Thank you to the member from Oshawa. Thank you very much for your compassion and your concern about the different officers and how they’re suffering from PTSD. I shared that emotion at one point. I think this is why we are having this special act to strengthen safety and modernize justice. Part of it is that, yes, we will continue to care and show our support for our officers, and at the same time we’re also hiring new and more officers right now.

But I would like to ask, even more so—this bill includes that we have immediate action to strengthen our bail system—is it important for us to include it in this act, in order to keep the violent offenders off of the streets?

I think our government is clear: We’re taking swift action. We see a problem, and we want to come up with a solution. We talked about bail reform before. We’ve introduced a motion within this Legislature. We have members of this Legislature, like the member for Oakville North–Burlington, like the member for Etobicoke–Lakeshore, who have been working on law-and-order legislation of their own that they’ve introduced in this House. We’re constantly talking to our community members. We’re constantly introducing different kinds of legislation. We’re building on this legislation. We’ve always got our ear to the ground.

And as the Premier says, he’s the biggest advocate for the Ontario Provincial Police; he’s always got the back of our OPP.

If you see the backgrounds of Chief Johnston and Chief Van Dyke, certainly, they’ve pursued a lot more post-secondary education. Chief Johnston is even pursuing a master’s right now at one of the universities in the United Kingdom, online, and he started with a degree in psychology. So I think the reality here is that police officers can come from all different walks of life.

One thing Chief Johnston and Chief Van Dyke say is that they have a huge recruiting challenge. They have the tools within their police force to be able to give the training necessary. However, they need the people and the bodies to come in through the front door that they can bring up to speed, on the ground, with the experience to get them trained and helping the community, because they can’t afford to wait.

This is not just something I hear in my community, but it’s something that we hear from places like the president of the Ontario police association. He says that these grants provide the necessary financial resources to support active engagement in monitoring of bail compliance. The ability of police services to utilize these financial resources will be limited by ongoing staff shortages and competing organization priorities. He goes on to say more things, but at the end he’s very supportive.

In addition, our Attorney General had mentioned some of those concerns in his remarks this morning when he talked about the fact that we can now train provincial judges, we can train our JPs, justices of the peace, with this piece of legislation, thanks to the work of the member from Oakville North–Burlington on the Keira’s Law piece. That also builds on some of the work the member from Etobicoke–Lakeshore is doing with Clare’s Law. There you have it, Speaker. Many members of this Legislature are working towards an improved court system.

In that case, as we know, if they knew that that particular member had a history of violence towards his wife, it may also trickle down to the children. That’s how we lost Keira, unfortunately, and that is one person too many who could have been prevented from us losing that young girl who had her whole life in front of her, but with this piece of legislation, with the leadership of our Attorney General, we’ll be able to prevent those cases in the future.

Report continues in volume B.