I am so proud to rise today to speak to our government’s 2024 budget, Building a Better Ontario, which funds programs and projects that will no doubt meet the needs of hard-working Ontarians during this time of global instability.

Before I begin, I want to acknowledge that we are celebrating PSW Week in Ontario. So to all of our wonderful PSWs working across different health sectors, but especially in long-term care, thank you for your contributions—and a very happy PSW Week in Ontario.

Madam Speaker, make no mistake, this budget is an investment into our children, parents and grandparents. It uses a proactive approach to tackle the ever-changing challenges Ontarians face.

I want to reflect on the Minister of Finance’s words on budget day—how his father bravely immigrated to Ontario from war-torn Europe, never to see his parents again; how through his hard work and the privileges afforded to him in this great province, he achieved his dreams of going to university, marrying the woman of his dreams and raising three children. And Madam Speaker, I can attest that at least one of those three children turned out pretty well. Wouldn’t you agree?

When I moved to this country at the age of 12, I could not have achieved my dreams if I wasn’t afforded the same opportunities as everyone else—if I didn’t have access to world-class primary, secondary and post-secondary education. My home country was under an authoritarian regime up until 35 years ago, where people were not guaranteed their freedoms.

Let’s not forget and let’s appreciate that we live in a country with a Charter of Rights and Freedoms that allows us to pursue our dreams, speak freely and worship as we choose.

In the same way the minister spoke fondly of his father achieving the Ontario dream, I can say the same for my mother, my brother and myself.

Madam Speaker, this budget is for the 16 million Ontarians who have their unique hopes and dreams, who proudly call this province home and want to live, work and play and raise a family in our great province of Ontario.

Speaker, let’s not forget that over 80,000 residents in Ontario live in a long-term-care home. Just like a house, a condo or an apartment is a home, so is a long-term-care home, where residents live out the last precious years of their lives.

Just two weeks ago, I attended a gala held by Copernicus Lodge, a non-profit long-term-care home that was founded 45 years ago to serve Toronto’s Polish community. Having known this home and their staff for many, many years, I can attest that the lodge provides a loving home to their many residents, using a holistic and resident-focused approach in their work. And they don’t just provide regular programming for residents but also cultural programming for the Polish residents, including those who are World War II veterans.

That being said, it is only right that we invest in these homes, ensuring that the Ontarians who need them have access to a safe, modern, state-of-the-art, comfortable place to call home.

Thankfully, our government has made groundbreaking investments and improvements to our long-term-care sector since forming government, and this budget had even more wonderful news.

Madam Speaker, Mahatma Gandhi once said the true measure of any society can be found in how it treats its most vulnerable persons.

Our elders cared for us, so it is only proper that we take care of them.

Caring for our most vulnerable seniors, including those with dementia, is why I tabled my private member’s bill, with the member for Thornhill, to reform our government’s approach to dementia care. Right now, 250,000 Ontarians are living with dementia or Alzheimer’s disease, and that number is expected to triple by 2050. Caring for this community requires our utmost attention, so I was glad to hear that we are investing $46 million into not only the continued operation of 59 behavioural support units but also to have 200 more total BSU beds across the province so we can provide care to our beloved seniors with complex needs. It’s the right move for our province, which is predicted to see a huge spike in our senior population, the “silver wave,” as my colleague across likes to call it.

There’s a report that shows a 23% increase in our over-65 population by 2029. Speaker, we know that many Ontario residents are waiting to be placed in a long-term-care home and, rest assured, our budget is addressing that need. We are making progress on our goal to build 58,000 new and upgraded beds by 2028 and already have 18,000 that are either open, under construction or have approval to start construction.

As of now, we succeeded in building 4,500 new and upgraded beds. This is fantastic news for Ontario families with loved ones expected to be placed into a home. With more beds, we will be able to serve the needs of vulnerable seniors in our province.

Sur les 110 foyers en cours de développement, 12 prévoient d’offrir des programmes et des services culturels et linguistiques à la population francophone de l’Ontario. Le fait que notre gouvernement donne aux opérateurs nouveaux et existants les moyens d’établir des foyers francophones est vraiment louable, car cela répond aux besoins de la riche diversité de la population de l’Ontario.

