Thank you to the member from London North Centre. Absolutely, there should be nothing more important than ensuring that people are housed. When you have safe, affordable housing, you’re then able to make your way into getting that job or being able to go to your job and be fresh, and not put yourself in danger in a job.

When someone isn’t housed, they find themselves in a precarious position. There’s food insecurity. There’s the ability to—just self-maintenance. All of those things go so far into making sure that people are able to live a healthy lifestyle. And when you have a government that actually takes money from municipalities instead of invests in municipalities so that they can have that affordable housing route, then we have people living in tents across our city, which we see each and every day. And it’s growing and growing.

This government, in all of their talk about all these housing plans—we’re literally seeing nothing happen, and people are continuing to fall through the cracks further and further.

We’re hearing, each and every day, they’re six years under inflation, and they were given 2.7%—not near enough when we know that families are struggling. If they want to talk about a big increase into education, is that to make up for the pay wages that they took from educational workers in Bill 124? That’s where that money is going. It’s making up for their errors.

It’s an honour to rise today to speak to Bill 180, the government’s budget measures act. Speaker, I think it’s important when you talk about the budget to contextualize the challenges that people of Ontario are facing right now.

What if I told you that in Ontario right now 16,000 people were sleeping rough and unhoused, where a one-bedroom apartment costs $2,200 a month on average, and it takes the average person 22 years to save up for a down payment to buy a home? And yet in the budget, housing starts go down, not up.

What if I told you that the wait-list for social housing is longer than the number of social housing spaces available?

What if I told you, Speaker, that last year, 700 forest fires destroyed one million acres of forest and the health care costs associated with the toxic air that that produced cost our health care system $1.28 billion in just four days due to increased hospital admissions?

What if I told you that our electricity sector grid has gone from being 90% clean to 80% clean, getting dirtier each and every year, and the government plans to make it dirtier?

What if I told you that 2.3 million people right now in the province of Ontario do not have access to a family doctor, where last year we had an unprecedented number of emergency department closures, where hallway medicine is the norm in hospitals across this province, and we have hospitals actually taking out lines of credit to be able to keep the doors open?

What if I told you, Speaker, that a third of secondary schools in the province right now are experiencing teacher shortages and a difficulty educating students, where the repair backlog in our education system is $16.8 billion?

What if I told you that 60,000 young people are on a wait-list to access autism services, and 30,000 children were on a wait-list to access mental health services that can be as long as two years, where organizations who provide services for people with developmental disabilities have told me their budgets have been frozen and they’re struggling to not have to cut programs for people in need? What if I told you that 717,000 people in Ontario right now are forced to live in legislated poverty?

That’s the Ontario we live in today. So then the question we have to ask the people of Ontario and the government is: Did the budget meet the moment? Did it meet the moment to address the real challenges that so many people in this province are facing? And Speaker, I would say no.

I want to start with housing. We have a government that has housing starts going down, not up. And the Premier, instead of saying, “Let’s legalize housing. Let’s make fourplexes legal across the province, so we can quickly build homes in a fast and low-cost way that people can actually afford in the communities they know and love without having to pave over our farmlands, our forests and our wetlands”—the government said no to that.

What if we had a government that actually sat down and read the Scotiabank report? Scotiabank—nothing too radical here: Over the next decade, Ontario needs to build 250,000 deeply affordable, non-profit and co-op housing spaces just to keep up—just to keep up, Speaker. And yet the government has built 1,188 of those spaces in the six years they’ve been in government.

There was nothing in the budget that talked about actually putting some money on the table so that Ontario once again could start building homes that people can afford so we can address chronic homelessness. The government had an opportunity with this budget—and I will, again, later today, when my colleague the MPP for Kitchener Centre brings forward a private member’s bill to actually bring in protections for renters in this budget, at a time when there is no city in Ontario where a minimum wage worker working full time can afford the average rent of a one-bedroom apartment.

