It’s a pleasure to always rise on behalf of our wonderful community in St. Paul’s. Today, I’m adding my words on Bill 26, Strengthening Post-secondary Institutions and Students Act.

I would first like to give a shout-out to the wonderful folks at Counterpoint Counselling and Educational Cooperative Inc. They run a men’s program. The core of their work provides psycho-educational counselling for men who have been abusive to their partners and have been mandated to participate in PAR by the criminal justice system. Services are provided in English, Spanish and Tagalog. That’s just a little bit of information about a wonderful organization that works with survivors and also perpetrators. They recognize that perpetrators have to be part of the solution. It is not only resting on the shoulders—it should never rest on the shoulders of survivors to fix the system. We have to have perpetrators also taking accountability for their action, but we also have to provide them with the space and the opportunity and the community-based resources so that they can shift and become, hopefully, positive, contributing members of their society.

Speaker, every year, an estimated 636,000 cases of sexual assault are self-reported across Canada, including 41% reported by students at post-secondary education. In 2021, 34,242 cases of sexual assault were reported to the police. That is 18% higher than 2020 and the highest number since 1996. This cannot be okay.

This Conservative Ontario has the lowest per-student funding in Canada. This means that, here in Ontario, some of the highest tuition costs, the highest loan repayments, are sitting on the shoulders of students while they try to navigate the academic, social, emotional and physical realities of post-secondary education. All the while, the government is sitting on billions of surplus dollars that over the next several years—could be useful now while we’re trying to fix our post-secondary institutions, our education sectors, our health care sectors. I could go on.

But anyway, I wanted to say, in our riding of St. Paul’s, we are home to the George Brown Casa Loma Campus situated within our Tarragon Village community. Many post-secondary students in St. Paul’s attend GBC, where students have access to a variety of academic centres and schools, from the School of Apprenticeship and Skilled Trades and School of Mechanical Engineering Technologies to the Centre for Arts, Design and Information Technology, where post-secondary students can thrive; the School of Computer Technology; School of Fashion and Jewellery, etc., etc., etc.—thriving today and building what they hope will be careers tomorrow.

Outside of GBC, of course, St. Paul’s students are all across our country, and while they’re across our country, while they’re anywhere they are in post-secondary education, we’re hoping that they are trying on leadership roles, building healthy relationships, and that they’re building a network that, frankly, they will have a lifetime. What students do not go to school to experience is sexual assault. They shouldn’t have to experience sexual assault. That should never be part of the experience at schools.

For any students watching who may have experienced violence on campus, I want to remind you that it is never your fault. You did not deserve this, and whatever feelings you are feeling right now are incredibly valid.

George Brown College’s sexual violence response adviser can be reached at 416-415-5000, extension 3450. They’re always there to answer the call.

For many post-secondary students, going off to college or university, whether living on or off campus, truly is the first time that you’re away from home, that you’re away from some of those familial connections that you need to feel safe. Post-secondary may also be the space where prior conversations on consent, safe and healthy relationships become centre stage as students are being exposed to school communities much larger than their high schools, for instance, and in some cases much larger than their home communities even.

It is because of this, among many other reasons, why it’s crucial that institutions of higher learning are safe spaces so students, regardless of age, can feel safe and supported. If anything, this bill needs to help create safe spaces for students, but it cannot only look at student or employer-to-student sexual violence; it should also include student-to-student—grad students as well.

I want to mention, on the piece around schedule 1, subsection 1(6), which was even difficult for me to fully weed through, let alone someone who may never have seen a government bill before, it needs to be clear that the NDAs should be banned. The fact that they are allowed until the end of the judicial process could essentially silence someone for two years, two and a half years, three years—however long that process takes. And we know that NDAs are harmful in cases of sexual assault. They work to protect the perpetrator, to prop up their power and privilege while handing perpetrators a licence to repeat their violence, quite frankly, over and over again, untouched, all while sexual assault survivors are muzzled from speaking their truth.

They also have the impact of preventing sexual assault survivors from seeking the counselling or reaching out to their friends and family about their experience for support in fear of breaking the agreement. Students need to have access to the resources of their choice to talk their trauma through. This is fundamental to a survivor’s recovery. So it needs to be clear what this NDA ban does, or what an NDA ban would and would not do. That needs to be clear in your legislation.

The bill also seeks to ban the reemployment of employees within public and private institutions who have been discharged because they have sexually assaulted a student. The bill also defines sexual abuse in relation to a student of a public institution. It seeks to ensure that students are free from a reprisal or threat of reprisal for the rejection of sexual solicitation or advances.

Again, these are pieces that the bill suggests, and I think it needs to be very, very clear how the bill is helping survivors, how the bill is helping build communities, school communities, and, I would even argue, just community-based resources period, because of course, students may be part of their school community but they’re of course part of their larger community as well, too.