Dans toute la province, nous avons des foyers qui accueillent les résidents dans de nombreuses langues différentes, y compris Ivan Franko, qui dessert la communauté ukrainienne locale.

This budget is providing $155 million to increase the construction funding subsidy top-up, supporting the cost of developing or redeveloping a long-term-care home. Eligible projects will receive an additional construction funding subsidy of up to $35 per bed per day for 25 years. And we want to support our newly built and existing homes so they can operate without issue, which is why we are responding to higher costs in the sector by increasing operating funding to support the financial stability of these homes.

And I want to mention one more home. Through the incredible work of our government’s Accelerated Build Pilot Program, we were able to create over 600 new beds with the opening of Wellbrook Place, a new state-of-the-art long-term-care home in Mississauga. This six-storey facility took only two and a half years to build. Speaker, that is a remarkable accomplishment and a testament to our government’s ability to build more homes for those in need of them.

C’est pourquoi ce budget prévoit 4,9 milliards de dollars pour embaucher et maintenir en poste 27 000 personnes dans le secteur des soins de longue durée, ainsi que 100 millions de dollars pour former des préposés de soutien à la personne et des infirmières dans le cadre du programme PREP LTC. Ce programme attribue des stages cliniques aux étudiants, ce qui leur permet de recevoir une formation pratique adéquate.

And that’s not the only program; we also have the BEGIN initiative, which our budget is investing $100 million into, which provides tuition grants for nursing students with the aim of adding 2,000 more nurses to our long-term-care sector by 2025. Speaker, just last week, our government announced $4.1 million towards GeriMedRisk, a program that makes it easier and faster for seniors living with complex needs like dementia to access coordinated care and get connected to geriatric specialists and pharmacists. This helps our seniors avoid unnecessary trips to the emergency room and allows them to stay at home to better manage their health.

Speaker, the members opposite who accuse us of mismanaging health care and mismanaging long-term care, I ask them: Look at the evidence. It is our investments that are supporting our seniors. It is our investments that are supporting and growing our long-term-care sector and it can only be achieved through budget 2024.

On a personal note, I just want to conclude by saying that I feel it’s a privilege of a lifetime to be working together with the Minister of Long-Term Care and the Minister for Seniors and Accessibility. We are all immigrants to this country, and I do believe that it is very, very inspiring that it is in our mandate to be travelling across the province, building modern, state-of-the-art long-term-care homes where seniors who have spent their entire lives building the province can live out the last days of their lives in beautiful, modern, welcoming homes. Because, Madam Speaker, they are truly homes.

Further debate?

It’s always a pleasure to be able to rise and ask questions of my colleagues across the way. I listened to your presentation—both presentations, actually—this afternoon.

I guess my question is, in a time when rich, well-connected people in Ontario are benefiting from this government and the working family continues to struggle, how can the government defend a budget that fails to address the soaring costs of living and their duty to build affordable housing, which even our federal counterparts are pointing out Ontario is desperately failing at, and which is affecting real people in all of our communities, especially across Niagara?

Great presentation from the member for Mississauga Centre. I’ve had a lot of constituents in my riding reach out to me, concerned about the rising crime, auto thefts. I’ve seen it in my own neighbourhoods. People are actually scared to walk in the streets and to leave their kids at home at night because there have been many, many break and enters. There’s a WhatsApp group that was formed and it literally went from zero to 1,000 people in 24 hours. There is no doubt, unfortunately, that there is a growing crime problem.

The federal government controls the Criminal Code, so we’re not able to have any say in that, beyond obviously talking with and suggesting to the federal government that they do make changes. I wondered if you could add your voice to what is being done by the provincial government in this budget to fight crime.

It is now time for questions and answers.

I have been up in this House many, many times asking for funding for Highway 69. Highway 69 is the only highway that goes from Toronto to Sudbury. It is used by hundreds of trucks every single day. For 68 kilometres on Highway 69, it is not a highway; it is a two-lane road, with very few opportunities to pass—so you go from a four-lane highway that is at 110 kilometres an hour to a two-lane pathway that goes just awful to make it to Sudbury.

I have been in this House for 17 years. Your government has been in power for six years. You are spending billions of dollars on the Bradford Bypass, on Highway 413, on Highway 7, on Highway 401 in southern Ontario. When can we expect a few million dollars out of those billions to four-lane Highway 69?

