I appreciate the comments from the Solicitor General.

An effective response for my community in London would have been stable, permanent funding for the COAST program. That is a program that pairs police officers with mental health workers, social workers and nurses so that they can respond effectively to the crisis of mental health and addictions that we are seeing in our city. We have a crisis that has triggered a whole-of-community response to address the escalating levels of mental health and addictions and homelessness. That permanent funding for the COAST program, which is what my community has been asking for for several years, would have gone a long way to improving community safety in London.

In London, we have 2,000 people on the by-name list, who are unhoused. We have 6,000 households, representing 11,000 individuals, who have been waiting, sometimes for a decade, to get into rent-geared-to-income housing, and in the meantime, they’re living in substandard housing; they’re couch-surfing. They are not able to get into that kind of housing stability that’s going to help them move forward and build their lives. Housing is where it has to start.

In fact, the Middlesex-London Health Unit just wrote to this government a couple of weeks ago with the finding that households with low incomes in our community cannot afford to buy food, and that’s why we’re seeing record numbers of people accessing food banks—record numbers of new people accessing food banks in London and across the province.

What would have really made a difference is a doubling of social assistance rates, which is what social service agencies have been calling for for several years.