I’m looking forward to getting a chance to take part in debate a little bit later this afternoon.

I did hear during the member from Ottawa West–Nepean’s dissertation here this morning that she said a lack of capital funding has been something that has plagued the province over the last few years.

I’m just curious to know why $15 billion in capital funding, which is the most the province has ever seen, would be such a plague on the province?

I’d like to thank the member from Ottawa West–Nepean for her excellent presentation. I’d like to thank her, as well, for bringing forward the concerns of parents, students, education workers, and trustees from across the province. It’s clear that these voices are not reflected in Bill 98—it’s clear that they were not consulted.

As the member has pointed out, mental health—there are four mentions of it within this legislation, and it only relates to policies and guidelines. There are not any additional resources.

Also, I find it quite concerning, after listening to the member’s presentation, that violence does not appear in this legislation even one time—not even one instance.

My question to the member is, if the government wanted to show legitimate and authentic care for students with special needs, how would they update GSNs in the funding formula?

I suppose the member opposite did not carefully listen to my dissertation, as he thinks he did. He actually wasn’t listening at all.

I did mention the figure $16 billion, which is the school repair backlog—actually, we know that the school repair backlog is even greater than $16 billion; we just don’t know by how much, because the government has refused for several years now to report it. I know the member opposite hasn’t benefited from these new investments in math, but I think the member can probably still do the basic math here that $15 billion is less than $16 billion. We’re not even fully funding the repair backlog. And that funding also has to go to the creation of new schools. So if we wanted to be sure that every child had a safe environment to learn in, we would be investing more.

Je doute absolument que les conseils scolaires francophones puissent mettre en place un nouveau curriculum en français pour septembre. J’ai peur aussi que les changements dans ce projet de loi—si on ne consulte pas avec les conseils scolaires, les mesures ne répondront pas aux besoins des conseils scolaires. Et nous avons vu déjà la pénurie d’enseignants et d’enseignantes de langue française. C’est parce que notre gouvernement a échoué de considérer les besoins particuliers des conseils scolaires francophones.

What we have seen is that parents have repeatedly complained about the human rights of their children not being respected, and the Ontario Human Rights Commission has had to respond that that is an issue of a lack of government funding rather than a failure on the part of the school boards.

Let me tell you, if we really respected the rights of francophone learners in this province, then francophone school boards and francophone educators would be consulted on changes before they were made. We would take into account the fact that decisions that affect anglophone school boards in one way do not affect francophone school boards in that same way. We would be considering the fact that children with disabilities and accessibility needs in the classroom can’t get the same treatment as kids who don’t need any special kind of support. We would actually be consulting with parents, with unions, with school board trustees to make sure the supports were in place to protect the right of every child in the province to a high-quality education.

It is absolutely essential that we take into account the conditions in our schools, because those are our children’s learning conditions. When they don’t feel safe, when they can’t be in the classroom or they can’t be in school because of levels of violence, they can’t learn. When the supports aren’t there, they are unable to learn.

Unfortunately, the way special education is funded, our children with disabilities are not getting supports, and that is disrupting their education. Many of them are not even able to be at school full-day, full-week because of this underfunding. Many of them aren’t getting the supports they need to allow them to participate in learning in the classroom.

A government that actually wanted to help every child in our province to receive a high-quality education would be funding special education based on needs instead of some kind of strange statistical projection that has nothing to do with what is taking place on the ground in our classrooms.

Accountability and transparency are absolutely meaningless when school boards are being forced to make cuts to the teachers and education workers who would actually help our children to achieve success, when schools are lacking the educational workers that would actually allow children to be in classrooms so they could achieve success. Transparency is meaningless without an actual plan to get us from A to B.

London–Fanshawe, thank you.

There’s lots of great London representation here, so I know how the Speaker could get confused.

I want to thank the member for contributing to debate. She mentioned the legacy funding, the legacy children, near the end of her speech. I just wonder if she could expand on, since there wasn’t a consultation, what that’s going to look like for parents and legacy kids returning back to school.

