Thank you very much to my colleague from Ottawa Centre for his very thoughtful remarks this morning, which I hope the government will take to heart.

I have some concerns about the government’s larger approach to the issue of violence in society, particularly as it affects the youngest members of society, who are seeing a very concerning increase in violence in our schools. We’re seeing the same tactics from the government of empty words that aren’t being matched by action. Parents, educators, education workers are all calling for an increase in mental health funding for our students, yet the government is giving less than a quarter per child per day, after a three-year pandemic.

Last week, when the member for London North Centre asked the Minister of Education why he’s not responding to these requests for increased funding, the minister responded by speaking about bail reform, when we are talking about young kids who are experiencing violence in their schools, who just need supports with their mental health.

Does the member from Ottawa Centre not agree that it would be much wiser to address the root causes of violence in our schools with increased funding for mental health and more supports and workers around our kids?

I’m pleased to rise to this motion, put forward today by the leader of His Majesty’s loyal opposition, because this is such an important motion.

Our children have really borne the brunt of the past few years. They had three years of disrupted schooling in which this government refused at every turn to make it easier on our children. They didn’t want to invest in the smaller class sizes that would have allowed our schools to stay open safely, so our kids spent more time out of school than any other jurisdiction in North America. They gave COVID tests to private schools but left our publicly funded schools at the back of the line to access testing that would have allowed schools to avoid outbreaks and stay open. They wrote cheques to parents that covered, at best, an hour or two of tutoring instead of hiring more teachers and education workers to provide supports to all children in the classroom. Their total mental health funding works out to less than a quarter per child, per day, when our children are in crisis.

We all recognize that the pandemic required some extraordinary measures to protect kids, but this government refused to fully fund those measures, even though they received billions of dollars in COVID support funding from the federal government. They left school boards to pay out of their own pockets for those measures. We know from the financial statements of school boards last year that the government paid less than half of COVID-related operating expenses in Ontario. The year before that, at the height of the pandemic, the government still left school boards to pay 20% of COVID-related operating expenses.

Because of this situation, the Toronto District School Board had to pay $70 million out of their own reserves, and now they’re facing a deficit of $64 million for next year, with no reserves left to cover it. The Toronto Catholic District School Board had to pay $60 million out of their reserves, and now they’re facing a deficit of $25 million for next year. The Ottawa-Carleton District School Board paid $10 million out of reserves and are now looking at having to make cuts of somewhere between $9 million and $39 million next year.

It is unbelievable to me, as a parent, that the government could have been so callous as to sit on millions of dollars rather than investing in protections and supports for our kids at a really critical moment.

And now, while the minister has been promising a normal, stable school year and talking about catching up on test scores, the government is still refusing to provide the funding that our schools need.

The minister likes to claim that he’s providing historic funding levels, but the only thing historic about this government’s funding is the government’s failure to actually get promised money out the door. The reality is that the government is providing $2.5 billion less in funding than they would have if education funding had just kept pace with inflation over the past five years—and that’s just to maintain the system; that’s not to provide any additional supports to kids who have been hit hard for the past three years. The minister can’t even get the money he has committed out the door. The government is underspending its education budget by $432 million this year alone, and so, instead of getting more supports, like they deserve, our children are going into next year with even fewer supports. We already have far too many kids who have experienced learning loss in crowded classrooms, where they can’t get the help they need because the teacher is trying to teach too many kids at once who are all over the map in terms of their learning level and needs.

Laura Neville is just one of many parents in Ottawa West–Nepean who have reached out to me about class sizes. Her son attends D. Roy Kennedy Public School, where his grade 6 class is now up to 35 students. Parents are receiving regular updates at D. Roy Kennedy informing them that students are being added to classes that are already overcrowded. The parents all really appreciate the grade 6 teacher, Mrs. Bowker, but they recognize that Mrs. Bowker is being put in an impossible position, trying to support 35 students who are in very different places in their learning and abilities. The students are being forced to learn in a classroom that is busy, noisy and cramped, because it wasn’t built for 35 students. In fact, the room is too small for 35 desks, so students are crammed together at small tables just to be able to physically fit in the room. Kids with IEPs can’t get the support they need—because how many kids can you provide individualized support to when you have that may children in one classroom?

