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—

We agree that is a very good development. It’s too bad that it has taken this long for such a development to be put in place, because we have been calling for whistle-blower protections in this sector for a number of years. Certainly we have an obligation to ensure that people—teachers, educators—who are employed in the care of children can report suspicions of abuse without fearing that they will not be protected. This is one of the reasons that we do support this bill. We do recognize that this is important, but it’s sad that it is so long overdue.

We do not have a children’s mental health system that is coordinated, that is easy for families to navigate, that ensures that young people who are in deep crisis get the mental health treatment that they require. We really need to take a systemic look at the mental health system and make sure that the services are there for parents and children who need them.

We had heard the former provincial child advocate—he had said that he received roughly 19,000 serious occurrence reports, a quarter produced by group residential homes. The government has failed to enable that kind—

Thank you to the member for the question. I want to assure the member that the NDP would never prop up the Liberals, just as we would never prop up any government that was going to undermine the rights of vulnerable children. The NDP has been calling for the reinstatement of the child and youth advocate. That is something that is missing from this bill that there was an opportunity for the government to move ahead with. The NDP has been calling for years for an end of for-profit group homes that exploit loopholes, that take advantage of children, that are abusive to children. We saw that horrendous exposé of what is happening to some of the most marginalized and vulnerable children in a for-profit group system.

My question is to the Premier. Yesterday’s budget showed that this government’s completely inadequate funding for post-secondary education, coupled with a 50% decrease in international study permits, will mean a $1.4-billion revenue loss for colleges in 2024-25 and an additional $1.7-billion revenue loss in 2025-26.

Not only that, the government’s inadequate funding ends after three years, which will mean even deeper losses for colleges and universities down the road. Why is this Premier choosing not to increase post-secondary operating grants and deliberately allowing colleges to fail?

Why did this budget not include the permanent, significant increase in operating grants that would move Ontario out of last place in the country in per-student funding and that is desperately needed to keep the sector afloat?

Interjections.

My question is to the Premier. Speaker, decades of chronic underfunding of post-secondary education by both Liberal and Conservative governments, followed by five years of Conservative cuts, have pushed our post-secondary system to the brink. Ontario is dead last in per-student funding—has been for years—which means larger classes for students, higher faculty workloads, greater reliance on precarious contract faculty and less time for faculty-student contact.

At least 10 universities in this province are already in deficit, and that number is going to grow, despite the government’s disastrous recent funding announcement. My question to the Premier: Will the government commit to the funding necessary to stabilize and preserve our world-class post-secondary system?

Interjections.

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 want to congratulate my very knowledgeable colleague the member for Oshawa for walking us through the legislation that’s before us today, the Building Infrastructure Safely Act. She made some comments regarding the locate requests that are affected by this legislation, and those locate requests are other than dedicated locator requests that are related to designated broadband projects. She made some comments about this government’s track record on implementing broadband throughout Ontario.

I wondered if she wanted to elaborate a little bit more on the government’s progress in achieving its broadband goals.

Thank you to my colleague the member for Ottawa West–Nepean for her remarks. I want to focus on what she’s talked about with regard to the education system. My colleagues and I in London had the opportunity to meet with the Thames Valley District School Board trustees and senior administration last week. One of the things they told us is that the special incidence portion of the education funding that flows to school boards has not increased in 10 years. This is funding that is used to support the highest-need kids in our classrooms. The lack of that funding has meant that school boards can’t hire the EAs they need, and they can’t offer the wages that EAs need, to support kids in classes.

What does the member think this budget should have done to deal with those high-needs students in our schools?

I would like to welcome Bishop Ronald Fabbro, who is the bishop of London from the Diocese of London and is here this morning for the Catholic Health Association of Ontario.

I want to thank the government members for their presentation. Several of the members talked about schedules 3 and 5 of this bill, which enact Keira’s Law, the federal legislation that was passed recently. Certainly, that is something that we in the official opposition strongly support.

My question to the government is, when gender-based-violence advocates were calling for stand-alone legislation to implement training for justices and justices of the peace, why did the government decide to bundle those provisions in this bill? And why did they ignore many of the recommendations—most of the recommendations, if not all of the recommendations—that were made by the Mass Casualty Commission, a broad examination of policing in Canada, and also the 86 recommendations of the Renfrew county inquest? Implementing some of those measures would have really made a difference for victims of intimate partner violence.

