Thank you to the member from London West. She is absolutely correct. Schedule 2 is about deregulating health care settings by expanding the definition of “regulated health professionals” to include those who are not part of a regulatory college. So we’re actually going backwards when it comes to safety and regulation. Going into any health care clinic, as Ontarians, as Canadians, we have come to be comfortable with believing in the fact that they’re regulated, that they have the proper qualifications.

By deregulating the system under schedule 2, there will be no regulation. They have not decided who the oversight body is going to be. They said that will come later, in regulations. There are a lot of concerns happening here. The government has not thought this out. Again, I think it’s more about the quick buck than it is public safety.

Of course people are happy that they’re getting services. People need services. But they don’t see the difference if it’s coming from the public or from the for-profit. Who is going to see the difference is our public coffers and how far that can actually go. When they only have so much money, what’s going to go first? It’s not going to be the for-profit. They’re going to make sure that their shareholders get their investments back. What’s going to happen is it’s going to come from that health care service that individual’s counting on.

I think it’s unfortunate that they’re actually moving in the opposite direction from the fact-learning process that BC has put themselves into. It costs them money now to bring those systems back into the public realm. The Conservatives in Ontario are going in the wrong direction—for-profit is not for our health care system.

So who is it—which side of the aisle here—that’s actually preventing people from getting surgeries? People wouldn’t have the wait times they have now if this government wasn’t sitting on billions of dollars in contingency funds instead of investing it into our health care system. For years our health care system has been underfunded, has not kept up with inflation, and now we’re seeing the devastating effects and the surgical backlogs that go with that.