The housing crisis is getting worse, the dream of home ownership is getting further and further away, and thousands of people are struggling to pay the rent. And while I appreciate the government providing some funding for permanent supportive housing in my riding of Guelph, which was highlighted in the budget, the budget fails to meet the moment of the housing crisis we’re facing, which is the number one driver of the affordability crisis. The Premier has been talking about bags at the LCBO, but let’s talk about what’s really driving up costs for people, and that is the housing crisis.

Speaker, I want to move to the climate crisis, because we’re already seeing an early start to the fire season in western Canada, and we have numerous experts predicting that we could have a historic fire season here in Ontario after the historic season that we experienced last year. So what I was hoping to see in the budget were two things: one, a firefighter protection preparedness plan that actually takes and gives wildland firefighters the dignity they need to be able to be treated as firefighters and the resources they need to ensure that we are prepared in Ontario after what we went through last year. The other thing I wanted to see was an actual, dedicated funding stream for municipalities to ensure that they can be climate ready.

According to the Financial Accountability Officer, the additional cost to public infrastructure in the next seven years will be $26.2 billion in the province of Ontario due to the impact of the increasing frequency and severity of climate-fuelled extreme weather events: floods, droughts, fires, extreme heat. It costs our economy when communities don’t have access to electricity for two, three weeks or longer due to a climate-fuelled extreme weather event, which we had last year in Ontario—nothing in the budget that actually prepares our communities or our economy for that.

As a matter of fact, I stepped out of committee. Right now, the government is going to ask people to pay more on their gas bills to subsidize Enbridge to expand gas services in the province. Instead, they could have brought in a climate affordability plan in this budget, making access to heat pumps, which reduce climate pollution, operate more efficiently, and save people money—save people money—rather than having people pay more money to expand gas infrastructure in the province. They could have brought in a climate affordability plan that helped people completely disconnect from the pumps and give them rebates to be able to afford the electric vehicles that we want to build in this province, or a rebate to buy an electric bike for those who live in urban areas so we can actually lower our cost of transportation in this province.

Speaker, my time is limited, so I want to close with health care and poverty. The budget could have brought in funding to address the fact that 2.3 million people don’t have access to a doctor. The budget failed to do that. And they could have taken pressure off the health care system by ending legislated poverty by more than doubling social assistance rates, because we know that poverty costs the province $33 billion a year, primarily putting additional pressure on our health care system, and the budget failed to do that.

Thank you, Speaker. You will know that, in the budget, there is a new $200-million investment in the Community Sport and Recreation Infrastructure Fund, which is intended to help build new recreation, sport and community centres in ridings across the province, including my colleague opposite in Guelph. It’s intended to revitalize older ones, but also to get upgrades that they need to continue to bring health to our communities and also joy for hard-working families, including Guelph.

Will the member opposite be voting against our budget measures to build and revitalize more community infrastructure?

When I look at this budget, my first impression is that it doesn’t make it much easier for people to get a doctor. It doesn’t make it easier for our kids to get a good education. It doesn’t make it easier for people to rent or buy a home that they can afford.

To the member for Guelph: When you’re looking at how this budget is going to impact the residents of Guelph, what’s missing?

We’re going to go to questions for the member. I recognize the member for Whitby.

Next question?

One last question?

Through you, Speaker, I know the member and every member in this room is concerned about the cost of living, but support for seniors is such an important issue. And I’m sure the member realizes that we all have people in our communities that need help and deserve our support as they grow older.

So, there are many ways, for crucial parts of the communities, we need to be there to provide for that. My question to the member is simple. Will you support the government’s expansion of the Ontario Guaranteed Annual Income System program to provide more support to our seniors?

I appreciate the member opposite’s question. I do think we need more funding for recreational facilities, and I think that’s a good measure in the budget.

