It’s wonderful to rise to talk about some important investments that our government is making, through our recent provincial budget, across Ontario, whether it’s the $1.8 billion for housing-enabling infrastructure, critical infrastructure to get more homes built across our province, whether it’s the $1.2 billion in the Building Faster Fund; $200 million for recreational facilities over the next 10 years; $15 billion to build new schools, doubling the amount of funding for capital this year in our provincial budget for our schools; and, of course, $50 billion over the next 10 years for hospitals across this province, from Toronto to Windsor, to the north and to Ottawa. We’re investing in Ontario, investing in the people in Ontario.

I know it was important to see the $50 million for stabilization of health care capacity in our northern and rural communities. It was also great to hear that we’re going to make the clinical extern program permanent. I know this is very important to our rural hospitals.

It was also great to see our government continue to build on our historic investments in primary care. Over $500 million will be invested to expand primary care across Ontario to ensure more people can get care closer to home.

Unfortunately, all the members of the opposition voted against the provincial government. They voted against primary care expansion. They voted against victim quick response programs. It is shameful.

We will continue to stand with the people of Ontario.

It is a pleasure to rise today to highlight some recent announcements I was able to make on behalf of the Minister of Health in my riding of Perth–Wellington. Last month I was pleased to announce not one but two local family health teams would be receiving funding to expand primary care in our rural communities.

The Minto–Mapleton Family Health Team will receive over $560,000 to hire two additional nurse practitioners, an RPN and a medical receptionist. This funding will ensure an additional 1,600 residents can access primary care closer to home.

The Listowel–Wingham family health team will receive over $822,000 to expand primary care to serve an additional 2,000 residents.

Speaker, it truly was a historic day for our rural public health care sector. The province-wide investment of $90 million represents the first expansion of primary care in Ontario’s history, ever. It is disappointing the previous Liberal government, supported by the NDP, had 15 years to expand primary care in rural Ontario, and they chose not to, Speaker. In fact, the current Liberal members and the current NDP members voted against our historic expansion.

Despite these obstacles the previous Liberal government put in place, we are rebuilding our public health care sector. We’re expanding medical school spots and nurse practitioner spots. We expanded the clinical extern program. Speaker, our government will continue to expand primary care.

Thank you to the member opposite for the important question—a very important question. As we all know, especially coming out of the pandemic, mental health is more of a need and a priority as well. Under the Minister of Education, as I mentioned earlier in the debate, we’ve increased to historic levels of mental health funding. It also is a government-wide approach. I know that the Associate Minister of Mental Health and Addictions and the Minister of Health herself are looking at mental health, those aspects, within our school system. I know in some areas of the province the family health teams will go into the schools with a mental health practitioner they may have on their team to ensure that there is that oversight and that support within our larger health care system and within the community.

Speaker, our government is focused on getting schools built and updated. Some $15 billion over 10 years, as I mentioned earlier in the debate, for school capital development. One of the first things going into my role as PA to education after the last election was learning how much—I didn’t realize, as a layman—education oversees the real estate portfolio it oversees.

And it’s getting more schools built, which is a change from the previous Liberal government, and ensuring that those schools are built quickly as well and ensuring that those resources are used to the maximum efficiency.

Speaker, I find it very rich from the members opposite, talking about big government when that party supports, essentially, communism.

Thank you to my colleague from Waterloo for her remarks on the budget. I know she spoke a lot about housing. I find it kind of perplexing. As the minister mentioned this morning in question period: over 27,000 new housing starts in 2023 and a 16% increase from last year, which was a historic year, as well, Speaker, so it looks really promising for 2023 so far. And she mentioned the Homelessness Prevention Program allocations. Our government made some changes around that. It was a new funding allocation model which was based on the Auditor General’s report from 2021, the value-for-money audit. The member for Waterloo mentioned the Auditor General many times.

Does the member for Waterloo support the Auditor General and her recommendations around that funding formula?

It’s my pleasure to rise today to highlight some important health care investments our government is making in my riding of Perth–Wellington. Recently, I announced, on behalf of Minister Jones, that our government is supporting our doctors working after hours in our hospitals through the Hospital On-Call Coverage Program. Stratford General Hospital will be receiving more than $2.3 million. Groves Memorial hospital will be receiving $1.2 million under the program.

