My question is for the Minister of Economic Development, Job Creation and Trade. Ontario is home to the largest life sciences sector in Canada, which employs thousands of workers in high-skilled jobs. But with competition growing south of the border and in other parts of the world, we need to remain competitive if we’re going to continue attracting these important and critical investments.

Speaker, will the minister please tell us how the government plans to promote the province as a place where global companies and entrepreneurs choose to invest, and ensure that services offered and products made here in Ontario benefit Ontario?

We are investing an additional $680 million this school year alone because we are committed to helping kids catch up after a global pandemic that has set so many children back in this province and around the world.

When it comes to mental health, we’ve increased funding by 400%—$90 million; for special education, that funding is up to the highest levels in the history of Ontario at $3.2 billion—$90 million more. When it comes to building schools, we have a $14-billion capital commitment over the next decade to build, modernize and renew our publicly funded schools after a decade of darkness under the former Liberal government.

We are going to continue to invest in each and every budget to get these kids back on track.

Under this party, under our Premier, we are investing in more staffing, in more resources, in a tutoring program that never existed in this country, the largest ever—$175 million to allow hundreds of thousands of kids get small group tutoring. We expanded investments because we know we need to lift the standards when it comes to reading, writing and math, getting back to the basics, helping these kids succeed.

We will continue in every single year to increase the investments in our children.

Last week, we were thrilled to welcome Novartis as they opened a brand new office in downtown Toronto. There are now more than 150 Ontario employees working for Novartis, including 50 in that brand new state-of-the-art office in the MaRS building. This investment from Novartis is creating more well-paying, high-skill jobs while strengthening Ontario’s world-class life sciences sector.

This comes on the heels of last week’s announcement from AstraZeneca, who are creating 500 well-paying jobs at their Canadian R&D hub in Mississauga. These back-to-back investments in Ontario are a vote of confidence for our thriving life sciences sector, and it is a strong signal to the rest of the world that Ontario is the best place to invest and grow.

Speaker, we have attracted nearly $3 billion in life sciences investments in just the last 24 months. That put 70,000 skilled employees working in more than 1,900 life sciences firms, because Ontario has the formula for success and everything global companies need to survive and to thrive.