that hard work of dismantling racism and hate if you are going to adequately protect students.

Here’s what another deputant said: “There’s a massive funding issue at post-secondary institutions right now, and we keep saying it over and over again. We have equity offices that are willing to do this work, that want to do this work. Our group has spoken with people who do this work on campuses, and they are dramatically underfunded. They want to get the word out. They want to hire experts, people who are specifically trained in culturally specific mental health supports. They want permanent employees who can do this work, and they don’t have the funds.”

We heard from the National Council of Canadian Muslims, the NCCM, as well as from some of the B’nai Brith and CIJA and the other organizations that appeared before the committee about the importance of faith-based supports for students. What NCCM said is that there are a growing number of faith-based supports on campus, but he pointed out that these people may start doing these services based on the initial funds raised—he was referring to trained Muslim psychotherapists who have both a faith identity and a track record of serving the Muslim community. But he said they could “start doing those services based on the initial funds raised, but if their services get interrupted, which often has happened, it’s one step forward, two steps back—there are so many students who are left in more difficulty than when they started, because of the interruption of those services.

“There needs to be a long-term strategic investment in this area, in mental health supports broadly, and to also have wide consultation with various faith-based communities....”

Speaker, when this legislation was announced, the government also announced a funding package to accompany it. That funding package included a total of $23 million to enhance mental health supports, but of that $23 million only $8 million was allocated to the post-secondary mental health action plan, and that was over a period of three years. So you’ve got $8 million over three years for direct support for the post-secondary mental health action plan, which when you do the math, means $2.7 million per year for the post-secondary mental health action plan, which means $57,000 for each of the 47 colleges and universities in this province in direct student supports.

So, in the face of everything they know about the underfunding of mental health supports based on the current levels of funding that are provided, this government made the decision that they’re going to mandate this new policy and they’re going to give every college and university about $57,000 per year in direct student support to improve campus mental health services. I asked people who appeared before committee: Do you think that’s going to make a difference on your campus? Every time I asked that question, they said, “Absolutely not, absolutely not.” In the face of the kinds of pressures that are experienced on our campuses, that’s a drop in the bucket.

Now, on the racism and hate policy, with the government’s funding announcement that went along with this bill, there were no additional dollars for implementation. And we know that moving forward with a new policy, training people on a new policy, implementing a new policy requires significant dollars. Yet as our universities and colleges are in the midst of the most serious financial crisis that we have ever seen in this province—they are literally on the brink—this government decided to mandate this new policy for anti-racism and hate, which replicates policies that already exist, and to provide no additional funding.

I just wanted to go a little bit deeper into the financial context that our post-secondary sector finds itself in right now. For the last four decades, Ontario has been at the bottom of the list in terms of per student funding that is allocated by each of our provinces in Ontario. Since this government came to power in 2018, it has gotten worse; it has literally brought our post-secondary institutions to a state of such crisis that the government had to strike a blue-ribbon panel to look at how to ensure the long-term sustainability of the sector, because there are very serious questions about whether our colleges and universities are going to be able to survive in this fiscal environment. That blue-ribbon panel came up with a recommendation that what this sector needed was $2.5 billion in permanent base funding just to keep the sector afloat. And that, Speaker, was before the federal government announced its cap on international study permits, which has generated another huge financial hit for our colleges and universities in Ontario because this government was quite happy to see colleges and universities actively solicit international students because they brought with them much greater tuition dollars and it took the government off the hook. It let the government avoid its responsibility to publicly fund our institutions.

We know from the government’s budget this year that the impact of the federal government cap on international study permits on the college sector is going to be $3 billion—an additional $3-billion revenue loss over the next three years. We don’t know the total revenue loss that universities are going to face because of different kinds of reporting, but we do know that in the college sector, for those 24 colleges, they’re looking at the removal of $3 billion in revenue.

