Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I’m delighted to speak and to share my time with my colleagues the member from Simcoe–Grey, the member from Etobicoke–Lakeshore, the member from Sarnia–Lambton, and the Attorney General of Ontario.

Monsieur le Président, je suis fier de soutenir nos policiers et nos premiers intervenants et tous ceux qui assurent la sécurité de l’Ontario tous les jours. Ce sont des gens formidables qui nous protègent au quotidien.

Je prends mon rôle sérieusement. C’est un honneur d’assurer la sécurité de notre province, parce que tous ont le droit de se sentir en sécurité chez eux et dans leur collectivité. Chaque personne mérite d’être traitée avec dignité et respect.

Mr. Speaker, it’s a great honour to rise here today and to also acknowledge the president of the PAO, the Police Association of Ontario, my friend Mark Baxter. The associations in Ontario know—Mark and his colleagues—that our government is with you every step of the way.

The safety of our communities is everything. Our growth and prosperity depends on peace and stability. As I’ve said before in this House, and I’ll say it again, public safety means having a place to raise our children, to wake them up from their bedrooms in the morning, to take them to school—it means a place that we can work; it means a place that we can take them to the parks at the end of their school day, and to be with our wives and our partners when we take walks on the street; it means to have a place to play and a place to pray.

Our communities are growing faster than ever before. We know that because we spoke about the need to build houses in Ontario and to build infrastructure in Ontario. As we build our housing and our hospitals and our schools across Ontario, and as we expand our communities, we need to make sure that their policing needs are met. Because the unfortunate truth is, the selfish actions of criminals continue to undermine what we believe is ours: a right to live safely in our communities. Our government recognizes that, now more than ever, public safety matters. That is why, under the leadership of Premier Ford, we have made public safety our top priority.

The reason we introduced Bill 102 is because we have to acknowledge that the sizes of our communities have changed. Technology has changed. There are a lot of things that change. Nothing remains stagnant. This bill, Bill 102, takes us current to where we need to be today. It includes elements, as I will speak to in my remarks, to address the police recruitment, to move us that step closer to getting the Community Safety and Policing Act, the CSPA, in place—an act that will replace a piece of legislation that is over 30 years old, the PSA.

That is why it is my pleasure to rise and to participate in third reading, together with my colleagues, of the Strengthening Safety and Modernizing Justice Act. It is a critical piece of legislation. It’s a major step in advancing public safety, and it delivers on our promise that we always said to Ontarians, that public safety matters. It helps address challenges and police recruitment by presenting a clear path for more people to consider a career in policing. I have to say, this was one pillar of a great announcement that we made a couple of months back, where we’re waiving the obstacles and the barriers for people to go to the Ontario Police College. This is important. We believe that we will have, next year, about 2,000 new recruits graduating each year from the Ontario Police College. It’s an amazing place. I have seen for myself. The member from Chatham-Kent–Leamington is a graduate and served in the Ontario Provincial Police. He was with me, actually, at one of the marches past. You see the promise in a person’s eyes when they graduate and they go to serve their communities, their First Nations communities, the Franco-Ontarian communities, the municipal police services. It’s absolutely unbelievable.

These amendments in our legislation will also help strengthen the protection for animals and modernize different parts of our public safety.

I want to give a shout-out to our incredible animal welfare inspectors. Why? Because I went to see for myself, just a couple of weeks ago, when they were doing part of their training in Brantford—I saw 37 new animal welfare inspectors who looked like Ontario.

I’m so proud of our diversity, whether it’s in policing, whether it’s in firefighting, whether it’s in corrections, whether it’s in probation and parole, whether it’s in animal welfare, or whether it’s in the telecommunicators, who are having a conference today. I always want to shout out to those amazing 911 call operators. I want to shout out to the support staff who keep everything else functioning.

This is important because this piece of legislation, in so many ways, catches the regulations that we need to catch up with. The amendments focus on oversight and governance and labour arbitration and police recognition and education.

At the same time, we want to make public safety an attractive career choice for a new generation of civic-minded Ontarians. Police services across Canada specifically had struggled to hire new recruits, and there were different reasons for it, but our government stepped up to the plate. I remember a conversation I had with the Premier himself and we talked about what we can do to plan for the future. As our province grows by over a million people in the next number of years—we know that because we know how many homes we need for them to live in—we need so many more people in public safety to keep us safe. This is exactly why this bill will help, amongst other things, address the need to find more recruits so that they can come and protect Ontario and have a career like Mark Baxter—a career of meaning, a career of satisfaction.

Our government treats the care of our animal welfare services with enormous concern. That’s why—and I know my colleague from Etobicoke–Lakeshore shares in this even more, perhaps, than any one of us—the Provincial Animal Welfare Services Act, 2019, which came into force in January 2020, has set a standard of care for animals and prohibitions against causing or permitting distress to animals. I want to thank her for her leadership in this. What Bill 102 does is take it to the next level. It sends a message to people that if anybody is thinking about causing harm to their animals, they had better think twice. The proposed Strengthening Safety and Modernizing Justice Act will improve cost recovery and close the gaps specifically on animal welfare—and this is important.