I’m proud to say that Ontarians experiencing or at risk of homelessness will be getting a hand up from our government to be better connected with emergency and transitional housing, including in my community of Newmarket–Aurora.

Last Tuesday, I had the privilege of being at regional headquarters in Newmarket to announce that the regional municipality of York will be receiving more than $36.7 million in 2023-24 under the Homelessness Prevention Program. I am thrilled to say that this represents a 76% increase in annual funding. The boost in this funding is part of the initiative that we are taking to tackle homelessness head-on and provide support for Ontario’s most vulnerable by including an additional $202 million annually in homelessness prevention programs in our 2023 budget, Building a Strong Ontario. This allocation will allow York region and local supportive housing service managers the flexibility to allocate funding where it is most needed, including capital projects.

I’d like to thank regional chairman Wayne Emmerson, commissioner of community and health services Katherine Chislett, and their entire leadership team for their continued support of our community’s well-being.

I’d also like to thank the member for Thornhill and the member for Markham–Thornhill for joining me last Tuesday.

The Northern Health Travel Grant was set up to ease the financial burden on northerners having to travel down south for medical reasons.

As it currently exists, the Northern Health Travel Grant is leaving many northern patients in vulnerable situations, unable to access the care that they need. You see, Speaker, a patient needs to have the money upfront to travel to see a medical specialist down south, and then they wait, weeks or months later, to get reimbursed. Many low-income patients cannot afford those upfront costs, so the door to treatment for them is shut.

There is a list on the Ministry of Health website with 17 agencies in Nickel Belt that the minister says provide upfront funding to those in need. My OLIP intern Sophie called each and every one of them. If you are a member of a First Nation, if you’re on Ontario Works or the Ontario Disability Support Program, or if you’re a child registered with Easter Seals, there is a bit of help for you. But for most people, there is no help available.

Minister, this is wrong. People should not have to come to see me desperate for care but not able to afford a bus ticket to Toronto to get the care they need.

It’s clear that Ontario needs an emergency fund available to the people of the north facing these circumstances, because what we have now does not work.

Back to the minister: Let’s be crystal clear—here are the numbers from the border to Beamsville: 16 schools have closed their nutrition program, 30 more are projected to close, and 49 have been affected. We are facing a $400,000 shortfall.

We all know food prices are going up and affordability is down, but this is not an excuse to let children go hungry.

I need a response from the minister that puts these children first. I need to hear these words: “This is not okay. I am going to look into it.”

To the minister: Will you commit to assessing this program, and will you commit to emergency funding so children in Niagara do not go hungry?

I thank the honourable member for the important question.

The Student Nutrition Program that the member is referring to is receiving annual funding of $27.9 million.

We’ve said from the beginning that we will make sure that student and youth who deserve all of the supports get it in every way, shape or form.

If you look at the support that we provided to the municipalities, the $1.2 billion, that helped them with food, with housing, with shelter—the $8 million towards Feed Ontario; and then $83 million towards the Ontario Trillium Foundation, to provide grants to help food banks across the province.

Once again, we will be there for children, for youth and families across this province, and we will not let them down—every day.

I want to thank the member from Oakville North–Burlington. She’s a school building machine—five schools in four years. Amazing. She’s a strong advocate for the people of Oakville North–Burlington.

Mr. Speaker, while in Halton region we have wonderful municipal partners to work with us to get schools built in anywhere between one to three years, in many of our communities it takes upwards of a decade to build a school. That’s going to come to an end.

The Premier is committed to getting on with streamlining and overhauling our capital approval process so we build where the growth is.

We have 300,000 people, according to federal immigration targets, coming next year and every year.

We have to work harder and smarter to build better for our kids.

This plan in the legislation allows us to streamline approvals, enables joint-use projects with community, allows school boards to work together and collaborate to share their assets for educational purposes. It enables us to build through a $14-billion capital plan to renew schools and build new schools for the future.

Ukrainians are fleeing a war zone due to Vladimir Putin’s genocidal war—an illegal war that has created so much impact on so many people around the world.