I want to thank the member from Mississauga Centre for her remarks and her most recent comment about public safety. She represents an area that’s protected by the Peel police service, a phenomenal police service in Ontario, a flagship service.

In the budget, there was reference to us providing monies for helicopters so that Peel and other GTHA services would have the special aerial support they need to fight crime.

My question to the member is, how important are these investments to making a difference in her own community, to keep Peel safe?

My question is for the member from Mississauga Centre. You said that the opposition accuses your government of mismanaging health care, yet you claim that you are supporting seniors and that you are doing things so that seniors can live out their lives in “beautiful, modern ... homes.” That’s a direct quote from you. Yet, in the city of Mississauga, Chartwell is evicting more than 200 seniors from their homes. Chartwell is a for-profit corporation that was heavily subsidized by the former Conservative government and that is heavily subsidized by this Conservative government, and yet they’re evicting seniors, so seniors are not able to live out their lives in their homes. In fact, they’re being renovicted so that Chartwell can sell that property to Minto and then Minto can jack up the rents on the property.

So how can the government possibly claim that they are supporting seniors living in their homes when this government is actively subsidizing a corporation that is evicting more than 200 seniors?

It’s now time for further debate.

I’m pleased to be able to stand in my place on behalf of the fine folks from Oshawa and speak on the 2024 budget. This is the supposedly—well, the named Building a Better Ontario Act, and I’m looking forward to sharing some of the perspectives from my community, although, I will say, Speaker, that the community perspectives that I’m sharing are going to sound familiar because we are hearing it from across the province.

Unfortunately, this is a budget that misses the mark. Folks from across the province don’t see what it is they need to get by in this budget, and if folks are looking for change, it isn’t in this budget. If people are looking for a family doctor, they’re not going to be reassured with this government’s plan. A young person trying to find affordable housing is going to come up short with this budget. If people are struggling with the cost of living, there isn’t anything in this budget for them. Unfortunately, this is a budget that is out of touch, and it would seem that they’re out of ideas, doubling down on policies that have been failing people. So I’m glad to be able to rise and point out a few specifics that we would have wished to have seen in this budget.

While I am the member for Oshawa, I am the only non-government provincial member in the Durham region. There are seven MPPs that have been elected to represent the entire Durham region, and I’m the only non-government and that’s been true for the 10 years I’ve been elected. I’ve always been this little orange island in—for a while it was in a sea of red; now it’s in a sea of blue. Regardless, it would seem that I have the only voice that can rise up against the government of the day and perhaps challenge them. I hope that my colleagues from the neighbouring ridings that are government members are indeed advocating in the backrooms or to the Premier, but publicly, I guess it’s up to me.

One of the things that I have raised in this House, and we’ve talked about in our community is the need for investment in health care and the need to invest in the future for access to health care, specifically a hospital in the Durham region. Oshawa would like that hospital to be in Oshawa. Every community wished that it would be chosen and put in their community, but there was a panel and a task force put together by Lakeridge Health and Whitby was the chosen site.

So the Premier of this province had said on our local radio about that hospital in Whitby, “Is it going to be tomorrow? Not tomorrow, but down the road, very shortly, we will be issuing the planning grants. Right now, for a short period, we’re not issuing any planning grants, but is Durham right in line for the next go-round? One hundred per cent they are.” He had said also, “There’s going to be a Whitby hospital.”

There isn’t any planning grant in this budget. There wasn’t in the budget before. The government has said, “Oh, we don’t put planning grants in the budget.” Well, where the heck do you put them? Put them somewhere. Tell us if that $3 million, or whatever it is, is coming so that folks in Durham can look to the future and know that at least some of their health care needs will be met. We continue to put this at the feet of the government, that the people of Durham region need medical investment, need medical care, need a hospital.

But hospitals, Speaker, are under pressure—part of the reason that we are looking to the future and need to see that that is moving ahead. The government is spending $1 billion less on health care and people are facing longer wait times, ER closures. The galleries were filled today with folks from Durham—not Durham region, Durham. There’s another Durham, and they’re losing their emergency room. They’re losing their hospital. They’re here wearing shirts saying, “Save the Durham Hospital.” It’s a reminder of what the folks from Minden went through. In their yellow shirts, they came here asking that their health care access be saved. It feels like déjà vu. It’s a year later, and it seems to be following the same script. So I would say that all communities across the province need to brace themselves, because this is not a government investing in a stronger future for health care. They’re actually pulling it away. And the folks who came from Durham are probably entering the next chapter of their lives, where they’re actually reaching for more health care.

