The government boasts about increasing funding for education to the highest level ever, but they don’t take into account inflation. There’s an inflationary cut of $40 million to school boards across the province. Toronto Catholic schools are facing at least a $35-million shortfall. That’s going to cause at least 120 staff cuts, and it may impact Amy Moledzki, who’s one of the parents in the House today. Her daughter has autism. Her daughter is non-verbal, is a flight risk and needs assistance with toileting. She’s in a special education class in a Toronto Catholic school. She’s worried that the cuts, because of the funding shortfall that your government is handing to TCDSB and other boards across this province—she’s afraid that they may lose some of the staff who support her daughter and that she won’t get the supports she needs to stay in school.

Why won’t the government put the safety of children first and provide adequate funding for special education?

This petition was submitted by the Jean Lumb Public School in Spadina–Fort York.

“Petition to the Legislative Assembly of Ontario from the Elementary Teachers of Toronto to Stop the Cuts and Invest in the Schools our Students Deserve.

“Whereas the Ford government cut funding to our schools by $800 per student during the pandemic period, and plans to cut an additional $6 billion to our schools over the next six years;

“Whereas these massive cuts have resulted in larger class sizes, reduced special education and mental health supports and resources for our students, and neglected and unsafe buildings;

“Whereas the Financial Accountability Office reported a $2.1-billion surplus in 2021-22, and surpluses growing to $8.5 billion in 2027-28, demonstrating there is more than enough money to fund a robust public education system;

“We, the undersigned, petition the Legislative Assembly of Ontario to:

“—immediately reverse the cuts to our schools;

“—fix the inadequate education funding formula;

“—provide schools the funding to ensure the supports necessary to address the impacts of the pandemic on our students;

“—make the needed investments to provide smaller class sizes, increased levels of staffing to support our students’ special education, mental health, English language learner and wraparound supports needs, and safe and healthy buildings and classrooms.”

I fully support this petition, will affix my signature and pass it to page Ryan to take to the table.

I want to thank the member from Carleton for speaking today, and I really want to thank the member from Timiskaming. It’s always a pleasure to listen to the member from Timiskaming. I’ve got to say, he’s one of the most entertaining speakers in the house, and he brings a northern perspective and a farmer’s perspective to this House. I think those are two perspectives that we need to hear more often.

One thing he said, though, was that we don’t have unorganized territories in southern Ontario. So far as I know, we may have some, but we do have—even in downtown Toronto here—unclaimed roads. There’s an unclaimed lane behind my office that is not maintained. The city doesn’t own it and no private owner owns it; it’s just a laneway behind my office, and it’s not maintained. The potholes kept getting bigger and bigger, and you needed a four-by-four to get into the parking lot of my office. We actually had to organize a few people to pay for a load of gravel. So we don’t have unorganized territories, but we do, strangely enough, have unclaimed lanes right in downtown Toronto.

Interjection.

But anyway, I’m going to talk today about this Legislature, about some lessons that have been learned in this House.

I’m going to talk about two former Conservative members of this House over the last 100 years who really were groundbreaking in the policies that they advocated for: Adam Beck and Bill Davis. I know it may sound odd for an NDPer to be praising the work of former Conservative members of this House—but I think it speaks to how far the ideological shift has happened in this province. The policies that were pursued by Adam Beck to create public hydro 100 years ago and the policies of Bill Davis to create our public colleges and universities are now considered on the left end of the spectrum. The spectrum has moved so far to the right that—

Yes, absolutely, and your government is a big part of it. This is part of what the member from—Glanbrook?

Interjection.

One of the things that really bothers me and that I think makes the bad policies—one of the major ideological shifts that this government is pursuing is the privatization of our public services and the sell-off of our public assets, and we’re seeing that again and again. We’ve seen it over the years.

I’ll start with two sections of this bill. I mentioned Adam Beck. I’m going to start with broadband rollout.

Broadband is the 21st-century electricity. Everybody needs broadband. I think everybody in this House agrees that every community, every resident in this province needs access to broadband, because if you don’t have it, you’re cut off from all kinds of educational and work opportunities.

