On behalf of the MPP for St. Catharines, I want to welcome to the House Anna Levin and Peter Runcan. I also want to welcome to the House Amir Farsoud. Amir is an Ontarian with a disability. He was afraid of losing his housing and applied for medical assistance in dying.

I’m wondering if the Minister of Children, Community and Social Services would be willing to meet with Amir and I after question period.

This petition is entitled, “Petition to Raise Social Assistance Rates.

“To the Legislative Assembly of Ontario:

“Whereas Ontario’s social assistance rates are well below Canada’s official Market Basket Measure poverty line and woefully inadequate to cover the basic costs of food and rent;

“Whereas individuals on the Ontario Works program receive just $733 per month and individuals on the Ontario Disability Support Program receive just $1,169 per month, only 41% and 65% of the poverty line;

“Whereas the Ontario government has not increased social assistance rates since 2018, and Canada’s inflation rate in January 2022 was 5.1%, the highest rate in 30 years;

“Whereas the government of Canada recognized through the CERB program that a ‘basic income’ of $2,000 per month was the standard support required by individuals who lost their employment during the pandemic;

“We, the undersigned citizens of Ontario, petition the Legislative Assembly to increase social assistance rates to a base of $2,000 per month for those on Ontario Works, and to increase other programs accordingly.”

I fully support this petition and will pass it to page Scarlett to take to the table.

A petition to the Legislative Assembly of Ontario: “Workers’ Comp is a Right....

“Whereas about 200,000 to 300,000 people in Ontario are injured on the job every year;

“Whereas over a century ago, workers in Ontario who were injured on the job gave up the right to sue their employers, in exchange for a system that would provide them with just compensation;

“Whereas decades of cost-cutting have pushed injured workers into poverty and onto publicly funded social assistance programs, and have gradually curtailed the rights of injured workers;

“Whereas injured workers have the right to quality and timely medical care, compensation for lost wages and protection from discrimination;

“We, the undersigned, petition the Legislative Assembly of Ontario to change the Workplace Safety and Insurance Act to accomplish the following for injured workers in Ontario:

“Eliminate the practice of ‘deeming’ or ‘determining,’ which bases compensation on phantom jobs that injured workers do not actually have;

“Ensure that the WSIB prioritizes and respects the medical opinions of the health care providers who treat the injured worker directly;

“Prevent compensation from being reduced or denied based on ‘pre-existing conditions’ that never affected the worker’s ability to function prior to the work injury.”

I fully support this petition. I will pass it to page Eric to take to the table.

To the member opposite, I appreciate your comments today. It was interesting to learn that you’re currently an undergraduate student at McMaster University.

Every campus in Ontario has a sexual assault issue—sexual harassment and violence, and 2SLGBTQ students are disproportionately affected by sexual harassment and violence. I’m wondering—because you are an MPP and a student, you are a leader on your campus—what will you do to curb sexual harassment and violence on your campus? Will you join the gay-straight alliance on your campus and will you help out with the sexual assault centres?

My question is, 2SLGBTQ students are disproportionately affected by sexual harassment and violence. What should campuses be doing to keep 2SLGBTQ students safe?

It’s an honour to rise in here and speak on Bill 26, which is a bill that is designed to help address sexual assault on campus. I think we all agree on the goal of this—all of us. Many of us have children who are on campuses now or have been recently on campuses and were absolutely shocked and terrified that this is happening so frequently on campus and that it blows up in the media once in a while.

We need students to be safe when they go to college or university, and in order to achieve that, we need processes for education—and I’m just getting some water. So I’m just going to pause for a minute while I get the water. Thank you so much, Oriana.

I just want to give a shout-out to the pages here. They work here, this is their—

Applause.

Anyway, it’s very clear. I think everybody agrees, and we saw this in the committee reports, that if we’re going to really address sexual assault on campus, we need education programs, we need processes for reporting, we need repercussions and we need supports for survivors. This bill takes some measures on increasing the repercussions for those who are accused or those who are guilty of sexual assault or sexual harassment and violence, but it doesn’t do anything on the education front and it doesn’t do anything on the supports for survivors. This is where the bill comes up short and should be improved.

