I move that:

Whereas the independent Financial Accountability Office found that the government failed to allocate $600 million in COVID-19 response funds and underspent its education budget by $432 million in the 2022-2023 fiscal year; and

Whereas the funding provided to school boards has been inadequate to cover pandemic-related expenses; and

Whereas this has resulted in an estimated budget shortfall of at least $100 million for school boards across the province; and

Whereas school boards are proposing hundreds of staff layoffs due to this budget shortfall;

Therefore, the Legislative Assembly calls on the government to cover all pandemic-related expenditures for school boards, including the programs and infrastructure needed to support students following three years of learning disruption.

Speaker, on Thursday, this government failed students. Their budget failed education workers, and it failed parents. The Premier and members opposite failed Ontario’s public education system, and with that, they snatched away a bright and prosperous future from thousands, indeed, millions of kids across this province. This government gave us a budget with nothing meaningful for the public education system, its workers or its students.

It has been a really tough few years for schools. I think we all know that. The pandemic caused serious disruptions in learning. So many students across this province face learning difficulties and mental health challenges. But where was this government? They were missing in action—missing in action just when our kids needed them most. I was the education critic during the pandemic, so I know that school boards had to dip into their own reserves to meet expenses. The Premier and the education minister sat on $600 million in COVID-19 response funds. They underspent the education budget by $432 million in 2022-23.

And now that kids are finally back in school, we needed this government to ramp up those supports, not cut them down. But do you know what they did, Speaker? They took an axe to them. In fact, I’m going to quote Press Progress here. They say that the Premier made “a sneaky move to quietly cut education,” leaving school boards with a gaping hole of millions of dollars.

This government would have us believe that they’ve increased funding for schools. They’d really like us to believe that, but the truth is, they’ve shortchanged students, shortchanged teachers, shortchanged parents by $47 million.

Thanks to this government, more school boards are looking at funding shortfalls again this year. According to the independent Financial Accountability Office, this year alone there is a $400-million shortfall, and over the next six years that gap is going to grow by $6 billion. That’s $6 billion less for students, less for schools and for the workers who keep them running. This government is leaving kids without the supports they need to get back on track, and we all know what that means: It means cuts to staff, the education workers and teachers and educational assistants, the admin support our students and staff so desperately need. The repair backlog is going to continue to grow. It grew so much—a billion dollars under this government—poor ventilation, classrooms sweltering hot in warmer months and cold as ice in the winter, crumbling schools. It means no financial or human resource support to address the growing issue of violence in schools, no new investments in early childhood educators or mental health professionals. They say they plan to recruit more math coaches in schools, but they’re struggling to hire any educators whatsoever because they can’t compete when it comes to wages. And this means no new funding for base investments in education supports.

Without proper funding, schools are going to be forced to make really tough decisions, and they’re looking down the barrel right now of staff cuts and layoffs.

Here in Toronto, the Toronto District School Board is projecting the elimination of 522 staff positions, including 65 teachers, 35 special education workers, 35 child and youth workers, and 40 school-based safety monitors. I’ve got to tell you, Speaker, if I go to the doorstep and talk to parents in my community about that, they’re going to say, “What are they thinking?”

The Ottawa-Carleton District School Board is looking at cuts next year of between $9 million and $39 million.

Last year, school boards were already forced to make cuts due to underfunding. The Peterborough Victoria Northumberland and Clarington Catholic District School Board cut 65 support workers, including educational assistants. The Trillium Lakelands District School Board cut 77 educational workers, including EAs.

I’m going to say it again: All these cuts are resulting and will result in bad and worse, and worse still, outcomes for our kids and for the future of Ontario.

This government seems to have no issue finding public money when it comes to their insider friends, but when it comes to students in our province, they always seem to come up short.

School boards need the government’s support to give our kids a good education. It really is that simple. It’s a cliché for a reason that today’s youth are the future of tomorrow. What Ontario are we heading towards when we aren’t investing our highest dollars in students right now?

This government talks a lot, and they did in their budget, about the need to attract and recruit new workers, newcomers into Ontario. But how are we going to convince families to come to Ontario and to stay here if they see that we have a public education system in crisis? We talk a lot on both sides of this House about the situation in health care right now. The health care situation is absolutely a staffing crisis; it is a human resources crisis. But that’s what we’re seeing in education, as well.

