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 remarks from my colleague the member for University–Rosedale. She talked a bit about the cost-of-living pressures that people in her community and across the province are experiencing. She talked about the tolls, for example, on Highway 417. Now, this bill prohibits tolls on provincial highways that don’t have tolls. So I wondered what her opinion is on whether that provision to remove tolls from highways that don’t have tolls is going to really help Ontarians deal with the affordability crisis that we are seeing in this province.

My question is to the Premier. A report last month from the Ontario Real Estate Association quoted CEO and former PC leader Tim Hudak saying, “Student debt is not merely a financial burden; it’s the biggest barrier to the ... dream of home ownership for many young Ontarians and their families.”

The report stated that students with debt want to own homes, but they are losing hope; 70% are worried it will never happen, and student loans are the main reason.

Speaker, this government’s changes to OSAP have left more students drowning in debt than ever before. Why is this government denying post-secondary students the dream of home ownership?

My question is to the member for Lanark–Frontenac–Kingston. Over the last couple of weeks, I have raised some issues in question period based on what I’m hearing from residents of London West. I talked about two young nurses who are leaving London, moving to other provinces, moving to the US, because of the way that they are treated here, because of the way they feel disrespected and demoralized and exhausted because of this government’s policies.

The health care programs that the member talked about all depend on having a health care workforce in place. My question is, why is the government not dropping its appeal of the unconstitutional Bill 124 and moving forward so we can actually have the health care workers we need in order to deliver the health care services that Ontarians deserve?

Carol Brisseau is a retired London West senior who lives with her adult son on ODSP. They are one of many London West families struggling to afford skyrocketing natural gas bills. Carol doesn’t know how she will afford to heat her home and worries she may have to leave retirement and find a job to avoid her utilities being cut off.

Families like Carol’s are facing an affordability crisis like never before, but this Premier seems more intent on allowing mega-mansions to be built on the greenbelt than in helping people afford basic necessities like food, housing and utilities. This Premier’s rubber-stamping of gas rate increases has meant a doubling of Enbridge gas prices in the last two years and left families at the mercy of price-gouging energy companies and volatile energy markets.

The NDP stands with Ontarians in calling for immediate relief from the rising cost of natural gas. The government should be providing financial assistance to help people struggling to heat their homes. They should be bringing back and expanding rent control. They should be doubling social assistance rates. They should be taking on greedy corporations that are using the guise of inflation to gouge. And they should be funding aggressive energy conservation programs that will help people stay warm and comfortable while cutting back on use.

Will we see these measures in this year’s provincial budget? Speaker, Londoners like Carol will be watching.

I am pleased to rise today, on behalf of the people I represent in London West, to participate in debate on Bill 36.

I certainly have some thoughts about the government’s progress on their so-called plan to build, but first I did want to observe that I think what we see in this document and this bill that is before us today is another fundamental misread of what the province of Ontario is looking for from this government and where Ontarians are at in their daily lives. We saw that with the government’s decision to ram though Bill 28, the bill that used the “notwithstanding” clause to remove workers’ rights to bargaining and impose a collective agreement on the lowest-paid education workers in our system. It created chaos in our schools, and it completely ignored some of the issues that are priorities for the people in the province. That’s what we see today in this bill. That’s what we saw yesterday when the minister stood up to present the fall economic statement.

The priorities that the people in this province have identified right now, the pressures, the crisis that they are living through, are in our health care system, and one would have expected that the government would have recognized this as they were preparing the fall economic statement, and that they would have put in additional funding to mount an aggressive campaign to recruit and retain and return nurses. We have seen nurses burnt out, exhausted, leaving the profession in numbers that we’ve never experienced before in Ontario. They’re switching careers. They are retiring early. They are going to other jurisdictions where they’re better compensated. Instead of seeing this government taking the aggressive actions that would be necessary to shore up that health care workforce, to prevent the overwhelming of our pediatric ICUs, of our pediatric ERs, and prevent the closure of emergency rooms in small hospitals across the province—this government decided, “No, that’s not a priority for us right now. We’re not going to put in any additional funding to deal with that crisis.”

