This government can’t be trusted to manage the economy. There’s a shortage of MTO ferry crews, service is being disrupted, and yet, with Bill 124, this government has suppressed salaries below prevailing wages, so, naturally, ferries are losing workers.

I’ll start with paramedic service on Wolfe Island, which was recently cut again in favour of paramedic crews based on the mainland. Residents were told that adding the new, second ferry could compensate during emergencies. Now, not only has the new ferry been tied up for a year awaiting crew and not only has the current service been disrupted by the lack of crew, now MTO is saying, not surprisingly, that they have to break their promise of running the new ferry alongside the old ferry because—wait for it—there’s a lack of crew.

What’s making the staffing shortage worse? This government has been suppressing wages with Bill 124. Workers have been sucked away to the private sector. This government has been hiring temporary crew from agencies to fill permanent positions and incurring much higher costs. Regular salaries are $23 an hour for deckhands, $38 an hour for a captain. My order paper question revealed that the Conservatives are paying $86 an hour for temporary workers. That’s salaries, expenses and also agency profits.

This is the exact same pattern we’ve seen with nurses in Ontario. It’s a pattern of economic mismanagement we cannot afford.

I’d like to welcome nurses from Kingston today, Debra Lefebvre, Heather Hamilton and Daria Hope, and also somebody who grew up in Kingston, a former colleague in the House of Commons, Matthew Kellway.

I want to ask the Minister of Health about her plan to use for-profit clinics to deal with the backlog of surgeries. It seems to me, looking at Bill 60, that a crucial linchpin is the director, who checks licence applications, does inspections and revokes licences for those who break the rules. But whereas in the existing legislation, the director has to be a public servant, an employee of the ministry, under this government’s new Bill 60, the director could be anybody or any “entity.” It looks like Bill 60 is setting up to have this government delegate oversight of this industry to some unspecified entity.

As it happens, the current Independent Health Facilities Program is run out of my riding of Kingston and the Islands. My constituents deserve to know how many experienced and qualified staff will lose their jobs to some as yet undisclosed entity?

Mr. Speaker, clearly this government hasn’t figured out to whom or to what entity it will delegate the management and oversight of the for-profit surgery industry. That’s a red flag for me.

How do we know that this government isn’t going to set things up so that people too close to industry are the ones in charge of licenses and inspections? This is a danger in so many industries. There’s a term for it: regulatory capture. It’s a lot easier to separate the regulator and the industry in the current situation, where the regulators are ministry employees—not anymore with Bill 60.

How can the minister ensure that there won’t be people going back and forth between the industry and the directorate in charge of licensing and inspecting for-profit surgical clinics?