Last Thursday our government, under the leadership of the Premier and the Minister of Finance, tabled the 2023 budget, Building a Stronger Ontario. It’s a serious budget for serious times, a plan that navigates ongoing global economic uncertainty with a responsible, targeted approach to help people and businesses today while laying a strong fiscal foundation for future generations. It’s a plan for building a strong province as well as a stronger Niagara, a plan that is working.

Highlights for the Niagara region include:

—expanding GO rail service to Niagara by increasing current service levels and building four new and improved stations, as well as supporting local transit-oriented communities to build more attainable housing;

—twinning the Garden City Skyway over the Welland Canal in St. Catharines; and

—supporting the redevelopment of the West Lincoln Memorial Hospital as well as the new South Niagara Hospital.

Speaker, I could go on. The bottom line is this: Our government and our government alone is building a strong Ontario, whether it’s more mental health funding, more new schools, more new local roads and bridges, more supportive housing, more jobs for auto workers, more nurses for our hospitals or more support for our rural economic development.

A strong Ontario means a strong Niagara, and this plan is a plan that supports the people of Niagara and our province, today and into the future. Together, let’s work to support and pass Bill 85 as soon as possible so that we can get to work and continue building a stronger Ontario.

I’m very thankful to be able to stand today to speak to the Leader of the Opposition’s debate and to speak to the motion brought forward by the Leader of the Opposition. I appreciate all those who have had the opportunity to contribute.

I do want to begin by also acknowledging and thanking our hard-working education workers here in the province of Ontario, those who spend so much time investing in our students and in the children of this province. I know I express the gratitude on behalf of the government of Ontario and all members of the House for the work that they do. I had the great privilege of working closely with many over the years that I’ve been in this place and also in the four years that I served as parliamentary assistant to the Minister of Education, and I’m grateful for their leadership and the work that they do.

I know many are watching today, and I’m grateful to be able to rise in this House and to be able to address some of the issues that were raised, perhaps not correctly, by the members of the opposition in having this conversation about the important funding of our education system and our commitment to publicly funded education. I say, Speaker, that it is a pleasure for me to rise, because I think we need to combat widespread misinformation that is out there with regard to the subject of education funding here in the province of Ontario.

Speaker, when my volunteers and I went door-knocking during the last election campaign, we would encounter voters who accused our government of making cuts to education. When we would politely ask them to explain what they meant, they usually couldn’t—or perhaps they confused our government’s one-time investments in school safety during COVID with permanent funding and then incorrectly assumed that we were making cuts. For the sake of clarity, Speaker, I’m of course referring to the $3.2 billion in special COVID-19 resources that were provided to school boards since the start of the pandemic in 2020. Thanks to these investments, which include the major improvements to air quality and ventilation in our schools all across this province, Ontario’s classrooms are again safe for in-person learning, because of the historic investments made by this government, this Premier and this minister in our education system.

I can’t stress this enough, Speaker: Those COVID-19 resources were one-time investments specifically targeted for crucial investments at that time, and we made that abundantly clear to school boards. So Speaker, when my campaign volunteers and I would door-knock and we would speak with local residents, where they had heard about the alleged education cuts, they usually couldn’t remember actually or see where these alleged cuts were, because they had often been, unfortunately, misled by local Liberal or NDP candidates. We saw the local Liberal or NDP candidates—

Withdrawn, Speaker.

For the sake of clarity, the lack of accurate information that was shared in my constituency by members of other political parties unfortunately led to a great deal of confusion when I would be speaking with our hard-working education workers at the doors. So I’m going to speak a little bit about the substantial investments that have been made in our education system, to clear the air and make sure that the cold, hard facts are on the table and that we see all the people in this chamber and those watching understand the substantial amounts of funding that have been allocated, the historic investments, and the rapid increases in that funding for the people of Ontario.

Thanks to the investments, which included major improvements to air quality and ventilation in schools all over the province, we’ve seen that Ontario’s classrooms are truly safe for in-person learning. I think that the Premier and the minister’s goal of ensuring that students stay in class all year we’re seeing has been a reality. We’ve seen students able to learn safely and with the supports that they need.

Now I can’t stress enough, Speaker, that it always is frustrating when I see people from other political parties sometimes mischaracterize or accuse us of an action that may not have actually occurred, but during my time, Speaker, I want to walk through some of our government’s investments in education and why we’re making them.

I want to say, Speaker, I was a little bit baffled when I first read this motion, because I know for a fact that our government has a great track record when it comes to education funding. I know that the Leader of the Opposition previously served as her party’s education critic, so I can only assume that she has some unfinished business on that file or perhaps she’s looking to try to get back at the minister for all the times that he responded to her questions with the facts about what was happening in our funding of the education system.