We saw nothing in this fall economic statement or this legislation to repeal Bill 124. That has been consistently raised by nurses and health care workers and public sector workers as one of the biggest impediments to their ability to sustain the kind of workforce that we need to deliver those vital public services, those vital health care services to Ontarians. We saw nothing in here to indicate that the government has any kind of a plan to put forward a comprehensive and effective public education campaign to get people to mask, to get people to recognize the link between wearing masks in public places and protecting kids from having to go on ventilators in pediatric ICU rooms. We saw nothing in this legislation or this statement that would indicate that the government understands the severity of the crisis and how much Ontarians care about the government dealing with the crisis, taking the actions that are necessary.

In my community, in London, the Children’s Hospital reported double the typical volume of pediatric patients ending up in the pediatric emergency room. Typically, they would have about 100 visits a day. Now they have 200 and more visits a day. These are critically ill children who are, with their parents, waiting hours on end to get access to the care that they need and they deserve.

I’m sure that other MPPs in this room read the comments from the CEO of Toronto’s Hospital for Sick Children on the weekend. He was talking not just about cancelling surgeries—because that had happened previously—but he was talking about the overwhelming of the pediatric ICU beds at SickKids hospital. He said that the cancellation of surgeries was “heartbreaking for the families” and “morally distressing” for medical professionals, who are not able to do the surgeries that they know these kids need in a timely manner. He said, “There is no child who ever has an elective surgery. There is just a question of what is life-saving, what is very urgent and what is less urgent.”

So I would say that it’s shameful that this government made the decision not to rise to the occasion and do an all-hands-on-deck response to the crisis that we are seeing in our pediatric ICUs.

Also, in London, we are continuing to see the problems with off-load delays of ambulances, of code zeros being declared when there are no ambulances on the road to be dispatched to help people who need emergency assistance.

We had a motion that we debated in this House just a couple of weeks ago—and it was actually passed unanimously, if I recall, by members on all sides—calling on the government to develop a plan to deal with the code zeros, to put an end to code zeros, because people in this province deserve to know that if they are in a crisis and need an ambulance to come, that ambulance would be available.

In London, we are seeing regular lineups of 16 or more ambulances waiting in the bays to off-load patients. That means that those ambulances can’t be on the road responding to emergencies, and the paramedics in those ambulances can’t be providing the support that they need.

Again, just as with the nursing workforce, we are hearing about paramedics who are experiencing burnout at levels never before witnessed. They are also making decisions to leave that profession.

We also know that in London and across the province there is a dire shortage of family physicians. There’s nothing in this economic statement to deal with that shortage of family physicians. I hear regularly from people in London that they can’t get access to a family doctor. That just puts more and more pressure on our emergency departments at our hospitals across the province.

We have a crisis in children’s mental health. I am hearing awful stories of the kinds of experiences that parents are having to go through with their children who are in dire mental health crises and absolutely cannot get the supports they need.

CSCN, the local agency that helps children who are having mental health issues, told at least two of the families who recently contacted my office that the needs of their children were too high for the programs that they had available. A response that we got from the ministry, when we contacted the ministry about one of these families, was that there is no provision in the existing model that facilitates a crisis response if or when one is indicated. We are reliant on community-based, ministry-funded services to address the needs of the community youth, to the extent that they are able. Well, they’re not able to address the needs of youth in the community, the needs of youth who are self-harming and are attempting suicide and all manner of experiencing mental health distress.

We also know, in my community in London, that there is a housing crisis. I want to point out, Speaker, that this document that we received yesterday has just three mentions of London, which is Ontario’s fifth-largest municipality, and one would think that, in a document of this size, London would be mentioned.

There was one mention of raising the speed limit on Highway 402 between London and Sarnia, and then there were two mentions of long-term-care homes in London that are getting upgraded beds. But interestingly, Speaker, as we consistently see from this government, the focus on beds comes without any kind of a plan to ensure that the staffing is there to care for those long-term-care home residents who are in those beds. There is nothing in the legislation, nothing in this document that suggests that the government has any kind of a plan to get to those four hours of hands-on care that long-term-care residents certainly deserve and have been waiting for, for far too long.

