This petition is entitled “A More Affordable Life in Spadina–Fort York,” and it’s addressed to the Legislative Assembly of Ontario.

It talks about how housing, groceries and gas are unaffordable in Ontario. The five largest grocery corporations are making record profits, as are the oil corporations. Rents aren’t affordable. The cost of buying a home is unaffordable. So the people who have signed this petition, they’re asking the Legislative Assembly to take immediate action on this affordability crisis by building 250,000 units of affordable housing, including co-ops, social and supportive housing.

They’re also asking that residential development on public lands, including the Ontario Line stations, mandate 30% of those units be affordable units, because it would be such a lost opportunity if they’re building those stations on public land and there’s no mandate for affordable housing with them—and also to take on price gouging by the oil and gas corporations that are causing both the prices to skyrocket and also inflation to skyrocket.

They’re asking that we keep our public services, particularly health care, public, so that people pay for their health care with OHIP rather than their credit card.

I fully endorse this petition. I will affix my signature and pass it to page Ruby to take to the table.

The funding for ODSP is around $1,300 per month, out of which $556 is for housing. But $556 does not provide any housing anywhere in this province, so the ODSP rates are pushing people with disabilities in this province into homelessness.

The Ontario Works rates are $733 per month. That’s for housing and for all costs. Nobody can live on that amount in this province.

The petition points out that the CERB program during the pandemic gave $2,000 as the minimum that was needed in order to keep body and soul together in this province, and they’re asking for an immediate doubling of OW and ODSP rates.

I fully endorse this petition, will affix my signature and pass it to page Aislyn to take to the table. Thank you so much.

This petition is from the Elementary Teachers of Toronto, and it’s asking the government to stop the cuts and invest in schools that our students deserve.

There’s been quite a bit of discussion about the number of cuts. The inflationary cut to our schools is $1,300 per student, per year, since this government took office, and that totals billions of dollars for school boards. This is the reason that almost every school board in this province is facing a funding shortfall this year.

This is not just a one-year thing. The TDSB mentions it faced a $63-million funding shortfall last year. There’s a $23-million funding shortfall this year. Every year, the TDSB trustees are asked to make cuts. They’re not provided with the funding just to continue the services that they offered the previous year, and that is on this government.

There’s also the government—the TDSB was instructed by the government to use the reserve funds to get through the pandemic to provide computers and other services that students needed to get through the pandemic. That reserve fund was never re-established by this government, so those cuts are also impacting our students. And the net impact is that our students do not get special education. They have larger class sizes. They do not get the health supports. We have an epidemic of mental health issues among young people these days, and they’re not getting the supports that they need.

So this group is asking the government to fix the education formula, to stop this year-after-year round of cuts, because our students deserve better.

I fully support this petition. I will pass it to page Armaan to take to the table.

I’ll ask my question to the member for Brampton South—the minster. This bill is called the Get it Done Act, and I’ve got to say, there’s an incredible irony, because I’ve got a list of seven bills that this Conservative government has had to reverse because they got it wrong: Bill 124, Bill 28, Bill 35, Bill 39, Bill 112, Bill 136 and Bill 150. These cover things like stripping education workers of their constitutional rights and protections under the Human Rights Code, the paving over of the greenbelt, the dissolution of Peel and the reversing the urban boundary expansion.

Rather than calling this the Get It Done Act, should this government not be known as the ready, fire, aim, we got it wrong and have to reverse it act?

Spadina–Fort York.