What we’re seeing are program cuts across the board, and I am positive that we are going to be hearing more and more about program cuts in every community in the province. This morning, I asked about Fleming College in Peterborough, which just announced that it was slashing 29 programs because of the loss of international-student tuition dollars. That’s more than one in five programs in that college. Queen’s University said that they are cutting programs in arts and sciences. University of Guelph said that they are cutting 16 programs; 10 of them in the science field. This is because of the very real financial pressures that institutions are facing.

The implications of those pressures are felt by students because the institutions have to cut programs, they have to cut staff; oftentimes they do that by not filling vacancies, by not replacing retirements, by moving to short-term contracts instead of permanent positions. In fact, when OPSEU appeared before the committee, they told us that in 2021-22, there were 231 full-time counsellors employed in the college sector. That was a 5% reduction from the total number of full-time counsellors that was reported the year this government was elected in 2018-19. So at a time when student needs are increasing, the number of full-time counsellors available in our post-secondary institutions is decreasing because of the very serious fiscal crisis that our institutions are facing.

Speaker, as I said, the big question for me, the big question not for the government members on the committee—although hopefully they were thinking about this—was, since these policies already exist in most if not all of our institutions, what can we do to strengthen them? Can we use this legislation to improve the student mental health services and anti-racism-and-hate services on campus? We felt yes, there is an opportunity to use this bill to strengthen those services, but you have to make sure that the policies that are mandated by the legislation are going to be effective. And how do you do that, Speaker? You require a broad process of engagement. You talk to students; you talk to faculty; you talk to staff; you talk to the people in the community about how best to support students’ mental health needs and how best to address racism and hate on campus.

Actually, I’m going to quote here from the Centre for Innovation in Campus Mental Health. She said, “For a mental health policy to be truly effective, there has to be significant consultation on that campus. It can take a year to two years for a mental health policy that truly embodies the needs of that school to ... come into fruition.” And she pointed out that, when you have that fulsome consultation process that leads to effective policy, there are costs involved in developing the policy and then additional costs in implementing the policy. But this government has refused to make the investments that the sector requires.

Again, we had other deputants who said—

Interjection.

Yes. And they refer to a report that was done by the Higher Education Quality Council of Ontario. This report was actually commissioned by the Minister of Colleges and Universities, and it was delivered to her desk in January 2024. It was a review of student mental health in Ontario, exploring best practices and identifying gaps. In that report, the findings of the report, the first finding of the report is that “structural and systemic forces ... make it challenging for institutions to implement programs, hire staff and plan comprehensively for the long term.” So, institutions’ ability to respond to increased service demands is limited by some of these structural factors, and one of their key recommendations was to “increase ... funding to help institutions address the growth in demand for services and increasing complexity of need.”

Now, this was research that was conducted by HEQCO. It took a very comprehensive look at mental health policies on post-secondary campuses, and nowhere in this report did the researchers say that what they were hearing is that the problem is that there are no policies in place. They very, very clearly heard that the problem is that there are policies but there is no funding. Again, I want to share some of the findings:

“Despite these investments, the systems in place to support students are struggling to keep up. Demand is outstripping the supply of available resources; institutions experience the dual challenges of ensuring adequate access to supports while experiencing increased need.”

So it would have been nice if the minister had reviewed this report when she received it in January 2024, and had held back on this decision to mandate, to dictate, a student mental health policy in this legislation, because we know that these policies already exist in our post-secondary institutions. It’s not an absence of policy; it is an absence of resources that is increasing the pressures on our post-secondary campuses.

I also wanted to talk about—and I mentioned this already—how the staffing for mental health services is very challenging. The roles that many of these staff fill are short-term, they are precarious, and that creates an ongoing turnover of staff and a massive level of burnout because of the caseloads that these staff are dealing with.

The challenges in delivering mental health services on campus also mean that campuses are limited in their ability to provide the culturally responsive mental health supports that are so important for young people on our campuses. We heard many of the deputants talk about the fundamental importance of culturally responsive mental health supports, including a deputant who works with Palestinian youth in particular. She talked about the need for culturally responsive trained mental health experts, as well as one of the Jewish students who came to speak to the committee. She said it’s paramount that professionals on campus are at the very least adequately trained on working with various student populations at the minimum. So culturally responsive supports on campus are critical, and yet, universities and colleges are challenged to provide those supports because of the lack of funding.