Canada has opened our arms, Ontario has opened our arms, and in our education system, through the most recent funding announcement, we have reaffirmed to school boards that we will fund every Ukrainian child who comes through our country to have free, publicly funded education. We are extending subsidies and daycare for their mothers, their parents and guardians. We are ensuring mental health supports in their language through a partnership with the Ukrainian Canadian Congress. We are working together to make sure that those children who have faced so much trauma and affliction have the supports and the confidence that they can succeed in this country.

I regret to inform the minister that she really should have consulted some of her senior officials, because Meals on Wheels Ottawa, Meals on Wheels elsewhere aren’t reporting any increases in their budget—are there?

Interjection: Nope.

You have to ask the question: Why is this government defunding Meals on Wheels? Why is this government wanting to push people into the arms of the grocery store chains that are ripping people off with price gouging on bread, milk and other essentials? Could it be because this Premier is personal friends with the Weston family? Could it be because this Premier once said, “God bless the Weston family”? Is that why—

Interjections.

I just want to ask the Premier, why is he favouring profits for Loblaws over funding for Meals on Wheels?

I do appreciate the question from the member opposite.

I’m working with the Minister of Infrastructure to accelerate building schools in this province. We brought forth legislation designed to help fix the problem cited, which is, there are too many schools that need repair and it takes too long to get it done. In this bill, we’re going to accelerate the approval process. We’re going to allow joint-use projects with community partners, to build better recreational facilities for our kids.

In the budget, $14 billion is committed over the next decade to build new schools—$550 million this year alone.

And the Auditor General has requested and recommended to government to invest 2.5% of our budget in maintenance and renewal in the GSN. We have done that. We are providing that stability and those funding guarantees to school boards.

We know there is much more to do.

If the members opposite want to improve the state of schools, they will vote for the Better Schools and Student Outcomes Act to ensure we deliver schools quicker and get things done for the children of this province.

When it comes to education, just this morning, the Ontario Human Rights Commission issued a statement on the legislation posted. They said, “The OHRC is pleased to read that the government of Ontario is committed to overhauling the language curriculum and screening all young children, as recommended in its #RightToRead report.”

We have strong support from Dyslexia Canada, from special education families, and from the parent associations of Ontario—demanding that we lift standards and we do better for kids.

We just announced a $690-million increase—the entire Ministry of Education budget. When you compare the peak of spending under Premier Wynne, it’s 27% higher.

We are investing more, we are expecting more for children in this province, and we’re going to continue to stand up for families in Ontario.

I’d like to thank the member from Eglinton–Lawrence for her question.

I would have to say, number one, what I hear the most about is the concerns about where the funding is going and what is going on with that funding. In this bill, we will have school boards actually post financial results of what’s going on, and it’s going to be tied to our student outcomes. At the end of the day, this is what it’s all about. Everybody agrees—all my constituents want to see the best outcome for their child.

This is what it is all about: ensuring that transparency with the school boards so that we can have reporting that is tied to student outcomes.

Thank you to the members for their comments. I’m sorry to say, the member for Kitchener–Conestoga was not nearly as entertaining as the member for Timiskaming–Cochrane, but the member for Newmarket–Aurora sure was there at the end.

A question for the member for Kitchener–Conestoga: I’m glad to hear of your interest in school safety, your support for shop class. But what we’re seeing from this government is a lack of investments to actually keep our kids safe in schools, along with a lack of investments to actually provide them this tech education that has been promised.

Every student is going to be required to take a tech class, but we don’t have enough tech teachers even for the number of classes that are offered now. Many schools have no shop space anymore or a computer lab. They’re going to need to set that up in order to offer a tech credit. If there’s no funding attached, then they’re not going to be able to do that safely and to do that well. I feel like that’s this whole bill. It’s a grand set of priorities with no plan to get from here to there and no resources to actually do it.

Would the member support actually putting the resources towards school safety and tech classes?