I’m hearing from boards in the north who are saying that they can’t—small boards, and they’ve got 40-plus positions opened up for educational assistants. That means that our kids are not getting that support that they need—the kids who are struggling the most. We have kids in our public school system across this province still struggling with the challenges that they faced during the pandemic. We know that they’re having trouble, in many cases, catching up. We know that education workers are really struggling with the stress of the day-to-day work, because they face those struggles of those kids every day when they can’t help them. How heartbreaking is that? We’re hearing increasingly about boards going out and hiring unqualified staff because they can’t find qualified staff who will work for these wages in this situation.

There’s only one solution: You have to stop squirrelling away those dollars for a rainy day. The rainy day is here right now.

Speaker, this is why we put forward this motion today. I want to also acknowledge our amazing education critic, the member from Ottawa–Nepean, for her incredible work on this. That’s why we put this motion forward—to help our kids get back on track, to help all those families out there who are struggling.

I want to say to those families who are watching this today: We have got your back. We’re not going to let this government get away with this.

Do you know what they want to do, Speaker? Do you know where they want this to go? This government wants to do the same thing they’ve done with health care. They want to manufacture a crisis, where things get so bad that—what’s the solution? “Oh, yes, I’ve got this buddy over here. He’s got this plan. He’s got this private company that can come in and ride in and save the day.” They’re going to come up with some kind of voucher system. We’ve called it; I know it’s coming. That is not the answer. Look at the research. Look at what has happened around the world.

We have a public education system in this province that we are proud of. I moved to this province 30 years ago from Newfoundland. I stayed here and I raised my family here because we had a public education system that my kids could believe in, that I could believe in, that would be there when my kids were struggling, that would help lift them up when they fell down. We cannot afford to lose that system. We will be the laughingstock of the world.

This government needs to and should absolutely cover all pandemic-related costs for school boards. Parents across this province are looking at the Premier and they’re looking at the Minister of Education to step up; our children sure need them to.

I’m pleased to rise to this motion, put forward today by the leader of His Majesty’s loyal opposition, because this is such an important motion.

Our children have really borne the brunt of the past few years. They had three years of disrupted schooling in which this government refused at every turn to make it easier on our children. They didn’t want to invest in the smaller class sizes that would have allowed our schools to stay open safely, so our kids spent more time out of school than any other jurisdiction in North America. They gave COVID tests to private schools but left our publicly funded schools at the back of the line to access testing that would have allowed schools to avoid outbreaks and stay open. They wrote cheques to parents that covered, at best, an hour or two of tutoring instead of hiring more teachers and education workers to provide supports to all children in the classroom. Their total mental health funding works out to less than a quarter per child, per day, when our children are in crisis.

We all recognize that the pandemic required some extraordinary measures to protect kids, but this government refused to fully fund those measures, even though they received billions of dollars in COVID support funding from the federal government. They left school boards to pay out of their own pockets for those measures. We know from the financial statements of school boards last year that the government paid less than half of COVID-related operating expenses in Ontario. The year before that, at the height of the pandemic, the government still left school boards to pay 20% of COVID-related operating expenses.

Because of this situation, the Toronto District School Board had to pay $70 million out of their own reserves, and now they’re facing a deficit of $64 million for next year, with no reserves left to cover it. The Toronto Catholic District School Board had to pay $60 million out of their reserves, and now they’re facing a deficit of $25 million for next year. The Ottawa-Carleton District School Board paid $10 million out of reserves and are now looking at having to make cuts of somewhere between $9 million and $39 million next year.

It is unbelievable to me, as a parent, that the government could have been so callous as to sit on millions of dollars rather than investing in protections and supports for our kids at a really critical moment.

And now, while the minister has been promising a normal, stable school year and talking about catching up on test scores, the government is still refusing to provide the funding that our schools need.

The minister likes to claim that he’s providing historic funding levels, but the only thing historic about this government’s funding is the government’s failure to actually get promised money out the door. The reality is that the government is providing $2.5 billion less in funding than they would have if education funding had just kept pace with inflation over the past five years—and that’s just to maintain the system; that’s not to provide any additional supports to kids who have been hit hard for the past three years. The minister can’t even get the money he has committed out the door. The government is underspending its education budget by $432 million this year alone, and so, instead of getting more supports, like they deserve, our children are going into next year with even fewer supports. We already have far too many kids who have experienced learning loss in crowded classrooms, where they can’t get the help they need because the teacher is trying to teach too many kids at once who are all over the map in terms of their learning level and needs.