In December, I was pleased to announce that Palmerston and District Hospital was approved for new MRI operating funding which totals over $1 million. Many in my rural communities currently travel to large urban centres for critical MRI services. This funding will ensure my constituents can access care closer to home in a more timely fashion.

There’s more, Speaker. The Minister of Health has provided Perth County Paramedic Services with over $187,000 to help provide wraparound supports through its mobile integrated health team. This funding is ensuring people in my riding are getting the right care in the right place.

There’s still more, Speaker. Last spring, our government launched the Learn and Stay program. As members know, this program covers the cost of tuition, books and other educational expenses for nurses in exchange for them practising in rural and northern communities. I’m pleased to share this program has helped the Huron Perth Healthcare Alliance recruit and retain 16 new nurses. This is great news.

There’s more work to be done, but I am proud to be part of a government that is building a strong rural health care system.

I’m getting to the best part, member from Brampton North.

These investments include an additional $683 million in this budget we just passed for this year’s funding to school boards, for a total of $26.6 billion. I want to compare this to the NDP-backed Liberal government just a few short years ago, Speaker. Our Progressive Conservative government and this Premier are investing more than $2.7 billion this year compared to the final year of the last previous Liberal government. This clearly demonstrates our commitment to improving student success, in contrast to the failed policies and practices of the previous NDP-backed Liberal government. These investments will go directly into our children’s classrooms to ensure they receive the top-quality education they deserve and the high standard of learning parents rightly demand.

What our students learn in the classroom is directly correlated to their future success. As such, we must continue to update Ontario’s various curricula, guaranteeing the instruction of necessary life and job skills to support a family and one day realize the dream of home ownership, and everything else included in the Canadian dream.

The previous Liberal government failed at nearly every turn to ensure our children’s studies kept up with the changing times. Neglected by the previous Liberal government, Ontario schools failed to address a rapidly changing world. I’ll provide an example, Speaker: Ontario’s elementary science and technology curriculum, which this government, under Minister Lecce, swiftly modernized, was last updated in 2007, the year Facebook and Twitter came online. This is unacceptable, and our government has made it a priority to constantly look for new ways to update and modernize curricula in ways that best work for students.

Another example includes Ontario’s grade 9 math curriculum, which the Liberals neglected to update since 2008, the same year the iPhone 3G was introduced. This neglect was shameful, and that’s partly why, in 2018 and again in 2022, the people of Ontario sent the Ontario Liberal Party to be independent members on the opposite benches in record-low numbers, and elected this party and this Premier, not once but twice, with a greater majority. Speaker, in doing so, the people of Ontario have given our government a renewed mandate to ensure student success is well-funded and looked after, and, most importantly, that students remain in class.

Ontario’s students deserve to learn in an environment that best equips them for the future. Our schools will finally include financial literacy, something the opposition previously neglected. For the first time, Ontario students will learn about mortgages, interest payments and the impacts of debt accumulation. These are foundational aspects of sound fiscal management which will help them succeed in life.

Students in Ontario and, indeed, across this nation and the western world have experienced declines in math. This cannot be understated, and we will not allow it to be so. We are investing $25 million in a new skills-focused curriculum that will ensure every board has a math specialist available with a special focus on early intervention. This government is also fighting the unions in court to ensure educators meet grade 9 math standards. Our students deserve no less than this common-sense requirement for education, and our government will keep taking every step necessary to ensure teachers are well-equipped to do their job.

For the past four years, this government placed a critical emphasis on science, engineering, technology and math, or STEM studies, in our classrooms. These subjects contain not only the keys to many successful futures for our students, but they represent areas of need in this province that will grow as time progresses. The success of Ontario’s future economy depends on the actions we take now. Under the leadership of Premier Ford, our government is ensuring that students will now explore how science relates to careers in the skilled trades and how emerging and new technologies impact these careers. These new learning expectations within the curriculum will ensure Ontario’s students are at the forefront of emerging innovation and thought, and able to compete in the global economy.

