It’s my pleasure to wel-come a gentleman who has walked with history in some of our toughest moments. A survivor of the Holocaust, Mr. Nate Leipciger, who is with us together with his wife, has participated in 20 March of the Living trips, received an honorary doctorate from the University of Toronto and numerous medals. He has worked tirelessly for tolerance in the world of freedom for anyone who is oppressed.

Joining Nate today are his wife, Bernice; Cary Green; Kevin Green; Lisa Pinkus; Arla Litwin; and Jennifer Green. And they’re also joined by Michael Levitt, the executive director of the Friends of Simon Wiesenthal foun-dation of Canada. Welcome to the Ontario Legislature.

It’s my pleasure to introduce Hillary Buchan-Terrell—she’s advocacy manager for the Canadian Cancer Society—and, of course, my good friend Cheri DiNovo, MPP from Parkdale–High Park for many, many years. Thank you for being here, ladies.

It is my privilege to introduce Dr. David Jacobs and the members of the Ontario Association of Radiologists, who are visiting for their Queen’s Park day and will be meeting with MPPs over the course of the day. The OAR represents 1,000 radiologists who specialize in medical imaging and strive to ensure timely access to diagnosis and better patient outcomes.

I would also like to welcome Sherry Wilcox, a lawyer and breast cancer patient, who is here with her daughter and will be sharing her story to shed light on the importance of lowering the age of breast cancer screening. Welcome to Queen’s Park.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. As you know, the OHL championships were completed on our constituency week. So I would seek unanimous consent for the member from Elgin–Middlesex–London to wear the maroon and white home jersey and the member for London North Centre to wear the white and maroon Peter-borough Petes’ OHL champion away jersey.

I’d like to welcome guests from Waste to Resource Ontario this morning to the Legislature: board Co-Chairs Paulina Leung and Gary Diamond, board members Denis Goulet and Bob Martin, and team member Ravneet Gill. Please come by their lunch reception in room 228 to learn more about the essential work they are doing for our communities in the waste and recycling sector.

On behalf of the official opposition, I’d like to welcome our guests from the Ontario Autism Coalition, including Kate Dudley-Logue, vice president; Steve Legault, an Ottawa parent; Sandra Huh; Karen Bojti and Michau van Speyk, along with former MPP Cheri DiNovo and Trustee Curtis Jordan from the Upper Canada District School Board, who is the first autistic individual elected to a school board in Ontario’s history. Welcome.

The member for Peterborough–Kawartha has a point of order.

Before moving on, I’ll remind members that all of you are invited to a lunch reception in honour of the senators at room 230 of the Legislative Building. Also, later on in the afternoon, we’re going to be having a round table discussion with members of provincial Parliament in room 340 of the Legislative Building starting at 1:30 so that we can have a dialogue with our guests from the Senate. You’re all warmly welcome to attend those two events.

Good morning, Speaker. This government didn’t campaign on a plan to sell off our public health care system. At no point during the campaign did they say they were going to bring in two-tier health care. That’s why, on Friday and Saturday, hundreds of thousands of Ontarians voted in the Ontario Health Coalition’s citizen-run referendum to keep our health care system public. People are making their voices heard because of overwhelming evidence from many other provinces that the government’s plan will worsen services for patients and cost so much more.

Speaker, to the Premier: Will his government listen to the people of Ontario and reverse course on their plan to sell off our public health care system?

This government’s plans for health care are seeing emergency rooms in smaller and rural communities across the province close for hours, for days or even permanently. Last week, I joined residents in Minden as they rallied desperately to save their local emergency room—it’s set to close permanently this Wednesday. They’re worried, Speaker, as anyone would be if the emergency room they relied on was shut down and they were forced to leave their community in a time of crisis.

Back to the Premier: How many communities will see emergency rooms close this summer because of this government’s failure to act?

While you’re busy trying to take more staff out of our system and move them into private, for-profit clinics, the solution is simple: Invest in the staff we need to keep those emergency rooms open.

To the Premier: What will he do today to make sure that this closure in Thessalon is the last ER closure Ontarians will see this summer?

Interjections.

In fact, the problems had gotten even worse. The P3 contractor was “building at risk,” which means the safety of these designs had not been confirmed. It suggests that the deficiencies with the Eglinton Crosstown could be much more serious than the public is being told.

Speaker, why did the minister ignore the problems with the Eglinton Crosstown?

The member for Scarborough–Agincourt.

Do you have a point of order? Point of order: the Premier.

Minister of Health.

We’ll move to the next question.

Just a quick indulgence: I would like to wish the member from St. Catharines, Jennie Stevens, a very happy birthday today.

Continuing the theme of “you never know who Jess will meet on Instagram,” it is my honour to introduce both a dedicated dad and a serving member of the London Police Service. We have Officer Chris Golder in the House today, a former dedicated school resource officer and very proud father of our page Arisa. He will be here all week monitoring her progress.

I’d like to welcome Beth Allison, principal in the London District Catholic School Board. Welcome back to Queen’s Park—a great friend from the London area.

I’m already taken.