I urge this government to look closer at the realities of student life, to expand this bill’s first two schedules, which remain limited, as I said earlier, to employee-student misconduct. Sadly, sexual assault and rape culture on campus is much more pervasive. And as I said earlier, it also includes student-to-student dynamics.

A 2021 article from Maclean’s magazine reported that 23% of Ontario university students have experienced non-consensual sexual contact. Meanwhile, 63% have experienced sexual harassment; 5% of women and 2% of men have said that the perpetrator was a professor or an instructor. So I cannot highlight enough that it cannot simply be only about students and employers. We need to also look at student-to-student ratios.

Another report from Statistics Canada, published in 2020, showed that nearly three quarters of university students in Canada “witnessed or experienced unwanted sexualized behaviour in a post-secondary setting in 2019—either on campus, or in an off-campus situation that involved students or other people associated with the school.”

And I have to say, when I read words like “misconduct” and “unwanted sexual behaviour” and “negative sexual encounters,” I do think that part of addressing the problem is naming the problem. I think we should be using correct language. Rape is rape. Sexual assault is sexual assault. Abuse is abuse. Efforts at “respectable language” does nothing but erase the significance of the violence against sexual assault survivors who, I cannot underscore enough, are disproportionately women.

I want to also take some time to mention the words of the member for Kitchener Centre, who has done fantastic outreach as the critic for colleges and universities: “A lot of the sexual violence happens between students and students—so the other missing piece is grad students. They are both an employee of the institution and a student.... So what happens if they are the perpetrator and they are fired ... but they’re still a student? Does that mean the survivor has to be in that program (with them)?”

Our member from Kitchener Centre has also warned that without minimum standards—the member from Toronto Centre has also raised this—for how these investigations happen or by whom, the government’s tinkering will not get us to our goal. I echo her questions about what implementation of this bill will look like, and whether or not the government is ready to invest actual finances into post-secondary education to end gender-based violence in post-secondary education.

This work requires long-term, stable funding to ensure financial security, but it also involves culturally relevant supports, supports that are in all languages, supports that are ready to reach survivors where they are, along the continuum of healing as well as the continuum of justice.

I’m pleased to have the opportunity to speak today on Bill 26, the Strengthening Post-secondary Institutions and Students Act. This legislation covers topics that are very personal to me, having spent the last few weeks working with my community, my colleagues and hospitals in Niagara to ensure we have better practices for sexual violence and harassment, not only on campuses but for anyone who is seeking support.

I do want to acknowledge, before going too deep into the theme of the bill, that Bill 26 does provide post-secondary institutions and private career colleges with the clear rights to fire employees when they are found to have sexually abused a student, stops them from being re-hired and bans the use of non-disclosure agreements.

It is important to create safe spaces. It is not a surprise that students who had experienced unwanted sexual behaviours reported that it affected their mental health; simply, it affected their life, both academically and their post-academic life. It is traumatizing.

Madam Speaker, I would be doing a disservice to my own community if I did not bring up an incredibly important point on the matter of sexual assault and this legislation: Transparency is important; however, so is the experience of the survivor once they have endured the trauma of a sexual assault.

In Niagara last month, we saw the cost of a health care and hospital system that has been ill-supported by this government in terms of maintaining staffing levels to ensure that a survivor, whether from academia or anywhere else, was able to receive adequate support, namely a sexual assault evidence kit.

Unfortunately, our local hospital in Niagara desperately needs support from this province. It is forced to send away survivors of sexual assault to see nurse examiners in other regions. In the case of being sent to Burlington from Niagara, a victim is being asked to get in a cab with a complete stranger and travel for over an hour to another hospital.

Survivors—ensuring they get access to sexual assault evidence kits in a timely manner and local manner. This is because we can all agree even a single survivor being turned away and a single survivor losing their justice is an issue we need to find a solution to immediately.

Speaker, sexual assault survivors need real, tangible support alongside protections like these. They need to know that we have priorities in this province, across all hospitals, that put survivors first.

In fact, during the same time survivors in Niagara were being turned away because we did not have the staff to give them the support they required, the same thing happened in New Brunswick. The difference between Ontario and New Brunswick has been crushing. Over the last few weeks, New Brunswick has offered sweeping changes to how survivors receive support and education, and guarantees that they get the support they need.

In Ontario, we see legislation like this but no mention of actual, tangible supports for survivors who are being turned away not only in Niagara, but, I’m expecting, across Ontario. Simply, we need to see minimum standards for campuses when it comes to sexual and gender-based violence. My colleagues have raised this issue. We cannot treat this matter as a token of half measure. We must make a full and comprehensive review of the gaps for survivors and close them, as urgently as possible.