Now here’s a key fact, Speaker: Our government has increased the Ministry of Education’s investments every single year since we came to office. This includes a $2.3-billion increase in this year’s education funding, to a total of $34.7 billion for 2023-24. I can actually remember when I first became the parliamentary assistant for the education ministry. I remember the then Minister of Education announced when the threshold crossed $30 billion. I remember when we saw for the first time an education funding allocation that crossed $30 billion. I remember that we were commenting about how historic that was, the first government to ever allocate $30 billion, and now we’re at $34.7 billion. I don’t know about you, Speaker, but that sounds like a lot of money ensuring that we’re representing the single largest investment in Ontario’s history in the education system.

This massive investment actually stands for a 27% increase from the education year prior to our government forming office, a 27% increase over the past five years. I’d like to thank this entire House for supporting those investments, especially the members on this side. Unfortunately, we saw members of the opposition vote against those investments in the past. But I’m confident that with the historic amounts being brought onto the table in this 2023 budget, we should see the opposition perhaps come to their senses and support these investments in our local schools.

A 27% increase in education base funding in a five-year period, and yet we still hear from the opposition about cuts—I don’t know. Perhaps it’s a by-product of the discovery math days, but I don’t know where they’re coming to this conclusion, because the facts speak for themselves. We spent billions and billions of new dollars in education to ensure that each and every student is receiving a world-class education system here in the province of Ontario.

And we could look at this a different way. We could look at it on a per-pupil funding basis. Speaker, our government is providing over $13,000 per student, $1,000 more per student than when the previous government was here in this House. Yes, the money we provided to school boards has been going to front-line funding positions. Since 2017-18, we’ve seen that front-line education staffing has increased by roughly 8,000 positions since our government came to office. That includes hundreds of principals and vice-principals, over 900 teachers and 7,000 education workers.

Interjections.

Additionally, it’s not just about the staffing, as much as we know that staffing is very, very important. We saw for many years the former Liberal government—when the NDP held the balance of power, we saw a government that closed hundreds of schools—

Interjection: What?

But our government now is investing $14 billion over 10 years in building new schools. I have to say, this is one of the aspects that I always really enjoyed in my time working with the Minister of Education, visiting different communities across this riding. I remember going to an eastern Ontario visit. I think we announced 11 schools in the space of a week, just going through communities who hadn’t seen meaningful investments in their local education systems under previous governments—and the gratitude and the thankfulness that I saw on the faces of the children and also expressed by those hard-working education workers, who saw that our government was taking infrastructure renewal seriously and building the new schools that were needed in every corner of this riding.

And it’s not just new schools. It’s building new child care spaces for hardworking families. Since 2019, we’ve invested over $2 billion into 100 new schools, 88 additions and 6,410 new licensed child care spaces. These are pretty significant investments, Speaker, and yet we seem to see once again this opposition motion claiming that our government is providing school boards with a so-called inadequate amount of funding—again, billions of dollars in new funding. But of course it’s never enough for the opposition.

The opposition motion also irresponsibly calls upon the Ontario government to provide an undisclosed amount of money to school boards to cover their budget shortfalls. They don’t say how much. They just say, “Give it all. Give the money away. Give it away.” But the amount of money is undisclosed, Speaker, because you can bet the farm that it would be an astronomically high number if we went down that road.

Incentives do matter. If our government was foolish enough to take the NDP’s advice and bail out school boards facing deficits, we would see that frankly, the boards had no reason to act responsibly. Every school board in the province would clamour for more funding, trying to make sure that they spent every red cent to get more funding from the provincial government. But we know that incentives matter, and we are taking a responsible approach.

In a nutshell, the NDP motion completely misdiagnoses the state of education funding in Ontario. It proposes a so-called solution that would, frankly, do more harm than good.

Now, just as an aside, Speaker, I am amazed that the NDP can so completely mischaracterize our government’s record on education funding with this incredibly accusatory tone and then turn around and attempt to take zero accountability for their time in government. Ontario’s first and only NDP government froze salaries for public sector workers; meanwhile, under our education deal, we see workers receiving a cumulative 15.8% raise, after this NDP, when they were in government, froze workers’ salaries. And we’ve seen that they ripped up signed contracts. They not only didn’t act in good faith when they were in negotiations; they ripped up signed contracts and ordered teachers, doctors, nurses and other public servants to work 12 days a year for free. It doesn’t sound like the NDP have a record to stand on, and not surprisingly, we did see that this resulted in some of the worst labour unrest in Ontario’s history.

When I read the motion we’re debating, it reminded me: It’s easy. I remember being in opposition, and it’s easy for the opposition members to criticize. Perhaps some of them haven’t been here that long, but I know others who have been in opposition for a great deal of time and have spent, I think, their entire political careers in opposition—and I think that is more than likely where they will stay. But it’s easy for them in opposition to demand our government hand over undisclosed amounts of additional funding to school boards.