But, Speaker, what municipalities also need is to ensure that those facilities are built in a way that withstands the increasing severity and frequency of extreme weather events, fuelled by the climate crisis. We’re already spending billions more in insurance costs and to deal with the uninsured losses due to the increasing frequency of climate-fuelled extreme weather events. The Financial Accountability Officer has shown that just public infrastructure alone will face additional costs of $26.2 billion this decade—I think I said seven years. Actually, it’s 2024 now; it’s six years.

The budget didn’t meet that moment. When we build these facilities, we have to make sure they’re ready for extreme rain, heat and freeze-thaw cycles, and there’s nothing in the budget that provides a dedicated funding stream for that—

Secondly, I can’t not answer that question without talking about post-secondary education because the University of Guelph, like many universities, is facing incredible financial pressures, because the province of Ontario is dead last when it comes to funding colleges and universities. I was meeting with a plant scientist who was telling me that two of her colleagues will be leaving and won’t be able to be replaced, which is going to have a direct impact on our agricultural economy, because of the research they do, let alone the students.

So I just want to close with, I know I’m out of time—

It’s impossible for somebody to live on $1,300 a month or $731 a month, so let’s more than double that. Let’s bring them up to the low-income cut-off level to help eliminate poverty in this province.

We’re going to go to questions for the minister.

Thank you to the member from Barrie–Springwater–Oro-Medonte. He talked a lot about victims and it reminded me of an issue with EMS workers across the province.

Just a couple of weeks ago, I was at a rally for CUPE 911 EMS workers in Niagara and they face the same problems that emergency workers all over the province do with lack of funding, lack of staffing. Those are costs that are shared with municipalities, but if the government cares so much about victims, why are they not providing more support for EMS workers across the province who are calling out for support for ambulance attendants and dispatchers and folks who are really struggling with code blacks and not enough staff in their departments?

I was kind of moved by the member’s statement on building system and supports and infrastructure, and the fact that his mother was a crisis counsellor.

So I used to work under the child protection act, and he talked about the independent legal clinics and the CYAC, which protect our most vulnerable. I was just wondering what these investments and the supports and the improvements to the court will have on the future generations of those victims?

I was listening to the member from Barrie–Springwater–Oro-Medonte talking about auto theft and his concerns and also the investments that they’re making into trying to address that issue. But I know that up in Kiiwetinoong, there are other concerns, other issues that we are facing.

Right today, I have 14 long-term boil-water advisories. One of the First Nations, Neskantaga, is on its 30th year of a boil-water advisory.

I’m just wondering, with regard to the budget, how is this government addressing to make sure that everyone in Ontario has access to clean drinking water?

I appreciate it’s a very specific question and it sort of allows me to give some specific answers.

Of course, we can always do more and we work with our partners to do that. As you go through the budget, I think you’ll see our continued focus on front-line services, whether it be the police, the firefighters, continuing to work with EMS—and it’s not always about money, Madam Speaker. Sometimes, it’s about operations.

I did a tour of the London Health Sciences Centre last Thursday. What a world-class hospital that is. I can tell you, Madam Speaker, the leadership team is top notch, but they’re working on how they interact with EMS, how they interact with the front-line services to make things more efficient and to make sure that the capacity is built so that we can serve the people of Ontario as well as we can, Madam Speaker.

By the way, I brought back Attorney General’s victim services awards, and all members get an opportunity to nominate people or have people nominated. I can tell you, the work that’s done—it’s absolutely stunning, the work that is done across Ontario by these individuals. So, thank you for that.

But I’m going to talk about what I am doing to help those communities. We’ve put Starlink in each of the fly-in reserves that the court has held and that’s so we are not dislocating communities.

It was surprising to me, when I became the Attorney General, to think of a six-seater plane that had on it the victim, the accused, some witnesses, all—I don’t know if you’ve been on a six-seater plane, but it’s a pretty intimate adventure. And to fly them out of their community into Sioux Lookout, and then potentially even drive to Kenora, and then what’s happening back at home over that extended time when you’re dislocating family—it didn’t make any sense. So we’ve invested in those communities, in justice services, and we’re working very hard. And we’re working collaboratively with our federal counterparts to try to arrive at better systems that are more effective for those in those communities.