Madam Speaker, there is a lot more work to be done to support survivors, and it is dangerous if this support is done in a way that ignores the problem we have at hand.

It is my hope that this legislation is not the government just checking a box, but that they will begin to see awful gaps across communities and help hospitals with funding to ensure no survivor is turned away, whether they are a student or otherwise. In Niagara, our hospital response program is still left with silence from this government on that support. This is a problem that makes it seem that this issue is not being taken seriously enough. That makes me very worried. I would like to see legislation that tackles sexual violence and gender-based violence include support for survivors and hospitals. In this legislation, specifically, I would like to see clear supports for students who are survivors, ensuring they get access to sexual assault evidence kits in a timely and local way.

I want to take some time out during the debate on Bill 26 to highlight that sexual assault and protecting survivors is not a partisan issue; it is not a platitude either. It requires, in a meaningful way, understanding the matter fully. Sexual assault shatters people’s lives, and the impact of this violence must never be minimized.

The rates of post-traumatic stress disorder for survivors of sexual assault are incredibly high. The road to trauma recovery is long, confusing, often volatile and immensely difficult. It is with this in mind and heart that we, as leaders, must work together to ease this path for survivors and remove each and every barrier we can along the way.

Through you, Speaker, I urge the government to include in any bill, especially one that relates to sexual assault, urgent next steps—that must include the immediate repeal of Bill 124 so we can recruit, retain and return nurses to this sector, which will help keep hospitals and community care centres operating at their full capacity, ensuring necessary care can continue uninterrupted. That’s the issue we have seen in Niagara region—survivors being turned away. Limiting what we can do to compensate nurses has led to survivors being turned away, and these survivors could be students or anyone in the public; we will all agree that it is unacceptable.

Supporting members of our community who have been sexually assaulted must include a holistic approach, it must include wraparound services, and it must utilize the great work that is already being done by our local experts—in Niagara’s case, these are performed by staff at the Niagara Sexual Assault Centre.

It is also imperative that this government restore funding to sexual assault crisis centres as well as provide the 30% increase called for by the sector. Sexual assault recovery often requires a comprehensive approach involving both treatment and crisis centre services, both of which are stretched thin, province-wide.

Madam Speaker, before I relinquish my time speaking to this bill, I have one more note to make, which should be tied to this bill: There should be a broader view of all sexual assault funding across the province. As a very local example, Niagara Health has requested $183,000 in additional funding to enhance staffing resources and ensure survivors of sexual assault are fully supported. Their plea for help has not received a response from the Minister of Health as of yet. It is discouraging to know they are still left with silence, despite the conversation about sexual assault support through this bill that is actively being discussed right here today. This money would have incalculable value to ensure that survivors of sexual assault are supported in the aftermath of an assault and are given the tools to ensure justice can be pursued.

Since Niagara Health has not received a response from your ministry, they are forced to fill this urgent funding gap with their own resources, which have already been stretched way too thin. That’s not the right approach we should be having. This is not the conversation we should be talking about. We should not create protections in schools but leave the actual follow-up and justice hanging in the air. There is no justice in that. I think we all can understand that.

Thank you, Speaker, for the time.

I think this bill is not going far enough. As I mentioned, survivors need to ensure that they’re getting access to evidence kits—which they’re not getting. If you’re a student or you’ve been sexually assaulted within your community, it is so imperative that that victim needs to get to a hospital and get a sexual assault evidence kit, in a timely way, and that they’re not sent to another hospital an hour and a half away with a complete stranger. It’s for their mental health, for their wellness and for them to be able to support survivors.

Last year—I believe it was last year, or a year and a half ago—I stood in this House and I brought forward inter-partner violence disclosure and Clare’s Law, and this government turned it down; they didn’t vote for it. That was one more tool that we could have put in the tool box for women who were being sexually assaulted in Ontario, so they could contact the police and find out if their partner or whoever they were with had some kind of charges against them of a sexual nature or an abusive nature.

I think that this government should put more funds in, spend their money where it should be and look back on this legislation—and, like I said, repeal Bill 124, so that nurses can definitely be retained and replenished.

It’s an honour to speak on this Bill 26 today. I think everybody in the House is in agreement with the goals. We need students to be safe on college and university campuses. In order to do that, to prevent and to stop sexual assaults on campuses, we need education, we need processes for reporting and repercussions, and we need supports for survivors.

This bill takes some measures on repercussions, but that’s it. It doesn’t have the education component; it doesn’t have the supports component. Bill 26 is about increasing repercussions for staff who sexually abuse a student. 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.