So, Speaker, we’re seeing that hospitals are under pressure. Certainly, unfilled nursing vacancies, they’ve more than doubled since the start of the pandemic. I want to share from ONA. The Ontario Nurses’ Association had put out a piece called, “Ford’s Budget Promises Cannot Be Trusted to Improve Care in the Public System, Says Ontario Nurses’ Association.” I will quote from the ONA provincial president, who said, “There are several actions this government could and should have taken to address the health care crisis it has created. Instead, Ontarians will see their taxpayer money flowing to for-profit, private corporations as the public health care system falls further into disrepair.” She goes on to say, “This meagre one-year increase does not begin to address Ontario’s hospitals’ budgets, some of which are using lines of credits to pay off their debts.” That is a sad state of affairs, and that’s from ONA.

I will continue sharing voice from nurses, from RNAO. They have highlighted that the number of Ontario nursing vacancies unfilled for 90 days or more have more than doubled since the start of the pandemic. This number has remained around 10,000 since the last quarter of 2022. And they have recommendations.

They have said, “To address Ontario’s nursing crisis, barriers that stand in the way of retaining and recruiting nurses, and advancing their career pathways, must be removed. This includes action on compensation and workloads. Policymakers must also leverage opportunities to pave the way for a brighter future for nursing in Ontario. This is the only way to emerge from this crisis with a stronger nursing profession and health system.” And their specific recommendations, on “Barrier: Compensation,” they’ve said to:

“—increase compensation for Ontario nurses in all roles, domains and sectors so it is competitive with compensation in other jurisdictions, including the US;

“—address pay disparities among nurses working in different sectors, including home care and long-term care, by harmonizing their compensation upwards.”

Some of their other recommendations: regarding workloads, “ensure safe and healthy workloads for nurses by increasing nurse staffing and supports all across sectors”; provide mentorship supports; provide leadership training; increase career development opportunities; register internationally educated nurses; increase nursing education seats and funding; expand nursing education pathways; return nurses to the workforce; eliminate racism and discrimination. Those are a whole whack of very clear able-to-be-implemented recommendations. We don’t see in this budget what we would want to in terms of funding to be able to act on those recommendations. We should be listening to nurses.

Speaker, I have another article here, from CBC, called “Ontario May Not Meet Long-Term-Care Direct Care Target Due to Staff Shortages.” We just talked about the systemic shortage of nurses. But as of this year, there’s a need for 13,200 additional nurses and 37,700 PSWs in Ontario, and this is a document, referenced in this article, that was prepared for the long-term care minister. Sharleen Stewart has said, “Every time the government announces that they’re going to have all these thousands of new beds, we’re sitting on the sidelines, saying, ‘Who’s going to staff those homes?’” Referring to the PSWs, “Some of them, they don’t last six weeks,” says Stewart. “A lot of them go in and say the workloads are just too heavy, the conditions are unsafe, and they move on. So we’ve had reported close to 50% of new hires leave within the first between six months and definitely after a year. So it’s a continuous revolving door.”

This is from a document that the minister has in front of him. The government knows that they’re dealing with a shortage. They’re getting information. So where do we see in the budget that we can rectify these challenges, that we can address compensation and workload and training for PSWs? We don’t see it.

I want to take the opportunity to highlight a success story in our riding. During COVID, a lot of our communities had stories of folks who came up with creative solutions, who rallied to meet a changed need. One of those stories in our community is Mission United, which was housed at the Back Door Mission in downtown Oshawa. This is a partnership across many organizations to support street-involved community members. Especially during COVID it started, but it has continued. It has grown; it has changed; and it’s meeting the acute medical needs of those who would otherwise not have access to medical care. It is building relationships with them so that they can perhaps connect with a service partner in the community they otherwise wouldn’t have known about.

