Of course, since the pandemic began over two and a half years ago, we’ve actually had a surgical backlog recovery program of almost a billion dollars. That has been available to organizations such as the Ottawa Hospital and other publicly funded hospitals, and they’ve been able to utilize it very well. They submit their program on how they can use existing OR capacity with their health human resources. It has, in fact, helped us a great deal. We are—and perhaps I haven’t said this enough—actually back at pre-pandemic wait times.

Now, having said that, some of those wait times are still 12-months-plus—six to 12 months—so we can do better, and we will do better. Because of Bill 60, we have a process that ensures that individuals, organizations, hospital partnerships can be formed and have that surgical recovery—surgical options—available closer in community.

The member opposite highlights exactly why we have brought forward Bill 60 and why we are expanding the community surgical and diagnostic piece. Since the beginning of the pandemic, we have had a fund available to our publicly funded hospitals of almost $1 billion. And yes, the member opposite is right: They have not been able to utilize that full $300 million that was assigned in the last fiscal. But does it not speak to the fact that this is why we need more innovation? This is why we need more opportunities in community to ensure that where there is capacity, where there are wait times that are unacceptable to all of us, we can make sure that we have a process, an oversight piece, that ensures people get access to surgeries faster.

I’m not sure I heard an answer in that, so maybe here’s the answer: Yesterday, the Deputy Minister of Health revealed that the $300 million earmarked for the surgical backlog had not been fully used. Or maybe it’s because Ontario has the lowest-paid nurses in all of Canada. Or maybe it’s because Bill 124 incentivized nurses and other health care professionals to leave our hospitals and go work for private companies.

Speaker, those operating rooms I spoke about have been dark on weekends for months—actually, probably years. How can that be? With all this government has to say about what they’re doing, how can that be? Speaker, in hospitals across the province, there are operating rooms that are dark simply because our hospitals don’t have the resources to use them to their full capacity, and the minister knows this.

Speaker, through you, can the minister tell us just how it is that we are not using operating rooms in our hospitals to their full capacity?