I am pleased to rise today to participate in third reading debate on Bill 102, the Strengthening Safety and Modernizing Justice Act. I want to begin by reflecting back on an experience that I’m sure many of us in this House shared in the fall, during the municipal election. I know that many MPPs were knocking on doors to support municipal candidates. One of the things that I heard in my riding of London West was a shared concern about community safety. People were raising anxiety about the level of homelessness in our city, about the increasing poverty in our city and the impact that this has on community safety for residents. Certainly, the official opposition believes strongly that it is important for the government to act, to invest in community safety measures, to support strong and caring communities, to make sure that the programs and services are there to improve quality of life in our communities and to keep our communities safe.

What we also heard, as I mentioned, in relation to these concerns about community safety is that a critical way to keep communities safe is to invest in community mental health supports. We need to make sure that there is supportive housing in place for people with complex needs who require wraparound supports in order to become well and to be able to function in our communities. We need programs that invest in youth, that build capacity in young people, that develop resilience, that enable people to thrive and to participate.

We also heard that there is a need to invest in alternative first responders with the expertise to respond to issues related to mental health, addictions, homelessness and school discipline; that we need to free up our police to be able to focus on what they are trained to do, which is law enforcement.

I have to say, Speaker, that in speaking to police officers in our community and speaking to residents of London West about some of the issues that we are seeing related to mental health and homelessness, we have heard overwhelmingly that what would be most beneficial is an investment in training.

I had the opportunity a couple of weeks ago to participate in a round table on mental health, and some of the officers who participated in that round table were members of London’s COAST program. COAST is an acronym that stands for Community Outreach and Support Team. COAST teams are in place in many communities across the province. London’s COAST team was established a couple of years ago, and it has really helped to address some of these pressing social issues in our community related to mental health and addictions. The COAST program pairs a police officer with a mental health worker to provide mental health and addiction supports when a front-line police response is not necessarily needed. The officer I spoke to—the two officers who were there from the COAST program talked about moving into the COAST program from the roles that they were doing previously, and how incredibly valuable to them the COAST training was, how incredibly valuable it was to work alongside a mental health worker and gain benefit from the expertise that mental health worker brings to an effective response to a homelessness and mental health crisis.

Unfortunately, in our community in London, the COAST program has continued to operate for the last several years on a pilot basis. There is no long-term, stable funding. There is no permanent funding to assure the organizations that are collaborating with COAST that it will be sustainable. St. Joseph’s Health Care London, the London Police Service, Middlesex-London Paramedic Service and CMHA Thames Valley Addiction and Mental Health Services have all pooled their resources to deliver this COAST program, and they are continuing to wait for a signal from this government that sustainable funding will be there to enable the long-term delivery of the program. They conducted a very, very promising evaluation about a year ago that showed significant improvement in our community’s ability to respond to mental health and addiction crises. The goals of the program are to support individuals living with mental illness through proactive intervention and follow-ups including navigation and access to local mental health services, while minimizing interactions with front-line London Police Service officers. The program pairs care workers, including nurses, social workers and paramedics, with front-line London Police Service officers, to prioritize intervention and de-escalation.

As I said, the members of the London Police Service who are part of the COAST program, who I spoke to a couple of weeks ago, talked about how incredibly valuable that training was and how they wish all front-line officers would have access to that COAST training. We know that police have become the default mental health workers in our communities. The vast majority of the calls that police are responding to are related to the mental health crisis. In fact, in May 2021, the London Police Service reported that police officers responded to 3,600 mental health calls annually. So this is something that police officers want to see. They want to see that investment in training. They want to see innovative programs like COAST that pair police officers with people with expertise in mental health and addictions so that they can respond effectively to the crises that we are seeing in our communities.

Unfortunately, that is not what Bill 102 delivers to the people of this province. There is no commitment in this bill to provide that additional training that police officers are requesting so that they can do their jobs more effectively, so that they can focus on crime prevention and responding to issues that require police intervention rather than responding as a de facto mental health worker.

In the most comprehensive review of policing that has ever been undertaken in this country, the report of the Mass Casualty Commission, which was released last year, we saw that need for training echoed again. In the case of the Mass Casualty Commission, the focus was training around sexual violence and intimate partner violence, gender-based violence. That extremely comprehensive review, in the wake of the killings in Nova Scotia, showed that training for police officers in gender-based violence, in sexual violence, intimate partner violence, is necessary to be able to support police officers to do their jobs. We also saw it in the report of the Renfrew coroner’s inquest, which was an inquest that was held into the murders of Carol Culleton, Nathalie Warmerdam and Anastasia Kuzyk in 2015—all murdered in an act of femicide by a former intimate partner. That inquest also reinforced the importance of training for police officers, for our justice system to be able to respond effectively to intimate partner violence.

