Thank you to my seatmate, because we’re a good team over here and definitely are able to feed off of each other in the work that we do in Hamilton together.

There is so much more that could have been done in this bill to ensure that there really was public safety. Look at Bill 74. Bill 74 was a bill to help vulnerable people when they’re missing, which this government didn’t even allow me the ability to debate. They took it and they stuck it in the justice committee, never to see the light of day again.

That’s true work that we can be doing for real justice for people, to ensure that we’re bringing people home safely. That’s all within the justice act. There’s so much more that could be done to ensure that our communities are healthier and safer, but this bill kind of missed that opportunity.

So we put forward suggestions. We try to help, but anything that comes from any other members of this House, unless they’re Conservative, gets shot down in an instant. We could make really good policy and we could make really great decisions for the people of Ontario if we actually took each other’s ideas instead of just beating each other up because we’re from a different party.

We were all elected to represent our constituents. Working together, we would probably come up with some really good policies.

It’s so unfortunate because we truly could fix so many things if we actually just worked together instead of the “gotcha” and instead of, “It’s a New Democrat idea, so we can’t listen to those lefties.” That’s just wrong, and this is what we hear coming out of this government, and particularly the Premier.

And so we put forward amendments, again, at committee, but the government refused to listen to it. The government committee members voted against an NDP amendment that would have required the Attorney General to make a plan to increase the amount of funding to Ontario’s rape crisis centres, sexual assault support centres and domestic violence support centres. The Ford government stopped renewing a $1-million funding boost to rape crisis centres in 2020.

We continue to put out the ideas. They continue to come back with smoke and mirrors. They’re talking about the billions of dollars, whatever they’re putting out now. They’re making up for Bill 124 for most public sectors, and so that’s where that funding is coming and going into. It’s not going into the capital that they need to survive—