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—