Laura Neville is just one of many parents in Ottawa West–Nepean who have reached out to me about class sizes. Her son attends D. Roy Kennedy Public School, where his grade 6 class is now up to 35 students. Parents are receiving regular updates at D. Roy Kennedy informing them that students are being added to classes that are already overcrowded. The parents all really appreciate the grade 6 teacher, Mrs. Bowker, but they recognize that Mrs. Bowker is being put in an impossible position, trying to support 35 students who are in very different places in their learning and abilities. The students are being forced to learn in a classroom that is busy, noisy and cramped, because it wasn’t built for 35 students. In fact, the room is too small for 35 desks, so students are crammed together at small tables just to be able to physically fit in the room. Kids with IEPs can’t get the support they need—because how many kids can you provide individualized support to when you have that may children in one classroom?

Our kids’ mental health is really struggling too. I’m sure there’s not a parent in Ontario who is not feeling this. I have three kids, and all three have needed mental health support in the past few years, which has given us an experience of what the system is like. In December, we were referred to the school social worker for one of my children. That meeting finally happened at the beginning of March, and it was a meeting basically to tell us that there are no supports available through the school and we’re on our own to find some.

When I spoke to the Ontario Association of Social Workers earlier this month, they told me that social workers with their own practice are getting heartbreaking requests every single week for young children who are depressed, anxious, sad, not engaging normally in school, and their parents are desperate for help because they are being left totally on their own to find support. These social workers don’t have room to take on new clients because of the high level of demand. They say that putting supports in schools would be a more effective way of addressing the demand because they’d be able to intervene earlier and offer group supports.

According to a recent report from People for Education, 59% of students in Ontario report being depressed about the future; 91% of principals said their schools need mental health support, but less than one in 10 schools has access to a regularly scheduled mental health professional. Half of schools have no mental health resources at all. That’s how badly this government is shortchanging our kids. And yet, the Minister of Health wants us to believe that providing less than a quarter a day per child after this incredibly disruptive global pandemic is somehow a major achievement worthy of a gold star. Parents aren’t falling for it. They are giving this government’s record a big red F.

The government is also failing kids with accessibility needs. There aren’t enough EAs to support every kid who needs one. Too many kids are being told they can’t come to school because there’s no one there to help them. Too many parents are sitting outside their child’s school to provide help because there’s no EA available. Too many EAs are running down the hall with walkie-talkies trying to determine which of the five children they are expected to support needs them the most right now. And in the middle of this situation, the government is transitioning the autism legacy kids into schools without a single dollar of additional support—thousands of kids with accessibility needs joining our schools, and no additional money for EAs or for special class placements. This government is setting these kids up to fail, just like it is already failing the many children with disabilities already in our schools.

This is the inevitable outcome of the government’s underfunding. It means cuts to supports instead of more support. It means fewer teachers and larger class sizes. It means fewer EAs, fewer child and youth workers. It means fewer safety monitors in schools at a moment when violence is increasing because of the mental health crisis and because of staffing shortages.

We don’t know yet what all the cuts will be, but we already know some of the damage this government is doing to our students next year. There will be 522 positions lost at the Toronto District School Board, including 65 teachers, 35 special education workers, 35 child and youth workers, and 40 school-based safety monitors. The Toronto Catholic District School Board is looking at the loss of 120 positions. The Ottawa-Carleton District School Board, which will be discussing academic staff positions tomorrow night, is facing the loss of many of its support teacher positions, who provide assistance to students who are struggling.

The minister says he wants to address reading and math competency. Well, students in Ottawa are losing seven literacy and numeracy support teachers and coaches, along with another six learning support teachers. Blind, deaf, low-vision and hard-of-hearing students are losing a teacher.

CUPE is warning that across the province, we are about to lose 7,000 education workers supporting our kids day in and day out.

What’s frustrating is that all of these cuts are avoidable. The mental health crisis is solvable. We can provide our children with the supports they need. We can give them smaller class sizes.

We need the government to reimburse school boards for their COVID-related expenses, and we need them to provide adequate and stable funding so that schools can provide children the supports they need, delivered in the classroom by caring adults.