This government is rolling out broadband. They’re spending $4 billion. The initial standard that they set when we met in committee last year was 50/10—so 50 megabits a second upload and 10 megabits a second download—and at the time, at the committee, I told the minister, “That’s simply not adequate. That’s an old standard. It will mean that the communities that you’re providing this to are already behind the curve. If you’re going to roll out broadband and you’re going to be rolling out fibre—the cost is not in the cost of the fibre cable. The cost is in the poles and the tunnels and the conduit—everything that you need to actually roll out the broadband. So you might as well roll out 1 gigabit symmetrical.”

I can give you an example of why that’s so important. A friend of mine, Charles Taylor, is a VFX artist. He’s a compositor. He has worked on some big movies that many of you will know: Shazam!, The Shape of Water. He lives in downtown Toronto, in my riding of Spadina–Fort York. He’s from Haliburton. The company he works for is in Montreal. He actually wouldn’t mind living in Haliburton, where he has a lot of relatives. But he lives in downtown Toronto because he needs 1 gigabit symmetrical broadband in order to do the work that he does. If the government is rolling out broadband that isn’t 1 gigabit symmetrical, with this $4 billion that you’re spending, then you’re cutting off people like him from the opportunity to work in Haliburton. You’re cutting off other communities.

I’ve got a committee that I work with—I’m the tech and innovation critic, so I’ve got a committee. I asked them, “Give me a list of the careers and the jobs that you need 1 gigabit symmetrical for,” and the list I got was computer animation, cloud services, artificial intelligence, machine learning, agri-tech.

Agri-tech now is really fast-developing, and it relies on image capture and processing online for decision-making around processing and sorting. In addition, the latest machinery is embedded with real-time error and fault management. So the modern farms that we have across this province need 1 gigabit symmetrical just to operate the equipment in the most efficient way possible.

People think of farms being a southern Ontario thing, and I used to think that, too, until I moved up to Geraldton, Ontario, a number of years ago. When you drive north of Toronto on the 400 or Highway 11, you get up to Orillia, and there are very few farms—you get into the Canadian Shield; you see all forests. And then you get north of North Bay, and you get to the Clay Belt, and all of a sudden, the land opens up again. There’s this huge area of farming in northern Ontario. That’s actually where the member from Timiskaming is from, and that’s where he farmed.

The farmers up there need—if you’re going to be rolling out broadband to the community, and we absolutely should, then you should be rolling out 1 gigabit symmetrical broadband to those communities so the farmers will be able to use the most modern equipment and operate in the most efficient way possible.

The other areas: Virtual reality—you also need 1 gigabit symmetrical, and supply chain inventory and fleet management. The latest supply chain technologies use blockchain for identification and security, and blockchains require heavy storage and processing powers to pack and unpack. And poor infrastructure will directly impact the rollout of the latest supply chain technology. So I’m asking the government to change the standard of these contracts for the last mile of broadband so that they’re 1 gigabit symmetrical. That’s what you should be rolling out. If you’re not, people will be happy because you’re replacing a horse and buggy, but you’re replacing it with a Model T, and really what they need is a modern vehicle.

The reason I mention Adam Beck in this is, 120 years ago, at the turn of the 20th century electricity was a new thing. They were just starting to put power generation stations on Niagara Falls, and they created, in 1906—Adam Beck, who was a member of this House, created Ontario Hydro to roll out hydro, and they actually ended up nationalizing our hydroelectric system. It ended up costing four cents a kilowatt hour from the 1920s until 1995. That’s how much we were paying for electricity. Our electricity rate, because it was delivered at cost through a public utility, was one of our biggest competitive advantages.

And then the Conservatives, in 1995, started to break up Ontario Hydro and sell it off, and then the Liberals finished off—

Interjection.

So when you look at the lesson from Adam Beck, if we had learned the lesson in 1995 and the early 2000s, we would have created a public broadband network or given it to Ontario Hydro to roll out broadband, and then every community—the advantage of Ontario Hydro was that they rolled out electricity to everyone in the province, because they recognized that everybody needed access to electricity. So that’s one of the lessons.

The other lesson—and this is from this bill as well. This bill is 37 schedules, 150-odd pages. We just got it recently, but the other thing that really piqued my interest in this is, they’re changing the name of private career colleges to career colleges. They’re taking away the term “private.” This means that people, when they’re registering or when they’re applying, won’t know whether they’re applying to a public college or a private college. The distinction is really important, although it’s a distinction that this government and the last Liberal government have been blurring for decades.