It’s a pleasure to rise and attempt to engage the government here on this education bill. I have to, though, take a step back, because one has to ask the question: When a government makes simultaneous announcements in the same area, what’s actually going on? On Sunday—this past Sunday—the education minister talked about this bill, but at the same time released the funding announcement, as the member for Ottawa West–Nepean mentioned in debate earlier this morning. Why do that? People are busy enough. Parents are busy enough. Kids who are working in our public school systems, attempting to be the best students they can be, are busy enough. As we await information about what this government’s plans are for our public education system, why release two things on the same day?

I have a theory, Speaker, and its doesn’t go to motive. It’s a theory about why a government would do such a thing. I think it’s because there’s some bad news here. I know we’re going to have a debate, in the questions and answers to my time this afternoon, about what that news is. I think it’s bad news.

Here’s why. I heard the education minister this week in debate get up and describe the funding announcement this week and this bill as a net positive thing for students and a net positive thing for our schools. But what the member for Ottawa West–Nepean said very clearly this morning is that the proof in the pudding always shows up at a school board level. It always shows up at a school board level when the people charged to actually oversee the schools at a local level look at the details about staff allocations, look at the details about resource allocations, and figure out what they’re going to do with what the government offers.

This is what we’ve learned at the Ottawa-Carleton District School Board. After burning through reserves, based upon previous cuts from this government, they are staring down the probability of $10 million to $13 million in cuts going forward. That’s not a net positive, as I see it. Here in the great city of Toronto, the Toronto District School Board has done the same assessment, and after burning through, I believe, as much as $70 million in reserves, they are now looking at $64 million in cuts. I know the education minister likes to talk about math and the importance of training up kids at math, but the math that I was trained to use myself leads me to believe cuts are not a net positive thing.

These 2,000 staff positions the minister talks about: As I read through the details of my colleague’s presentation of what the minister presented, what I understood is that these aren’t necessarily assigned to a particular occupation. They’re math coaches, as I understand it, Speaker. If you were to take those 2,000 positions and put them across the entire school systems of all the boards that we have, you wouldn’t even be sprinkling a meaningful amount per school. So if the minister truly wants kids to win and succeed, win and be the best person they could be, why would he be sprinkling such a paltry amount of resources by way of staff?

This is what I know from actual math. If the government had simply kept pace with inflation, according to the Bank of Canada—an actual, statistical source of data, unlike this government—they would be spending $2.5 billion more this year in education. That is what would be required just to keep pace with inflation.

Now, what happens when we don’t keep pace with inflation? What happens when school boards get shorted? What happens is, ultimately, staff and students get shorted. Sadly, I hate to tell you, Speaker, the people who are often at the top of the getting-shorted list are students with disabilities.

I want to talk about a few stories, one of which comes from home and that has had some modest progress as recently as today, thanks to a family who is tireless in advocating for their child, but I think it will help give the government some sense about when they propose enhancements, but deliver cuts, who suffers.

Elliot Legault is a high school student in the city of Ottawa. His family lives in Ottawa Centre. Elliot Legault is an autistic adolescent. He’s non-verbal, but what his behavioural analyst determined at the school board level and to the family is that Elliot has an incredible amount of gifts to give and bring, not only for himself but to his class.

But what happened in the pandemic is interesting. Because there was so much virtual education happening—special education was still going on in person, so Elliot, actually, during the pandemic, was one of those few students who got the benefit from schools being relatively open so he could, as is his wont, get up and walk around and explore and experience learning in a very interactive way. It’s a necessity for Elliot; it’s a necessity. So the pandemic, oddly enough, was a positive thing for Elliot as he was grappling with his learning journey in his high school.

But when people came back from virtual learning, things were very different for Elliot. There were obvious tensions with other students. Getting up and walking around are not necessarily understood by other students as part of Elliot’s learning journey and could be understood as disruptive, and conflicts could be created. The only way those conflicts get mediated is with trained people in the classroom. That is the only way those conflicts get mediated. So the Legault family advocated for their son and went as far as the autism program at Children’s Hospital of Eastern Ontario, and made a proposal, successfully, to have CHEO-based resources allocated to their son’s high school to make sure staff could figure out how to quickly mediate conflict as it was happening so it didn’t spiral out of control, so a classroom didn’t have to be cleared.