Our kids’ mental health is really struggling too. I’m sure there’s not a parent in Ontario who is not feeling this. I have three kids, and all three have needed mental health support in the past few years, which has given us an experience of what the system is like. In December, we were referred to the school social worker for one of my children. That meeting finally happened at the beginning of March, and it was a meeting basically to tell us that there are no supports available through the school and we’re on our own to find some.

When I spoke to the Ontario Association of Social Workers earlier this month, they told me that social workers with their own practice are getting heartbreaking requests every single week for young children who are depressed, anxious, sad, not engaging normally in school, and their parents are desperate for help because they are being left totally on their own to find support. These social workers don’t have room to take on new clients because of the high level of demand. They say that putting supports in schools would be a more effective way of addressing the demand because they’d be able to intervene earlier and offer group supports.

According to a recent report from People for Education, 59% of students in Ontario report being depressed about the future; 91% of principals said their schools need mental health support, but less than one in 10 schools has access to a regularly scheduled mental health professional. Half of schools have no mental health resources at all. That’s how badly this government is shortchanging our kids. And yet, the Minister of Health wants us to believe that providing less than a quarter a day per child after this incredibly disruptive global pandemic is somehow a major achievement worthy of a gold star. Parents aren’t falling for it. They are giving this government’s record a big red F.

The government is also failing kids with accessibility needs. There aren’t enough EAs to support every kid who needs one. Too many kids are being told they can’t come to school because there’s no one there to help them. Too many parents are sitting outside their child’s school to provide help because there’s no EA available. Too many EAs are running down the hall with walkie-talkies trying to determine which of the five children they are expected to support needs them the most right now. And in the middle of this situation, the government is transitioning the autism legacy kids into schools without a single dollar of additional support—thousands of kids with accessibility needs joining our schools, and no additional money for EAs or for special class placements. This government is setting these kids up to fail, just like it is already failing the many children with disabilities already in our schools.

This is the inevitable outcome of the government’s underfunding. It means cuts to supports instead of more support. It means fewer teachers and larger class sizes. It means fewer EAs, fewer child and youth workers. It means fewer safety monitors in schools at a moment when violence is increasing because of the mental health crisis and because of staffing shortages.

We don’t know yet what all the cuts will be, but we already know some of the damage this government is doing to our students next year. There will be 522 positions lost at the Toronto District School Board, including 65 teachers, 35 special education workers, 35 child and youth workers, and 40 school-based safety monitors. The Toronto Catholic District School Board is looking at the loss of 120 positions. The Ottawa-Carleton District School Board, which will be discussing academic staff positions tomorrow night, is facing the loss of many of its support teacher positions, who provide assistance to students who are struggling.

The minister says he wants to address reading and math competency. Well, students in Ottawa are losing seven literacy and numeracy support teachers and coaches, along with another six learning support teachers. Blind, deaf, low-vision and hard-of-hearing students are losing a teacher.

CUPE is warning that across the province, we are about to lose 7,000 education workers supporting our kids day in and day out.

What’s frustrating is that all of these cuts are avoidable. The mental health crisis is solvable. We can provide our children with the supports they need. We can give them smaller class sizes.

We need the government to reimburse school boards for their COVID-related expenses, and we need them to provide adequate and stable funding so that schools can provide children the supports they need, delivered in the classroom by caring adults.

Nous voyons les effets du sous-financement systématique de notre système d’éducation par ce gouvernement : les coupures que les conseils scolaires doivent mettre en place à un moment où nos enfants ont besoin de plus de soutien, le manque d’aide pour la santé mentale, la pénurie des soutiens pour des enfants qui ont des besoins d’accessibilité. Mais les solutions existent. Il faut que le gouvernement rembourse les conseils scolaires pour leurs dépenses liées à la COVID-19 et que le gouvernement donne un financement adéquat et stable à notre système d’éducation.

