Good morning, Speaker. This question is for the Premier.

I want to welcome health care workers, advocates and ordinary Ontarians who are here in the galleries today to witness one of the greatest threats to the right to public health care that we’ve seen in our province for generations. Under Bill 60, we’re going to see even more emergency room closures because there won’t be enough staff to keep them open. People will pay more for care as investor profits are put first, and we’re going to see a two-tier system where a select few will jump to the front of the line and everyone else is going to have to wait even longer.

Knowing this, will the Premier drop his plan for two-tier investor-driven health care?

It’s my pleasure to welcome students, part of the Ontario Parliamentary Friends of Tibet summer program. We have Tenzin Dolker, placed with MPP Patrice Barnes; Tseyang Palmo, with MPP Trevor Jones; Tenzin Kelsang Tawo, with MPP Christine Hogarth; and Tenzin Wangmo, with me.

I’d also like to welcome from Parkdale–High Park my constituent Andrew Goldberg, who is here for question period.

I want to remind the government members opposite that it’s not just the people in this room who are watching carefully; it’s people all over Ontario. From Thunder Bay to Minden, from Chesley to Kingston, they are all rallying against Bill 60. They know that this bill is going to make their health care worse and not better, and they’re either going to have their voices heard today or at the next election.

Will the Premier listen to the voices of Ontarians or will he continue to put their health care ahead of companies trying to make a profit on the backs of sick people?

Speaker, he doesn’t have to take our word for it. We’ve already seen private delivery of surgical services fail Canadians. Quebec handed billions to private health care providers, only to see their workforce depleted and exhausted, with higher costs and worse outcomes for patients. BC changed course because of rampant illegal overbilling by private for-profit providers.

Speaker, the Premier has a chance to stop this scheme before it’s too late. And so, back to the Premier: Will he pull Bill 60 and instead invest in our health care workers, our public hospitals and patient care?

Speaker, if this is such a good deal for the people of Ontario, why is this Premier keeping the details a total secret?

It’s been revealed that the government is now working on a sole-sourced backroom deal with Zlatko Starkovski and his nebulous company Ontario Live.

To the Premier: Does he or does anyone in this government have an existing or a past connection with Mr. Starkovski?

Now, another Conservative insider, Carmine Nigro—who was appointed by this government, by the way, to be chair of Ontario Place, who is a good friend of the Premier and attended his family’s wedding reception—is brokering a backroom deal with Starkovski—

Interjections.

My question to the Premier is, does he have any idea how bad it looks to have one family friend brokering a deal with another family friend on behalf of his government?

Supplementary question?

Start the clock. Leader of the Opposition.

Thank you to the Leader of the Opposition. Mr. Speaker, the public was very clear. Right now, we have an Ontario Place that is sitting there, that is not enjoyed by the public 365 days of the year. We are seeing a $500-million private capital investment into Ontario Place. We are seeing a brand new facility, 12 acres of public realm space on the west island itself and ongoing maintenance. Why is ongoing annual maintenance important? So that we don’t have an Ontario Place like we have today that is falling apart, that is being flooded. We will make sure that there will be a beautiful Ontario Place for generations and generations and families—

Again, back to the basics: Do we just leave Ontario Place as is so that it can continue to fall into disrepair and continue to be flooded, or do we bring it back to life and make it a wonderful place for families? I think the choice is very clear.

God forbid I have a friend at the wedding.

We’re going to build Ontario Place. Mark my words, Mr. Speaker, every single person over there, what they’re going to do when we’ve built a beautiful amphitheatre, when we’ve built a beautiful water park and we add beaches and we add parks—guess what? Every one of them is going to show up there to either a concert or to wander through or bring their friends. We aren’t a government that sits around. We’re a government that gets things done, unlike they did for 15 years that destroyed the province.

When it comes to your health, the status quo is no longer acceptable. Our government is taking bold action to eliminate surgical backlogs and reduce wait times for publicly funded surgeries and procedures. Ontario has a three-step plan that better integrates and uses community surgical diagnostic centres and their state-of-the-art facilities to speed up how quickly people are able to get surgeries and procedures using their health care card, never their credit card.

This plan will add more than 14,000 OHIP-insured cataract surgeries each year, expand community-based clinics, perform more surgeries such as cataract surgeries, MRI and CT scan imaging, and expand surgeries closer to home—more convenient for people.

If the NDP want more transparency and accountability, they should be supporting the changes brought forward in Bill 60.