I mentioned in my kick-off speech in second reading that under regulation 180 of the existing Coroners Act, the Office of the Chief Coroner and the Ontario Forensic Pathology Service—by the way, proudly located their head offices in my riding of York Centre. They have the authority to retain and store tissue samples and body fluid obtained during a post-mortem examination. The regulation identifies the types of specimens that can be stored and the length of time that they can be retained. But the act did not contemplate the retention of materials for purposes beyond the needs of a coroner’s investigation, like DNA, something that is part of—to understand DNA today is understanding it in a whole new world. I understand this just a little bit, because in my previous business iteration, before I got elected, I started a company that helped people identity drug interactions that may occur over the course of their lives. DNA provides us with a glimpse into the future, and it solves mysteries that were never before able to be solved. I look back on the announcements just from genetic genealogy, on what that has done, just as of recently, in Moosonee and in other cities—in the province of Quebec, in other jurisdictions where they’re solving 40- and 50-year-old murder crimes as a result of the DNA technology today. So the proposed amendments will deliver this added tool to prevent further deaths now and into the future by the use of it.

Finally, there is the Fire Protection and Prevention Act, 1997. This act established the legislative framework for the delivery of fire protection, but there were gaps in this old piece of legislation, and there were inefficiencies. Bill 102 will close those gaps and streamline decision-making at both the Office of the Fire Marshal and the Fire Safety Commission.

Making the Community Safety and Policing Act a reality, attracting new recruits, and strengthening and modernizing Ontario’s public safety framework is why this is important. This brings us one step closer. Our government is eager to move forward and to proclaim and set the date for enactment.

Again, I want to thank the associations and all of our stakeholders who have worked with us every step of the way. Their concerns matter, and we have listened, and I am encouraged that in the months ahead as we complete the final regulations that need to be done in order for us to move to move forward, we will see that this is something that will be a reality.

Nothing has been as impactful to me as travelling throughout Ontario and visiting the fire and the correction and the police and the communications services in people’s ridings. It has been an honour of a lifetime.

One of the first tours I went to last summer was visiting the member’s riding in Sarnia–Lambton—my great friend—and I saw for myself something that we take for granted: that if we don’t treat our security by having this 360 perspective on it, we don’t know. In many respects, it’s not our fault because we live our lives, as I’ve said before, in a narrow focus of wanting to be safe but not understanding the roles that people do to keep us safe.

When I went with the member from Sarnia–Lambton to the St. Clair River, it was the first time in my tenure as Solicitor General that I saw just how close the other side is, and I became fascinated by the need to learn more. My great friend from Sarnia–Lambton and the member from Etobicoke–Lakeshore helped educate me on the needs of public safety not only in their communities, but in their roles as parliamentary assistants to the Solicitor General. They knew, and I knew, that by saying to the public in Ontario that our safety matters, the public will respond by saying, “We agree with you.”

We always have to have the backs of everyone who keeps us safe. Last week, I think it was the 91st AGM of the Police Association of Ontario, and the Premier and I were there. It was important for us to be there, because it also was a time that we had to reflect on the times that find us, on the people we lost just last week—a beautiful constable in Ontario; we lost Steven. Before Steven, we lost Eric, Andrew, Morgan, Devon, and Greg, and the list unfortunately has kept growing. But it won’t define who we are. It won’t take away from the resolve we have to say that our communities mean everything; our public safety means everything. Never before in my generation have we had such a vocal government that has raised public safety to the forefront, that can look somebody in the eye and say, “We will always have the backs of everyone who keeps us safe”—because we need to have public safety, because the rule of law must matter and our public safety must matter.

And for those who wish us ill, as I like to say, who can’t agree that we have a right to live in our communities, however we choose and whoever we want to be with, we have a message for them: We will call you out.

That’s why, as we debate third reading of Bill 102, change is needed. This bill takes us one step closer. It addresses the changes and regulations we need to do to bring us forward, and it acknowledges what everybody knows: that when we have a safe community, we have absolutely everything.

I said at the funeral of Sergeant Eric Mueller of the OPP: « En tant que solliciteur général, je continuerai à travailler chaque jour pour assurer le bien-être de nos policiers et nos premiers intervenants. Pour le premier ministre de l’Ontario et pour moi, c’est personnel. » It really is. It’s an honour of a lifetime to work as hard as I can, day and night, for Ontario’s safety, and we won’t stop. Our commitment to public safety is absolute and constant.

I want to thank my friend from Simcoe–Grey for the question.

In Ontario, we are investing in the latest technology and using cutting-edge techniques to keep Ontario safe. We are a province of innovation and progress, and we’re proud of this.

Just last week, the Ontario Provincial Police, with the help of state-of-the-art genetic-based technology, were able to close the 1980 murder case of Micheline St. Amour. This science is transformational. I want to recognize retired Detective Superintendent Dave Truax and retired Detective Constable Mike Hickey for their work in solving this homicide. Now Micheline’s family can finally have some peace.

Monsieur le Président, rien pour moi, en tant que solliciteur général, n’est plus important que la sécurité de notre province. Pour le premier ministre de l’Ontario et pour moi, c’est personnel.