It is having success; it is also having challenges and struggle. I want to say that when I had flagged this issue, and I’ve done it a few times because their funding has almost run out now twice—I want to thank the Associate Minister of Mental Health and Addictions that when I raised this issue, he listened. He acted and actually came at my request to the Back Door Mission, to the Mission United project in Oshawa, saw for himself and also listened to community members, listened to the partners and, I’ll even say to his credit, came back another time unannounced so that he could see—just wanted to make sure that it was indeed what they said that they were. The government funded it so it can continue.

Then, we were in the same position again where the funding was about to run out. Again, we got that one-time funding. Remember, this is to meet the medical needs of street-involved community members.

So what I want to say is, after the back and forth and the advocacy and the understanding of the minister, I want to actually say thank you because there is funding now that is not year to year. It still is short term, but it allows us to figure out our next chapter. That’s not a small thing, but that is a perfect example of a community that came together and created a solution that the government recognized was a positive thing.

There are positive things happening across communities, and we hope that the government would indeed fund those as they come across them. Recognizing the opportunity to appreciate that, I’m going to say thank you, and I’m going to continue to do the work alongside the partner agencies with Back Door Mission, Mission United, CMHA. I want to thank Dr. Ho, Dr. Meunier. I want to thank Stephanie, the folks at Back Door Mission and the ED and just everyone at CMHA who have been working so hard to help very real people with very real needs.

I’m hoping to be able to continue to work with the Associate Minister of Mental Health and Addictions to address the needs that are not being met in our community for youth and youth mental health. I’ve been reaching out with community partners, and we’re hoping that that could be something, maybe in the next budget, to address mental health needs of youth in Oshawa, in our community.

While I’m talking about health care and kids, I had the opportunity to meet with a pediatrician, Karen Mandel, and Maureen Cuddy, who’s a neonatal nurse practitioner. They’ve been doing unbelievable work in our community, and they have put together a proposal, the KidsKare pediatric health team.

There is a very real need. It’s strange to imagine that babies aren’t getting the health care that they need. They’re so vulnerable. They’re brand spanking new, and there’s no doctor who will take them. Very few doctors will take on newborns. Numbers wise, there aren’t enough family doctors, and very few are setting up practice, because they can’t make a living. That’s another conversation.

What I’ll say specifically about this KidsKare pediatric health team—it was an application, a vision for children’s care in Durham region. The Ministry of Health had a call for proposals for new models of care—partnership models. They were due in June 2023. We’re coming up on a year. Some places have heard that they have received funding; others have heard nothing. We’ve heard nothing on this particular model. It’s a really impressive model. It has sort of loosely been working out of a pediatric clinic right now, but they’re looking for that funding to grow it to serve babies—well child visits, routine visits for health maintenance. It doesn’t need to be done by an MD; it could be a nurse practitioner, someone who can teach and care. We’ve got young parents with a brand new baby who don’t know what to do with this child. They’re seeing people who, for five or six months, with a new baby, have never seen a doctor. Imagine that for a moment. I have not been a new mom, but all of us can imagine that when you have a brand new baby, you want to ensure you’re doing the right thing. But when there aren’t doctors, when you cannot have those wellness checks, we’re missing a step.

So this is a plan, this was an application that’s before the government, and it’s just lost. I don’t know where it is. They haven’t heard anything—it was received, and that’s the only thing that they’ve got. This is a good idea—and if it’s not, if the government has a problem with some part of the application, work with them. We have need for babies, newborns, to be receiving medical care. They have got so many cases they’ve come across, as this pediatric clinic that is lucky enough to have a neonatal nurse practitioner who draws from years of experience, and they’re hearing that bad things are happening. So I’m hoping that someone in the ministry is watching this and can find that application and work with them, fund them.

Speaker, I want to talk a bit about homelessness.

Rent is so unbelievably high. In Oshawa, it’s really bad—it’s bad all over. We are hearing from tenants who cannot find affordable rent.

People who aren’t actually legally considered tenants but who are boarders will answer an ad to share a room—or answer an ad for a room in a home for maybe 800 bucks, and they get there and there’s another adult on the other side of the room, a stranger they are meant to live with. They’re not tenants. They’re not protected by the Landlord and Tenant Board, which is not being appropriately funded. The backlog is wild.