So I can’t give you a direct answer on the boil-water, but I can tell you that we’re very focused on making sure that services are enhanced.

Now, we’re doing our part. What the federal government needs to do is potentially look at legislative change. Grand theft auto isn’t just a video game; it’s actually a charge in the States. So we need to do something about that. We need to make sure that they’re checking at the ports. They only check 1% of the cargo containers, Madam Speaker. It’s just ridiculous.

They’re trying to do “gotcha” politics. There’s no got-caught nonsense. It’s my obligation to appoint the Chief Justice, and I of course asked what is protocol, what is normal. It’s my obligation to appoint the Chief Justice. So of course I’m going to do an interview and make decisions, Madam Speaker. I’m not going to willy-nilly appoint somebody without even talking to the individual in an interview.

Now, we’re talking about the importance of making sure that the justice system is as solid as possible to protect people, keep our communities safe. That’s what this budget does. That’s what we’re working towards, and that’s what this budget does. The “gotcha” politics is nonsense. We’re getting the job done. We’re building highways. We’re building subways. We’re making sure the infrastructure is there, and we’re building the justice system.

I’m proud to see that our government is acknowledging the disturbing rise in crime we are watching unfold across our communities. In my own community of Markham–Unionville, my constituents have come to me countless times to share their concern of the safety of their neighbours, their families and their fellow Ontarians. Saying that safety is paramount is something I think all members of this House can agree on. It is something that I hope my NDP and Liberal colleagues will consider supporting in this budget.

So, through you, Madam Speaker, I ask the minister to please tell us what our government’s 2024 budget does to keep our streets safe and protect our communities.

I appreciate the Attorney General’s comments today. One of my biggest concerns about this government, in terms of its legacy, its continued attacks on our democratic rights: They’ve passed three bills that use the “notwithstanding” clause to strip Ontarians of their charter rights, and more recently, the Attorney General was actually caught interviewing candidates for the Chief Justice of Ontario position. When I asked him about this a couple of weeks ago, he said, and I quote, “Politics never came up” in those interviews. It would be inappropriate. “It would be crossing a line.”

A week after I asked that question, the Premier spoke to the media and said that he wanted to appoint Conservative judges; he didn’t want the Attorney General appointing Liberal or NDP candidates. The Attorney General has directly contradicted what the Premier has said. So, will the Attorney General stand up in the House today and tell the Premier that his comments were inappropriate and he crossed the line in demanding politically motivated appointments of judges?

It’s always an honour to rise on behalf of the members of Ottawa West–Nepean and to be their voice in the House. This morning, I’m speaking about the government’s budget implementation act.

Last week, I spent time door-knocking in Ottawa West–Nepean and I heard from my constituents that this is a really difficult moment in Ontario right now. People are struggling to afford their rent or find a decent place to live. They can’t afford to put food on the table. They don’t have a family doctor. They’re waiting 12 hours or more at the hospital for emergency care. Their children can’t get the supports that they need in school. And yet this government is running ads using their taxpayer dollars telling people everything is fine in Ontario. It reminds me of that meme of the dog sitting drinking coffee while the flames are rising around him, saying, “This is fine. Everything is fine.” The government wants people in Ontario to believe that everything is fine as things are crumbling around them and they’re struggling.

What we really needed, Speaker, was a budget that met the moment that we are living in, a budget that showed that the government actually gets what people are experiencing right now, when people are in desperate need of a government that gets it. Instead, we have a budget that completely misses the moment.

I attended the pre-budget hearings in eastern Ontario, and we heard loud and clear from witness after witness that people are struggling, and the government is more focused on talking points than actually doing something about their struggles. The organizations that provide care to people and that fill in the gaps are struggling because they are so underfunded that they can’t keep up. Demand is growing for their services, but these organizations are losing staff and having to cut back on services because they do not have the funds they need to keep operating.