I hope the government will consider who they are harming with their ideological agenda and will provide the necessary funding so that our kids can finally get the support they need.

It’s with regret today that I rise to speak to Bill 60, the government’s plan to introduce two-tier health care in Ontario. Public health care is a key component of our identity in Canada. Unlike our neighbours to the south, we made a decision that we weren’t going to let wealth determine people’s access to vital health care. We created a public medicare system that ensures everyone is able to get the health care they need, when they need it, without any question of how much money they have. People don’t have to go deeply into debt or sell off homes or businesses just because a family member got sick. People without money don’t need to worry that people with more money are going to come along and bump them out of the way. Access to health care is based on the urgency of your condition instead of your bank account.

Conservatives have never liked this system. They’ve always hated the fact that you can’t buy your way to the front of the line, and we know there have always been many people lobbying them, salivating over the opportunity to make a lot of money off of people in need. So, over the past four years, they’ve been hard at work generating a crisis.

Admittedly, the past Liberal government wasn’t great at managing health care either. They cut and underfunded until people were being treated in hallways—hallway medicine, everyone called it. But, under this Premier, we’ve gone from hallway medicine to no medicine. Emergency rooms are closed, so people can’t even get into the hallways. We’ve got beds and operating rooms that are empty despite the demand for health care, the long wait-lists, because we don’t have nurses and health care workers to staff them.

I guess it’s “mission accomplished” for the Premier and for the private, for-profit health care industry that has been lobbying him so hard for the past few years. Now that he has made the crisis so bad that nurses are leaving the profession in droves, now that people are waiting 12 hours at the emergency room, now that the wait-lists for surgeries are so long, the Premier has decided that this is the moment to really stick the knife in public health care and introduce two-tier health care in Ontario.

Make no mistake: This is deliberate. This government has set up public health care to fail so they could replace it with a for-profit model to line the pockets of their wealthy friends. And it is Ontarians—as always, with this government—that will pay the price, that will have to pull out their credit cards to pay for health care at these private facilities, that will wait even longer for health care in our public system as they bleed even more health care workers out of our hospitals, that will have to pay the taxes that are going into the pockets of private shareholders instead of to strengthening and expanding our public health care system.

This is part of a pattern with this government. Whether it’s the development of the greenbelt, the refusal to invest in public education or the destruction of public health care, we see this government constantly make decisions that don’t help people with the very real challenges that they face every day but somehow manage to make a bunch of friends and lobbyists around the Premier a lot of money.

We’ve seen this pattern with health care throughout this government’s time in office and throughout the pandemic. They took away public oversight of home care, leaving people vulnerable to the whims of for-profit companies. They granted licences to for-profit long-term-care providers that had hugely disproportionate death rates and they took away the rights of family members to sue. They contracted out PCR COVID testing to for-profit companies, leading to Ontarians having to pay $200 out of pocket to be tested because publicly accessible tests were so tightly rationed—unless you happened to attend a private school. And they’ve been expanding private clinics.

This most recent bill is not the innovative, bold or creative solution to surgical backlogs the health minister has claimed it is. It is the oldest trick in this government’s book: Put further pressure on an already struggling sector and offer privatization as the only way out.

If this government really wanted to address the current concerns in the health care sector, they would actually listen to nurses and health care workers about why they are leaving the health care sector and stop their appeal to try to save Bill 124, a bill that the courts found unconstitutional, a bill that nurses and health care workers have told this government they found profoundly disrespectful—humiliating, even—at a moment when they were working so incredibly hard throughout the pandemic, with their wages capped well below the rate of inflation.

I was at the pre-budget hearing in Ottawa, where nurses said that they were leaving the profession because of Bill 124 and that they found Bill 124 profoundly humiliating. Instead of listening to them, government members of the committee got into arguments with them. Nurses were literally telling them, “We’re leaving because of Bill 124,” and the government was saying, “No, that’s definitely not it.” How profoundly disrespectful is that?