I now want to talk a little bit about the second major element of this bill, which is the requirement for colleges and universities to have an anti-racism and hate policy. As I said at the outset, there’s no disagreement that there is a need to strengthen post-secondary responses to racism and hate on campus. One of the pieces of information that was shared with the committee was from Hillel Ontario. They said they’ve had nine times more reports of anti-Semitism on campus within the last academic year. NCCM said that they had tracked a 900% increase in Islamophobia and anti-Palestinian racism on campus in the last year. So we do need to make sure that post-secondary institutions can respond to these increased incidents of Islamophobia and anti-Semitism, as well as the other kinds of racism and hate that we have heard about on our post-secondary campuses.

At the University of Waterloo, in June 2023, there was a gender studies professor and two students who were attacked right on campus in—

It is my great privilege to serve as the critic for colleges and universities for the official opposition. I am pleased to rise today to participate in third reading debate on Bill 166.

I have shared before that prior to my election in this place, I was a policy researcher. So third reading debate always is something that I particularly enjoy, because it speaks to the researcher in me. You get to go to committee and conduct key informant interviews with the deputants who appear before the MPPs. In this case, there were 33 deputations. You collect very rich qualitative data on perspectives on the government’s bill, and you amass evidence that you can use to inform policy.

Clearly, the government does not share my interest in evidence-based policy-making. They appear not to have listened at all, or they’ve listened to a few of the voices that appeared before committee but ignored many of the deputants, in particular the deputations that were made by key stakeholders in the post-secondary sector: the Council of Ontario Universities, Colleges Ontario, Ontario Undergraduate Student Alliance, CUPE, OPSEU, OCUFA. These were all organizations that are deeply embedded in the sector and that raised some very legitimate concerns about this bill.

That was helpful to us in the official opposition in determining how we were going to vote on this bill at third reading, because we certainly did support it at second. We wanted to hear what people had to say. We listened to what people had to say, and we presented a series of amendments to address the concerns that were raised, to fix the bill, to make sure that it actually does address the very serious concerns that people raised with us—students in particular—about the lack of support for student mental health on campuses and the lack of appropriate institutional response to incidents of racism and hate.

I just want to begin with some reflections on that committee process overall and what we heard from the deputants who appeared before us. There was certainly a very strong recognition of the need for increased mental health supports for students. There was a strong urging of the committee, of the government, to ensure that there were increased efforts, more effective efforts to respond to reports of incidents and hate on campus.

We heard from individual students who were unacceptably failed by their institution when they went to report the anti-Semitism that they had experienced on campus. We heard from organizations like the National Council of Canadian Muslims how Muslim students on campus and Palestinian students on campus are also experiencing increased racism and hate. They also have concerns about the effectiveness of administrative responses to these reports.

The third piece of the bill, the requirement for institutions to provide some financial transparency about the ancillary fees of attending post-secondary institutions: There were very few deputants who spoke to that piece of the bill; obviously, that makes sense. We on this side of the House agree with the government that at a time of rising cost of living, students should not have to bear the cost of increased tuition. But unlike the government, we believe that the government should not just say to institutions, “We’re going to remove any possibility to increase tuition fees and institutions will have to figure it out.” We have said that the government has to come forward and ensure that there are public resources provided to institutions to replace the lost tuition revenues.

We also heard at committee from many of the deputants that the mental health supports that are provided on campus have to be culturally responsive. They have to be informed by the lived experience of marginalized communities. One of the examples that was shared with us was the student from the McMaster Students Union about the Black Student Success Centre on that campus.

We also heard from a number of the deputants that policies to support student mental health needs and policies to address racism and hate on campus already exist. So the question was raised, why not improve—strengthen—those existing policies? Why bring forward a bill that now says that these new policies have to be implemented on campus, dictated by the minister? Why not look at the policies that are already there that have been developed through a broad process of consultation and collaboration and that speak to the specific realities of each individual institution?

