Ma question est pour la ministre de la Santé.

As our provincial health care system continues to face severe staffing shortages and patients are seeing record wait times, whether in emergency rooms or for surgery, more than a dozen nurses are being laid off at Stevenson Memorial Hospital. Can the Minister of Health explain what led this hospital to have to lay off 13 nurses?

Will this government allocate the funds to Stevenson Memorial Hospital so it can keep their nurses that the patients so need and deserve?

This afternoon, I have a petition to the Legislative Assembly of Ontario, and it reads as follows:

“Whereas to address the current staffing shortages in the health care sector, the Ontario government has proposed an investment of $200 million in 2023-24 to address immediate staffing shortages; and

“Whereas to grow the workforce for years to come, this” funding “includes:

“—offering up to 6,000 health care students training opportunities to work in hospitals providing care and gaining practical experience as they continue their education through the Enhanced Extern Program. This program has offered these opportunities to over 5,000 health care students; and

“—supporting up to 3,150 internationally educated nurses to become accredited nurses in Ontario through the Supervised Practice Experience Partnership Program; and

“Whereas more than 2,000 internationally educated nurses have enrolled in this program and over 1,300 of them are already fully registered and practising in Ontario; and

“Whereas Ontario is continuing to hire more health care workers to ensure everyone” in this province “can see a trained professional when they need to; and

“Whereas key new investments in” the 2023-24 budget “to build the health care workforce include:

“—$22 million to hire up to 200 hospital preceptors to provide mentorship;

“—$15 million to keep 100 mid-to-late career nurses in the workforce; and

“—$4.3 million to help at least 50 internationally trained physicians get licensed in Ontario;

“Therefore we, the undersigned, petition the Legislative Assembly of Ontario as follows:

“To urge all members of the Legislative Assembly of Ontario to support the passage of the Ontario budget bill, Bill 85, Building a Stronger Ontario” Act.

Speaker, I fully support this petition. I’ll be signing my signature to it as well, and I will be passing it to page Leonard to bring it to the table this afternoon.