We used to have—and I mentioned Bill Davis. In the 1960s, Bill Davis created our CAAT colleges, our community arts and applied technology colleges, and they were delivered at cost. He also expanded our public university system. He created many public universities and expanded the universities that we had, so that Ontario became one of the best-educated jurisdictions in the world. It’s one of our biggest competitive advantages.

The other big competitive advantage of our public colleges and universities: Every one of them has an innovation centre, and those innovation centres partner with local businesses and researchers. Those businesses benefit from the research that’s being done in those colleges and universities, and the students get hands-on experience developing and doing that kind of research with real-world applications. So Ontario is the fastest-growing tech ecosystem in North America. We’re growing faster than Silicon Valley. We’re not as big as Silicon Valley yet, but we could possibly overtake Silicon Valley one day if the trajectory continues.

But this government is privatizing our public colleges and universities. You’re undermining one of our biggest competitive advantages. This is a real concern and it’s being done just like the Liberal government.

I’ve got a bit of time here, so I’ll just backtrack a little bit. Until 1995, our university tuition fees were about $2,500 per student per year. That was for all programs. That was undergrads, that was med school, that was grad school, that was engineering, that was dentistry, that was veterinary. Whatever program you wanted at university, it was about $2,500 a year, and college was about $1,200 a year.

The Conservatives—and those were created, the colleges and universities, as I mentioned, by Bill Davis, who in the 1960s was the Minister of Education. Then he became the Premier through the 1970s until 1984. He was incredibly proud of the work that those public colleges and universities were doing and he was proud of the contribution they were making to the economic development of this province.

But since then, in 1995, the then Conservative government got into power and they began privatizing our public colleges and universities. They doubled tuition for undergrads from $2,500. By the time they left, in 2003, it was over $5,000 for undergrad tuition.

They delisted professional program tuition fees, so they went from $2,500 in 1995, for law school and med school at the University of Toronto in 2003, to $12,000. The Liberals got in and they doubled tuition fees again. By the time they left—their last election was in 2018—our undergrad tuition fees were about $8,000 or $9,000 a year. Law school and medical school at the University of Toronto were $28,000 a year. An MBA at the University of Toronto, when the NDP was in power, was $2,500 per person per year. Under the Conservative-Liberal regime, working hand in hand—the Liberals and the Conservatives always supporting each other—it’s now $54,000 per year. It’s a two-year program, so it’s $108,000 to get an MBA in Ontario.

That’s part of the privatization. What it means is that in our public colleges and universities, 85% of the funding used to come from our taxes. The tuition that people were paying until 1995 was about 15% of the operating costs of the colleges and universities. Now the students are paying, through their tuition fees, more than 50% of the operating costs of those colleges and universities.

One of the things that has been created with this privatization of our public colleges and universities is that we’ve got a student debt industry. It’s difficult to get a clear estimate, but there is at least $25 billion in student debt in Canada. That is mostly held by private banks and the banks are now charging prime plus 2%, so somewhere around 6.5%, in interest on that $25 billion. This is a major revenue generator for those banks.

If you look at the big picture of it, what this privatization and the increase in tuition fees mean is that the Conservative government—this Conservative government and the last Conservative government—and the Liberal government have actually created a system that transfers wealth from the lowest-income students in the province to the investors in the banks, some of the wealthiest people in the province. It’s robbing from the poor and giving to the rich.

What this government is doing now with this bill is, they’re taking away the distinction between public colleges and private colleges. What used to be called private career colleges are just going to be called career colleges, so that people won’t even know the distinction between the one and the other.

Part of the reason for this is, it’s part of a bigger trend. The public colleges have been so grossly underfunded by this government and the last government—in the post-secondary sector, the funding from the government has been frozen for at least a decade, which means at least a $1-billion inflationary cut. The colleges and universities have to make up for that somehow. One way that this government has conveniently created is this government has created a policy to create partnerships between our public colleges and private colleges, so private colleges can use the curriculum that’s developed by the public colleges and they can give degrees and diplomas in the name of the public college. So they’re blurring the distinction. This step in this bill of removing the term “private” from career colleges is a further blurring of that distinction between our public colleges and private colleges.

