One year ago, I was honoured to be re-elected as the member of provincial Parliament for Mississauga–Erin Mills. Mr. Speaker, we have been working hard to fulfill our promises to build a stronger, more prosperous Ontario for the people.

In Mississauga, we are committed to building highways and transit projects. In December, we saw the Highway 401 expansion open. Work on the Hazel McCallion LRT is well under way, and Mississauga received $19.6 million in transit funding.

Investments continue to pour into health care. We are clearing the backlog on essential surgeries and building a new Mississauga Hospital. Last year, the government gave $4.2 million to Trillium Health Partners for upgrades and repairs.

We are also building long-term-care homes, including a new centre for aging and longevity at Ivan Franko Homes and 128 beds at a new facility by the Church of the Virgin Mary Coptic church.

Additionally, I was proud to announce last month, alongside the Minister of Labour, that the Professional Engineers of Ontario are the first regulated body to remove Canadian experience requirements, and over 30 more industries will be doing the same. Promise made, promise kept.

We are going to continue to be there for Ontarians, keeping our commitments to build more housing, support families, create jobs and keep the province open for business. We are getting it done for the people of Ontario.

It’s my pleasure to welcome Thomas Soliman, a new member of our team in the constituency. He’s here at Queen’s Park for the first time. Welcome.

“To the Legislative Assembly of Ontario:

“Whereas police provide protection to some of the most vulnerable members of our society; and

“The provincial government has launched the Guns, Gangs and Violence Reduction Strategy; and

“The 2023-24 budget commits an additional $13.4 million to this strategy;

“Therefore we, the undersigned, petition the Legislative Assembly of Ontario as follows:

“That the Legislative Assembly of Ontario reject the ‘defund the police’ position, and continue funding police, seizing illegal guns, suppressing gangs, and supporting victims of violence through the Guns, Gangs and Violence Reduction Strategy.”

I fully support the petition. I will affix my signature and pass it to the table through page Halle.

My colleague from Toronto Centre talked about the police, and I think you tried to stay in the grey area. You are trying to avoid talking about defunding police and saying, “We don’t say ‘defunding police,’ but we say that we need to divert the resources,” and do this and do that. Again, I don’t know why we don’t come straight about that. This is downloaded from your site, “End police violence,” and on the first page—

My question for you is, with this bill trying to add more flexibility for chief officers to control and train, can you justify defunding police?

I really am very delighted to discuss and support this bill. Why are we looking to the Strengthening Safety and Modernizing Justice Act? Because we have some issues; we need to address them.

The problem is, crime is on the rise. Since 2014, crime rates in Ontario have risen by 9%. Violent crime rates have risen by 20%. According to data from Peel police, this May there were 304 reported cases of vehicle theft in Mississauga. On average, there have been 12 vehicle thefts per day in Mississauga this year. Less than 2% of those have been solved.

Violence against workers doing their job is on the rise: public transit—we see what’s going on with the TTC—nurses, some violence in hospitals, pharmacy robberies. Every day, I get one of the pharmacists calling me in regard to a pharmacy robbery.

Police officers we lose—I think this is the highest rate maybe in decades, maybe ever; I’m not sure. I don’t have any other statistics—older ones to compare. On average, we are losing one officer almost every month. This is a very high rate of violence. Over the past year, we have seen a tragic number of police officers die in the line of duty.

Violence in schools is on the rise. Schools should be a place for learning and community, not violence. The Minister of Education announced in April that the government is investing $24 million to reduce the risk of violence and promote the safety of students and educators.

We did a motion calling for the federal government to implement bail reform. Earlier this year, the House passed an address calling on the federal government to implement meaningful bail reform. Finally, the government agreed, this May, to start the process of bail reform. We must continue working with the federal government to ensure repeat violent offenders stay off the streets.

This bill will allow meaningful changes to address Ontario’s crime problem. We are implementing the 2019 Community Safety and Policing Act. This new legislation will replace the Police Services Act with a robust framework to advance safety, transparency and effectiveness of the community safety system. Amendments to oversight and governance and labour arbitration provisions will improve accountability for the police sector.