I appreciate the question from my colleague the member for London North Centre. If this government really wanted to improve student outcomes, to ensure better schools in this province, they would consult with the education workers who are delivering the programs in our schools. I’m not confident that there’s a simple fix to this legislation that would deliver the outcomes that we want to see, because it all comes down to engaging with the people who are supporting students in our classrooms. It is reaching out to parents to really understand what it is that parents want to see in our school system, and it is using that information to move forward in a way that meets the needs of students in the province.

It is a pleasure to rise today to participate in this debate as the representative of my community of London West, but also as a school board trustee who served on the Thames Valley District School Board for 13 years. There is nothing I would appreciate more than having a meaningful debate about ensuring better schools and improving student outcomes. But unfortunately, I don’t think that’s what we are doing here today with this legislation.

If this government was actually serious about ensuring better schools and student outcomes, they would have done the consultation that would be necessary to make that happen. They would have talked to the teachers unions, to the educators who work in our school system. They would have talked to principals. They would have talked to school board trustees. They would have talked to parents across this province, and yet we have heard nothing about a consultation that took place prior to the drafting of this bill, and we have heard nothing from the minister about what actually informed the legislation that is before us today.

I have to commend my colleague the critic for education, the member for Ottawa West–Nepean, who points out quite rightly that this government is nothing more than smoke and mirrors. It is an attempt to deflect the attention of the public away from the very critical issues that are present in our schools that face parents and young people in our province every day and instead deflect blame onto school boards, to teacher unions and to whoever else the government wants to assign responsibility for the problems that they have created through years of underfunding.

Speaker, I wanted to begin with a contrast to the major governance overhaul that we see in this legislation versus the last time in this province that an education governance review was undertaken. It was in 2009. It was prior to my election to this place, but I was a trustee on the Thames Valley District School Board and a vice-president of the Ontario Public School Boards’ Association.

A governance review committee was struck to take an in-depth look at school board governance and look at how we could actually improve school boards, improve the functioning of school boards to better support students in the province. The committee that was struck had representation from the four publicly funded school boards in the province; had representation from the Canadian Education Association, who participated in the process as a representative of the community; and also had representation from a former director of education. That committee met with representatives of 70 school boards in the province, 137 trustees, 54 directors of education, 71 parent representatives. There were 148 written responses to the consultation paper on school board governance. That process led to legislation that was introduced by the Liberals to refocus school board governance in Ontario. It’s a stark contrast to the process—to the absence of process—that this government was engaged in in order to bring this legislation forward today.

But one of the fundamental principles that came out of that governance review process was the obligation of school boards to maintain a joint and equal focus on both student achievement and well-being. What we see in this legislation is the government putting well-being to the bottom of the pile. This Conservative government has no interest in ensuring that students are able to function in our school system and deal with the mental health impacts—the ongoing, worsening mental health impacts—of the pandemic, the increasing numbers of students with special needs who are in our school system, and ensuring that every student in this province has the resources and the supports they need to be successful. We are seeing in our school system data showing how students’ needs are increasing. The complexity of needs is increasing and the ability to access supports is declining.

There was a recent study from People for Education that was released in February on the mental health crisis in our schools. That report found that, in just three years, the number of students who described their mental health as good or excellent had dropped 12%, from 73% in 2019 to only 61% in 2022. But even more alarming, that report cited research from the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health that said 59% of Ontario students stated that the pandemic had made them feel depressed about the future and 39% reported that it made their mental health worse. What kinds of resources and supports are available in our schools to help students cope with the mental health stresses of the pandemic? There’s almost nothing in our school system, Speaker.

People for Education reported that 95% of schools said that they needed some or more support for students’ mental health and well-being. Only 9% of schools in Ontario said they have regularly scheduled access to mental health and addiction specialists or nurses. Almost half of schools had no access whatsoever to specialized mental health or addiction supports; 28% of schools said that they had no access to a psychologist, which is almost double the percentage just 10 years ago; 93% of schools said that they needed support staff such as educational assistants, administrators and custodians. We don’t see those additional supports that school boards have identified as being so desperately lacking in our schools in this legislation that is before us today. Nor did we see it in the funding announcement that the government released at almost the same time as this bill came forward.

Instead, the government announced GSNs, Grants for Student Needs, that include only a 2.7% increase over the GSNs from last year. Everyone in this place knows how inflation has been hitting our wallets and our ability to ensure affordability. Everybody in this place knows that a 2.7% increase is far below the rate of inflation and therefore represents a cut. We see total funding that’s available for school boards in Ontario that’s $2.5 billion short of where it would have been if school board funding had kept up with inflation since this government was elected in 2018.