The reason this matters is that the privatization of our public services ultimately means that we pay far more and we get far less, that students will be paying far more in these privatized colleges and universities—they already are. They have to take on more debt in order to get their degree or diploma, and they’re also facing, because of the funding cuts, larger class sizes and less support than they would have had 10, 20, 30 years ago.

And this is just one schedule of 37 in this bill, but this schedule is a really important indication of the ideological bent of this government. This government does not believe in public services. They are trying to privatize public services as fast as they possibly can. It’s like the last Conservative government. They privatized long-term care, they privatized home care—

Interjection: The 407.

The 407. Oh, my God, the 407. The Conservatives keep boasting about how they won 84 seats, and, I’ve got to say, I don’t know how you won it, because you won most of the seats in the 905, and the 407 goes right across the 905.

When the NDP started building the 407, it was going to be a toll highway, but it was publicly controlled, and after 20 years, the tolls would come off because it would have been paid for. The Conservatives sold it to a private Spanish conglomerate for $3 billion and gave them a 100-year lease. So people in the whole 905, who for some reason are electing Conservative MPPs, are paying these outrageous fees. If the NDP had stayed in power, there would be no tolls anymore on the 407 because the drivers already paid for it. The drivers already paid for it. But, because of the Conservatives, they’re going to be paying for it for another 70 years.

The Conservative government of the day sold the 407 for $3 billion, and the Premier at the time, Premier Harris, said, “Oh, well, we can regulate how much they’re going to charge.” Then it went to court and it turns out we can’t regulate how much they’re going to charge. And so, the 407, which was initially supposed to be a public highway and eventually, after 20 years, was going to be free, became this privatized highway that people are going to be paying for for 100 years.

The value to the investors—and this is what it’s really about—is that highway is now worth $45 billion. The Conservatives sold it for $3 billion, it’s now worth $45 billion, and somehow, you get elected in the 905 by all those poor people who have to pay those outrageous fees on the 407. I don’t know how you do it.

I’ll tell you one of the reasons you’ve been able to attract that kind of activity: because in spite of privatizing Ontario Hydro and now having some of the highest hydro rates or electricity rates in North America, you are subsidizing—it’s $6.9 billion in taxpayer subsidy to what used to be Ontario Hydro. It’s now a private, for-profit corporation. So you are handing over $6.9 billion of our tax dollars to attract industry, whereas if you just kept Ontario Hydro public, then it would be a competitive advantage and we wouldn’t have to provide that $6.9 billion in subsidy.

And it’s not just me who says this; there was a report on the public-private partnerships of the colleges in this province. It was from the former Liberal government in 2018. The independent report said there’s a real risk to the reputation of our post-secondary sector in Ontario if the government continues to privatize it.

I know this about the subsidies because I used to teach about the Ring of Fire at York University. I started teaching there in 2009 about the Ring of Fire. I was waiting for the Ring of Fire to get developed, and I was wondering why it wasn’t. One of the agreements that was made between the Ontario government—the Liberal government at the time—and one of the mining conglomerates that was going to be operating was to smelt the ores in Sudbury. In order to get that agreement, the government was going to be subsidizing our hydro rates by $350 million a year. So if we kept Ontario Hydro as a public utility, as Adam Beck—and the member accused me of being socialist. Was Adam Beck socialist in fighting for public hydro? Was Bill Davis socialist in fighting for our public colleges and universities? I would say those are the things we’re fighting for on this side of the House—

The other thing this government has done—I was talking to an international student at a public university here in Ontario who came last year and their tuition fees were $40,000 a year. This year they were $50,000 a year. Next year, they’re going to $60,000 a year. That’s how this government treats international students in this province, and the fear is that you’re going to undermine the reputation of Ontario as fair brokers for international students.

We’ve also been pushing for—if you read Hansard, every time a member on this side of the House stood up and talked about broadband, we’ve said we are strongly in favour of rolling out broadband, getting it to everybody in this province. The challenge here is that the government is doing—what they’re rolling out is not up to snuff. The concern that I have on this side of the House is that the rollout means that the rural communities that are finally getting broadband aren’t getting the latest up-to-speed broadband—