That’s incredible. I think about the amount of parents who have the capability to figure out all those avenues of advocacy where they can connect with the children’s hospital to the high school to the staff, but they accomplished all those things. But when people came back, those resources were time-limited. The CHEO resources were not there forever. They were gradually withdrawn, and staff were told, “Okay, here we go. We have all these students coming back in the high school now, and you’re going to have to figure out a way to help Elliot without an EA today.” That was often the response: “You’re going to have to figure out a way to accommodate Elliot without the ability to move around, to go in the hall and walk back and forth, and keep him in the classroom.”

You can tell it’s a ticking time bomb of a problem. A conflict is going to happen. A classroom is going to be cleared. And surely enough there were a couple of incidents. Sadly, the Legault family was dealing with the situation that I was first presented with back in the fall of Elliot’s high school education being reduced to two hours of learning a day—two hours. What does that mean for his dad, Steve, and his mom, Carrie? What it means is, Carrie is the full-time, stay-at-home educator. Carrie is not allowed to pursue her professional employment because we do not have the requisite staff to be able to help Elliot in Elliot’s learning journey—quite frankly, not just Elliot’s: It’s everybody’s learning journey when you have a mixed environment and kids learn how to interact with different kids who learn differently. So the Legault family is told by fiat that their son is only entitled to two hours of education a day.

I was made aware of a mom recently in Durham who just recently found out that her seven-year-old son has not been allowed outside for recess since October—since October. Why? Because staff worry that he is a flight risk. Staff worry that there is a conflict brewing at any corner, and they do not have EA resources, so the child stays inside for recess.

This is what happens. This is what happens when you short public education, and it doesn’t go away by talking about 2,000 staff who are math coaches who magically might be able to present themselves to a classroom one day and help Elliot or help this seven-year-old I’m talking about. It doesn’t.

So then the problem in this bill, as I understand it, gets even more complicated, Speaker, because in a context where this government is proposing enhancements to funding, enhancements to staff, but actually cutting the ability of school boards and schools and staff to provide that support, they’re blaming school boards for improper governance. I would never say, Speaker, that there aren’t problems at a school board level, certainly as there aren’t problems in this building with how we interact and make decisions. There’s always going to be, and you have to have good governance processes to hold people accountable, absolutely—absolutely. But beginning with the supposition of negativity is a problem.

It also concerned me, Speaker, that the Ottawa public school boards’ association—I might have gotten the acronym wrong—the body that’s responsible for bringing together the school boards to advocate here was not consulted on this bill. They found out about it in the media. Can you imagine, Speaker, for any one of us, if we were presented with a project of law a constituent wanted us to embrace, and that constituent just took to the media and said, “My MPP is lousy because they don’t care about my issue,” but we’ve never been consulted on it in the past and someone just holds forth and questions our integrity? We would be outraged, wouldn’t we? We would feel like we were being disrespected. But that is precisely what this government is doing to school boards right now.

So I want to invite this government, if they’re listening, to redo this process. If you’re actually interested in code of conduct policies—proper code of conduct policies that will help make sure that when there is a complaint about staff behaviour or trustee behaviour amongst each other—I want the government today in debate to confirm that they will consult with public school board authorities, consult with employee groups and parent organizations, put in as much effort as they did into the physical and health education curriculum of 2018. Do you remember that, Speaker? They went out on the road with that, and they found out from communities that their approach was wrong. I want them to put a similar amount of resources and effort into the issue of code of conduct.