Talking about birthdays, it’s our great member from Bruce–Grey–Owen Sound’s birthday, Rick Byers. Happy birthday. He’s turning 40.

What I would recommend, Mr. Speaker, is the NDP member and the PC member should maybe go out for lunch today and celebrate together.

Interjection: Hey.

We had the opportunity, myself and the Minister of Health—we went to Kensington Health. What a phenomenal facility that is. And I’m just wondering if the NDP wants to close Kensington Health doing 12,000 cataract operations a year. That’s the question for the NDP, because it would be a disaster if we ever close Kensington Health and cancel 12,000 cataract operations.

Good morning, Speaker. I don’t have anyone to introduce, but I would like to bring to the attention of our colleagues in the House that today we are celebrating the Armenian Heritage Month. This is the inaugural celebration which will take place in rooms 228 and 230 between 5 p.m. and 7 p.m. Many leaders of the Armenian community from St. Catharines, Cambridge, Hamilton, Mississauga, Oakville and Ottawa will join us, but in addition to that, we will have other ethnic groups like the Chinese community, the Greek Cypriots, Tamil and the Jewish community who will join to us celebrate. Everyone is welcome.

I would like to introduce and welcome the newest member of my team: Andrew Tadrous. He’s here today for the first time to visit Queen’s Park. Welcome to Queen’s Park.

The NDP are satisfied with the status quo. I can tell you that our government is not. We have made many different investments that—to quote Anthony Dale, the president of the Ontario Hospital Association: “We’re rushing to make up for lost time and the government has implemented a wide range of well-designed and very constructive programs to recruit and retain, to incentivize health care workers—and especially nurses—to consider practising in rural and remote communities.”

We’re making that effort. We’re making those investments and we will continue to do that because we understand, as Ontario grows, we need to continue to make the investment in health care—a health care budget that, I might add, is over $80 billion in the province of Ontario. We are investing; we are ensuring the people who want to practise in the province of Ontario have that right through many different programs.

We have now in the province of Ontario, the first across Canada, as-of-right rules under Bill 60, which means that an individual clinician, doctor, nurse who wants to practise in the province of Ontario can do so today, instead of waiting months to get that qualification happen through the college.

We directed the College of Nurses of Ontario and the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Ontario to quickly deal with the backlog of individual, educated, trained people who are waiting for those licences. We now have, and we saw, a historic number of nurses who were able to pack into that program. We’ll continue—

The minister needs to follow along here. They passed their bill and we are in this situation. It’s done nothing.

Speaker, transit P3s in the United Kingdom experienced repeated lawsuits, insolvencies and bailouts. A £30-billion P3 scheme to upgrade the London Underground fell apart. Costly P3 failures like this are why the UK’s Conservative government abandoned P3 contracts altogether in 2018. Now, Ontario is running into the same costly delays, overruns and deficiencies.

If the Eglinton Crosstown P3 contractor doesn’t get another public bailout, are we going to see the whole thing collapse just like what happened in the UK?

Confidence in Metrolinx and the minister are at an all-time low. So, Speaker, to the minister, why is she appointing her friends to the Metrolinx board instead of fixing the problems with the Eglinton Crosstown?

I thank the Leader of the Opposition for the question. But it is so ironic to hear the leader and members opposite ask about problems that are faced with the Eglinton Crosstown, because we brought forward a bill to this House in 2020 to address a lot of the problems related to a lot of those delays that were created that we saw in the Eglinton Crosstown, Mr. Speaker. It was a bill called the Building Transit Faster Act. It couldn’t have been more clear what the intention of that bill was. And what did the opposition do, Mr. Speaker? They voted against it.

So for the Leader of the Opposition to stand in this House and ask why we’re not building transit faster, I would ask her, why did they vote against that important piece of legislation so that we can avoid a lot of the problems with the Eglinton Crosstown, get shovels in the ground faster and build the transit that the city of Toronto and York region and Hamilton deserve?

And what have we seen? In 2019, the Premier introduced the most ambitious public transit expansion plan anywhere in North America. Since then, Mr. Speaker, we’ve seen shovels in the ground on the new Ontario Line, a line they voted against. We have seen significant progress on tunnelling on the Eglinton Crosstown West extension. The tunnel is halfway done. In Scarborough, we’ve seen significant progress on the Scarborough subway extension, and just a few weeks ago, we announced the RFQ for the Yonge North subway extension.

They claim to believe in and stand up for transit riders and for the people of the city of Toronto, York region and Hamilton, but at the end of the day, the Leader of the Opposition and her party always vote against it.

We’re building public transit. We are supporting it—

Interjections.

Mr. Speaker, that member opposite knows full well how important it is to make sure that people who are building a transit system have the time to make sure they do it right. That’s why our government called a public inquiry into what happened at the Ottawa LRT. That’s why, learning the lessons that Justice Hourigan put forth in his report on the problems that plagued the Ottawa LRT, our government is determined to make sure that with respect to the Crosstown we do it right and we make sure that we build this system properly and that it is safe for transit riders, that it’s safe for transit operators, and it will open when it is safe for all.