We heard very much about the importance of consultation. As I said at the outset, there was no consultation with post-secondary stakeholder organizations. We heard some references to what sounded very much like informal visits to campuses, where the parliamentary assistant had spoken to small groups of students. There was no report provided from those visits. We don’t know how many campuses were visited, how many students were talked to, but we do know that no formal consultation took place with any of the major post-secondary education stakeholders.

We heard about the importance of involving local communities. Certainly, in terms of students’ mental health, universities and colleges have stepped up to provide these services for students because of the pressures on community mental health services. Universities and colleges are already committing significant resources to supporting students’ mental health needs because they understand that resources in the community are so limited. But it really does speak to the importance of involving communities who understand the different supports that are in place, how the system works together and that will be very specific to the locations where these campuses exist.

We heard about the need to involve the people who are most directly affected by these policies in their development and implementation. Those people are students. It’s faculty. It’s staff. It’s community. It’s experts. Those are the people who should be involved in developing the policies that are now required by Bill 166 and yet the legislation doesn’t mention the word “consultation” at all.

If you read the legislation on its surface it says that the minister is going to unilaterally dictate the contents of these new policies on mental health and on racism and hate, and there’s no guarantee whatsoever that any kind of consultation with local campus communities will take place.

Many people raised concerns about the unprecedented nature of the ministerial directives that are imposed by this bill. As I said, the legislation gives the minister the power to say to a college or university, “Thou shalt have a policy and it shall contain these elements, these topics, these pieces of content.” That is a huge concern for institutional autonomy, but in particular in the university sector, for university self-governance. The principle of university autonomy, university self-governance, is established through legislation. Each university in this province exists by virtue of a specific university act, and that delegates governance to a board of governors and a senate, and it empowers individual universities to make their own governance decisions. This bill represents an unprecedented challenge to that long-established principle of the independence of our universities in this province.

Hearing the delegations from the people, organizations and individuals who appeared before the committee, the NDP members on the committee tried to move amendments to address some of these legitimate concerns that were raised. We put forward a number of amendments specifically around legislating a requirement to have a broad consultation process involved in the development of policies, to remove the minister’s power to issue ministerial directives, to have a transparent process through order in council, which is what had happened when the previous Liberal government mandated post-secondary institutions to have sexual violence and harassment policies.

When the previous Liberal government had made this requirement for sexual violence and harassment policies on campus, they brought forward the elements of those policies through order in council and they mandated a broad process of consultation to inform each campus’ policy. That, we heard from several of the deputants who appeared before the committee, was viewed as a very constructive process that resulted in good policy.

I just wanted to speak a little bit about what we heard about the need to have good policy, the need to have policy that really does address the growing mental health needs of students in our post-secondary institutions and the rising reports of incidents of racism and hate on our campuses.

We heard that the mental health needs of students are becoming much more complex than they were in the past. Instead of being episodic, they have now become sustained throughout the year and, as I said, much more complex than in the past. They talked about the fact that, as I mentioned, the gaps in community-based resources mean that the pressures on campus mental health services are even greater and that increases the demands on our university campuses.

We heard about long wait times. Some students can wait six months before seeing a mental health counsellor, depending on the kind of counselling that they were seeking. It’s also depending on whether specialized care was needed, what kind of support you need, how often you need it, etc.

Other barriers that created delays in enabling students to access services on campus related to accessibility because campuses are also dealing with issues around pressure on accessibility services, as well.

We heard about staffing of campus mental health services, where positions are short-term; they’re not able to become full-time positions so that there is a full-time counsellor who’s there to provide the support. They may be funded for a very limited period, and as soon as that staff contract ends, the service ends, as well.

