I had the pleasure of meeting the hard-working staff and board members at Street Haven at their Roxborough site this summer. Street Haven is one of Canada’s oldest women’s shelters. The shelter provides temporary housing, food and treatment for mental health and addiction to about 1,500 women a year.

These are high-risk people, people who are homeless, people who’ve just been released from prison or hospital, people who are deeply traumatized. They need help. And it’s the staff at Street Haven that step up to help them each and every day.

But here’s the problem: Street Haven also needs our help, because they’re seeing a big increase in the need for their services. And there has been a big rise in homelessness, in addiction and in people facing very complex issues and very tough life circumstances.

Yet government funding for Street Haven’s work is being cut by this government. Funding to help people manage their addictions is being cut, and funding to manage the home and provide housing to people in need is also being cut. Street Haven is operating at a deficit. Their hard-working staff—when I met them—are exhausted and underpaid, and the need just keeps growing.

I am asking this government—the Minister of Health, the Solicitor General and the Associate Minister of Mental Health and Addictions—to meet with Street Haven and understand what they do, and commit to providing support to them and other vitally important supportive housing services and treatment programs so Ontarians can get the help they need.

Thank you to the member opposite for the question. As I said in my remarks, a home is foundational for a stable society, and if I look at, really, the time under the previous government, and supported by the NDP, there was no emphasis on building homes in general. There was no emphasis on building hospitals. There was no emphasis on building long-term care. There was no emphasis on building the skilled trades workforce that we needed to address this very, very necessary endeavour of creating more homes for people. In fact, I really don’t know exactly what we have to show for all the billions of dollars that were spent.

Look at the situation that we’re in with the homeless. Again, we look at families to try and make things affordable for them. So we’re building the skilled workforce. We’re building the homes. We’re building the hospitals. We’re building the long-term-care homes. I think about ODSP and I say, we’re creating historic amounts for ODSP. It’s the largest increase in decades.

I am very proud of the effort that we have made as a government acknowledging that Indigenous communities may have different needs. Our government’s policies have delivered historic results, getting more housing built faster, and complement our more than $4.3-billion investments over three years to grow and enhance community and supportive housing for vulnerable Ontarians and Indigenous people and address homelessness.

So this is something that everyone deserves: a place to call home. Everyone deserves to live in dignity and respect, and we must continue as a society to work towards that. I’m very proud of our government’s efforts in that regard.