I’ll tell you why, Speaker. There’s a disturbing story from my own community that I take to heart, that not a day when I walk into this place do I not think about. A very prominent trustee in our community for the Ottawa-Carleton District School Board is Dr. Nili Kaplan-Myrth. Dr. Nili Kaplan-Myrth runs a family health organization. She’s a family physician with an incredible pedigree and reputation in our town. Why? She was one of the primary health care providers during the pandemic that brought the immunization wave, the wave of mass immunizations that happened in our community, particularly for essential workers: people working in grocery stores, warehouses, trucking, the occupations that were essential, but they weren’t health care. It was Dr. Nili Kaplan-Myrth that came to be known as a major organizer in our community for her work on mass immunization. Her efforts immunized over 15,000 people. They were called “Jabapalooza” efforts. They filled up entire streets—the Fourth Avenue where her clinic is based, the Common Ground family health organization clinic. You could see the street; she worked on it with the city. The road was blocked off, with people backed up for a long way, because they were scared about going to work if they weren’t protected through immunization; they were scared about passing on a virus to an immunocompromised loved one.

Dr. Nili Kaplan-Myrth came to be known in our town for being a leader because of her work in the pandemic. And then, because of her experience in public advocacy, she decided, “I want to serve the public more.” So she ran to be a trustee of the Ottawa-Carleton District School Board in the very area where her clinic is based.

Trustee Kaplan-Myrth is also the first—to my knowledge, at least—elected Jewish trustee we have had in the Ottawa-Carleton District School Board in a long time. And sadly, given what we have seen in some quarters of social media, she has been subjected to a tremendous amount of hate and anti-Semitic vitriol—constant. It’s gotten to the point, Speaker—I want this said for the record. I won’t read the text of the emails Trustee Kaplan-Myrth has received, but it’s gotten to the point where every single day she’s receiving a death threat from anonymous email accounts. That’s not an exaggeration—every single day. That is what she is dealing with.

So what has her approach been from advocacy to change the Ottawa-Carleton District School Board? On January 18, 2023, she went to the Ottawa-Carleton District School Board with a proposal to hire a Jewish equity coach, because there had been a number of disturbing incidents of anti-Semitism in schools and because of what she had experienced herself. The board unanimously adopted that approach, and the Ottawa-Carleton District School Board has set in motion by which schools can start to grapple—led by leaders in our Jewish and this Jewish equity coach—with dealing with the issue of anti-Semitism. Something to do—they didn’t ask for the government’s help in this. Trustee Dr. Nili Kaplan-Myrth led that effort.

So what I would tell this government if they want to revamp code of conduct processes is to talk to Dr. Nili. Talk to Trustee Nili. Talk to advocates in other school boards who have had to deal with awful incidents of hate in the classroom and awful incidences of hate that they’ve received as elected officials and ask them for their advice, because your provincial code of conduct will be better from those engagements. I’m happy to send along all the contact information I have from the rather ugly chapter that continues to unfold in our city.

I also, for the record, want to shout-out Proton Mail. Why, Speaker? Because Trustee Kaplan-Myrth approached Proton Mail—which if people don’t know about, it’s an encrypted form of email you can sign up to. This is where a lot of the hate for Trustee Kaplan-Myrth has come from: sources that can’t be traced. And this company, when Trustee Kaplan-Myrth reached out to them, was horrified at the hate being spread out from their platform, and volunteered—

I’m so excited to be able to ask a question, because this has been very entertaining, frankly. The member opposite talked about underfunding, but everything, according to the NDP, is underfunded. I would just point out that per-student spending for elementary students in Canada is $13,125, and in the UK, that same number is about C$10,000.

Beyond that, you’re talking about Elliot; Elliot has special needs. I am very passionate about making sure that we have resources for special-needs children. What this bill does is make sure that we know what the special-needs funding—which we’ve increased and are giving to schools—is being spent on. That’s what parents want to know, because I’ve had special-needs teachers in my office tell me it’s not being spent on special-needs teachers. I want to see it spent on special-needs teachers.

Thank you to the members opposite for their comments. Let’s talk about this government’s record for a moment. Because what we learned this week is that:

—there are now four fewer high school teachers for every 1,000 secondary students in Ontario than there were five years ago;

—there is $1,200 less per student in funding than under the Liberals, once you’ve accounted for inflation;

—90% of schools have no regularly scheduled access to mental health professionals;

—50% of schools have no access to mental health resources at all; and

—schools across the province have a shortage of teachers and educational assistants.

