I will split my time today with my colleague from Oakville North–Burlington.

Madam Speaker, I am very delighted to stand today to support the new budget, of 2023. There are many aspects we can talk about this budget. My colleague beside me focused on one point; I will speak generally about, actually, two points: what this budget gives towards Mississauga, my city, and, as well, the health side of this budget.

Talking about Mississauga, we are getting close—more funding for the LRT, the Hazel McCallion Line, which is huge spending in transit and covered in this budget, and we all know how that will help Mississauga’s growth.

Also, in my riding, we got funding for a community centre, South Common Community Centre, and there is more spending in the city when it comes to festivities and all kinds of spending in this budget still covered here, in multiple government agencies like Trillium funding, which, again, helps Mississauga to be a vibrant city.

Also, the Mississauga hospital, Trillium Health Partners, which is going to be the biggest hospital in Canadian history, the biggest emergency room in Canada: It is a state-of-the-art hospital, which Mississauga is in bad need of. I can say that. Since I immigrated to Canada, we had two hospitals, and in 23 years, Mississauga has grown from maybe—I don’t know—200,000 to almost more than a million now. Again, we have to expect, with this kind of growth, the health care system having issues. That should not be the case if proper planning was done, if the government which was at the time responsible for that did their job in projecting the growth and making this ready. Now, the hospital might take seven years to get done, but at least we are getting shovels in the ground, we’re getting things started and working, and we hope that we can see that coming to life very soon.

Another aspect of health care which my colleague the independent from the other side touched base on is, where is the medical staff? Where in the budget is medical staff? Again, I will speak about that, because as a person who lived that dilemma—my wife was an international medical graduate. We had a challenge for her to get into the system with all the challenges there, which caused her to have to be in the province for seven years to get her licence in Ontario. That’s another discussion; I’m not going to get into it. But I promised her at the time that we would work hard to change that, to make things different. Thanks to this government, who worked very hard in Working for Workers 1 and Working for Workers 2 and even Working for Workers 3, which is currently debated—today, in the morning, we were continuing debating on that. I was honoured to be speaking about that bill and standing to support it, because I gave a promise 21 years ago that this would change, to myself and to my family and to my wife, and it took me 21 years, but when this bill passed, I said we maybe spent two, three, four, six hours debating something, but that’s going to impact the lives of hundreds of thousands of new immigrants coming to this country who will benefit from the change. On the day we were debating that bill, I said it’s a promise made, promise kept, and I still support that because I see that budget is doing exactly that.

We are expanding medical workers. We added two more medical schools, one in Scarborough and one in Brampton. We added more seats for medical graduates. The IMG program—at the time my wife was doing the exam, for the whole country there were 24 spots. So all the IMG doctors, coming from anywhere in the world, were fighting for 24 spots. Maybe in five years with all the meetings we did with the Minister of Health at the time, they expand it to 75.

Today, the announcement—and I thank Premier Doug Ford for that. Today, he announced that for 2023 projected, we are adding 100 spots for undergrad and 124 postgrad. Today, he announced that we’re expanding that, so there will be 295 spots for postgrads. This is the biggest investment in getting our health care force expanded to cover the shortage in doctors and family doctors, as my colleague said: 295 this year. I’m saying 24 spots across the country to 295 spots for Ontario. This is the kind of change this government is doing.

If we look into hospitals, we are adding a hospital in Windsor. We are adding a hospital at Oak Valley in Uxbridge, a state-of-the-art acute care hospital in Windsor, Ottawa Hospital Civic Campus, Runnymede Healthcare for first responder wellness and rehabilitation and, of course, the Mississauga hospital. There is huge spending in health care infrastructure. For this budget, it’s $48 billion over the next 10 years to build up our health care hospitals, as well as our medical staff.

Adding nurses: We added 6,000 new nurses, thanks to Minister Monte. He sponsored a program to help nurses to study. We are getting more nurses graduated in-home here in Ontario to be able to match the shortage. We are changing the working conditions for PSWs, personal support workers. We made the conditions of their work better. We added more to the hourly rate to make sure we can retain those. We are expanding into this. There are many colleges now offering training—very short training. I think it’s a year’s training or two semesters, and we are getting more PSWs to add to the force to support the need.

Adding long-term care: This is the first government—30,000 long-term-care beds since 2019. We approved more than 30,000 long-term-care beds. In seven years of the previous government, they added 640 beds for the whole of Ontario.

I’m very proud with my colleagues from Mississauga, the six MPPs from Mississauga. We managed to get for Mississauga 1,128 beds—just in Mississauga. I just want to compare the numbers: 1,128 beds in Mississauga versus 640 beds in seven years in the whole of Ontario.

Do you see the comparison? This is the amount of spending we are doing. It’s all major projects: transit projects, highways, hospitals. This is infrastructure that’s needed for Ontario to be ready to welcome 500,000 newcomers every year. It’s going to be coming in the next few years for every year—500,000. They need housing. They need hospitals. They need highways. They need jobs. I’m very, very proud of this government for that budget which I see as unheard of.

Thank you very much for your question. Actually, this question is—the opposition keeps bringing back again about privatization of health care. I don’t see any privatization in this. I see that as a public-private partnership. Small hospitals who have the medical capacity to offer operations and do cataract surgeries or eye surgeries—why don’t I as a government make use of that infrastructure? Why don’t I expand the hubs doing those surgeries from two hospitals to 20 centres and clear the backlog? Again, I don’t see that as privatization, because at the end of the day, the patient is getting the same service using the same card, their OHIP card. I don’t know where this “privatization” word came from, and I—