What’s even more disrespectful is that government members tried to claim that it wasn’t Bill 124 that’s causing the shortage, because other jurisdictions also have a shortage of health care workers. Well, if other jurisdictions also have a shortage of health care workers, then how foolish is it to cap the wages of our health care workers and drive them away when there are job opportunities in other provinces?

If the government actually wanted to improve health care, they would focus on recruiting, retaining and returning nurses to our health care system—and personal support workers and other health care workers—providing them with better pay, better working conditions and the respect they deserve.

The government could work on licensing tens of thousands of internationally educated nurses and doctors already in Ontario, who are waiting years and paying thousands to have their credentials certified. The government could also fund hospitals across the province so that they have enough staff on every shift and on every ward, so that rooms don’t sit empty due to understaffing.

Make no mistake: The bottleneck for the surgical wait-list in Ontario is not due to a lack of operating space, it is due to a lack of staff for these operating rooms. Operating rooms are sitting empty because hospitals don’t have the resources to staff the ORs they already have. And now this government is trying to create a parallel system which will pull more staff out of our publicly funded system.

This move is also going to cost our health care system more. Services in private clinics receive more money than our public hospitals do for the same service, meaning that when private facilities perform surgeries, Ontario tax dollars will be going right into the pockets of shareholders that have invested in these facilities. The government’s actions will lead to investors making large profits off the backs of sick Ontarians.

Meanwhile, our hospitals depend on economies of scale to be able to fund more complex surgeries. So when we pull services out of the hospital, we leave the hospital trying to provide the more complex surgeries and the people with complications requiring longer surgeries, but we’re paying the hospitals less money than the private facilities are getting for simple surgeries, so we’re actually making it harder for the hospitals to pay the cost of these surgeries.

And while these clinics are able to charge our health care system more for the services they provide, they can also charge extra fees directly to the patients who are being sent there by this government. These fees take the form of consulting fees or membership fees that patients are made to cover in order to receive the health care they desperately need. We also know that many patients are upsold by doctors keen to make a profit.

But it’s not just people who are getting surgeries or procedures at private clinics who will be paying a price for this government’s policies; patients using the public system will also pay a price. They’re already paying a price now for Bill 124, with 12-hour wait times or longer at emergency rooms.

The Ottawa Hospital has had many times over the past year where they have been short as many as 800 nurses. They’ve had to get creative, and these absences are filled with unregulated, unlicensed care providers, not trained, professional registered nurses. In January, the Ottawa Hospital lost more nurses than they were able to recruit. While this is happening, this government has chosen to suppress nurses’ wages, ignore their concerns and undervalue their profession, while people are working in unbelievable conditions.

Here’s why this really matters, Speaker: There’s not a magical pool of nurses and health care workers that we just haven’t tapped yet who are suddenly going to appear and fill these positions in private health care facilities. These nurses and health care workers are going to come from our public system. And when we’re capping their wages in the public system, when we are putting them into unsustainable and dangerous working conditions, when nurses are already leaving to work at Costco because it’s less stressful, then why wouldn’t they leave to take a job at a private facility that only works weekdays from 9 to 5 and doesn’t have a wage cap?

This move is only going to pull more nurses and health care workers out of our system, leaving public health care in an even more precarious state, lengthening wait times for everyone, and the minister’s toothless staffing plan requirement isn’t going to address that, as we’ve already seen at the Riverside hospital in Ottawa, because that’s not a magic wand that can miraculously create more health care workers.

Ontario’s public health care system needs fixing. It absolutely needs fixing, but by allowing for-profit companies to offer health care services that were originally done by the public sector, this government is instead ensuring that sooner or later, those with more money will have access to better health care faster than other Ontarians, and this is unacceptable.

And so, Speaker, here we see another pattern emerging: Ontario residents are demanding better, health care workers are demanding better, but instead of listening to them, working with them and investing in the system, the government is enriching some private, for-profit corporations that lobbied really hard. Shame on them.