When we’re talking about the budget, it’s a very large document that has a whole lot of stuff in it, and usually the government focuses on some of the key things that they want to talk about in it—and there’s a lot of good things in this one. We talk about eliminating the licence plate renewal fee. We talk about electric vehicles and our Critical Minerals Strategy. We talk about seniors’ tax credits so that they can stay at home. We talk about child care costs and reducing that for parents. We talk about some of the gaps that there are in education as a result of what’s happening with COVID—and there’s a lot of really good things in it. The Ontario Staycation Tax Credit—up to 20% for people who want to vacation here in Ontario; spend your money in Ontario, get the economy going. Those are all great things that we talk about in the budget, and the opposition focus on things that they want that may not be in it.

But, Speaker, there’s something that we don’t often talk about and it’s one of the tools that we, as MPPs, have. As members, all of us have the ability to introduce a private member’s bill. We can all craft some legislation that we would put forward, but you can’t have anything that commits government money in it. That’s not possible. But sometimes there are things that we, as members, are passionate about, that really got us here at Queen’s Park: things we’ve decided that we want to do, that we want to make better, and bills like the budget and the fall economic statement are ways that we, as members, can actually have influence on what the government does because we have the ability to go and lobby a minister.

I’m going to touch on a couple of things. Specifically for me, in my first year I was really active in our community with the special-needs community, involved with hockey, involved with baseball. A lot of the people I worked with helped me, and I said to them, “I’m going to do some things that are going to raise awareness, that are going to make a difference in your lives—small differences, but they make a difference.”

One of the things I was able to get in the first fall economic statement was Special Hockey International day. For those who don’t know, Special Hockey International is a hockey league designed specifically for those who have special needs. Ontario has hosted that tournament—it’s an international tournament—a number of times. And 2019 was the last time we hosted it in Ontario. Prior to that, it was 2016 and it was in Peterborough, and I was involved in it. I was able to convince the Minister of Finance at the time—again, I’m not allowed to say his actual name—that this was something good. It was something I was able to accomplish, just a small thing. It became part of the budget—actually, the fall economic statement.

I was appointed as special adviser to Ontario Parks at one point, and I did a great deal of work on a parks report. What came from that was two budget cycles later—just about everything that I had recommended was something that was implemented in our budget. It’s a way that we, as private members here representing our communities, can make that difference without having to be a minister, and it doesn’t have to be partisan. In fact, it’s not partisan in a lot of cases.

A story was relayed to me today by my good friend Jeremy Roberts, the former member from Ottawa West–Nepean. He talked about his time when he was working for the federal government, and how Jack Layton had this great idea and he went to Prime Minister Harper about it. He went to Finance Minister Jim Flaherty about it and pitched it, and they worked together across partisan lines.

Jack Layton’s idea was something that truly was not partisan: It was a way to help veterans turn their helmet into a hard hat. How could we get veterans who were leaving the armed forces into the skilled trades? How could we do something that would make it easier? That ended up being part of the budget; I believe it was 2011. A federal budget: a private member—opposition leader, actually—Jack Layton working with the finance minister to get something put in the budget that was completely non-partisan, that was in the best interests of not only the people Jack represented but the people every MP represented.

That’s a tool that we have in the tool box. We have that ability, then, to lobby the minister, to lobby the Premier, to work with the ministry to flesh out things that are going to make a positive difference.

We heard Jeremy’s story of why he got involved in politics, why he wanted to make a difference: Jeremy’s younger brother is on the autism spectrum, and there were some significant challenges that his family had gone through navigating the system and getting things done.

One story in particular—and I’m going to apologize to Jeremy, because I’m going to plagiarize a number of things that he has said and done. When his brother was 10—Jeremy was 14 at the time—they had gone into CHEO hospital, and there were some issues around behavioural outbursts with his brother. That’s not uncommon when you’re on the spectrum. When you’re far on the spectrum, it’s not uncommon for something like that to occur. They were working with the children’s hospital and, as Jeremy has relayed the story, they were talking to the doctor about it. He wanted to change the medicine, but they needed to speak to a neurologist, as well, to find out how that would affect Jeremy’s brother and whether or not this was actually something that was going to be good and have the desired effect. But they couldn’t talk to the neurologist right at that point, because that’s not how the system worked. At 14, Jeremy was dumbfounded by this and said, “He’s only three floors above. Why can’t we get together in the same room? Why can’t we have the same meeting?” The answer was, “Because that’s not how the system works.”

He was a very strong advocate for the autism community. The reason he got involved in politics was because of that: to try to make life better.

On page 128 of the budget—I just have to bring my laptop back up here so that I get the quote appropriately. On page 128 of the budget, there’s a line in there. It reads, “An example of a children’s health investment is $97 million over three years to improve the experiences and lifelong outcomes for more than 1,100 children and youth with complex special needs at Children’s Hospital of Eastern Ontario”—CHEO—“Holland Bloorview Kids Rehabilitation Hospital and McMaster Children’s Hospital. Funding will support a pilot project for an integrated model to provide key health and social services, including hospital‐based assessments, access to interdisciplinary clinical teams, medical care and behaviour therapy.”

What it is, is a long way of saying, “We’re going to make it easier for those families.” We recognize that when there’s a child with a special need, that there are multiple diagnoses, there are multiple people you need to be working with. The way the system is right now, you are going to be working with multiple different divisions within the hospital.