We have so many people who are struggling, and we don’t see the money in this budget to address our housing challenges. The budget admits it has never been more expensive to own a home. Young families and newcomers have been totally priced out of home ownership. And that’s going to continue to rise.

This government is not meeting their own goal of building 1.5 million homes. The government lumped long-term-care-home beds into their overall housing count to bump up the numbers, but even with that, they’re still falling short of the target.

The affordable housing commitments are shockingly low. They’ve just built 8% of the affordable homes that this government said that they’d build back in 2018—the number I have here is 1,187 homes in six years that have been built. That number might be a bit different today, but it’s not enough. People don’t have places to live.

There’s such a struggle for people, also, to have remedy if something goes sideways. I’m hearing from tenants, and I’m hearing from neighbourhood landlords.

Roxy, who I heard from in my riding, has a home that she rents, and she has had a really rocky journey with bad tenants, in this case—has been through the Landlord and Tenant Board. The tribunal has issued the eviction notice. But did you know that in Oshawa we only have one sheriff? So it has taken, my understanding is—not in that case, but in others—four months for that sheriff to be able to go and enforce that eviction. That’s a long time for a neighbourhood landlord who’s trying to make ends meet and who’s also trying to be a part of the solution to housing people—we’re talking basements; we’re talking a small home. These aren’t corporate landlords. These are our neighbours. But nothing is working for anyone with the LTB right now, and that is not okay, and the money is not in this budget to address this, to fix it.

Speaker, it’s no surprise to anyone here that I’ve run out of time. I have so much—I’d like another 20 minutes, if I may, on education. No? Perhaps during the questions and comments, my colleagues would be so kind as to ask me about education, because I have thoughts to share.

Before I wrap up, Speaker, I want to say that this is a budget that missed an opportunity. And the thing is, I do believe the government members read their emails and speak to people in their community, and they know that things are tough for real people, so we would have expected to see some real solutions that will have that impact on people’s day-to-day lives. It’s missing from this budget, so I’m encouraging the government to do better.

It’s now time for questions and answers.

I listened to the member and, like her, I’m interested in our most vulnerable. I think the member from Mississauga Centre talked earlier about our heartfelt interests in our most vulnerable, which are our seniors. They’re a crucial part of our communities. They’ve helped build this province.

One of the things that our government did was expand the Ontario Guaranteed Annual Income System program to provide more supports to seniors across this province. I was just wondering if the member would support that, given she does care about the seniors, who are our most vulnerable.

I would like to thank my friend from Oshawa for an excellent presentation on Bill 180.

I did want to ask, and I know the member herself is an educator as well: Within Bill 180, “school violence” does not appear once. The government says that they care about this, yet we only see mentions of cameras in hallways and vape detectors. Would the member like to comment with her background and her expertise in education about the things that are lacking in the budget for education?

I want to thank the member from Oshawa for her comments today. I know both she and I were teachers before we became MPPs, and the thing that actually got me into politics was that the former Conservative government was deliberately undermining and creating a crisis in our schools in order to bankrupt and privatize them.

This government is doing the same thing: They have underfunded our schools. There’s an inflationary funding cut of $1,500 per student. There are 5,000 fewer educators in our schools than there would have been if the government had kept up with the rate of inflation, than there were at the beginning, when they took power in 2018.

What is the member from Oshawa seeing in Durham schools? What is the impact of these cuts on the students in Durham?

Speaker, we all know the importance of building more homes across the province. I know especially young people are seized with the issue as they become concerned that the dream of home ownership will never be a reality. That is why I am so glad that the new measures in budget 2024, taken to provide new support, ensure we are hitting our goal of 1.5 million new homes by 2031.

My question to the member opposite: Will you support our government’s investment of $1.8 billion in infrastructure funding that we are providing to our municipalities and vote on the budget 2024?

Thank you to the member from Oshawa for her comments. I was very happy to see the investments in health care in this budget, and I think all of us share an interest in making sure we have the best health care available for our constituents. I know the member mentioned that she was pleased that the minister of mental health had worked with her to ensure that a community group was getting ongoing funding.

There are some great investments in the budget, including an extra $2 billion over three years for home and community care; a 4% increase in hospital funding; the first new medical school in Canada focused on training family doctors; and also the primary care investments—an additional $546 million for more primary care interdisciplinary teams.