Why do the members think that school boards are going to be able to deliver more with fewer resources for our students? And why are they talking about school board responsibility instead of ministerial responsibility?

I want to thank the member opposite for her question. As a mother, we want to get value for our educational dollar. The Better Schools and Student Outcomes Act advances vision for the education system that is centred upon preparing students.

When we talk about funding, this past Monday we announced a historic investment by providing $27.6 billion for public education for 2023-24. As I said in my presentation, this has grown every year. Our government has continued to make these historic investments every year in the face of stagnant enrolment. We’re continuing to put in, but we need to see the results.

My question would be, does the member of the opposition want to see value for dollars spent?

This government did no consultation with parents or parents’ groups in putting this education bill forward, so let me read into the record a letter that I received from a school, from the school council of the Cootes Paradise Elementary School in my riding, who wrote to myself and the minister. They said immediate action is needed in their schools.

The letter says, in part, “Our children with additional needs are not getting the education they deserve. We demand better for our children. There are three primary issues: insufficient funding, EAs needed in every kindergarten class and transparent contingency plans needed for staff absences. There’s a lack of funding for EAs provincewide.”

They conclude by saying, “It’s time to act on your promises, invest in EAs, hire enough of them, pay them what they deserve, mandate at least one EA per kindergarten class, plan for contingencies.”

My question is, why did this government not spend $600 million of federal COVID dollars? Why did you underspend your education budget by $500 million? This would have helped the school in my riding, Cootes Paradise Elementary School, to deal with the problems that they’re facing right now.

Thank you very much, Speaker. I was here yesterday when the minister spoke to the bill and he did spend some time on the GSNs and what the funding was covering. I’m just pointing out some of what the GSNs are not covering that people in London West have highlighted as a gap.

I heard from some school bus drivers also who say, “Due to a funding shortage, we have been forced to cut back on the number of buses and routes in our region. That means that often, despite my efforts and those of my colleagues, students are late or not picked up at all.” He says, “We are doing everything we can, but the system is under extreme pressure and it may buckle at any time. Please, for the sake of the students across this province, give the system emergency funding so that I can do my job and we won’t leave kids stranded.” These are some of the issues that we are hearing about in London West, as well as the need for new schools.

Now, this bill includes some provisions for the disposition of surplus property. The challenge that we are facing in London—it’s the fastest-growing city in Ontario, second fastest in Canada; it is seeing explosive population growth in areas outside the city, and this government continues to move forward with a funding formula that basically guarantees that the moment a new school finally opens its doors, there are going to be 10, 12, 15 portables on the site because, the way that new school construction is funded, it is planned around the number of students who are living in the community at the time that the new school is approved and does not take into account the planning projections for the number of students who are actually going to be in that area. We have seen a huge need for new schools, certainly in the northwest area of the city—terrible overcrowding in our schools, which is not good for student learning.

We know that what students actually need to be successful in schools are those resources and supports that I talked about. It’s an educator in front of a classroom; it’s reducing class sizes; it’s ensuring that we have caring adults in the school system to support kids who need supports.

As much as I would have liked to be able to actually talk about better schools and student outcomes, I’m not able to do that today because this bill does nothing to ensure that our students will actually be better off in our schools.

It’s very interesting to hear the response from the member to my last question, and it shows that the NDP simply doesn’t know how this actually works. You see, the Ministry of Education sends funding to the board. The board then sends it along to the school. They are responsible for the programming decisions. It’s not the government who sits here and says, “Let’s look at these programs and see what’s best for the needs of those children.” It is up to the broader public sector—the school boards, in this case—to make those priority decisions on what programming is best for children. That is exactly how that system works, and I know this first-hand because, as I said, my wife has been a teacher for over a decade and tells me how that system works and how the programming actually doesn’t have any clarity around how those decisions are made. And parents are left in the dark when programs like reading programs are cut.

Now, we know the funding is up. You can read the budget. You see it’s 27% higher than when the last Liberal government was here—a hard stop on the facts.

Interjections.