Bill 26 provides post-secondary institutions and private career colleges with clearer rights to fire employees when they are found to have sexually abused a student, to stop them from being rehired, and bans the use of non-disclosure agreements. So there are some measures in here, but we’ve also heard in committee that some of the measures that are in here may not be constitutional. This is a real challenge with this bill, because if they are not, then what this means is that a student may come forward and make a complaint and the complaint will go through the process. It’s very clear from the literature and it’s very clear from people’s experiences and what was written and we heard in committee is that that re-traumatizes the person. You’re asking somebody to come forward and make the complaint, and then if this bill is not constitutional, it could be—whatever repercussions are imposed upon the perpetrator, the charges could go to court and get overturned because this bill is not constitutional, it’s not within the Charter of Rights. This could actually revictimize the victims. That’s why we asked at committee for the government to check this, to make sure that this bill fits within the Charter of Rights and Freedoms.

Sexual assault is an issue that keeps coming up on our campuses. It’s not a new issue, but it does blow up once in a while in the media. We know that it’s going on all too frequently.

At Western University in September 2021, during the orientation week, there were reports from social media that suggested 30 or more students were drugged and/or assaulted on campus in on-campus housing. In the same week, an additional four women came forward to police about three incidents of sexual assault. This prompted a school-wide walkout, and it occurred with 9,000 students protesting a culture of misogyny on campus. They called for Western to review policies and procedures for handling these situations.

Western University students actually came to depute at committee. They want more than what this bill is offering.

So let’s talk about some facts about sexual assault. Post-secondary students experience a disproportionate number of sexual and gender-based assaults compared to the rest of the population. Forty-one per cent of sexual assault cases are reported by students at post-secondary institutions in Canada. Three out of four students have witnessed or experienced unwanted sexual behaviours while attending a post-secondary institution. One in five women will experience rape, and one in 10 young men will perpetrate rape by the time they graduate. Men are disproportionately the instigators and perpetrators of sexual assault and violence and most often against women. And most sexual assault and gender-based violence is committed by students towards other students and occur in high-risk times and spaces on and off campus.

This is one of the other shortcomings of this bill. It only deals with staff harassment and assaults on students. It doesn’t actually deal with student-on-student, which is the most common type of sexual assault on campus. So we need education, we need processes and we need repercussions, both preventive and punitive measures. The stronger punitive measures that are in this bill also don’t consider that sometimes graduate students are also staff members. So if a graduate student who is also a staff member is accused and found guilty of sexual harassment or violence on campus, they may be dismissed as a staff member, but what will happen is, they’re still allowed to be on campus as a graduate student, and that’s one of the things that’s not addressed in this bill, and so the victims may have to continue to be on the same campus with the perpetrator.

I want to talk about solutions, because we heard a lot in the committee about what needs to be done. There were a number of organizations that came to the committee, and every single stakeholder who came to the committee brought forward changes that they wanted to see in this bill. Unfortunately, the government refused almost all of the suggested amendments.

The people who came to committee said, “We want a trauma-informed, survivor-centric, comprehensive and prevention-focused approach to sexual violence and harassment.” They talked to the committee, they made written deputations and the committee heard from survivors.

A coalition of 24 student organizations that included the Canadian Federation of Students, the Ontario Undergraduate Student Alliance, the College Student Alliance, the University of Ottawa Students’ Union, the University of Toronto Students’ Union and the Wilfrid Laurier University Students’ Union released in August a comprehensive report called Our Campus, Our Safety. They had 10 calls to action. They wanted provincial standards for data collection on campuses, and that is key, because if you don’t have the data, then you don’t know the extent of the problem and you can’t come up with appropriate remedies. They wanted prevention education. They wanted minimum standards for sexual violence policies. And they wanted mandatory review processes.

There were a number of things that these 24 student organizations asked for, and none of these recommendations are included in the legislation. My colleague the member from Ottawa West–Nepean asked the minister if she had read this report from these student organizations, and the minister said she had read the report, but she didn’t give a reason on why none of the recommendations from these 24 student organizations were included in this bill.