The member said she expects this budget to do things to help people, and I wanted to ask: Don’t you think these are important investments to help people in your community and all of ours?

Thank you, and I do support our seniors. I personally have one of my own at home. I have a 103-year-old grandma who I’m glad is still spicy and snarky. She’s a wild little beast. But anyway, she’s very fortunate. She had been a homeowner. She is able to afford to live and she is getting very good care at a home in the region.

I worry, though, about seniors who are not able to enter care, who can’t afford to live. I worry about those seniors who are facing long-term care in private homes that don’t have the PSWs, don’t have the medical support, don’t have the space for them, with exorbitant fees. And I see the privatization of our long-term-care system and what it looks like when things go wrong—what it looks like even day to day—and that is heartbreaking.

So sure, small increases here and there that are going to put a couple more dollars in someone’s bank account, but that doesn’t put a roof over their head or it doesn’t help them sleep at night, knowing that they are safe with the care that they deserve.

Violence in our classrooms and in our schools are complicated matters. The thing is, children with complex needs require support and a plan for that support, and we’ve been hearing from educators who have talked about the need for smaller classes, the smaller class sizes that you need to have specialized for children who are struggling. We’re not seeing that.

The government isn’t actually talking about violence in a way that is strategy-based. We need adequate funding that meets the diverse needs of students. We need to reduce class sizes. They should be ensuring compliance with the Occupational Health and Safety Act as well. There are layers to this. This isn’t about vilifying anyone. This needs to be about keeping people safe, whether that’s an educator or the other students in the classroom, and there isn’t a plan in this budget or anywhere on those government benches.

We need to have the kind of funding that not just keeps up with inflation, but that meets the needs of what the hospitals are laying out for the government of what it is that they need. You can’t just have beds; you have to have people staff them. You have to have the care providers.

Just open the newspaper and you see that the doctors aren’t happy with you. Nurses aren’t happy with you. PSWs are leaving the field. So, obviously, something is missing. Big dollar numbers do not equal care. Fix it.

There isn’t the support for students. Small classes, where students can be more successful—those are being eliminated. The children who had that smaller class and the support that went with it are now going to find themselves thrown into the mainstream, where there isn’t the support in the classrooms, and what that looks like remains to be seen.

When you have fewer and fewer students who are going to be able to be successful, that doesn’t serve anyone, let alone the students.

The government has predicted that prices will rise, and you’ve asked if I support the government in meeting its goals. It’s not even meeting its own goals of building those 1.5 million homes. The government counted long-term-care beds into their new home numbers. Like, that’s kind of padding the numbers, and those numbers don’t even add up.

I will say that the funding in the budget for municipalities comes close, but it doesn’t fill in the full need of municipalities, right? The Conservatives have a history of holding back funding. We’ll watch to see whether they even get that. So I don’t support something I don’t believe.

It’s now time for further debate.

It’s always an honour to rise, today to debate Bill 180, the government’s budget bill. It’s interesting that we’re debating this bill on the same day the Financial Accountability Officer released their economic and budget outlook for Ontario.

When the FAO compared the 2016-17 to the 2022-23 period versus the current and projected periods for 2022-23 to 2028-29, they only found one area of spending where we’re seeing a significant increase in government spending. Do you know what that area was, Speaker? Interest on debt.

Health care, going down; education, going down; community and social services, slight, slight increase. The one area we saw a significant increase? Interest on debt, which to me just shows a government—maybe we haven’t had a government in Ontario’s history that has spent so much, increased the debt by so much, and actually gotten so little out of it. If we weren’t experiencing the various crises in the province of Ontario, you might understand the decrease and the increase in spending in all the other major categories.

Speaker, I want to talk about five areas of the budget where the government falls short, and I’m going to start with housing. Right now, in Ontario, tonight—on average, any night in this province—16,000 people will be unhoused in Ontario. The average market rent in the province of Ontario for a one-bedroom apartment is now $2,200. It takes the average young person 22 years to save for a down payment on a new home. We have a whole generation of young people wondering if they will ever own a home.

The government had an opportunity in the budget to actually legalize housing, legalize fourplexes, four storeys, as of right. They had a chance to legalize six- to 11-storey buildings along major transit and transit corridors, something builders tell me will cut their building time in half, just those two measures, key recommendations from the government’s own task force.

