Mohawk Institute.

At that same time, I spoke in this chamber about the collective grief that Indigenous people were feeling last year. It was a great open secret that our children lie on these properties of former schools, an open secret that Canadians can no longer look away from. In keeping with the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s missing children project, every school site must be searched for the graves of our ancestors. Canada must demand apologies from those who helped commit these heinous crimes.

I understand that this name change is only one symbolic step. But we as the government need to do the work asked of us by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission and the survivors of residential schools and their families. Meegwetch.

It is now time for questions.

Mohawk.

Good morning to everyone in the House. The member opposite spoke to one component of the bill; there are certainly multiple components. I know recently the member from Kitchener Centre, who is the critic for colleges and universities, discussed sexual violence in this Legislature previously and certainly brought up situations at post-secondary colleges, universities etc.

So my question to the member opposite is: We’ve heard from you that you seem to be supportive of the name change for Ryerson, so based on that and other components related to sexual violence on campus, can we assume, then, that you will be supporting this government legislation?

I want to thank our friend from Kiiwetinoong for that incredible offering for us this morning. I want to thank you, actually, my friend, for all of the teachings you have helped us try to grapple with in the four and a half years I’ve been around this place.

You mentioned as you closed that the renaming of the university you spoke about is symbolic. I have heard people say in the past when we’ve raised these issues in our community that we shouldn’t just focus on symbols, that symbols are unimportant. But it struck me, from what you were telling us, that symbols really are important.

At home, we have but we have a parkway we’re trying to rename from the Sir John A. parkway to the Kitchissippi Highway, inspired by the great Albert Dumont, our city’s poet laureate and Algonquin leader. We’re having this debate at home. I’m wondering if you could just help us understand a little further why, in your view, symbols are important.

Thank you to the member from Kiiwetinoong for your comments today. We are all so fortunate to have you in this House, to have your voice and your experience as a residential school survivor in this House. Every time that I hear you speak, everybody in the House is paying attention, and especially in these quieter periods in the House, that’s not always happening.

You mentioned at the end of your speech that renaming Ryerson to Toronto Metropolitan University is one step and that there’s room for improvement in this bill. What else should this Legislature be doing in order to get to true truth and reconciliation about the residential school system?

I appreciate the words this morning from the member opposite. I can say that one of the great things I’ve come to understand and respect about sitting in this Legislature is that we listen and we learn. We can’t listen and learn enough, and I think we all need to take heed of that thought, so again, thank you very much.

That being said, just looking back at a little history, the member opposite from Algoma–Manitoulin once said, “The effects of sexual violence cannot be understated....

“The official opposition supports legislation and policies that keep people safe and provide effective tools to do so.”

Speaker, through you, does the member opposite still support, or does he support—what is the position of the opposition, and will he support Bill 26?

I rise today with the honour to speak on behalf and in support of Bill 26, the Strengthening Post-secondary Institutions and Students Act, 2022. The Minister of Colleges and Universities continues her great work on behalf of Ontario students, and I’m pleased to contribute to her work today.

Our government is committed to ensuring students have access to a secure and safe learning environment. We’ve taken recent steps to strengthen supports for post-secondary students reporting sexual violence or harassment. We must also specifically address sexual misconduct by faculty and staff toward students. That is why we’re proposing legislative amendments that would require publicly assisted post-secondary institutions and private career colleges to have specific processes in place that address, and increase transparency of, faculty and staff sexual misconduct.

If passed, these changes would better protect students who experience faculty and staff sexual violence by:

—strengthening tools available to institutions in order to address instances of faculty or staff sexual misconduct against students; deeming sexual abuse of a student to be just cause for dismissal is one example;

—preventing the use of non-disclosure agreements to address instances where an employee leaves an institution to be employed at another institution and their prior wrongdoing remains a secret; and

—requiring institutions to have codes of conduct regarding faculty and staff sexual misconduct.

As a parent, I am sure I’m not alone in this. We raise our children knowing that at some point they will leave the safety and security of the family home. We do our very best to prepare them and provide them with the skills and the tools for success and their safety, but we still must let them go.

We have recently seen a series of stories regarding sexual misconduct in publicly trusted institutions. Clearly, more must be done to protect the children of this province, and that’s why I’m speaking today in support of Bill 26.

Speaker, if you’ll indulge me this opportunity, I’d like to quote the minister on introduction of this important bill. The minister stated, “Our government believes that no one should have to worry about sexual violence or misconduct on or off campus. And from day one, we have been clear: this government has zero tolerance for sexual assault, harassment, or any other forms of violence or misconduct. All post-secondary institutions have a responsibility to provide a safe and supportive learning environment and are expected to do everything possible to address issues of sexual violence and misconduct on campuses. While our government has taken action to strengthen the policies that protect post-secondary students who report incidents of sexual violence or harassment on campus, we must also address acts committed by faculty and staff towards students.”