These kinds of things are also supported and have been said by our Auditor General here in Ontario. Ontario needs to make changes to support patient care better, to make sure patients get access to care quickly, and that is what this government is going to do. We’re putting patients at the centre of care.

It’s a real shame, hearing the two members from Ottawa criticizing their hospital, because that’s what they’re doing. They’re criticizing one of the best CEOs in the province, in my opinion: Cameron Love. I had a discussion with him, and Mr. Speaker, you see the increase of backlogged surgeries go up by 30%. This is about getting rid of the backlog, making sure we help people get well again. But to sit there and criticize their own hospital—and, by the way, we’re putting $9 billion into that hospital.

We’re fixing health care. We’re ending this hallway health care that you created, and we’re bringing health care back to the standards of a world-class health care system—the best in the world.

My constituent Lorrie’s best friend urgently needs an MRI, but hospital wait-lists are now months long. She called an advertised for-profit clinic and was told that for $795 she can get an MRI within 48 hours. This entirely contradicts the Premier’s promise to Ontarians, which is that they would never have to pay for health care with their credit card. Why did the Premier break his promise?

Blythe, a constituent and a health care professional, asks, “Why are we paying taxes for health care when the government consistently underspends by $1.6 billion? The Premier must stop giving his friends pay raises and fund our public health care system.”

Will the Premier listen, then take action, stop Bill 60 and finally stop privatizing the people’s public health care?

Interjections.

My question is for the Minister of Economic Development, Job Creation and Trade. Ontario is home to the largest life sciences sector in Canada, which employs thousands of workers in a high-skilled job market. But with competition growing from south of the border and in other parts of the world, we need to remain competitive if we’re going to continue attracting these important life-saving investments.

Speaker, will the minister please provide an update on how the government is continuing to attract these critical investments in the life sciences sector while also ensuring that services that are made in Ontario benefit all Ontarians?

Speaker, will the minister please elaborate on what our government is doing to secure Ontario’s standing as a global pinnacle in the innovation of life sciences and health sectors?

Our government knows that wait times for surgeries and diagnostic tests have been increasing year over year. We’re not okay with the status quo. We know that more work needs to be done. That is why we are passing—hopefully, today—our innovative plan, which includes the introduction of the Your Health Act, which will help eliminate surgical backlogs and reduce wait times so Ontarians can have easier and faster access to the care they need when they need it. That’s what it’s about.

Now, the member opposite knows that our government has invested almost a billion dollars in the surgical backlog, trying to clear the backlog of surgeries from COVID, and we managed to get it down to pre-pandemic levels. But that still means too many people are waiting for care too long, and that’s not good enough for this government. We’re going to make sure people get access to care in a timely and convenient way.

You’re raising an issue. Somebody has offered to charge this person, but this person can receive publicly funded services and will receive publicly funded services more quickly if we pass Bill 60 and put in more clinics.

Last week, with the Premier, we were thrilled to welcome Moderna’s multi-million-dollar partnership with Novocol Pharma in Cambridge. They will expand vaccine manufacturing in Cambridge and ensure faster, more reliable access to life-saving vaccines. Not only will this investment create good-paying jobs, it will provide our health care workers and families with more reliable access to life-saving vaccines, helping to ensure we no longer have to rely on other jurisdictions to keep us safe.

Speaker, with the $4-million investment through our Ontario Together Fund, Novocol will add to their 500-plus highly skilled workers. It’s hard to keep up with the billions in life science investments: Sanofi, Roche, OmniaBio, AstraZeneca, Novartis; this list goes on and on, Speaker. The momentum of investments by these companies is a vote of confidence in our life-saving sector.

Speaker, think of where we were when the pandemic struck. We had almost zero PPE being built in Ontario. Today, we’re at 74%, and tomorrow, when the nitrile gloves are built in London, we’ll be at 94% of all PPE manufactured.

Wait times for breast cancer surgeries in Ottawa have stretched so long that women have been driving to Quebec and paying out of pocket just to get surgery. And now, last week, we learned from the Ottawa Citizen that one of the Ottawa Hospital’s breast cancer surgeons was getting only two hours of operating time a month.

Why is this government pushing ahead with its privatization agenda when publicly funded operating rooms have been sitting unused while surgeons and patients have desperately needed access?

Interjections.

Members will please take their seats.

Member for Eglinton–Lawrence.

The Premier.

