It’s a pleasure—and an honour, actually—to be in this House fighting for public education today. Like my colleague, as a former trustee and former president of the Ontario Public School Boards’ Association, public education is always worth fighting for. I will tell you that it made a substantive difference in my life. I would not be here today if I did not have a strong public education system to help me reach my potential.

What the Minister of Education doesn’t seem to understand is that learning conditions and environments are working conditions. The fact that he doesn’t seem to understand what’s actually happening in our system is truly concerning, I would say. For instance, in Waterloo region, there are huge concerns around the use of non-teachers working in classrooms, which has skyrocketed because schools can’t find enough supply teachers.

Five years ago, the Waterloo Catholic District School Board reported that around a hundred times a month they used non-teachers in their classrooms. Today, that number is 899 times every month—this is Patrick Etmanski, who is the president of the Waterloo Catholic teachers. They have said that this trend is so alarming, because students are often left without a teacher in the classroom. I can tell you, the failure to fill in our schools is changing the culture of the school. These are facts for the Minister of Education.

On the public side: “The Waterloo Region District School Board has had as many 600 days a month over the winter, and about 200-300 days a month ... when no teacher was available.” This is coming from Nathan Core, who heads the Waterloo region occasional teachers.

The fact that the minister was talking about these downtown NDP schools—my husband teaches in a rural high school in Wilmot. These kids are still struggling with a student transportation model that fails every single day. Getting students safely to schools is kind of important, Madam Speaker, and it’s not something that you do on the back burner, if you will.

This is what we’re hearing from teachers who are in the classroom, who have the lived experience of what’s actually happening in our education system. I would encourage the Minister of Education to actually get into a public school, Madam Speaker. This is what they say: “The job has changed in such a way that teachers are leaving the profession in numbers that we’ve never seen before.” It has never been this bad in this province on the education file.

I mean, you’ve been very systematic about undermining health care. Now, the post-secondary education is undermined. Child care—what a mess on the child care file. But we’re actually reporting what’s happening in public education schools. This deserves the government’s attention. The fact that the minister refuses to acknowledge that qualified, trained staff keep students safe is also very alarming for us.

I want to say that we have seen past Conservative governments systematically undermine public education. We are still feeling the effects of the Mike Harris government removing shops and the industrial studies programs as we face a skilled worker shortage in Ontario.

So we know where we stand. These are targeted resources—targeted, trained staff that improve the quality of the education system in Ontario. You will never do it unless you have the confidence and the belief in the very people in the system and, clearly, this Minister of Education does not.

It’s always a good thing to get up in the people’s House and talk about public education.

This is the question I want to ask in the three minutes I have this afternoon: I wonder how often the minister over there thinks about the people we are losing every day in our public schools. And I’m not just talking about the staff who may decide to leave. I’m talking about the kids who are excluded from class. I’m talking about the kids who feel like they don’t belong in our schools. And why? Because they need more support.

What’s on the chopping block right now back home? Special education.

Albert Einstein, high-school dropout—how many other wonderful minds, even if they aren’t geniuses of that calibre, are we prepared to lose because this minister can’t figure out what inflation means? This minister can’t figure out that the amount of money you spend in 2018 is not what you need to spend now to at least keep things moving. It’s a wilful refusal.

The question, again, I will ask rhetorically now is, who are we losing as this minister decides to throttle the funds of public education?

I will submit to you, Speaker, we are losing autistic kids, we’re losing dyslexic kids, we’re losing kids with anxiety disorders—kids who are brilliant, compassionate, wonderful people, who need help at that stage of their life. We stand at risk of losing them.

My friend from Thunder Bay–Superior North has the role now, but when I had the honour of being the disabilities critic in this province, the amount of disabled adults I talked to who had interacted with the corrections system, who had a hard time holding down work because they felt like they weren’t smart enough and they were told and they felt like they weren’t worth anything—the staff in our public school system stand ready and stand prepared to help those kids, but they can’t do it at a ratio of 24 to 1, or in JK, like 32 to 1, when half the class are on individual education programs. It’s an impossible task.

If one actually is a Conservative, I would like to say that an important thing you’re concerned about is waste. So how many kids and how many people in our system are we wasting wilfully because we refuse to invest in them?

We’ve got $600 million for a parking garage for a spa, or we have billions in potential money that we hand over to real estate speculators and real estate investment trusts, but we do not have money for disabled kids, and we do not have money for the staff who are prepared to help them.

Who are we losing? That’s my question this afternoon.

If we vote for this motion and we say as a House that public education requires investment kept up with inflation, then we are speaking the honest truth and putting our faith in the staff and the kids who deserve our help.

I thank the Leader of the Opposition for putting this on the floor.

First of all, we are building infrastructure. And first of all, I have to thank the Minister of Education for being in my riding on Friday to announce a new public school for our growing community. In that area where we’re growing and building, we’re building another 825 student spaces and another 88 child care spaces, which is just huge for families. Thank you again to the Minister of Education for this infrastructure build.

Also, what we’re looking for in some of our communities is—we have aging infrastructure when it comes to community centres, and we need that extra little help. We see a lot of our malls are changing. A lot of our seniors would walk around the malls, but our malls are being redeveloped into townhouses and different types of housing—affordable housing—because of our initiatives from our government. Once again, thank you to the Minister of Municipal Affairs and Housing for helping us build more housing, but for that we need some help with some community space.

I’m asking the parliamentary assistant, if you can help me: Explain what’s in the budget to help with community space for our growing communities.