We also know, thank goodness, from the Financial Accountability Officer, who is providing some transparency on school board funding—this government says this legislation is necessary for transparency. We appreciate the work of the Financial Accountability Officer, who showed us that this government is actually spending $1.1 billion dollars less than planned in education during the 2022-23 budget.

This increase to the GSNs that the government has announced works out on a per-student basis to represent an increase of one half of 1% for every student in our school. Their so-called plan for math education works out to less than 50 cents per student per day. Their plan to hire new education workers works out to one educator for every 6,650 students across the province. The legislation, along with the GSN announcement, is going to do nothing to actually provide the supports that students need in our school system.

I want to share some information, some emails that I have received from parents in London West about what is actually happening in our school system. This is a parent who said her daughter is in senior elementary. She has identified learning disabilities. She says, “Because of her learning disabilities, she has been in a particularly high-needs cohort with severe behaviour and mental health needs that go unaddressed annually. The particular behaviours in her cohort have led to teachers opting for early retirement, needing to access sick leave, choosing to leave the profession altogether. Sadly, the school has lost teachers seven out of eight years in the grade that this cohort reaches, including one teacher who was assaulted by a student and another one who passed away—unconfirmed stress-related condition.”

This parent asks, “Why is the government not providing access to reading support programs?” She said that there were a number of students in her daughter’s class who were struggling, yet only six students per year were able to access the program funded by this government to provide daily instruction. Her daughter had to wait three years and was almost denied as she was already in grade 6.

The parent asked how many of her daughter’s peers have similar literacy and numeracy learning challenges “without the ability to access what we have managed to track down independently?” This is a two-parent family who had the resources to get some additional support for their daughter.

She says, “How will the current government’s underfunding education affect my daughter’s future employment opportunities now that she is only five years away from the full-time job market?” These are all very good questions, and there are no answers for this parent in the legislation that we have before us today.

I want to share a submission that was made by the Elementary Teachers’ Federation of Ontario Thames Valley Local during the pre-budget consultation in February. That submission references a systemic and pervasive crisis that is characterized by an increase in the number and severity of violent acts in schools, large numbers of teachers off work due to injury and mental health issues caused by violence and students who are immersed in and increasingly inured to the violence that surrounds them every day. They point to a six-month average of 636 violent incidents per month, which means that Thames Valley District School Board is on track to report 6,360 violent incidents by the end of the 2022-23 school year. Much of that is due to those mental health challenges that I spoke to earlier with students who are experiencing increased mental health crises and do not have access to the programs that they need to support them.

The other thing missing from the government’s GSNs is funding to actually address the backlog of maintenance and repair that we have seen built up under the Liberals and worsen—close to $17 billion now—under this government. Thames Valley District School Board is facing a backlog of $700 million in maintenance and repair, and if that were to include HVAC updates and AODA compliance, that backlog rises to $900 million over the next five years. And yet, nothing in this government’s budget or GSNs addresses that huge backlog of maintenance and repair that has built up in this province.

Thames Valley District School Board is also very worried about the fact that this government decided to discontinue the tutoring supports that were available for students coming out of the pandemic, which they saw as being very valuable and beneficial to students.

The other issue that I’m hearing about in London West related to school board funding, and again, not addressed in this legislation, not addressed in the GSNs, is the need to fund transportation to our schools. If kids can’t get to school, they’re not going to be able to learn.

Parent Vanisse Victoriano wrote to me to say, “I am a mother of two lovely kids. My 13-year-old keeps missing school due to a school bus shortage situation, bus delays and bus cancellations. My daughter’s school had five bus line cancellations today alone due to bus driver shortage.” This email was written to me in February.

She says, “I urge and beg you to help increase the bus driver wages so we don’t keep having this problem over and over again. The problem will only resolve once government starts paying better wages to bus drivers so that will attract more people to work as bus drivers”—

I am delighted to welcome Cat Van Eyk, who is here from London West as part of A Remarkable Assembly women’s forum.

Welcome to Queen’s Park, Cat.

My question is to the Premier.

Barbara Savage is 84 years old and lives in London West. She recently received a sudden and shocking diagnosis of stage 4 breast cancer and underwent a double mastectomy in February. With tubes dangling everywhere from her chest, she was discharged and told a nurse would come to her home the next day. Speaker, 11 days later, a nurse finally came. When the tubes filled with blood, Barbara’s daughter had to google how to drain them herself.

