Thank you, Madam Speaker. I’m very happy to stand today to speak once again about Bill 166, the Strengthening Accountability and Student Supports Act.

This bill contains historical changes that will help our students. Our students are the future of Ontario, the future of Canada, and this bill would support students while creating accountability. We, as a government, will only be viewed as successful if the next generation remembers us fondly with bills which made their life better. Madam Speaker, tomorrow’s professionals are students of today.

As the father of two young men, Dr. David, and soon-to-be-dentist Christopher, who are about to complete their terms and come into the workforce, but also as a professor who has been teaching college students since 2007 to date, over 17 years, I have met hundreds and thousands of students. I taught hundreds, proudly to say that one of my former students sits here as a member of this chamber as one of our colleagues today.

I can’t claim that I understand many of the challenges students go through in the post-secondary sector. It is our duty to try to pave the way for them to be successful as students and, more importantly, as future citizens, as professionals and those who will be able to compete in Ontario, in Canada and anywhere around the world.

Bill 166, the Strengthening Accountability and Student Supports Act, will support students while creating accountability for actions, which is the third reading debate, so many of those details are already covered. As this is my last chance to speak for this bill, I want to address the bill from the perspective of its reasoning and importance and how it will impact our students.

I know that many of our universities and colleges are already providing mental health supports for their students. As the minister mentioned, five colleges—George Brown, Centennial, Humber, Seneca and Sheridan—already have programs, two of which I was faculty member of. They have already partnered to pool their expertise and resources as they support students. I know first-hand, having been faculty of at least two of them for many years, that this bill is raising the bar. It would mandate and hold university and college administrations accountable to support students.

This is a good start. We want to standardize it, make it mainstream, not only at some of the institutions. Every post-secondary institution should have comprehensive supports for students’ mental health. Mr. Speaker, we believe and are acting on the belief that mental health is health.

Our government allocated $32 million for 2023-24 in mental health to support post-secondary students through grants like the Mental Health Services Grant and the Mental Health Workers Grant. Mr. Speaker, our government was the first government to appoint an associate minister especially for mental health, because we believe that mental health is health.

We are, as a government, trying to remove the stigma around mental health. Our students are already under the severe stress of exams, competitions, uncertainty, fear of the future and fear of failure. Some students develop mental illnesses, and unfortunately, in some cases, they even commit suicide. Losing one life is too much. Those losses could be prevented, because if they could be easily recognized and get the right attention and medication early enough, they could have been good, proactive citizens living with us today.

I believe this bill is an important step to mandate and hold educational institutions accountable. We want to keep an eye on and care for our most vulnerable and valuable, our students, our kids.

The other part of that bill is talking about freedom of speech in universities and colleges. It is important to create environments where our students can freely express their opinions and exchange those opinions with other students. But at the same time, we need to be very fair regarding hate speech, bullying and any other form of discrimination against students. This is not freedom of speech; this is discrimination, and it could affect the mental health of students. We need to create an environment that is inclusive, safe for our students.

With that said, I very strongly recommend full support from both sides—our colleagues in the opposition—to support that bill, which will benefit our students, which will benefit our universities and colleges in their way to help their students, monitor their students, and take the responsibility in protecting our students.

We said we are trying to move the bar, to raise the bar to make sure that our students are having some mental health attention from the institution that they are relying on, that they are going to every day. This is the only way we can monitor their mental health. If there is more money needed in the future, we’ll see. If it’s through the grants program, all the institutions should be able to build the programs to monitor the—

Thank you to my colleague. Despite the fact that this question is not related to the inclusion environment in the campus or preventing discrimination or supporting freedom of speech—you are talking about the OSAP changes, which is—actually, we did put OSAP where it was. Before the election, the previous Liberal government tried to prepare for the election by bribing voters, saying, “We’ll give you free programs.” When we took over, we just put back OSAP as a loan system, which students can—every student can make use of OSAP and pay back the money in 20 years, which is—