Clearing the backlog in the justice system: Slow justice is injustice; I always say that—if it takes years to get my right, this is injustice as well. So ensuring that claims are heard in the court of appropriate jurisdiction—low-volume claims should be held in Small Claims Court. The bill frees up time and resources for the Superior Court of Justice to address bigger cases.

Improving emergency services such as by implementing next-generation 911: Last year, Ontario announced a $208-million investment towards 911 emergency response system improvements which will make the system faster, more responsive and more efficient. With this bill—some parts of it will allow some information-sharing, which will allow the police to act in a better way in creating co-operation between different areas of the police.

Training judges and justices to address gender-based violence: Again, the new judges need some training. This is similar to recent bipartisan federal legislation to provide training on sexual assault. That’s one item, but our government has gone even further. We need to do training about intimate partner violence and coercive control in intimate partner and family relationships.

Social context, which includes systematic racism and systematic discrimination: The Chief Justice is now required to submit a report to the Attorney General on these topics. We need to monitor the improvement of this area.

Ontario’s government is keeping people safe and secure. We need to work together. Again, the approach of any defunding of police or talking about stopping police violence—this is demoralizing our police forces. Those front-line officers work shifts, nights, weekends to make sure that we are safe. If I am a police officer and I hear this “defund the police” talk—it’s rhetoric, and it’s actually demoralizing police. It doesn’t even get them enthusiastic to do a good job because they don’t feel that anybody feels that they are doing good job. But they are doing a good job.

Another approach of that is—we need to promote neighbourhood watch. We need to get lots more information sources to the police to help them, because they can’t be everywhere every time. As much as they have resources, as much as we put resources, there are still going to be gaps. We need to take the approach that public safety is everybody’s responsibility—not only the police, not only the firemen.

Again, I have to emphasize that when somebody is looking for a house, searching for a house or preparing to get a house, they check the areas, and they seek to have a home in a safe neighbourhood. Business cannot act, cannot grow and cannot prosper when they, all the time, have holdups and guns pointing—and losing their revenues and losing their workers to mental issues or shock issues after an attack. They lose their workers because they can’t function anymore because of the stress of what happened. If, God forbid, something happened—we lost one of the workers—the whole team gets really in a bad shape. Business cannot act and cannot grow unless there is a good safety environment to be able to function and do business.

We hear that some gas stations start closing at an early time of the evening because they don’t want to have anybody inside the gas station overnight, because they cannot guarantee safety. This is alarming.

We need all of us to work together. Maybe this bill only is not the answer. We need more bills. We need to strengthen and modernize our ways of conducting police business to protect the people. We cannot allow the gangs—technology-wise and training-wise—to be beyond the police’s capabilities or more advanced than the police. The police have to be on top of everything.

Yesterday, I heard that a friend of mine’s car got stolen. He asked some people, and they said that a reader that can decrypt the key’s encryption is sold on Amazon for $100. That’s scary. We need to be ready for these kinds of activities.

We need to make sure that legislation is up to speed so we can protect properties, protect businesses, protect the life and safety of Ontarians.

Again, we are providing those at the forefront of community safety with the legislative and administrative support they need to deliver the highest-quality services to the province.

I refuse and reject any talk about violence of the police and defunding police.

Thank you to my colleague for the question. Again, yes, I hear—we all hear, together—the talk about defunding police in different versions. Talking about the case in Ottawa—maybe that bill is not to address this specific incident or this specific type of incidents.

I just have to say something: There was always a police officer in every school. Who removed the police from every school? It was the Liberals, with support of the NDP. We had police inside the school to protect students, and you guys asked to remove them. Now we are asking for police to be proactive when they get a call and then move to act on the call. This is just for a reminder.

Thank you very much, Madam Speaker, and through you to my colleague from the opposition: I don’t think that this bill has anything to do with the correctional facility, the prison. What we need to address here is the continuous violence and protecting our communities from the crime rate, making sure of our Ontario people’s safety. In regard to that, I definitely would encourage the member to address that with the finance minister to make sure that we have more budget for that.