My question is to the Attorney General. The Ombudsman’s investigation into delays at the Landlord and Tenant Board was a damning indictment of this government’s failure to provide justice to tenants and landlords. The Conservatives have had five years to fix the Landlord and Tenant Board, yet this report shows that the government has made the problem worse. Delays at the LTB have increased, and the number of people waiting for hearings has doubled to 38,000 people.

This government has accepted all the Ombudsman’s 61 recommendations to fix the LTB. When do you plan to implement those recommendations?

The Landlord and Tenant Board is a mess. Tenants are waiting up to two years to get their landlords to do basic repairs, stop harassing them, to deal with vermin. Landlords are waiting for months—if not years—just for a hearing while they lose on rent or lose their homes because they cannot keep up with their mortgages. This system isn’t working for anybody, and they have had five years to fix that.

Speaker, my question is, can this government actually commit to making those changes that the Ombudsman has recommended? Because Ontarians deserve a Landlord and Tenant Board that actually is working right now for Ontarians.

I appreciate the opportunity to address the Ombudsman’s report, which is well received.

I’ll remind the member opposite that the Landlord and Tenant Board—the data that he is using was from a previous moment in time. But let me tell you this, and I’m going to quote the Ombudsman, where he says that a factor was the transition of government in 2018. The Landlord and Tenant Board should not have been in that precarious a situation before the 2018 election. So it was a mess when we got it.

What he’s recommending is that we add more adjudicators. Well, we’re doubling the number of adjudicators. That is done. The NDP did not support us.

The Ombudsman says we should add more resources to the back office staff. Well, when we brought that forward, the NDP opposed it. We did it anyway.

We are fixing the Landlord and Tenant Board for all Ontarians, and I wish the NDP would support us on one of the many things that the Ombudsman has highlighted that we’re already doing.

But let me be clear, Mr. Speaker: The member is asking, will we do the things the Ombudsman is saying we should do? Well, we’ve already done most of the things that he’s told us to do. We’ve doubled the number of adjudicators. We’ve supported back office staff. He said technology was failing when this government came to power. Well, this government spent $28.5 million on a new state-of-the-art system. It’s working very well, and they opposed it.

I want to thank the member from Newmarket–Aurora for her exceptional work in promoting health in the classroom. I’d be remiss to also give a message of gratitude, I think on behalf of all parliamentarians, to the member from Burlington for her leadership in this House, in this province and country, advancing mental health literacy for the next generation. We are inspired through her work, and because of her motion, we’re standing today proudly to advance the cause of mental health literacy, mandating it across the curriculum, including strengthening it in grades 7 and 8 for our teachers and for our students, as well as mandatory learning in grade 10. Connecting it with the real-life skills, young people can now use part of this curriculum in grade 10 careers as they start to give thought to higher learning post-secondary, skilled trades learning and to come up with a useful tool kit of ways by which they can manage stress and angst in their life.

Speaker, I also want to affirm that part of this announcement is the expansion of funding. Under our Premier’s leadership, we’ve increased funding by 550%, a positive step forward as we help to ensure the success and the health of children—

When you compare the former Liberal government peak of spending in mental health in schools, we were around $18 million per year. Today, under our government’s leadership, we’ve increased funding to $114 million, a 550% increase in mental health. I accept fully that we have to keep going, keep investing, keep lifting standards and keep supporting these kids, because demands are rising—the member is absolutely right.

As part of the announcement we made last week, and thanks to the leadership of the member from Burlington, we are going to be funding summer learning to create an annualized experience, access 12 months a year. The system wasn’t designed for kids. Kids would have access to a psychologist, a psychotherapist till June and then have to pivot to community in the summer. We’re going to expand capacity this year, add $14 million next year and $16 million the year after to ensure kids have dependable access to mental health in every community across Ontario.

For the Premier: Bill 60 is reckless, incomplete and poorly conceived. It ignores the root causes of the problems in our health care system and fails to prioritize patient health over private wealth. Bill 60 could have been salvaged, but of 45 amendments I proposed, all were thrown out. When the government was asked to ensure that the bill allow Indigenous consultation, they said no. When they were asked to establish conflict-of-interest rules for directors who issue licences, they said no. They said no to protections against upselling, up-charging, profiteering and cycling of health workers out of the public hospitals.

Ontarians are outraged. I know this. I know government members are hearing it from their constituents, because when their constituents don’t hear back from them, they reach out to me instead.

So to every government member: Who will have the courage to listen to the people of Ontario and vote against Bill 60?

And to the Premier: Since this government isn’t serving the interests of Ontarians, whose interest is it actually serving?

Thank you. Supplementary question?