Unfortunately, Bill 102 does not incorporate the learnings that we gained from the Mass Casualty Commission report. It does not incorporate the jury recommendations that were made in the wake of the Renfrew coroner’s inquest. It does not incorporate what we’ve been hearing from police officers about the value and the importance of training in mental health and addictions, effectively responding to mental health and addictions. It’s basically silent on the need for police training. What the bill does—and I want to commend the government for including schedules 3 and 5. The bill amends the Courts of Justice Act and it amends the Justices of the Peace Act to require training for judges and justices of the peace, and this training is around sexual assault law, intimate partner violence, coercive control in relationships, systemic racism and systemic discrimination. So, to its credit, the government recognized the importance of training for judges and justices of the peace, but it failed to recognize the importance of training for our front-line police officers.

Having given the government that credit, however, I also want to point out one of the things that was said about this legislation by advocates in gender-based violence. Schedules 3 and 5 in this bill are modeled after federal legislation called Keira’s Law, which required training for federal judges. Keira’s Law was a stand-alone piece of legislation. It was a stand-alone bill because it was that important to honour the memory of Keira, the little girl who lost her life in an act of intimate partner violence by her estranged father. Instead of following in the model of Keira’s Law and instead of bringing forward a stand-alone bill that could have included all of those other recommendations from the Renfrew coroner’s inquest and from the Mass Casualty Commission for a broad-based training program for everyone involved in policing and community safety and the justice system, the government decided to include schedules 3 and 5 in Bill 102, which calls into question the government’s commitment to actually addressing intimate partner violence and gender-based violence in this province.

The other issue about this bill is that it would have provided an opportunity for the government to address some of the issues that we hear about quite regularly from our constituents. Certainly, whenever there is a media story about an officer who has committed an egregious offence and is suspended with pay—this bill could have addressed that. It could have permitted the suspension without pay of officers who are convicted of serious offences. That was a motion that was tabled by the NDP during clause-by-clause on this bill, because that is something our communities want to see. There is justifiable outrage when these media stories come up about an officer who is convicted of a serious offence and yet is suspended for years while collecting a paycheque. That offends our sense of due process and fairness. This is something that could have been corrected by this government while they were opening up this bill, but they chose not to go there, which is unfortunate.

The final thing that I want to say about this bill: The other missed opportunity that this government had was to address head-on the PTSD that so many of our front-line service officers experience, and many times that is related to that lack of training, that lack of preparation that police officers need when they are responding to the kinds of crises that we see across this province.

We saw in a report from the Auditor General back in December 2021 that in the OPP there are more than 1,000 vacancies for front-line constables, which is more than a quarter of all funded front-line constable positions, and a third of those vacancies are because those officers who filled those positions are off on long-term disability because of the PTSD that they have experienced on the job. And we know that the mental health stress, the PTSD, that front-line officers have been facing over the past decade or so is continuing to escalate. In the auditor’s report, she summarized police officer deaths by suicide in Ontario and showed that the lack of support for police officers to deal with their PTSD has very much contributed to a serious deterioration in their mental health and an increase in officer deaths by suicide.

Speaker, we see this legislation as very much a missed opportunity. It was a missed opportunity to address the urgent community safety priorities of our communities by providing the kind of training that police officers want, that would benefit our communities, that have been shown to benefit our communities—as I said, with the COAST program. It was a missed opportunity for the government to declare decisively that it’s serious about addressing gender-based violence and intimate partner violence. They could have included the first recommendation of the Renfrew coroner’s inquest, which is to formally declare intimate partner violence an epidemic—because that is what it is in this province—but they chose not to. They could have looked at the extensive work of the Mass Casualty Commission and implemented some of the training that is recommended by that commission for officers, to prepare officers to respond to gender-based violence and sexual violence, but they chose not to.

So this bill, as I said, is a missed opportunity to really tackle the issues of community safety in Ontario in a meaningful way, to invest in officer training and to respond to gender-based violence and put an end to gender-based violence in the province of Ontario.