We also heard about the incredible waste that is happening on this government’s watch and because of this government’s poor decisions. There are people in hospitals—and hospital care costs $720 a day on average—because home and community care, which costs only $36 a day, isn’t available. And why isn’t it available? Because the government will not fund it. There are people who are in hospitals today because there is no place for them in a home for people with developmental disabilities, so when their parents can no longer provide care at home, a hospital bed is the only place for them. The government has frozen funding to the developmental disability sector for over 10 years. There’s 1,200 people on a wait-list for this care and yet the government has offered them no support at all.

The government is also downloading costs onto the individuals in our province who can least afford it. We see this in education, where children with disabilities and learning exceptionalities are being forced to pay for this government’s cuts to education. They just cannot receive the supports and services they need in order to be able to learn, but also to be able to be safe at school. There are seniors who have lived in their own homes for decades who are seeing their property taxes go up and up because the provincial government keeps downloading costs onto municipalities, refusing to invest in the kind of infrastructure that people need in order to live in their homes but also to be safe in their communities. We see aging parents struggling to provide care for their child with developmental disabilities, unsure of what will happen to them because there is no space available for them.

It was very clear from these presentations that this government is incredibly bad at managing money, Speaker. Doris Grinspun, the head of the Registered Nurses’ Association of Ontario, used a phrase at the Belleville hearing which has stayed with me ever since, which was “waste through poor planning.” And we see example after example after example from this government of waste through poor planning, where we are spending more because the government is failing to make the important decisions that we need, the systematic decisions that would actually provide the people of Ontario with the supports that they need but also save us money in the end. The lack of investments in primary care is a perfect example of that, where when we don’t provide primary care and address a problem before it becomes an emergency, then people end up in the emergency room; they end up having a problem addressed only once it’s become much more severe. And, again, that hospital visit is $722 a day, when a primary care visit is much less expensive, Speaker. So we are making foolish decisions in the province that are costing the taxpayers of Ontario more.

But we also heard from the witnesses at the pre-budget hearings that there are solutions in place. There’s incredibly good work happening in eastern Ontario in health care, housing and community supports, and I saw this with the leader of the official opposition in Ottawa when she came recently and we met with the Pinecrest-Queensway Community Health Centre, the Centretown Community Health Centre, CHEO, Ottawa Community Housing, that there is incredibly innovative programming happening, usually held together by a shoestring budget and lots of goodwill, and the government is failing to support these organizations in delivering these solutions, refusing to invest in the kind of care and supports that we desperately need.

A great example of this is Counselling Connect. So 30 health care organizations, community support organizations in Ottawa came together during the pandemic to form Counselling Connect, where there’s one number, there’s one website. Anybody can go there, no matter what your age, no matter what your challenge is, and you can select an appointment with a counsellor that will happen within a matter of days, and you can receive a counselling appointment that provides you with immediate care and they will also make a referral on to other support services.

It only costs half a million dollars to provide this care in Ottawa, yet their funding is about to run out. When they came and testified at the pre-budget hearings, they received nothing but praise from government members and, in fact, government members were saying, “This is amazing. How can we scale this model across Ontario?” And yet, there’s no funding for Counselling Connect in the budget.

Only half a million dollars to provide counselling to over 27,000 people a year in Ottawa and yet, there’s no funding here, and so these people end up on wait-lists for other forms of mental health care while their problem becomes more serious and they need more care, instead of just investing in these kinds of innovative solutions. And half a million dollars is less than a rounding error in the government’s health budget. These kinds of decisions just make no sense.

We’re also seeing record demand for food banks right now. In my riding they’ve had to extend into evening and weekend hours to serve those who are employed full-time but still need to use a food bank.

Last Monday, I was at the Ottawa Mission serving Easter meals. This year, the Ottawa Mission served a record 17,400 meals across Ottawa between two food trucks, plus the Easter meals served at the Mission on Easter Monday. This is just an incredible expansion of the demand for food within Ottawa.

