My question is back to the Minister of Municipal Affairs and Housing.

I want to quote the Ontario Human Rights Commission:

“Access to cooling during extreme heat waves is a human rights issue....

“At most risk are people with disabilities, older people and low-income, Indigenous, Black and other racialized communities....

“This vulnerability is also compounded by social isolation and poverty....

“The Ontario Human Rights Commission calls on the government of Ontario to include air conditioning as a vital service, like the provision of heat, under RTA regulations....”

Over 500 people died in BC during their last heat wave, and the vast majority of them were elderly people who lived alone in un-air-conditioned apartments.

Will this government listen to the Ontario Human Rights Commission, make AC a vital service, and set a maximum temperature for homes?

This petition is called “Housing Crisis: Safe and Affordable Housing Now.”

“To the Legislative Assembly of Ontario:

“Whereas Toronto’s residential rental vacancy rate is 1.1%; and

“Whereas the average rent for a 1-bedroom apartment in Toronto is over $2,000/month...; and

“Whereas the wait-list for social housing in Ontario is nearing 200,000 households; and

“Whereas the Ford government eliminated rent control protections on new rental housing; ...

“We, the undersigned, petition the Legislative Assembly of Ontario as follows:

“—Reverse the recent elimination of rent control protections for new rental units;

“—End vacancy decontrol” which allows landlords to increase the rent to whatever they want once a tenant leaves;

“—End above-the-guideline increases...;

“—Strengthen the Residential Tenancies Act to protect tenants from renovictions and illegal evictions.”

I support this petition. I’ll be affixing my signature to it and giving it to page Evan.

I’m Jessica Bell, the MPP for University–Rosedale, and I rise today to speak about the government’s budget. A budget is not just about numbers; it’s a moral document because it affects our lives. It tells us who the government cares about and who they don’t. Here are a few things I noticed when I read through the government’s budget and how it affects the University–Rosedale community.

Number one: Education funding falls short. I recently looked at the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives’ analysis of education funding and the state of education funding in Ontario, and the reason why I had to go to an outside source is because the government does not provide a clear indication of how they’re spending their money and when they’re spending their money. So we have to go to outside sources and our Financial Accountability Officer to get that data. Their assessment is that, over the past five years, the amount of funding that now goes to each student has dropped by $800 a student when you factor in inflation and enrolment. They looked at how much that affects each school, and they calculated that the average high school has lost $600,000 in funding over the last five years. This budget is part of that process.

It’s a reason why there is not going to be enough funding to hire enough education workers to help kids catch up and grapple with the learning loss that they face because of the pandemic. There’s not going to be enough funding for the community nurses and the mental health professionals and the social workers to help kids who are struggling, who need extra support. There’s not going to be enough funding to hire education workers and teachers in order to decrease class sizes to ensure that our kids get additional time with a teacher to help them learn how to read and write and excel at math.

It is a tragedy that we are not investing more in our public education system, because it is good for our kids, it’s good for our future, it’s good for women and parents in particular, and in the long term, it’s good for our economy.

I also notice—number two in this budget—the issue with health care funding. This government loves to talk a good game about how much funding they’re putting into health care and how many nurses are supposedly going into the system, but the reality is, in my riding of University–Rosedale we have critical care units at Toronto Western who cannot take new patients at certain times because they have staffing shortages. We have issues at SickKids, where they have a shortage of 15%. They’re short 15% of staff, and they’re short funding. And this is the pre-eminent hospital for children in Canada. We have issues where Toronto Western’s emergency room was at risk of closure—the MPP for Davenport raised this issue in the Legislature—because there wasn’t enough staff. That’s unbelievable that that is happening.

Number three, what I noticed in this budget: I deeply care about our response to climate change and how we can adapt and mitigate to climate change. There’s nothing in this budget that will seriously address the climate crisis that we face. There are no significant funding programs for energy efficiency, for building resilient cities, for funding transit operations so that we can improve the service and lower fares on the thousands of transit routes that operate across Ontario today. There is nothing in there.

There is funding for future transit projects, that will one day—2030, 2032—be built. But there’s also a huge amount of funding for highway projects that we just don’t need. Highway 413 and the Bradford Bypass will not save commuters time, and they will cost upwards of $10 billion. That money should be invested into our health care system, into our education system, and it should be invested into climate change programs so we can adapt to the crisis that we are facing.

There are many other issues that I see with this budget. The minimum wage is not going up fast enough. It should being $20 an hour, because $15.50—with inflation at 7%, with rent at the rate that it is today—is not enough. It’s not enough to live on. And the social assistance rate increase of 5% is really an insult to the people in this province who are living on Ontario Works and Ontario disability. It is locking them into poverty, when they should be helped, not hurt.

I urge this government to do more for the people of Ontario and bring forward a budget that invests in education, in health care, in mitigating climate change, in investing in public infrastructure and to helping people who are struggling get a leg up.