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.”