Parents want accessible, affordable child care. Providing child care workers with the supports they need will go a long way to solving our critical retention and recruitment problem.

This legislation would create an advisory committee solely dedicated to supporting workers in the child care sector and would help make child care workers’ concerns and voices heard. The legislation will allow the advisory committee to immediately get to work on addressing some of the biggest challenges facing workers in the sector, including: increased wages; minimum work standards; career advancement opportunities; recruitment strategies; immigration considerations; enhanced collective bargaining.

We need a real plan and a real strategy to ensure families have child care that they can rely on, because a chronically underfunded child care sector is simply inexcusable.

Passing this bill will be an important step towards a better future for the hard-working ECEs and RECEs in this province who are caring for our generation.

I also want to thank my co-sponsors, MPP Bell, MPP Karpoche and MPP Pasma, for supporting me in this bill.

I’ve met with constituents in the London–Fanshawe area with respect to the decision that has been made in this Legislature not to allow members or guests to wear a cultural piece of clothing that actually identifies their heritage and their culture. They’ve given us a petition, and they’re asking the Legislature to allow guests and members who work in this legislative chamber to be allowed to wear the kaffiyeh. The kaffiyeh, to them, is a symbol of their culture and their heritage. The netting of the kaffiyeh is about the fishermen and how they survive for food. Then there is the part of the kaffiyeh that looks like olive plants—and then the roads are the roads travelled.

This is not a political piece of clothing. This is a cultural and heritage piece of clothing that identifies the Palestinian people, and they want to be able to visit this House and be in the galleries.

Members who work here who are of Palestinian heritage should be allowed to wear the kaffiyeh.

I support this petition—and we ask the Legislative Assembly of Ontario to please allow that kaffiyeh to be entered into the chambers.

Again, we talk about transparency; we talk about the intent of this bill. The Premier was quoted saying, when he was asked about Bill 166, that he had concerns about political interference and he said, “We shouldn’t get involved in that and that’s really up to the dean to govern his own university. I think we shouldn’t get involved in that.” This is where the confusion lies.

Then we get a statement from the Premier’s office saying that he supports the bill. Now we have directives from the minister asking the colleges and universities to have a student mental health policy, which we think we need to make sure is robust there. But they need to put their programs on the website and report back and they need to comply. But in the bill, they don’t tell you what the compliance measures will be if they fail to do that, and that’s another confusing part.

Can the member comment on how confusing this legislation has become with the Premier’s comments and then no recourse for how they have to comply, and when they don’t comply, what are the consequences?