When I was knocking on doors last week, affordability was the number one issue that I heard about. People are not able to make their rent, let alone being able to pay for food. I spoke to one woman who is deeply upset that she can no longer afford the apartment where she lives but she doesn’t know where else she will go because everything else is even more expensive.

I’ve heard from Sharon, a senior living on a pension, who in the last eight years has seen her rent increase by more than the guideline seven times. The Landlord and Tenant Board keeps approving the increase even when it’s being imposed because of repairs, which aren’t supposed to qualify, so Sharon, who’s living on a pension, is now looking for a roommate or a new place to live because she can’t afford her housing. And what did this government offer people like Sharon in the budget, the people lined up at food banks who are working and still need the food banks, the many folks eating Easter dinner at the Mission? Nothing.

There are no measures to address rental affordability, no increase to ODSP or Ontario Works. They promised to raise minimum wage in October of this year but there’s no funding in the budget to support that, and even their increase in the minimum wage falls $4 short of a living wage in Ottawa so it’s still going to be difficult for people to afford housing, which is why so many people who are employed are going to food banks. There was no crackdown on price gouging, and in fact, the government is allowing people to be gouged by private, for-profit health care providers.

Let’s talk about that lack of access to primary care. Connie, who is one of my constituents in Ottawa West–Nepean, says:

“We are both 68 years old in very good health. We do everything to protect our health—we eat well, we exercise regularly, we see our dentist regularly, we are active in our community and have a good circle of friends and family. We live in our own home and hope to remain independent as long as possible.

“We’ve signed up with the Ontario government site that promises to match us with a doctor. We’ve approached several medical offices and clinics to ask if they’re taking new patients. We’ve networked with friends and relatives. We have a niece who is a nurse practitioner and have sought, and followed, her advice. At this time, we are on one waiting list and were warned it was likely at least a three-year wait.

“The thing that baffles me is how we got to this place. Surely you understand that every year we remain healthy, independent and living in our own home is a win for Ontario and our collective budget. The cost of the occasional GP visit to maintain our health, versus the cost of an extended hospital stay to treat a complicated illness—well, there is just no comparison.”

And Connie is right. This makes no sense. It is wasteful. It is absolutely short-sighted. The only explanation is that it is deliberate.

Some 2.3 million people have no family doctor, like Connie and her husband. The NDP offered a plan that would provide primary care coverage for almost all of them and the government voted against it. The budget offers funding to provide primary care coverage for only one quarter of them by the end of three years. Yet the Ontario College of Family Physicians is saying that by 2026, 4.4 million people will have no family doctor. This is literally fiddling while Rome burns, Speaker.

And what happens when people have no family doctor? A few weeks ago, one of my constituents, Angela, cut her finger so badly that she needed stitches, but she didn’t have time to wait 10 hours in the ER. She initially wanted to go to a local Appletree clinic but she was told she would be charged $69 to see a nurse practitioner, so in the end she had a roommate who was trained in first aid stitch her finger. That’s what we’ve come to in Ontario, Speaker: roommates stitching wounds.

And let’s talk about those wait times at hospitals, because the government recently cut funding to the Queensway Carleton Hospital for the ER, so the Queensway Carleton is down 10 physician-hours per day, every single day. Earlier this year, one of my constituents who was experiencing extreme pain went to the ER. She couldn’t move, yet she sat for 15 hours before finally seeing a doctor. Here’s what she said:

“I was not the only person who had waited 15-plus hours to be seen, and if it had not been for the encouragement and advice from other patients in the waiting room, I believe that I would have gone home without care. Many people left as they could not handle the wait.”

It’s not just our patients who are sitting in primary-care waiting rooms and ER waiting rooms who are suffering. We’re also seeing incredibly important services to people with developmental disabilities—residential and day programming—being cut or being put in jeopardy by this government’s underfunding.