I know that the Minister of Colleges and Universities is passionate about this issue, as she too is a parent. As I said earlier, we as parents do our best to prepare our children for the rigours and risks of the real world. That’s why we are here today, to enhance the safety of our children and students in the post-secondary world.

That’s why last summer the minister held consultations with more than 100 stakeholders, including representatives from post-secondary institutions, labour and student groups, private career colleges, faculty associations and community organizations. Today, I am pleased to support the minister on the legislative amendments contained in Bill 26 that, if passed, would require publicly assisted colleges and universities and private career colleges to have specific processes in place that address and increase transparency of faculty and staff sexual misconduct on post-secondary campuses.

Again, the strengthened policies would allow institutions to:

—deem the sexual abuse of a student as just cause for dismissal;

—prevent the use of non-disclosure agreements to address cases where an employee leaves an institution to be employed at another institution and their prior wrongdoing remains a secret and unknown; and

—require institutions to have sexual misconduct policies in place that provide rules for behaviour between faculty, staff and students, as well as disciplinary measures for faculty and staff who break these rules.

These changes would not only help protect students in cases of faculty and staff sexual misconduct, but also allow the institutions to better address complaints when they arise. The changes also build on the new regulatory amendments that our government introduced last fall to protect students from inappropriate questioning or disciplinary action when they report acts of sexual violence. All of us have a role to play in creating learning environments where students feel safe and supported, and with these legislative amendments we will ensure that all post-secondary students in Ontario can feel safe on campus.

The Strengthening Post-secondary Institutions and Students Act, 2022, if passed, would further protect students by providing measures for post-secondary institutions to address faculty and staff sexual misconduct towards students on campus. I can’t say it better than the minister, so I’ll once again share her powerful words upon her introduction of Bill 26, words I feel all of us in this great House can get behind and support.

The minister stated, “All students deserve to learn in a safe and supportive learning environment. From day one, we have been clear: This government has zero tolerance for sexual assault, harassment or any other forms of violence or misconduct. That’s why we’re taking action to better protect students from sexual violence and misconduct on and off campus.”

Additionally, I would like to point out that through Bill 26, if passed, our government is introducing legislative amendments so Ryerson University can legally change its name to Toronto Metropolitan University. The proposed change in name supports our government’s efforts to ensure Ontario has a post-secondary system that embraces diversity, inclusivity and promotes success for all learners, including Indigenous learners, so they can find rewarding careers. These legislative amendments contained within Bill 26, if passed, will help Toronto Metropolitan University begin a new chapter in its history and better reflects the current values and aspirations of the institution.

Bill 26, the Strengthening Post-secondary Institutions and Students Act, is about combining student safety and student protection as they go about their learning experience at Ontario’s 23 public universities, 24 colleges or 400-plus registered private career colleges.

Heading off to post-secondary school is a new-found freedom for many of our children. It’s an exciting time of their lives in a new environment, maybe a new community far from their home. This exciting time in our students’ and our children’s lives should serve as a safe and secure experience for learning. That’s why I’m speaking today on behalf of my colleague’s important bill. Any effort we can take to protect our children, our students, is something I can proudly stand in the House and support.

The member talked about Egerton Ryerson within the context of the piece of legislation, around the renaming and the importance of that. And he said that there was some resistance, I think, to contextualize Ryerson’s role in establishing the design and the implementation around residential schools. And so my question to the member is, how important is it to recognize the truth of our history, and in a moving-forward way, how important is it that that history be taught in a safe and accurate way?

Questions?

Further debate?

Questions and answers?

Further debate?

Thank you to the member opposite for your comments today on this bill. Sexual assault on campus is a huge issue that needs to be addressed, and a couple of the things that we in the opposition have asked the government to do—I’m wondering if your government is willing to incorporate these into this legislation.

One is that the government disbanded the Roundtable on Violence Against Women. We’re asking that this be re-established, and we’re also asking that a private member’s bill from a member on our side to create a consent awareness week also be established in this province. Would you be supportive of these two initiatives to help address sexual assault on campus in Ontario?

This government invests $6 million annually in the campus safety program. These funds assist and support publicly assisted colleges and universities with campus safety, and initiatives include safety training for staff, student leaders and volunteers; consent and healthy relationship workshops or programs; security cameras, lighting, safety apps and emergency notification systems; safe walk programs; sexual violence prevention websites and programs; safety and sexual violence prevention workshops, conferences and speaker series; assault prevention programs and bystander/upstander training.

Thank you to my colleague for his speech and remarks this morning. I’m just wondering if he can comment on how the government is helping to keep publicly assisted colleges and university campuses safer, including campus sexual violence prevention.

