I’d like to join colleagues in welcoming the Ontario Association of Naturopathic Doctors, and in particular, Yousuf Siddiqui, Harsimranjeet Bhatia, Emma Pollon-MacLeod and Natalie Pond. I’m looking forward to our meeting later today. Thank you for being here.

It’s been six years now since my constituents paid deposits to Greatwise Developments for new homes, and construction has still not started. A year ago, I raised this issue in the House and the government responded that they were putting bad developers on notice, making them think twice before taking advantage of homebuyers. And yet, while homes are going up all over Ottawa right now, this developer hasn’t even prepared the land to start construction.

Why is the Premier allowing a bad developer to hold homebuyers hostage with no consequences at all?

When will we finally see real action, not just words, from this government to hold bad developers accountable, so families like my constituents finally get a home in Ontario?

I’d also like to say hello and welcome to folks from AEFO, ETFO, the trustee organizations and the Toronto Schools Caregiver Coalition who are joining us online this afternoon to watch the debate on education.

I have to start by saying that as a parent of three school-aged children in the province of Ontario, that was an incredibly shameful display from our Minister of Education. For a speech that talked a lot about accountability, that is a person who takes zero accountability for what is happening in schools under his watch.

The minister says his philosophy of success is outcomes. Well, let’s talk about his record, the outcomes for students and for schools in the province of Ontario, because what I hear daily from parents, from students, from teachers and education workers, from trustees, is that things have never been so dire in the education system in Ontario.

We have children who are struggling with serious mental health challenges, who are being told that they need to wait for a social worker and aren’t getting to see one until the next school year. These are children who need help immediately, and nine out of 10 school principals say their school doesn’t have the support they need to help children’s mental health. In fact, half of schools have no access to mental health professionals at all, at a time of one of the greatest crises in student mental health in our province’s history.

Children who have special education needs aren’t even being kept safe, let alone being supported in their learning in school. We’ve had multiple children who have eloped from school, who are being put in incredibly dangerous situations. One student who is supposed to have one-on-one support all day long not only escaped from his school, but they didn’t know he was missing for 35 minutes, because his school is so strapped for staff to support children with special education needs that there was not somebody with that student. There was not somebody to pay attention for 35 minutes.

There are students who need support who are spending the entire day with the principal, going around from classroom to classroom, because the principal is the only person left in the school building to keep an eye on this child.

We have students who are experiencing violence on a daily basis, teachers and education workers who are experiencing life-altering injuries because of the level of violence, people who are being sent to school in Kevlar because the Minister of Education is failing to take action on violence in our schools.

We have 5,000 fewer educators in our classrooms than we did when this government came to power. That means larger class sizes for our children who are struggling with their academics coming out of the pandemic, and it also means more challenging working conditions for the teachers that we have left, because they’re trying to juggle a class of 34 or 38 students, some of whom have mental health challenges, some of whom have special education needs, none of whom are getting the supports that they need.

It’s not surprising, under these circumstances, that people are fleeing our education system. We have 46,000 teachers in the province of Ontario who are registered with the Ontario teachers’ college but are choosing not to work in our education system because of this minister and his policies. A quarter of our elementary schools, a third of our secondary schools have daily staff shortages, and the minister wants to talk about qualified teachers? We are so short on teachers that those positions are being filled with unqualified people every single day. Instead of showing teachers any respect for the work that they’re doing, the minister stood up and attacked our hard-working teachers once again. He can’t even show them the tiniest bit of respect for the hard work they do and the conditions that they work under every single day in the province of Ontario. Those are the minister’s outcomes. That is the minister’s record.

Apparently not satisfied with having done that to our education system, not satisfied with having done that to our children—my children, your children, everyone’s children across the province—the minister is cutting funding once again, for the sixth straight year.

To make matters worse, Speaker, he’s not even putting the full amount that he announced towards our kids in education. They announced a nice big number, and then, if you read the small print, it actually says $1.4 billion of that amount is not going to kids in classrooms; it’s going to the government’s priorities. As a result, we have $1,500 less per child in Ontario than if funding had just kept pace with inflation and enrolment growth since 2018.

But even 2018 funding levels wouldn’t be enough right now to address the incredibly serious challenges that we’re experiencing in Ontario. As I mentioned, we have these really high rates of violence, which are making students, teachers and education workers, principals afraid to go to school in some cases. And what’s this government spending on student safety? Fourteen cents per day per child—that’s really going to help address the situation, Speaker. That’s really going to make people feel safe in their schools. But it’s okay, because there’s a security camera that’s going to capture the violence that nobody’s doing anything about.

We have a student mental health crisis, but what’s the government spending on mental health care for students? Twenty-two cents per student per day, and that’s a cut from last year, because even this year’s inadequate funding was 27 cents per child per day. So we already have kids waiting more than a year—kids who have no mental health support whatsoever in their school this year—and the minister thinks that’s such a successful outcome that he’s cutting funding for next year. It’s absolutely crazy-making, Speaker, that we cannot provide supports for our children who are struggling in Ontario.

As a result, while our kids are already not getting the supports they need to learn, to be safe, to be supported, school boards are being forced once again to make cuts this year. They have already cut to the bone. They have already laid off teachers, educational assistants, child and youth workers—the people who help our children learn and keep them safe every day. And now school boards are being told they’re going to need to make even more cuts this year.

We’re seeing school boards cutting incredibly important resources—resource teachers, for one, teachers who support children who have special needs. We’re seeing congregate classes cut. We’re seeing every single school board in the province running a deficit in special education, and now they’re going to have to cut even more supports for our children with special needs.

If this funding had just kept pace with inflation, we would have $3 billion more in our school system than what this government is putting in. At a moment when things are so dire, what would that $3 billion mean? What would $1,500 more per child mean in our education system? Well, every single school that I go to, I ask the principal, “If you could have one thing, what it would be?” And do you know what every single principal responds? More EAs.

For a school of 400 students, $1,500 per student would allow for the hiring of 10 more EAs. These are EAs who are currently running from crisis to crisis with a walkie-talkie trying to figure out which student needs help the most after the crisis has already erupted.

Imagine what a difference it would make for that school, for the levels of violence, for kids who are not having their learning needs supported, if a school had 10 more EAs? It would mean more social workers and mental health nurses so that when a child says, “I need help,” help is there and we’re not making them wait. It would mean more child and youth workers to help supervise lunchrooms and hallways and make sure that we’re actually intervening before things reach a crisis level. It would mean that every child in Ontario would have a better opportunity to go to school safely, to feel safe and supported at school and to receive the high-quality education that I would like to think we all believe children in Ontario deserve, except that the government’s actions demonstrate differently.

So I will conclude with a plea to the other members of the government. We have clearly heard that the Minister of Education is not going to support giving our children the resources and supports that they need for a high-quality education in the province of Ontario, but many of you are parents; many of you are hearing from your constituents what the outcomes of this minister’s policy are.

So stand with parents; stand with kids; stand with the future of Ontario and support this motion today.