The Our Campus, Our Safety report says we need to go beyond stand-alone, individualistic measures, and I will say this is one of my biggest concerns with this legislation, because I was a part-time professor at York University in 2015-16, and at that time sexual assault became a hot item in the media. They were talking about it and there was a call to bring an end to sexual harassment and violence on campus.

The government of the time, the Liberal government, gave the universities and colleges $42 million and they mandated that all of them have sexual assault prevention policies, but the $42 million went to better lighting and to cameras. At the time, all of these student organizations, all of the advocacy organizations all said, “This isn’t going to solve the problem. It’s a step in the right direction, but this isn’t going to solve the problem. We need a comprehensive approach.”

That was 2015-16, and then in 2021 we had that blow-up at Western University where 9,000 students walked off campus talking about a culture of misogyny. And so the Liberal government didn’t listen to the advocates, they didn’t listen to the experts in designing the legislation and their actions back in 2015-16. Sexual harassment and assault continues on our campuses.

And here we are in 2022, and this government has got another piece of legislation. They haven’t listened to the advocates. They haven’t listened to the experts and designed a comprehensive piece of legislation that will actually address these issues. It’s an incredible lost opportunity, because what I’m afraid is going to happen is that this legislation, because it only addresses punitive measures for staff-on-student sexual harassment and assault, doesn’t take a comprehensive approach, and so it’s going to continue and students are going to continue to be victimized on their campuses.

Let’s talk about solutions. One of the solutions has actually been presented by my colleague in the NDP. MPP Wong-Tam, the member from Toronto Centre, has brought forward a piece of legislation called Consent Awareness Week Act. It’s Bill 18. It’s before the House, and it was supported by the member from Toronto Centre, the member from Davenport, the member from St. Paul’s and the member from Kitchener Centre.

The point of this bill is to proclaim the week beginning on the third Monday in September in each year as Consent Awareness Week. The goal of Consent Awareness Week is to engage and create space one week every year for Ontarians to have meaningful, positive, intersectional and age-appropriate conversations around consent, what it means and what it looks like. My colleague from Toronto Centre said, “Sexual assault of any kind causes lifelong trauma and impacts relationships for the rest of the survivor’s life.”

That bill was carried at first reading. What we heard is, that kind of action, that Consent Awareness Week and the education that was implicit in that bill, was asked for by every group that came to committee. These groups included Courage to Act, Possibility Seeds, the YWCA and many gender-based violence experts; they included unions, like OCUFA, CUPE, OPSEU and OSSTF. They all asked for a comprehensive approach to addressing sexual harassment and violence on campus. They asked for education: education on consent, education on prevention, education on safety measures, on what your rights are and education on what to do if something happens. They also wanted education on how to intervene safely and what to do if something happens to you or someone discloses an incident of sexual violence or harassment to you.

I want to talk about consent for a minute. That’s part of the education. We need education about consent. The Canadian Women’s Foundation says that 96% of Canadians believe that sexual activity between partners should be consensual, but only one in three actually know what consent means. They believe consent should be there—96% of people believe there should be consent with sexual activity—but one in three don’t know what it means. That shows there’s this education gap, and that’s an opportunity for this bill to address that gap.

Let’s see. My colleagues, the members from Nickel Belt and Ottawa West–Nepean, in committee moved amendments to mandate prevention education. They wanted it for all students, faculty and staff at publicly funded universities and colleges and at private career colleges, but the government voted against it. It seemed odd. Why would you vote against incorporating prevention education into this bill? The rationale from the government was that they couldn’t incorporate it into the bill without doing consultation on it, but the committee hearings themselves were consultation.

I mentioned a number of organizations that were there, but among the student organizations that were at committee, there was the Ontario Undergraduate Student Alliance, the Canadian Federation of Students, Courage to Act, Possibility Seeds, University of Toronto Students’ Union, PEARS Project, OCUFA and Western University. Those are just some of the people who spoke or made submissions to the committee.