Nous voyons les effets du sous-financement systématique de notre système d’éducation par ce gouvernement : les coupures que les conseils scolaires doivent mettre en place à un moment où nos enfants ont besoin de plus de soutien, le manque d’aide pour la santé mentale, la pénurie des soutiens pour des enfants qui ont des besoins d’accessibilité. Mais les solutions existent. Il faut que le gouvernement rembourse les conseils scolaires pour leurs dépenses liées à la COVID-19 et que le gouvernement donne un financement adéquat et stable à notre système d’éducation.

I hope the government will consider who they are harming with their ideological agenda and will provide the necessary funding so that our kids can finally get the support they need.

It’s an honour to stand up today and speak to this motion and stand up for our public education system, stand up for the students, the families and the educators who make that system work, because we know that a high-quality public education system is vital to our quality of life. It’s vital to our economic prosperity. And it’s vital to democratic and civic participation.

It’s essential that we invest in our schools, in the staff and educators who teach and support students. Speaker, we all know that the pandemic had a tremendous negative impact on everyone in our society. But students bore the brunt of that impact. Due to the lack of investments and the fact that we had larger class sizes and repair backlogs in our buildings with inadequate ventilation, we had more days with our students out of school than any other jurisdiction in North America.

So we know that our students paid the price, and they’ve struggled. They’ve struggled with mental health challenges. They’ve struggled with learning gaps. They’ve struggled to maintain those social connections that are so vital to their quality of life.

I know the member from Brampton North, our friend over here, threw out some statistics and numbers in his talk, but here’s the bottom line: School boards were forced to dig into their reserve funds, funds that are set aside for capital improvements to invest in improving and upgrading their schools, because the government funded less than half of the COVID-related expenses the school boards faced. Quite frankly, the government failed to allocate $600 million to support COVID-related expenses. No wonder so many school boards across the province now are struggling to fund the things that our students need.

Speaker, I want to just say that the people who have been filling those needs and covering those gaps and managing the shortfalls are the educators and the support staff in our schools. But they’ve had to do it under tremendous pressure, without the kinds of supports they need, and so I want to thank those teachers and education staff.

I also want to remind everybody here that those teachers and support staff have gone above and beyond the call of duty, pre-pandemic and post-pandemic. I think we can all be grateful, prior to the pandemic, when we were having educational days of action in our schools, that it was teachers and educators and support staff who were walking the picket lines, saying no to larger class sizes and no to mandatory online learning. I think the pandemic highlighted for us that—I don’t think anyone wants mandatory online learning, so thank goodness educators stood up and said no to that prior to the pandemic. And I think the pandemic has highlighted the need for smaller class sizes, not larger class sizes. Sometimes when people attack education unions and say, “Hey, why are you disrupting our schools?”—it’s oftentimes, most of the time, because they’re fighting to improve our quality of education, and thank goodness, prior to the pandemic, that’s exactly what happened.

Now that we’ve made it through the pandemic, we need the government to step up and actually flow the money that our schools need. We need to make sure that we make the investments in smaller class sizes, that we have enough educational assistants and mental health supports, because the inadequacy of those has real-world consequences.

I just want to tell a few stories, because I think parents’ and students’ stories need to be told, Speaker. I can tell you, I did a round table with a group of parents who have children with special needs. Each and every one of them talked about how many times they’re called to the school to take their child home because the school does not have the adequate staff to serve their child’s needs, and then sometimes the lack of staff actually leads to danger for their students’ safety. And then the disruptions that are caused from that lack of teachers, educational assistants and adequate staff creates disruption that affects the learning of all the students in that classroom. The struggles that those parents and those students go through, the increased violence that it leads to, the fact that we have educational assistants now wearing Kevlar in our schools to protect themselves—I don’t think enough people in the public understand what’s happening in our schools due to lack of staffing, resources and the real-world consequences it has on people. So to me, I just don’t understand how the government failed to spend $435 million that they allocated for education that didn’t actually get spent given the clear needs in our schools.

And I don’t understand how the budget failed to actually address the $16.8-billion repair backlog that exists right now across the province in our public education system. Students are hot in the summer, cold in the winter. The ventilation systems are inadequate. There’s nothing in the budget to address those needs.