I’m going to pivot a little bit to a personal experience. It’s been well documented that my daughter had cancer when she was four. We saw the nephrologist. We saw the oncologist. We saw a psychologist. We saw a urologist. And after treatment was over, we still had to see all of those individuals. It was about once a month that we saw them—four different departments in the hospital—and it meant we were coming up once a week, because there was no coordination of it. There was no way that we could get all of those different departments together.

You go through a traumatic experience, and the way our system was set up—fantastic medical support, absolutely the best. My daughter is alive today because of our health care system. There’s no question in my mind about that. We have, by far, the best medical professionals in the entire world, but the system is not designed to be focused around the patient, to be focused around the child or the family.

If you have a child with a special need, it’s not uncommon to have multiple different diagnoses, and everything is based on that diagnosis. The supports that are there are based on this diagnosis or that diagnosis, but there isn’t a system in place where they’re put together, where they work together for the needs of the child, the needs of the parents, the needs of the family.

This small paragraph—I’ll read it again, because I think it’s so important: “An example of children’s health investment is $97 million over three years to improve the experiences and lifelong outcomes for more than 1,100 children and youth with complex special needs at the Children’s Hospital of Eastern Ontario, Holland Bloorview Kids Rehabilitation Hospital and McMaster’s Children’s Hospital. Funding will support a pilot project for an integrated model to provide key health and social services, including hospital-based assessments, access to interdisciplinary clinical teams, medical care and behaviour therapy.”

For many parents across the province whose children are diagnosed with special needs, they’re shocked to learn that clinical therapies for the children are often not fully funded and, unlike other medical issues, special needs treatments are often funded through a web of social services and health care. It’s a challenge to navigate and access it.

This is a pilot project to show that we need to be focusing on the needs of those families and those kids. What we have said all throughout government, for the last four years that we were elected, is that we need to break down those silos. We need to make sure that things that are inter-ministerial are actually breaking down those silos. This is one of those prime examples, because you have the Ministry of Children, Community and Social Services, who looks after most of the funding for special needs, but there are health care components to it. What this pilot is doing is putting the Ministry of Health together with the Ministry of Children, Community and Social Services, and they’re working closely together and they’re jointly funding a project that, in the grand scheme of things—and I never, ever thought in my life I would ever say this: $97 million isn’t really a whole lot of money for a government. I never thought I would ever say $97 million isn’t a whole lot of money. It’s a $190-billion budget; $97 million is not a whole lot when you look at it from that perspective. But it’s going to make such a positive difference for so many different families.

The only reason it’s in the budget is because a former member decided to put his name forward, because of his personal experiences with how the system worked. That member had the tenacity to not accept “no.” He knew what the problem was. He had the lived experience with it. He saw how the system wasn’t working properly.

All of us, as members, find times where we feel like we’re beating our head against the wall talking to the bureaucrats on different things, because a government of this size with a budget of that much money doesn’t turn on a dime. It’s a massive, massive shift, and the way things are done. We hear that a lot when we introduce things.

I’m going to use one of our catch phrases, and the NDP is going to boo me for it and harass me and heckle me on it: Status quo doesn’t work anymore. You can’t just accept status quo. Jeremy Roberts didn’t accept status quo. He had an idea. It was the right idea. The idea was, focus on what the needs are of the families; focus on what the needs are of the kids.

How do we make it easier to get a better outcome? The system is the system. We’re not changing families. We’re not changing what’s happening that creates the environment of whatever it is. We can’t do that. But what we can do is, we can change the system. We can make it easier for families to navigate. Because when you find yourself in those positions—whether it is a special need, whether it’s a family illness, whether it’s some diagnosis that you don’t know anything about—your focus is on, “How do I deal with this? How do I help my child? How do I help my brother or sister?” That’s where your focus is.

This is one of those times where a private member has been able to get into a budget a pilot project that says, “How do we focus on the needs of that family? How do we focus on what is going to give the best outcomes for that child?”

In the grand scheme of things, it’s $97 million of a $190-billion budget. It’s a small victory. It’s not a victory for us. It’s that small victory for all of those families who have had to navigate the system, for all of those families who have found themselves in the position where their child, at two or three years old, was diagnosed with something that was outside of the norm of 80% of the rest of the population. It’s a change to the system for the better. It’s a small change, but the expression is, how do you eat an elephant at a barbecue? You do it one bite at a time. Government systems are a massive, massive thing. It’s very difficult to change the direction. It’s very difficult to make an adjustment. The system wants to continue with status quo.

But a private member, a member elected by his community who wasn’t a minister, said, “Status quo is not acceptable. This needs to change. We need to focus instead on the needs of the families, the needs of the children, the needs of everybody who is coming through the system.” We can make that change. It’s a small change, but it’s a change that is going to make a difference for every one of them.

By doing it as a pilot, it makes it small enough and nimble enough that we can try different things. We can see what’s going to work. We can see that maybe there’s going to be some challenges with it; maybe there are some things that aren’t going to work perfectly. By rolling it out by a pilot this way, we can do things to get it right. Because that’s why all of us have been elected, to make that positive difference for so many families.

I want to make sure that it is on record that my friend Jeremy Roberts stepped up and made a positive difference for all of these families. He made a change to the system that will benefit everybody, and deserves the credit for it.