By all accounts, the pancakes were satisfying at the Saturday, Feb. 29 breakfast hosted by Newmarket-Aurora MPP Christine Elliott at St. Andrew’s Presbyterian Church in Newmarket.
A steady stream of residents filed into the church basement for a hot-cooked morning meal that began at 9:30 a.m. Two York Regional Police officers were on duty to ensure the event went off without a hitch.
Some residents attended the breakfast simply to meet Ontario’s deputy premier and health minister face-to-face, as evidenced by the continuous line-ups to have a quick word with the influential politician.
Several had concerns they wanted to share in person about such things as provincial cuts to publicly funded education, the noise from train whistles, the safety of municipal drinking water and Ontario’s Clean Water Act and Safe Drinking Water Act, and growing waiting lists for youth who need mental health support.
Others still wanted to bring a new grassroots initiative to address homelessness and an affordable housing shortage to the attention of the local MPP.
NewmarketToday sat down at a table of local teachers to hear what was on their minds about the apparent deadlock to get a new deal between Ontario’s major teacher unions and the Ford government.
Newmarket resident and local elementary teacher Chris Fuerth said teachers appreciate the support parents have shown by honking car horns, bringing coffee, walking picket lines with teachers, and voting in online polls.
But the government will only get the message when people contact their MPP to share their views, he said.
“At an event like today, Ms Elliott can safely go back to the cabinet meetings and say that five to six rowdies from this riding showed up and politely voiced their opinion about government cuts,” Fuerth said. “If that is all the boots-on-the-ground opposition this government faces, then they are winning.”
“So that is another reason I came today,” he said. “I want our elected officials to look at their bosses - the people of this province - in the face and hear the message that this is not OK,” he added.
Fuerth said he has many concerns about the Ford administration, but as a teacher, one of his primary concerns is education.
“I’m concerned as a parent, too, because seeing the system from inside, I can already tell you that there isn’t enough funding for special education,” he said.
“Any cuts to special education is going to hurt. I’ve heard tales of schools that have students locked in their classes, and where students are often asked to evacuate the room while another student is going on a rampage, and it happens on at least a weekly basis,” said Fuerth, of the growing issue of violence in elementary school classrooms.
“I’m probably more concerned as a parent than as an educator about class sizes, and right now students are choosing high school courses for next year, and the staffing is going to be based on the funding. ...Some of the extra supports that my son would have had is not going to be available,” he said.
“Honestly, there are probably places to save money in the education system, but the ideas they have are not good for students,” Fuerth said.
Semi-retired social worker, educator, and a board member of the York Region Social Planning Council, Lori Yaccato, came to the breakfast armed with an envelope of information on the social planning council’s latest endeavour to form a non-profit affordable housing group that aims to put new units on the market.
Yaccato said she wanted to share with Elliott that momentum was building about the need to address the critical shortage of affordable housing in Newmarket and Aurora. Already, the group has held one community forum and a subsequent meeting to flesh out how it can take the lead in providing local housing that supports vulnerable citizens.
“We’re going to need sources of funding to do this,” she said.
Meanwhile, Newmarket parents Brad and Meagan Whitehorn, whose 17-year-old daughter, Tiffany, has been living in a makeshift “group home” at a rented apartment in Markham the couple devised to help manage her complex health needs due to a lack of mental health beds in the community, attended the breakfast to “put a face” to their story, which NewmarketToday reported on in December 2019 here.
The Whitehorns had appealed to Elliott in the past for help to navigate the mental health system to keep their teen daughter safe but have never met the MPP in person. They’ve only dealt with staff in her Newmarket constituency office.
In a chat with NewmarketToday on Saturday, young Tiffany gave this reporter a “high five”, as the Whitehorns said she will move next month to a new group home in Orillia that is minutes away from Lake Couchiching, and not too far from mom and dad.
Tiffany has dual diagnosis, which means she lives with both a developmental disability and complex mental health needs, including post-traumatic stress disorder.
The latter diagnosis came when Tiffany was just 10, about six months after the Whitehorns adopted her from the foster-care system.
The Whitehorns have been reliant on group-home placements for the past three years to provide a supervised environment in which the teen would have the best chance of success.