As I mentioned, the funding for this sector has been frozen for over a decade. So L’Arche, which operates a number of homes in Ottawa West–Nepean, has made the incredibly painful decision to close one of their homes. The other organizations, like the Ottawa-Carleton Association for Persons with Developmental Disabilities; TCE, Total Communication Environment; and Tamir are also having to face incredibly painful financial choices. And Christopher, one of my constituents, talked about what closing a TCE home would mean for his brother Jamie:

“For somebody like my brother Jamie, who has an intellectual disability, to then have to change where he’s lived for over 20 years would be devastating for him. He’s very high-needs, and he has his same routine every day and has his house set up in a way that supports his needs—and it’s everything that TCE has done with the eye of” being “person-centred. His needs are always at the forefront, and everything that we do is to ensure that his needs are taken care of. So to upend him like that, to have to close a home and to move him into a home where his needs might not be met would be very devastating for him. He’s very immobile, so he needs a place that’s accessible.”

I have another constituent whose son has been on a wait-list for supportive housing for 15 years, and he’s currently in a hospital bed because there is no place for him.

This is truly waste through poor planning. The sector asked for a 5% increase so that they could continue to support people with developmental disabilities, and this budget gave them nothing. Who even are we as a society if we cannot provide care for the most vulnerable members of our society?

And speaking of the most vulnerable members of our society, Speaker, we need to talk about education, because what this government is doing to education funding is appalling. The minister’s favourite word is “unprecedented.” In fact, when his term as a minister comes to an end, I’m probably going to give him a plaque that says “unprecedented” so he can stare at it every single day.

But let’s look at what actually is unprecedented in education. The levels of violence are unprecedented. The mental health crisis is unprecedented. The shortage of teachers and education workers is unprecedented. In fact, we are seeing teachers leaving, retiring and resigning in the middle of the year, some of them in September, because they just can’t take it anymore—

It being 10:15, I have to interrupt the member and ask for members’ statements.

Second reading debate deemed adjourned.

Speaker, point of order.

Speaker, last week, I was glad to join Premier Ford’s funding announcement of $9 million for the establishment of York University’s school of medicine. This new medical school will be the first in Canada to focus on training family doctors that will work towards ensuring Ontarians have access to the connected and convenient care they deserve. It stands as a significant milestone, underscoring our government’s steadfast commitment to improving health care, accessibility and quality across our communities.

I firmly believe that nurturing a new generation of primary care physicians will not only serve to strengthen our communities but also contribute sustainably to the overall health and well-being of Ontarians.

I would like to commend the university for its unwavering dedication to addressing the health care needs of underserved regions.

Furthermore, I am enthusiastic about the forthcoming opening of York University’s Markham campus this spring. This strategic move will embed the university in the vibrant heart of Markham–Unionville, one of the most diverse and dynamic urban communities in our province and country.

As MPP for Markham–Unionville, I pledge my full support to York University’s endeavours in nurturing talent for our province and nation, and I remain committed to advocating for their continued success.

I’ve spoken many times in this House about Beyond the Streets, a volunteer-run organization in Welland that connects those without a home to community services and basic necessities.

This winter, Beyond the Streets created and operated an emergency shelter in partnership with Holy Trinity church in downtown Welland. They started this shelter after they saw people nearly die of hypothermia on the streets earlier this winter and because other shelters were completely full. Unfortunately, their shelter closed last week due to an end to a city grant that lasted to the end of March.

In the words of the organizers, “What we can say from all this, is that the need is greater than even we expected. Our friends need a permanent place to go to until they can find a place to call home. Living on the streets isn’t a life for anyone. It doesn’t allow for anyone to better themselves because they are always in survival mode.

“So we guess the next question is ...

“Do we give people a fighting chance?”

Speaker, access to housing is a human right. No person should be living on the streets, fighting for their survival through the bitterly cold winter months. A fighting chance means housing, food and medical attention as well as livable assistance rates.

My heartfelt thanks go out to the dedicated volunteers from Beyond the Streets, Holy Trinity church and the citizens of Welland for stepping up and making this emergency shelter happen when other levels of government failed.