I think we can also agree that there is a crisis of sexual assault on campuses. We saw it blow up about a decade ago, and the Liberal government brought in a few supports and they brought cameras to campuses. Let’s see; in September 2021, at Western University during orientation week, the reports from social media suggested that 30 or more students were drugged and assaulted on the campus. In the same week, four women came forward to police about three incidents of sexual assault. There was a school-wide walkout with 9,000 students protesting what they called the “culture of misogyny” on campus. They called for Western to review policies and procedures for handling these situations, and they want more than this bill has to offer. We know there’s a crisis, and it blew up a year ago.

This government conducted consultations, but the only thing they came back with was this legislation that increases the repercussions for staff who sexually abuse a student. It doesn’t deal with student-on-student sexual assault. It doesn’t deal with so many other aspects. It doesn’t deal with the education or the supports that are needed.

We know that this is a crisis because 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 of 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. Most sexual and gender-based violence is committed by students towards other students and occurs in high-risk times and spaces on and off campus. This is why Bill 26 needs to be amended to address student-on-student violence as well as staff-on-student violence.

We need education, processes and repercussions, both preventative and punitive measures—stronger punitive measures that consider graduate students who are also employees of post-secondary institutions. This is one of the gaps in this legislation, because it talks about staff, and so if a staff member is found to be guilty of sexually abusing a student, they can be fired, there can be no non-disclosure agreement, and they cannot be rehired. But what if the perpetrator is a graduate student, so they’re both a staff member and a student? Do they continue as a student on the campus? And if they do, what does that mean for the victim? Does the victim have to face their perpetrator on the campus? So this is one of the gaps in the legislation that I hope the government will address when it goes to committee.

When I was teaching at York University, before I became an MPP, the Liberals created the sexual violence campus safety program. It added cameras on campus, and this was thought to be the necessary solution to addressing sexual and gender-based violence at colleges and universities, but it wasn’t. This was almost a decade ago.

What has happened—because the Liberals did not take adequate measures at that time—is that sexual assault on campus has continued to the point where, at Western University, 9,000 students walked out in protest because of this culture that’s happening on our campuses.

So I want to talk about solutions. I want to talk about three things that we’ll be asking the government to do. First of all, we’ve got to have prevention. We have to have repercussions, and then we have to have supports for survivors.

On the prevention side, my colleague—who’s sitting right beside me here—from Toronto Centre and the members from Davenport, St. Paul’s and Kitchener Centre brought forward in September Bill 18, the Consent Awareness Week Act. 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 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, because sexual assault of any kind causes lifelong trauma and impacts relationships for the rest of the survivor’s life.

This bill, currently, was carried past first reading, but it’s sitting in committee. So I would ask the members of the government to consider incorporating that bill, the consent awareness bill, into this bill when this bill gets to committee.

Process and penalties—I actually talked about this. The grad students who are both employees and students at the university—that needs to be changed. We need to make sure that, if somebody is accused and found guilty of sexually abusing a student, then whether the abuser is a student, a graduate student or just an undergraduate student, that the victim never has to face that person, their perpetrator, on the campus again. That’s an amendment that needs to be made to this legislation.

The final thing I want to talk about is supports for survivors. After the protest last year at Western University, they launched the action committee on gender-based and sexual violence with an independent review to identify policy gaps or procedural failures related to the events. Most of the recommendations they came back with were around prevention, and these are actions that Western, to their credit, has taken for the most part, so far as I know.

They have appointed a special adviser to address campus culture and safety. They require all incoming students to complete a gender-based and sexual violence prevention education and awareness training. They are hiring an additional gender-based-and-sexual-violence-support case manager and education coordinator. They are creating a training program for Western special constables and other security personnel. They are providing more support to student organizations like fraternities and sororities, to address issues around gender-based and sexual violence, and applying for funding from the Canada Research Chairs Program and the Canada First Research Excellence Fund to support new academic position focused on gender-based and sexual-violence-related research.

So all of these prevention measures—Western University went through that crisis a year ago. They had their own task force. They came back with these prevention recommendations. Why doesn’t the government incorporate these recommendations, these prevention measures, into this legislation? We should be taking a bill like this very seriously and doing everything we can to support survivors, and the bill doesn’t do everything we can. It seems to do the bare minimum.

My colleague from St. Paul’s says, “Students go to post-secondary education to study, experience life and have fun, not to be subjected to unwanted pain and violence.” Students deserve to feel safe at university. They pay exorbitant tuition fees. They must have good grades to attend, and will be burdened with years of student debt and interest on that debt tied to—they’re paying so much money. We have an obligation, a responsibility, to make sure that they’re safe in that space. They should not be traumatized by sexual assault because preventative training and supports have not been put in place.

I’m asking this government, when we get to committee with this legislation, to please consider amending it and broadening the scope so that student-on-student sexual assault is taken into account, so that education is part of this package and supports for survivors are also part of this bill.