The least the government could do in order to make sure that our students receive the quality of education they need and deserve is to pay the pandemic-related costs those schools experienced, Speaker. That’s why I’ll be voting for this motion.

It’s a pleasure to rise today to speak to this opposition day motion.

The pandemic hit all of our communities hard, and it’s not news to any of us that students and school staff were among those hit the hardest. And while the pandemic seems to be mostly behind us, its impacts are definitely not.

Teachers and education workers deserve our continued gratitude for their service to our kids, but instead, once again, they feel like they’re grovelling to this government to get the supports they need.

Time and again, we’ve seen the government shortchange students. This government received significant COVID funding from the federal Liberal government, and as the opposition day motion mentions, they underspent that money by $600 million and underspent on education by $432 million. Let’s be clear, Speaker: That is money that school boards are now trying to make up for as they work to develop a balanced 2023-24 budget.

Let me remind the Premier and the education minister that Toronto and Peel were two of the areas hardest hit by the pandemic. When this government did not give them the money they needed to keep their staff and students safe—to lower class sizes—school boards like the TDSB did what they needed to do to respond. They were told to tap into their reserves to take the actions necessary to minimize risk to children, instead of getting the money they needed from this government. So they did. They dipped into their reserves to make class sizes smaller, to support our kids as well as the teachers and education workers who worked so hard to support and educate our kids during the toughest times of the pandemic.

According to TDSB’s letter from Chair Rachel Chernos Lin and ED Colleen Russell-Rawlins written to the Minister of Education on March 22, “The government and TPH’s health and safety directions were critical to maintaining the confidence of everyone we served during the health emergency. In following those directions, the TDSB incurred approximately $70.1 million in pandemic-related costs that were not covered by the Ministry of Education.”

Now, because of that, the TDSB faces a funding shortfall that could result in them cutting 485 positions. Those positions are for people who supported kids through the pandemic, who support them now, who are supporting them as they deal with the impacts of the pandemic on learning, which are not over.

Cutting positions for youth and social workers, counsellors and special education workers will hurt kids and families in Ontario, in Toronto, and in my riding of Don Valley West—especially those who are refugees and new immigrants to Canada, whose first language is not English, and many who have special needs.

Teachers, educators, researchers and families are telling this government that our children need more support to catch up from the learning loss they experienced. They need more support for mental health. Cutting that albeit temporary funding now that provides these supports is “reckless” according to the TDSB. Ontario school principals know this too and are calling for these additional supports to remain in place.

In a recent piece in the Toronto Star, Karen Littlewood, president of the OSSTF, quoted a People for Education report stating that more than 90% of Ontario school principals reported their students need greater access to mental health supports and services. And now this government is cutting it.

Our kids need the support of the education workers, and this government needs to step up and make sure teachers and education workers don’t leave our schools.

Balancing a budget by not spending on our kids’ education and mental health needs is not balanced. The potential cuts to 485 workers in TDSB when we’re still trying to recover and rebuild after the devastation that was COVID is not fiscally responsible. Students, parents, teachers and education workers had to weather the storm with insufficient support from their provincial government, and now that government continues to tell families who need their support that they’re going to pull it away.

Speaker, I’m proud to support this motion, and I thank the opposition for proposing it.

It’s an honour to rise today. The NDP have got a motion today, and all we’re asking the government to do is to cover the pandemic costs that were absorbed by school boards across the province. This will help to reduce the number of cuts that this government is going to be making to our schools and our staff over the next year. It’s very simple.

The Minister of Education was just boasting about the investment in HEPA filters and other things, and that was good, except there were two issues I take with what the government did in that area. The first was that the pandemic started in March 2020, and our schools were closed. Our students in Ontario had the longest closure, missed the most school days of any jurisdiction in North America. In January 2022, this government was boasting about a new investment in HEPA filters in our schools, so they could open classrooms. It took them a year and a half to make that investment in those HEPA filters that the minister was just boasting about just a few minutes ago. We need a government that’s actually going to invest in our students today.

The minister also has continuously boasted in the House about a $680-million increase in education funding from last year to this year, but the Financial Accountability Office, which is an independent office of the provincial government, says that they didn’t spend $430 million in the education budget. When you look at inflation, inflation over the last year was 5.4%; if they had increased education funding by the rate of inflation, it would have been a $1.5-billion increase, not a $680-million increase. So the amount that they increased did not account for inflation, and they didn’t actually spend the amount that they had been boasting about, that they budgeted for last year. The impact is that we have 8,000 more students in the province of Ontario—these are government figures—and 2,000 fewer education workers: 2,000 fewer teachers, education assistants, special-needs assistants and custodians.