Does the Premier believe that this is an acceptable standard of home care?

When Barbara and her daughter frantically called ParaMed, they were told no nurses were available. Thankfully, Barbara did not develop complications, but many patients do, forcing them back into the hospital.

Will this government admit that its failure to address the home care worker shortage, its refusal to drop the unconstitutional Bill 124, is putting the health of Ontarians like Barbara at risk?

I rise today to share the story of London West constituent Cathy Melo. Cathy has been waiting since 2019 for a knee replacement. She lives with a tremendous amount of pain. She can hardly walk. She’s unable to work. She contacted my office and told me that she has been put on strong painkillers, but she feels very uncomfortable taking opioids for the long-term basis. She’s seriously considering asking for assisted suicide if she doesn’t soon get relief from pain. She asked me about accessing knee surgery at the Nazem Kadri centre for ambulatory care, which is operated by London Health Sciences Centre. This is a model that solves the crisis that we are finding here in this province with people like Cathy, who are unable to get access to the surgeries they need.

The Nazem Kadri centre is a publicly delivered facility that operates under the auspices of the hospital. It has all the hospital safeguards and oversight in place. It opened in early 2020. It has performed 4,000 procedures—the first of its kind in Ontario. It currently has two operating rooms. It is in negotiations with the province to expand to six operating rooms so that they can do more of these procedures and they can expand from very low-complexity, minor procedures for foot and ankle into those hip and knee replacements that are so terribly backlogged in Ontario.

Instead of approving the funding for the Nazem Kadri centre to expand their ORs, this government is looking to shift public dollars to private, investor-owned corporations where shareholders will make the profits—and patients won’t get the relief that they need.

Speaker, investments in facilities like the Nazem Kadri centre actually save public dollars. There has been an evaluation done that says the costs of traditional operating rooms are about $469 per patient; in an ambulatory care centre like Nazem Kadri, under the London Health Sciences Centre, the costs are $172 per patient. So the province could invest in ambulatory care centres like Nazem Kadri at hospitals across the province, and they would save dollars on operating costs, and they would improve patient care.

The other findings that have come out of the Nazem Kadri centre are that patients spend less time in post-op recovery. There is better planning in those operating rooms, because they know the time that each procedure is going to require, so they are able to go through 10 to 15 procedures methodically each day in each of the two ORs.

That is the kind of solution that would really make a difference for people in this province like Cathy, who are struggling with the terrible pain of hip and knee replacements and are unable to get access to the surgeries they need.

That is the investment that this province should be looking at. That is why they should be supporting our motion today that calls on the government to fund and fully utilize public operating rooms instead of moving to further privatize hospital operating room services.

Thank you very much, Speaker.

So we’re back to the time allocation motion on Bill 51, the Legislative Assembly Amendment Act. What this time allocation motion does is it takes the bill from where it was sitting at a committee, waiting to receive public input, and it allows the government to call the bill, without any committee input, for—

Interjections.

I appreciated the member’s reference to some of the data that has been collected in the student surveys, and in particular, the very disturbing data from Western University about the prevalence of students’ experiences of sexual violence. Western University has been taking exemplary measures to deal with that data and other issues at the institution. That includes university-wide mandatory training. That is the kind of holistic investment in prevention and education that would really make a difference for students in our institutions in this province.

I’d like to ask the member, why did the government not include measures like campus-wide education and training for all students, staff and faculty?

Speaker, I’m wearing purple today to show my support for the education workers, the education assistants, custodians, early childhood educators, school secretaries and other school support staff who provide vital supports to students, yet are the lowest-paid workers in the school system.

Parents in London West and across the province know the contributions of these workers to the success and safety of their children, and they want to see them fairly compensated. They also want more supports for struggling students in schools instead of direct payments to parents for an hour or two of tutoring, which won’t do anything to help students catch up and requires parents to try to track down a tutor.

CBC London shared some comments from parents. One said, “You can’t have a government at the table saying we have no money to give education workers, then provide all these random payments to parents.”

Another asked, “Wouldn’t it just be a better decision to take that money and hire EAs? That way, this so-called catch-up plan could be a plan that helps teachers support our students and not put the burden back on parents.”

A third said, “This feels a little bit more like a bribe to parents and families,” and would rather have that money go back into the education system.

Instead of a $365-million catch-up program, why won’t this government invest in the supports that would really help kids catch up—the education workers who support students in our schools?