Our government has transformed the curriculum to now emphasize STEM education across all grades, embedding life and job skills that will support the next generation of scientists, innovators and entrepreneurs. For the first time in Ontario’s history, the revised curriculum includes required learning on real-world connections between science, technology, engineering and mathematics. And it includes food literacy. Coming from Perth–Wellington, it is great to see that that is included in the curriculum as well at such a young age, teaching our students the importance of our agricultural sector, food and healthy eating.

This government is also committed to building state-of-art schools which will play a major role in providing top-quality education spaces for Ontario students who need them now more than ever. Our classrooms are critical to the learning recovery for our students.

But, Speaker, we know that success inside the classroom can always use some help from outside the classroom. It is for this reason our government invested $176 million to expand free school-based—through school boards—tutoring supports, the largest publicly funded tutoring program ever in Canada for the students who need it the most. This investment will be used to improve the foundational reading and writing skills of our earliest learners, and to support them with better math literacy after a global decline during the two-year pandemic-related disruptions. This follows our government’s $15-million investment to deliver expanded summer learning opportunities.

Of course, Speaker, we know that schools provide much more than a space for education. Schools have always been important social settings for our kids to make friends and build life-lasting relationships. So it is clear, particularly for our young people, that pandemic-related disruptions have had a profound impact on the mental health of young people. Speaker, mental health is health. Our government and this Premier have made it a point to expand access to mental health supports well before the pandemic, but now more than ever, our children need our help.

This government is proud to have invested a historic $90 million in mental health supports for students, including an additional $10 million in new funding to expand access to much-needed mental health supports. For context, this investment represents a 420% increase on investment compared to the last mandate of the Wynne Liberal government. On this side of the chamber, we understand the critical importance that schools play in the lives of our students. That is why we must fight to make sure they stay in class, where they deserve to be.

Mr. Speaker, I am proud to support our newly re-elected government’s continued determination to provide financial relief to hard-working Ontario families. It is real and tangible economic support at the most crucial of times that also respects the choice of parents. Through Support for Families, Support for Learners and the COVID-19 child benefit, our government, under our last mandate, made over $1.6 billion available in financial relief to Ontario families in the uncertain economic times of the pandemic. Mr. Speaker, it was shameful that the opposition voted against all three initiatives to support families and provide relief.

Recently, this government has added to already historic levels of direct support to parents, as I mentioned, by announcing the education catch-up payments, which I am pleased to say, as of this morning, 972,000 families have applied for. This is $365 million in financial relief put directly in the pockets of Ontario parents, which will help ensure our students recover from learning losses accrued during the pandemic and allow parents, who are best suited to make these decisions, to do so.

It is worth noting that every step of the way, as I mentioned, the NDP and the Liberals have opposed this financial relief because they believe in a one-size-fits-all approach drawn up by downtown Toronto bureaucrats far away from the families in need.

There is only one political party in this Legislature which consistently stands on the side of parents, and I’m proud to be a member of that party supporting parents and providing stability to students at every turn.

CUPE’s decision to walk out on students in this province by imposing a needless, but predictable, strike only proves their lack of support for the ones who need it the most: the students.

Speaker, I would like to take the time to set the record straight in this place: At no point, throughout the months of negotiation, has CUPE budged on their demand for a nearly 50% increase in compensation over four years—

Interjections.

Earlier this fall, I had the opportunity to attend the Stratford Optimism Place women’s shelter 40th anniversary celebrations. Optimism Place provides an integral service to our community. They offer shelter, counselling and protection for women and children in abusive or precarious situations.

At their anniversary celebrations, they also marked the official ground-breaking ceremony of their 7,000-square-foot, 18-bed expansion project. This expansion project will add 10 new bedrooms, seven new washrooms, three laundry rooms, a new playground, two counselling offices, a multi-purpose meeting space and a kitchenette. Through private donors, government and in-kind support, they’ve already raised 80% of their $5-million capital budget.

I’m pleased to announce they also received over $100,000 through the Ontario Trillium Foundation Resilient Communities Fund. They plan to use this funding to support additional staff, programming and the development of an Optimism social enterprise initiative. This physical expansion and the new social enterprise initiative will allow Optimism Place to help more women and children in our communities.

Congratulations, again, to Jasmine and the entire team. Thank you for everything you do in our community.