The reality is this governing is far more difficult, because we know that governing entails accountability; it entails responsibility; it entails being good stewards. And when they were given the opportunity to govern, unfortunately, we saw that the NDP made some terrible decisions. Of course, I wish they hadn’t—I’m sure they wish they hadn’t—and I know the people of this province wish that they had not made those decisions. But unfortunately, it seems to be they haven’t learned their lesson. We often hear the opposition members smugly try to tell us, “Well, Bob Rae is a Liberal,” and pretend none of it ever happened. Well, Speaker, it’s the NDP record, and I think they have to stand behind their record.

I would now like to take a little bit of time in the time that I have left—and I know we’re running a little bit close, but I do want to walk through a little bit of this government’s achievements so far on the education file, because I think they’re substantial and important for education workers to understand. Our government strongly supports public education here in the province of Ontario. We know that it has a critically important role to play in the years to come. Ontario is facing the largest shortage of skilled labour in generations.

The Minister of Labour, Immigration, Training and Skills Development recently said it best: “Our government is taking an all-hands-on-deck approach to attract and train the next generation of skilled trades workers for better jobs and bigger paycheques for themselves and their families.” There are currently over 100,000 unfilled skilled trades jobs across the province, and it’s projected that by 2026 approximately one in five job openings in Ontario will be in a skilled-trades-related field.

Ever since our government was first elected, we have taken action to update the province’s curriculum and ensure that it does a better job of reflecting the changing needs of the labour market. For over a decade, we saw previous generations of students lacking math, financial literacy and numeracy skills.

I’m proud to tell this chamber that the government made some incredible progress over the last five years. We have new curriculums that emphasize relevance in today’s job market, with an emphasis on practical life skills, learning more about interest, debt, savings, personal budgeting and price comparisons—things that really matter to people when they’re living in the real world—as well as helping students prepare for the jobs of tomorrow by introducing students to how to apply coding skills, to better understand complex mathematics and how to make predictions.

As we pivot from a failed discovery math program and introduce evidence-based learning and math and STEM curriculum, training will need to be provided to ensure that teachers have the pedagogical training to meet the highest standards. To achieve this, Ontario is providing $30 million to double the number of school math coaches, beginning this September, as well as providing additional staff support—

Interjections.

Absolutely—double the amount of school math coaches.

But we’re not stopping there; we’re expanding online learning opportunities provided by TVO and TFO that will provide resources for both students and teachers, available wherever there are.

Another item announced in last week’s fantastic budget, brought forward by the Minister of Finance, was that Ontario is expanding resources and partnerships so that more students will have hands-on learning experiences to further their financial literacy learning and growth. We will be releasing self-directed learning modules that provide senior students with further opportunities to explore how financial literacy helps them transition to post-secondary pathways and compete in a rapidly changing economy. Foundational knowledge such as financial literacy prepares Ontario’s students for success by giving them the basics that they need to pursue a career in STEM, the skilled trades or entrepreneurship.

A new initiative that was also brought forward in last week’s budget that deserves a bit more of a spotlight is the expansion of the co-op program for special education students. We believe that every child in Ontario, especially those with intellectual and physical disabilities, should be able to graduate from school, access a job and live a life of dignity and respect. It’s why our government is expanding placements in co-op to allow these students to get the hands-on learning experience that they deserve. Educational assistants will provide individualized supports to students with disabilities, to help them be successful in all areas of their learning, including co-operative education.

Another landmark initiative brought forward in last week’s budget is the $25-million fund to screen every student from senior kindergarten to grade 2 on their reading competencies and provide targeted supports for those who really need it. We know that early interventions are crucial. This will be the most comprehensive program of its type in our country—yet another way that the Ministry of Education and the public school system here in Ontario lead the charge in our country.

Teacher-led reading assessments will also ensure that students who are struggling with reading at a young age are identified early, to allow appropriate supports to be put in place sooner, supporting long-term reading success. The investment will provide kindergarten-to-grade 3 educators—around 30,000 different educators in this province—training in the science of reading, representing a significant shifts from the discovery math reading program that we saw under the former Liberal government.

Our government has been clear: We are committed to investing in access to all learning recovery resources, to ensure success for all students. Our government is strongly committed to supporting public education in the province of Ontario, and it shows that we are providing students with the resources that they need.

We’re on the right track. We’re reforming the curriculum to address the shortage of skilled labour here in the province, and we’re investing more than ever before to get students on track—learning, growing and thriving in classrooms, with a greater focus on reading, writing, math and technical education, to prepare our students for the jobs not just of today but of tomorrow.

The bottom line is this: Despite the mischaracterizations of our government’s funding, we strongly believe in our public education system, have demonstrated that with the real dollars to back up that commitment, and our funding to school boards has gone up, not down.