Speaker, through you: This bill creates an advisory council for the provincial police. I know many front-line workers who carry a heavy burden from their experience on the job, police officers especially. Police are responding to situations that are increasingly difficult, like mental health crises. Can you expand on why investing in those training pieces that consider the community and involve the community is so vital?

Thank you, Speaker. Through you to the member from Kitchener South–Hespeler: Retaining our front line is important. Health care, policing—across the board, they need to see that we support them. But it is also true that we should be supporting them with tools to do those things.

This bill has left two unaddressed recommendations from the Renfrew county inquest that would have done that, like creating a record of past IPV—inter-partner violent abuse—that is accessible to all police services and considering disclosure of a partner’s history to help avoid inter-partner violence in the first place, like the bill I tabled in 2018 called Clare’s Law.

Do you see those empowerment tools as a way to help police feel safer on the job, help prevent future conflict? And if so, why were they not included in the act that is designed to help retain and recruit police officers?

Speaker, through you to the member from Barrie–Innisfil: Empowering and supporting education in our courts is very important, but so is understanding the weight and the cost and rewards of those decisions. One of the recommendations from the Renfrew county inquiry was just that, studying judges’ decisions in inter-partner-violence-related crises. Both the community and the judicial wing can learn, and that is training.

My question: Why was the recommendation not actioned when amending the Justices of the Peace Act, considering the measures taken to encourage education within the courts?