Good morning, everyone. I’ll be brief. I know you don’t believe me—

There are three things that this bill does. The one that I can see that has—

You have the tools available already, but you’re putting more demands and giving yourself more power in relation to universities and colleges. All of us in this building are against all forms of hate: anti-Semitism, Islamophobia, transphobia. We’re all there. We did have tools inside government in 2018 in the Anti-Racism Directorate to address all of those things, but this government cut them all.

This doesn’t happen very often. It’s not very often that I agree with the Premier of this province, but I want to tell you why or tell you the thing that the Premier said with regard to this bill: “It’s really up to the dean to govern his own university. I think we shouldn’t get involved in that, that’s my personal opinion. Like I said, there’s a lot of tools ministers have that they don’t use. It’s up to the people, that’s what we believe in.” And I agree.

To actually make programs and then not provide the support that is needed to make those programs that you say are important work is not really doing a heck of a lot. That’s why this bill is hard to support.

I was part of a government—I worked for a Premier who put a focus on post-secondary education. Campuses expanded. We made sure more people had access to post-secondary education, like first generation, and then programs later to add grants and supports for people of very low income to be able to get an opportunity.

I’m not going take any lessons from you. So your demand of knowing what I’m going to say or what I’m going to do, I’m not going to buy that. You guys haven’t done what you’re supposed to do.

Post-secondary education is not just fun and good, it’s actually about the economy. It’s actually about having the most highly trained, highly skilled workforce. It’s the best thing for our economy. To not actually ensure that we can keep our workforce stable, that we have enough people to teach our young people the things that they need to learn, the skills that they need to build, it just doesn’t make economic sense.

For a government that talks about expanding the economy and about growing, I cannot believe the lack of support this government has for post-secondary education.