So the committee itself was the consultation. There was no reason not to take what they had said, what they were recommending, and incorporate it into this legislation. Even if there was a reason, if the government had doubts about what direction to take this, there’s a thing in the Legislature called “travelling a bill.” So if the government isn’t sure they’ve got the legislation right, they can take the bill and a group of MPPs, travel all across the province and get feedback on it, and then make recommendations and revamp the bill. That was a possibility here as well, but the government didn’t take it.

The other thing that I want to talk about is supports for survivors. After the blow-up in 2021, Western University launched the Action Committee on Gender-Based and Sexual Violence. It was an independent review to identify policy gaps or procedural failures related to the events of September 2021. The report called for preventative measures.

They appointed a special adviser to address campus culture and safety; they required all incoming students to complete a gender-based and sexual violence education, prevention and awareness training program; they hired an additional gender-based and sexual violence support case manager and education coordinator; they created a training program for Western special constables and other security personnel; and they provided more support to student organizations like fraternities and sororities to address issues around gender-based and sexual violence and helped them to apply for funding through the Canada Research Chairs Program and the Canadian research excellence program.

And so Western University went through this process just last year. They came up with some actions to address sexual harassment and violence on their campus. But the actions that they took, the lessons that Western University learned from their experience, were not incorporated into this legislation, and that’s a real concern. This is a lost opportunity.

Let’s see. What we heard is that there aren’t adequate investments at post-secondary institutions to enhance gender-based violence prevention training and supports. We should be taking an opportunity like this bill to really do everything that we can to prevent future sexual harassment and violence on campuses, and what we’re seeing and what we’ve heard is that this hasn’t gone far enough.

I’m speaking particularly to the members opposite, to the members in the Conservative government here. The goal is clear: The goal is to address and prevent and to deal with sexual harassment and violence on campuses. This bill just doesn’t go far enough. It doesn’t have the comprehensive education. It has some increase in repercussions, but it doesn’t have a comprehensive process for dealing with sexual harassment and violence, and it doesn’t have the supports that survivors need. This is a real lost opportunity.

I’ve got one minute left. I want to talk about the renaming of Ryerson University to Toronto Metropolitan University. This is a measure that’s good, that’s very supportable in this bill. It’s something that needed to happen because, as we just heard from my colleague from Kiiwetinoong, there is long-lasting trauma from the residential school system, and it’s intergenerational trauma. The renaming of that school will hopefully be one small step towards healing and towards real truth and reconciliation for the First Nations people of this land.

So thank you for that part of it. I wish the government had gone further on the sexual harassment and violence piece.

I want to thank the member from Markham–Thornhill for the question. We are all agreed that we need to deal with sexual harassment and violence on campus, and this bill just doesn’t go far enough. There should be much more. There should be an education component and there should be supports for survivors built into this bill. That’s what was asked for at committee by many, many organizations and experts. Unfortunately, it didn’t get incorporated into the bill, which is a real lost opportunity.

When you’re talking about education, I mean, it’s very clear: The statistics are clear that 96% of Canadians believe that there should be consent with sexual activity, but one in three don’t know what consent means. So that’s where the gap is. That’s where we really need education, and that’s why I’m really hoping the government will push through the consent awareness act that our colleagues have brought forward, because that is going to mandate education about what consent actually means across the province.

There are some good things in this bill, but this in itself is not going to protect students on campus, and that’s got to be our goal. There should be no holds barred on that, like we’ve got to do—well, we’ve got to do it within the Constitution and the charter, but we’ve got to make sure that we’re doing everything we possibly can to make students safe on campus. This bill just doesn’t go far enough.

The other thing that people were asking for is comprehensive data and province-wide data on this issue, because the data is the key to understanding how broad, how widespread this problem is and then to address—creating real solutions for it.

The question back for me, especially reading the reports coming out of committee, was, why weren’t the recommendations from so many deputants incorporated into the legislation? This bill was an opportunity to address this. The last time that this issue came up in this Legislature was back in 2015-16, when the Liberal government was in. They provided money for cameras and lights and they mandated policies at campuses, but it just wasn’t enough and it didn’t stop the problem. My fear is that this bill is not going to stop the problem.