Good morning to everybody again. I’m very excited that we had the opportunity to table this game-changing bill in the Legislature. I appreciate that the member wants to ask a question about Bill 23.

We are continuing to work with municipalities to understand the financial costs that they’ll be under. Many municipalities already incent development, already incent affordable housing, already incent attainable housing, so this is not a new concept. It might be new for Sudbury.

We will be pleased to take a look at the numbers that the member obviously has received from his council, and we’ll be more than happy to give him a very lengthy, detailed response.

Again, I want to encourage all of the members opposite to have a relationship with their service manager. Those are the people who are on the ground, the DSSAB—she’s shaking her head; I guess she doesn’t want to have a good relationship with her DSSAB. But if there’s an affordable housing project that a community wants, the first opportunity they should have is to sit down with the district social services administrator to talk about the available programs that the government of Ontario has, along with the federal government, under the National Housing Strategy. This is our system. We work collaboratively with our service managers. They do great things on the ground. Despite her shaking her head, I happen to be very supportive of what her DSSAB does, and I look forward to continuing to work with them.

This week, the government released their legislation to bring surgeries and diagnostic services out of hospitals. While there could be merit in such a strategy if implemented in a not-for-profit manner with credible guardrails, it alone cannot be a solution to all the challenges in our health care system.

The bedrock of our health care system is its people, and that bedrock has been eroded by Bill 124. This wage-constraining, unconstitutional legislation has pushed health care workers out of the public system. Meanwhile, temporary, for-profit nursing agencies, operating with limited oversight, have been pulling them out. As this has happened, we have learned how some temporary, for-profit nursing agencies exemplify some of the most corrosive elements when profit is mixed with health care.

That is why today I will be tabling a private member’s bill that, if passed, will license and regulate temporary nursing agencies. It takes aim at the most outrageous and predatory practices in a fair and reasonable way. For the first time, nursing agencies will be required to obtain a licence that can be suspended or revoked. They will be forbidden from unethical recruiting practices, unfair negotiation tactics and price-gouging. There will be transparency and accountability achieved through inspections, along with a prohibition against unconscionable pricing.

The bill is fair. It is not onerous. It borrows from accepted practices by this very government, and it won’t destabilize our health care. What it will do is level the playing field and prevent siphoning of health care workers from our public system, and it will stop runaway profiteering.

When it comes to health care, we know that the status quo is no longer acceptable. That’s why we’re taking bold action to eliminate surgical backlogs, reduce wait times, increase publicly funded services and procedures and make sure that services are available for residents across Ontario, like in the member’s riding.

Ontario now has introduced our three-step plan, the Your Health plan, that better integrates the use of community surgical and diagnostic centres and their state-of-the-art facilities to speed up how quickly people are able to get their surgeries. We know that taking innovative steps like this is the way to improve our health care system to make sure that we can have services across Ontario, in people’s communities like the member opposite’s.

Our government obviously is doing everything we can to ensure services are available across Ontario, in every community. That’s what our initiatives are about. We’ve been making record investments—$14 billion a year—and we will continue to invest in health care to make sure the services are available when and where people need them. That’s why we’re proceeding with our Your Health Act, which we hope the opposition is going to support us in.