I was coming there.

I think we can all agree that disputes among school board trustees are costly and time-consuming. I think we’ve seen examples of that across the province, haven’t we? They erode public confidence and deflect attention away from their primary duties of promoting student achievement. Moreover, considering that approximately 700 trustees provide governance over a high-profile, high-impact $27-billion education system, it’s a little surprising to hear that trustees lack a consistent set of qualifications, training and, importantly, even a standard code of conduct.

Elected trustees perform an incredibly valuable service to parents and taxpayers by holding school boards accountable and ensuring that tax dollars are well spent. For that reason, we need to ensure that all trustees within the province of Ontario have the knowledge and skills required to perform their duties and that their conduct is held to provincial standards.

The vast majority of elected trustees are diligent, dedicated and altruistic public servants who care about education and the people they serve. But in recent years, the media has reported numerous incidents of trustees who treated parents less than respectfully and even said things that were completely unacceptable.

To quote from the 1994 Royal Commission on Learning that was established by Bob Rae’s NDP government and co-chaired by a former federal Liberal cabinet minister—I’m going to interrupt the quote, Speaker, by saying I move that the question now be put.

In my riding of Essex, we have some very good landlords and some very good tenants, and these very good landlords and very good tenants have contacted me because they have disputes that they need to have settled. In order to settle these disputes, they need to go to the Landlord and Tenant Board, and there have been delays that have piled up at that board due to the pandemic. I’m sure that the member who just spoke also has good landlords and good tenants in his riding who are having disputes that need adjudication at the Landlord and Tenant Board. So my question to my friend is, what is this government doing to help adjudicate those disputes and get them through the system?