There’s a frightening crisis in children’s hospitals across Ontario. Children are waiting days in emergency rooms, facing cancelled procedures, and—for what must be every parent’s nightmare—they are being sent across the province to find care beds.

Bruce Squires, who is the president of McMaster Children’s Hospital, is sounding the alarm: “Our pediatric critical care capacity is so limited that critically ill children are having to be transferred outside of their local area to be admitted to an ICU.” This is a situation that he calls “extremely concerning.” Critically ill children from Hamilton have been sent as far away as Ottawa to find a bed in a pediatric unit. As of Thursday, there were 11 patients in the ER who had been admitted to hospital but were still waiting for a bed, some for 30 hours or more.

Grey, who is a four-year-old boy from Ancaster, waited five days for emergency elbow surgery. Now his mom is warning other parents that the system is a disaster and people need to know what to expect.

It should be our highest priority to care for sick, injured or dying children. But instead, hospitals are being slowly starved by this government’s disastrous plan to privatize health care. We need more investments in our struggling health care system, not a profits-over-people approach.

We have the solutions. We need to implement them now to make things better for children across Ontario.

There’s the rub.

My question is to the member from Renfrew–Nipissing–Pembroke—

Interjection.

Interjections.

You talked about the relief from development charges for developers. That’s your plan to sort of goose the housing supply. But can you tell me what you’re going to do to protect taxpayers who are going to end up with this additional burden? If it’s not being paid by the developers, it’s going to be paid by your local taxpayers. So is there any other solution that you have other than putting this on the backs of already strained and stretched municipal taxpayers?