My question is to the Premier. Residents yesterday were shocked to learn that Ottawa is receiving only $845,100 of the $200 million Ontario is giving municipalities to tackle the homelessness crisis. Ontario’s second-largest city, home to a million people, facing one of the biggest homelessness crises it has ever faced, is receiving only enough money to build two affordable homes.

Curiously, at the same time, the minister’s own riding received triple what Ottawa got, with less than a fifth of the population. Something seems off. Minister, can you provide a full account of where your government’s affordable housing funding is going and why?

Minister, can your government to commit to providing cities with the fair funding they are asking for to build the affordable housing they need?

And homelessness.

I’ve said this before: The district of Cochrane, the area covered by the Cochrane social services board—so that’s Cochrane, Timmins and the surrounding area, to the coast—has the highest number of homeless people per thousand in the province. The highest in the province. There is still a couple of feet of snow north of Cochrane. It hits minus 40 degrees regularly in Cochrane. It’s a great place to live but it has its issues. We know that; we live in northern Ontario. So we’re wondering why we have issues there. Let’s look at how to fix that and then we’re going to have fewer issues.

Are we going to solve everything? No. We are always going to need well-trained law enforcement; that’s a fact of life. That’s one of the things about a civil society: You need people to enforce rules and regulations when some people aren’t civil. But it is also the role of civil society, the role of our government, to actually look at the underlying issues, identify them, and try to deal with them.

I’ve had this job for 12 years. I can remember, when I got here, being homeless was a Toronto thing. It was a big-city thing—and it’s never acceptable. I’m not saying it’s ever acceptable, but it was kind of: “Oh, there’s a homeless person there.” But now, there are encampments. The highest level of homelessness in the province is in Cochrane, and we just keep going on like there’s nothing wrong. We talk about spending millions here and we’re spending millions there, but I don’t see it on the street.

I do see that the use of food banks is going up exponentially. That tells me that what the government is talking about and what’s really happening are two different things. There are two Ontarios. It’s almost like there’s corporate Ontario and the rest of us.

I’m veering off the bill, Speaker. I’m going to veer back because I’m self-correcting here. I’m one of those people who doesn’t really need enforcement; I self-correct.

I was coming to the theme of, again, you can’t simply enforce yourself out of a problem, because when you try and do that, you’re just pushing the problem onto someone else. And, without proper community support, one of the groups you’re forcing the problem onto is our justice system, our police officers, our court system—and it’s being overwhelmed now. We need to look at having trained officers on the ground. We need all those things, but we have to also look at the underlying cost. We need to look at that.

I’m going to close on this issue: We need to have people in place who understand local conditions. That’s why people in the country instinctively know that when you lose detachments, when you lose—it’s not that the OPP is not going to try and do their job. That’s not the case. But you’re going to lose your local connection to the community. In my case, Officer Fisher might not have done that. We would have made a lot more news coverage. The only reason that happened is because Officer Fisher was around. He was at local sports events. He knew us, and I think—I’ve never asked him this, and I never asked his permission to use his name either, so I might be in big trouble. I’m sure it might have been frowned upon when he did that, when he went and stepped in, but he trusted his gut because he knew us. It’s really important that we don’t forget that and don’t think that we can control everything from far away.

When the Solicitor General talked in one of the questions about the changes to police boards, that might be a good thing to have them more local. Hopefully, we’ll have some time when this comes to third reading—that we can be a lot more technical. I said it was going to be a pretty high overview on this, because this is what you get in under 24 hours. You get a few good stories. But it’s an issue, an issue that hopefully we can correct here.

In closing, I’d like to thank you very much for your indulgence, Speaker, for your occasional smile and for allowing me to speak.