They had an opportunity to legalize commercial to residential transitions. They had an opportunity to legalize making it easy to build on underutilized strip malls and parking lots so we can quickly increase housing supply in places where we already have infrastructure built. But unfortunately, the government said, “Not in my backyard. We’re not going to legalize housing,” at a time when we’re in a housing crisis.

The government also had an opportunity to invest more in non-profit, co-op and permanent supportive housing. As a matter of fact, the Bank of Nova Scotia says that we need 250,000 additional non-profit and co-op deeply affordable homes built over the next decade. Do you know how many the government has built since they’ve taken office? Around 1,100—only 6% of the commitment they made to the federal government in 2018.

The reason this is so important—and I’ve seen this in my own community, and I am going to compliment the government on this one. We actually have succeeded in building permanent supportive housing in Guelph. We got to yes, and I want to take a moment, because this was highlighted in the budget, to thank the Associate Minister of Housing and the Minister of Health for saying yes to building and funding permanent supportive housing in Guelph. I was happy to see it highlighted in the budget. But why aren’t we seeing that across communities all across Ontario, where so many people are desperate for housing?

I want to turn for a moment to health care. I wanted to address health care because, right now, 2.3 million Ontarians do not have access to a family doctor. Hallway medicine is the norm in Ontario—even though this government said they were going to eliminate it when they first ran for election—and we have emergency departments closing across the province of Ontario.

I’ve been listening to the members in debate, and they’re saying, “Hey, we’re going to build more hospitals and long-term-care homes.” What I haven’t heard them talking about is who’s actually going to staff any of these hospitals, long-term-care homes and primary care offices, especially at a time when the projection is that over the next decade, we’re going to be short 33,200 nurses and 50,853 personal support workers. There wasn’t anything in the budget about addressing these staffing shortages that will be critical to making sure that health care services are available to the people of Ontario when and where they need it.

I want to shift to education now. You know what the biggest cut in the budget was? Post-secondary education—critical to our economic well-being, to educating the workers of the future. What’s so surprising about seeing that cut in the budget was, prior to the budget, the government said, “Hey, we’re going to invest $1.3 billion in post-secondary education,” which was less than half of what their own blue-ribbon panel said. The government failed to address the fact that we’re going to have less international students coming, which is going to cost our post-secondary education sector $1.8 billion, which actually led to a real cut in the government’s budget on post-secondary education.

On top of that, we’re dealing with a teachers’ shortage in our elementary and secondary education. As a matter of fact, just yesterday, the Elementary Teachers’ Federation of Ontario released a report on the alarming increase in violence in our schools due to the shortage of adults in the schools teaching our children. As a matter of fact, a third of secondary schools in Ontario face daily teacher shortages—not addressed in the budget.

The next area I want to talk about in the budget is poverty. There are 16,000 people unhoused on any given night in Ontario and 717,000 people living in legislated poverty in the province of Ontario, many of those people with disabilities. It’s shameful in a province that is as wealthy as Ontario, especially when we know that poverty costs this province $33 billion a year. The government had an opportunity to increase ODSP and OW rates to a level that would bring people above the poverty line. That was not addressed in the budget.

I want to close by talking about the climate crisis, because the government had an opportunity in this budget to bring forward a climate affordability plan to help us reduce climate pollution and make life more affordable for the people of Ontario. One way they could have done that was to make heat pumps affordable for people. We know that heat pumps save people 13% on their heating and cooling bills versus folks with gas furnaces, though today, unfortunately, the government passed a bill imposing those expensive gas furnaces onto new homebuyers. PEI offers free heat pumps for people who make under $100,000 a year to help them be able to afford increases in energy costs in their homes.

The government could have also had money in this budget to expand EV charging stations across the province and to bring back EV rebates so people in this province can afford to drive the electric vehicles we want to build in Ontario. I will say, yes, we’re making some progress on building electric vehicles in this province, and we should all celebrate that, but you know what? It would be nice if Ontarians could actually afford to drive those electric vehicles.

It would also be nice if we would open up investment opportunities in renewable energy, low-cost wind and solar, because the $1.88 trillion invested in the green energy transition, half of it to wind and solar—