Far too many people, especially racialized women and non-binary, trans and gender-diverse folks, experience sexual harassment and sexual violence. It’s common and it’s a brutal feature of the university experience, but I would like to say it is also an everyday experience.

I want to talk a little bit about—I support the bill, I think it’s useful, but I don’t think it addresses some very key aspects of why sexual violence and other forms of violence, particularly against racialized or somehow lower-on-the-gender-hierarchy people, who are subject to violence.

I’m just going to give a little bit of a story. I know we don’t have a lot of time, so I’m skipping through what I have to say, but let me tell you how often this happens in graduate school, where there is close one-on-one contact and where a student is utterly dependent on the support of their advisers for their future careers and for their future lives. These relationships are of necessity close, and they’re relationships of power.

What is missing for me in this bill is an understanding that we’re actually dealing with relationships of power and a culture of entitlement. I want to tie this also to what the member from Kiiwetinoong had to say about the violence of colonization experienced by Indigenous peoples, because it’s a violence that’s borne out of entitlement, the entitlement to dominate somebody else.

If you look at court cases about where Indigenous women have been raped and killed, you’ll be horrified, because so often, right up until today, the perpetrators are never punished. Those women are understood to be deserving of what they got. Part of what is taking place is that the perpetrators are reinforcing their sense of entitlement as male, as white and having the entitlement to act out their superiority over somebody with less power.

Now we see this with gender-non-conforming people; you see it with women, with people deciding to teach them a lesson. So we’re not talking just about sexual interest, sexual tension. We’re talking about sexual acts as an acting-out of a relationship of power, of proving oneself to be higher up in that hierarchy of who counts and who’s entitled to be dominant.

What I see as being completely necessary is a very big education piece. We need to understand what is meant by consent. I would like to see this government accept the bill that brings consent to younger people, so that people are actually learning and thinking about this at a young age. But I would also like to see all of us make the connection between something like Bill 28, which assumes an entitlement to exploit the lowest-paid workers to death—“They’re mostly women and they’re low down on the hierarchy. Who cares if they don’t get a living wage?” There is a sense of entitlement, that it is okay to pay people nothing—hardly anything—and expect them to work themselves to death. I connect this to this culture of domination, this culture of entitlement that is also connected to sexual violence, and the acting out of putting yourself in a pecking order and having somebody you can look down on to prove your superiority.

I want to say that yes, this bill is important for students, but it’s only one piece, and it’s not really going to change the culture of universities. It’s going to add a punitive element—excellent; if some people start to realize that they have to be accountable, excellent—but it is not going to change the culture until we really dig deep and start to look at what the formation of Canada is. On what basis was a whole group of people dismissed, raped, slaughtered, pillaged, whatever, and a whole new population brought in to replace them? On what basis? What kind of thinking does that reflect? That is the thinking of entitlement and the entitlement to dominate others. That’s got to be part of what goes into any program—

What does the member think about the idea that the bill mentions colleges that are publicly supported, rather than having public colleges who are supported by the government to teach our kids?

It’s just over a year ago that the sexual allegations came to light from Western University. I know that the minister has spoken out repeatedly about this and how there is no tolerance anywhere in Ontario for this. I know the member talked about it during his speech, I know that he has touched on it a little bit with some of the other questions, but could the member give us a little bit more about specifically what this bill does to help prevent some of those problems?

The normalization of the use of the “notwithstanding” clause should alarm all of us. Prior to this government, the “notwithstanding” clause had never been used in Ontario. At its inception, no one could predict a government that would override fundamental freedoms in such a cavalier manner. It was designed to be a nuclear option, not a convenient loophole when the work of governing is difficult.

In 2018, this government threatened to use the “notwithstanding” clause to reduce the size of Toronto’s municipal council. And it used it in 2021 to uphold a law that limited the ability of third parties to advertise during an election—an election that happened this summer and had the lowest voter turnout in Ontario’s history.

Bill 28 will fundamentally change labour rights in this province. Governments in Ontario throughout history survived strikes; this government has halted collective bargaining before that bargaining even reached an impasse. Today is a day in constitutional history, a day when this government threw us into a constitutional crisis simply because it was inconvenient for them to bargain in good faith.

What other matters will be too inconvenient for this government to respect charter rights? This government has put legislation before this House that sections 2 and 7 to 15 are notwithstanding. Section 2 is the freedom of thought, belief, opinion and expression; section 7, life, liberty and security of the person; section 15, that every individual is equal before the law and has the right to equal protection without discrimination.

I urge every government member to sit down and think about what they will be voting on today. Party discipline is not a matter of law. The fundamental freedoms of the people of this province are. Do not support Bill 28.

And that is all the time we have now for debate.

Second reading debate deemed adjourned.