Nothing about the housing crisis in our city, and as my colleague, our finance critic, the member for Waterloo pointed out that, in fact, what the government does highlight in this document about housing is a downgrading to the targets they had previously committed to to reach the 150,000 new housing starts that are needed annually in order to get to that 1.5-million-homes target that we need to achieve in this province over the next decade. So the government has now reduced its projections for new housing starts and leaving it—you know, even after they announced this plan to carve out the greenbelt and they introduced Bill 23 to deregulate, to restrict the role of conservation authorities and housing development and to make it easier for for-profit private sector developers to build. But we know that the needs for deeply affordable housing, for non-market housing, are not going to be met by the private sector, and yet the government has not included the kind of investment that would be necessary to meet the needs of Ontarians in our community who are under-housed, who are living in substandard housing or who are homeless.

I just want to refer to the Vital Signs report for London that came out earlier this month. According to the city of London, there are more than 6,000 people currently on the wait-list for social housing, and as of September 1, 2022, 2,241 individuals in our community were experiencing homelessness.

London Cares is an agency of the city that provides wraparound supports through an outreach team for people who are experiencing homelessness, and they have reported a 68% increase in their outreach team’s interactions with homeless individuals in the last year.

We need supportive housing, Speaker. We need housing that that will address the mental health needs of people who are homeless, who are under-housed.

I just want to share a couple of shocking stories that were in the media just over the last week in London. Charles Pearce is living at Bruce Residence in London. He’s been living there for two years. He is on ODSP. Bruce Residence is a for-profit business. They announced a $200 rent increase for him, even as there is a rampant bedbug infestation and a rampant cockroach infestation at his building. He gets about $1,100 in ODSP. He’s being asked to pay $1,000 in rent for this facility that he is living in because there are no options. There are no options for people like Charles, who ends up having to stay in a horrifying place like that.

Another story just came out yesterday. Tom has both legs amputated. He has lost several of his fingers to frostbite. He was discharged from London Health Sciences Centre and has been lying at the corner outside the hospital for the last four days because the electronic wheelchair that he was discharged in—the battery died, and he has no way of getting somewhere to stay.

This is the kind of dire circumstances that people on ODSP are facing. The government’s plan to allow recipients to earn $1,000 before they start clawing back ODSP instead of $200 won’t do a thing to help Tom. Tom has difficulty with a lot of issues around daily living. He’s not able to go out into the workforce. He needs the doubling of social assistance rates that the NDP had called for, as does Charles, who is living in that bedbug-infested Bruce Residence.

Speaker, we also know that Londoners are experiencing food insecurity, again, at rates that we haven’t seen before. The London Food Bank said that the record for monthly visits was broken three times over a four-month period, and many of these people who are visiting food banks—one in three, in fact—are first-time users of the London Food Bank. Many are students. Many are seniors.

My colleague the member for Waterloo talked about the fact that in last year’s budget, the government underspent OSAP funding for students by $83 million. They withheld $83 million of financial aid to students that would have made a huge difference. But we also know that this government has decided that student loans are the way to go, instead of the grants that students in financial need should have access to, to attend post-secondary.

But when you have students who are facing big loan repayments and interest rates are rising to the extent that we’ve seen them, you’re going to see things like what we saw at Western University: Demand at food banks for Western University students doubled. Students are facing financial hardship, again, like they haven’t seen before. And more students are turning to the food bank on campus, to the food bank operated by London Food Bank, than they ever have before.

I also want to, in the last minute and 40 seconds I have, highlight that November is Woman Abuse Prevention Month. Today is Shine the Light on Woman Abuse. It’s a campaign that originated in London to raise awareness of gender-based violence. In June of this year, we had an inquest release 86 recommendations coming out of the Renfrew murders of three women by an intimate partner. Over the last year, there have been 43 femicides in this province, and yet the government has decided: no new investments in violence-against-women programs; no new investment in counselling and support for survivors of gender-based violence.

We know that those deaths, in all of those inquests that have been held into intimate-partner violence, were preventable if the proper supports had been put in place. It’s very disappointing that what we saw today—or yesterday, when the statement was read and the bill was tabled. We saw a bill that really fails to address the highest priorities and concerns of Ontarians. But frankly I’m not surprised, because that is what we have seen all along from this government.