I am deeply concerned about education. I was a high school teacher in the 1990s, and I continued teaching part-time after that. I was a school board trustee from 2010 to 2018. The reason that I am so passionate about our education system is that our publicly funded education systems are the foundation of our democracy and the foundation of our economic growth, and we need to support them.

And so when the government is putting out all these numbers and the numbers don’t actually equate with what’s happening in the classroom, then this is a problem, because spin is not going to educate our children. What’s going to educate our children are the teachers, the education assistants, the special needs assistants, the custodians, the secretaries and all of the staff, all of the workers, in our schools. That’s who is educating our children, and they are the ones who need to be supported.

But right now, the Toronto District School Board spent $70 million to ensure that their schools met the health guidelines provided by this government during the pandemic. That money was not reimbursed, and so they’re just asking the government to reimburse that $70 million in pandemic measures that the TDSB made. Instead, the TDSB is facing a $61-million shortfall in the next school year, 2023-24. The outcome of this will be—and this is the bottom line; this is where people will be able to judge whether the government is giving the full story or not. They are estimating that they’re going to have to cut 522 staff. And from what I’ve heard from the other side, from the government side during this debate, it sounds like they’re not going to support the motion to reimburse school boards for the pandemic measures. And the other thing that I’ve heard from them is they’re going to start attacking the school boards. Even though all of the funding is provided by this government to the school boards, they’re going to start attacking the school boards and saying, “Hey, you’ve got to manage your budgets better.” Well, the government insisted. They forced the TDSB to spend $70 million on pandemic measures and they didn’t reimburse them. That’s what this motion is about: reimbursing those pandemic measures.

At the TDSB, it will mean 65 teachers, 35 educational assistants, 35 child and youth workers, 40 school-based safety monitors. We are facing a crisis in our society coming out of this pandemic and this government is proposing to cut school-based safety monitors. The Toronto Catholic District School Board used $60 million in reserves during the pandemic, and next year they’re projecting a shortfall of somewhere around $35 million, and they are expecting to lay off at least 120 education workers. The impact of this is that we have larger classes; we have fewer resources; we have fewer staff to serve our students in our schools.

And the other thing—I don’t have much time left, but I just want to say, the government spins all these numbers out. Every time you ask them about something, they spin out the numbers. But my real concern is that their goal is to privatize our education system just like they’re privatizing our health care system. We spend $80 billion a year in Ontario on health care. We spend $34 billion a year in education. And there are a lot of corporations that look at that money and they think, “How can we possibly divert some of that into our pockets? How can we change these systems—these public, not-for-profit systems—into private, for-profit systems?” That’s what’s happening in our health care system, and it’s something that I think this government is doing in our education system as well. And I think it’s really, really unconscionable to be privatizing education when it is truly the foundation of our democracy and of our economic growth.

I want to thank all the members for participating in the debate this afternoon on this opposition motion. And I want to be clear: Really, what this motion does is just simply ask the government to come through on funding that they haven’t covered for costs that boards had to take on during the pandemic just to keep up—just to barely keep up. Nearly five years into this government’s tenure, and I’ve got to tell you, everywhere I go around this province, life is not better for people. People are struggling. They really, really are. Whether you look at the situation in health care or in the workplace or—it’s just not better.

But for people with school-aged children right now, boy, that struggle has been so deep and so long. And it is our very littlest kids that are struggling the most. They’re struggling with really basic things like playing nicely together and sharing and learning to read, and we’re hearing this from those experts on the front line. And what this government is doing by failing to come through on this funding request by the school boards is going to mean that those little kids get less and less support, because it will mean cuts. And we heard members of the government caucus here today basically—I would consider it threaten boards.

And I’ve got to say, I want the government to show some responsibility here. I would really, really request and beg the government to please come through with this funding. Our kids need all the support you can provide right now. They don’t need excuses. They don’t need spin. They just need to make sure there are enough teachers, educational workers and educational assistants in the classroom to help them with the very most basic things. Thank you, Speaker. I hope I can count on their support.