One of the presentations, I think, that had a particular impact on me—and I certainly hope that the government listened carefully to this presentation—was the presentation from the Centre for Innovation in Campus Mental Health. That centre, Speaker, is a very unique partnership funded by the government of Ontario, but it is a partnership between Colleges Ontario, the Council of Ontario Universities, the College Student Alliance, the Ontario Undergraduate Student Alliance and the Canadian Mental Health Association. The experts from the Centre for Innovation in Campus Mental Health understand what is happening on our post-secondary campuses related to student mental health concerns.

They cited a report from the Canadian Alliance of Student Associations that found three quarters of students reported experiencing—three quarters, Speaker—negative mental health in their studies, and in particular, Indigenous students, low-income students and 2SLGBTQ+ students were most at risk.

They also talked, however, about the fact that most, if not all, college and university campuses in Ontario already have student mental health policies. What these campuses are really grappling with is the lack of resources to adequately deliver student mental health services. I’m going to quote from the presentation. They said, “The issue is the acute need for stable and ongoing funding for the work that must be done to put policies” in place. “A further concern is that the creation of mental health policies ... with no funding will consume resources and provide no real value to campus well-being.”

Thank you to my colleague for that question. Certainly, we have seen the track record of this government is that they don’t value post-secondary education. They don’t value public institutions in general. They don’t value the public hospitals who deliver health care to Ontarians that are completely at the breaking point.

They don’t value health care workers. We saw them introduce Bill 124 in 2019, which imposed an unconstitutional wage cap on public sector collective bargaining. They have shown a fundamental disregard for the work that public sector workers do in this province.

But what the NDP would have done differently is that when you remove that almost $2 billion in revenue that is represented by tuition, you have to replace it. You have to ensure that there are public dollars there to sustain the stability of the sector. That is something that this government failed to do, and that is why we find ourselves on the brink. That is why the sector is in such a very serious crisis at this moment. And this government’s investment will do very little to solve the problems that have been created.

I appreciate the question from my colleague across the way. One of the reasons that I spent so much time at the beginning of my remarks in providing a context for the financial situation that Ontario colleges and universities face is to emphasize that no policy, however perfect it is, is going to be effective if there are no resources to implement it. We have reached a situation, in the post-secondary sector, where our post-secondary institutions are literally on the brink.

We heard from the government’s own research report that was released in January 2024 about mental health supports on campus that universities and colleges are already struggling with the ability to resource the mental health supports that are supposed to be available. So we need to have that funding—

As lots of research has highlighted, financial stress is very much a contributor to student mental health issues.

We know that investing in OSAP, in making student financial assistance much more accessible to students would go a long way to removing the financial barriers that students face, not just to enter post-secondary education, but to continue their studies.

As I mentioned, we have seen post-secondary students, international students among the largest group of food bank users because of their struggles with food insecurity, because the affordability crisis that we are seeing in this province is affecting—

She goes on to say, “This commitment does little to tackle the serious lack of investments in Ontario’s post-secondary sector and continues to burden students, especially international students, to fund the quality of post-secondary education.”

So while they may be supportive of the requirement to have mental health policies and racism and hate policies, students are very concerned about this government’s failure to address the fundamental—

This bill requires colleges and universities to develop and implement policies on student mental health and also anti-racism and hate. The government has committed $8 million over three years for the student mental health piece, which, with 47 institutions in Ontario, means $57,000 per institution for each of those three years. There’s no additional funding for colleges and universities to implement the anti-hate policies.

How does the government expect institutions to be successful in developing and implementing these policies when there are no additional resources, and our sector is already in such a financial crisis?

I listened with interest to the minister in her lead speech on Bill 166. As the minister said, this bill was introduced as part of a package of announcements that the government claims would stabilize colleges and universities, who are facing a financial crisis in this province as a result of years of chronic underfunding and cuts that have been made by this government.

The government’s financial investment was $1.3 billion over three years, which is half of what the government’s own expert panel said was needed just to keep the sector afloat, which was before the international student cap was announced, which will make the financial pressures in the sector even worse.

My question to the minister is, why did this government ignore the advice that they received from the expert panel that they struck?