Thank you so much this morning to the member for explaining the real lived lives of people that are on the street. The solutions aren’t simple and they’re not, in some ways, the bumper statements that we’re hearing in the House today, so we need to come together and understand the continuum of supports that we need.

In Hamilton currently, we can tell there are 1,500 people who are homeless, living on the streets, and we have 500 shelter beds. We’ve seen the closure now of three agencies, the kind that you described in Ottawa, that were serving people living on the streets, including Hamilton Mental Health Outreach, that were dealing with people right on the street, serving them where they’ve managed to find some shelter.

And so, can you speak a little bit further to all of our communities, how cutting that kind of service, as you said, is not good for anyone? It lands on municipal taxpayer dollars, and it lands on the police budgets that should be directing their resources elsewhere.

Thank you to the member from London North Centre. I want to read in part a letter that was sent to the Premier from the Association of Municipalities of Ontario, AMO. It’s signed by some of the front-line service providers in our community: the Ontario Association of Chiefs of Police, Ontario Association of Paramedic Chiefs among others.

It says, “Dear Premier Ford,

“Homelessness is a crisis in every part of Ontario.” They ask that the Premier “acknowledge that homelessness in Ontario is a social, economic and health crisis” and they ask the Premier to “commit to ending homelessness in Ontario” and “work with a broad range of municipal, community, health, Indigenous and economic partners.” They end by saying, “You have the opportunity and the resources to end homelessness in Ontario. We are here to help you succeed.”

Can you explain why you think, when they developed this budget, they ignored this letter from the Association of Municipalities of Ontario?