I want to thank my colleague the member for Don Valley East for serving almost like a one-person opposition on health care. He’s done such a great job to hold this government to account. I’m going to try my best to add a few things to what he said.

What we’re talking about today is establishing something called integrated community health services centres, and what we’re repealing is something called the Independent Health Facilities Act. Now, already this sets off some flags in my head: Why are we changing the name so much? So I decided to compare the two acts a little bit just to see very quickly what the differences might be.

One thing that I found is that both acts rely on a director to grant licences, to look at licence applications, to conduct inspections, to potentially revoke licences if something goes wrong. But I noticed that in the previous act, the director had to be an employee of the health ministry, and in the current act, the director could be anybody. The legislation doesn’t say.

Why is it, Madam Speaker, that the government made this subtle change in the legislation so that they did not have to appoint a director who is an employee of the ministry? They don’t have to appoint a director who’s used to giving fearless advice and loyal implementation. Why is it that they don’t have to appoint a director who is an employee of the ministry and therefore, generally, is non-partisan, is not a big donor or is expecting favours or anything like that? That, to me, is a red flag, and I’d like to understand at the committee stage why the government made this change.

The act is quite long—it’s a lot of pages and it takes a long time to read through. And sometimes little, subtle changes like that, especially when there’s two different acts—one that’s getting repealed and another one that you’re trying to read through as the legislation is being debated—you don’t always see these comparisons. But I would hope that in committee, these little differences are examined. I would very much like to know why this government chose to change the act slightly so that they don’t have to appoint the director—in fact, the most important person, the lynchpin in this whole system, the person who grants licences, reviews licence applications, oversees inspections and potentially revokes licences. Why is the government not committing itself to hiring an employee of the Ministry of Health?

As my colleague said, a lot of the actual plan is going to be in the regulations. This is kind of like asking the people of Ontario to put down a deposit on a house by looking at the sales brochure instead of being able to walk through an open house. That’s what it feels like. If you look at what the considerations are when licence applications are looked at, it doesn’t include what the licensee is going to do in terms of protections from upselling. It doesn’t include what the licensee is going to do to prevent poaching staff from hospitals.

If there are any complaints, what the act says is that the licensee—the operator of the integrated community health service centre—is required to establish a process for complaints, not the system. That strikes me as a little strange, because if we’re going to change the system, it would seem to me that in the first few years, we would want to have a more robust system of hearing complaints from users to make sure things are working, to make sure that there aren’t little adjustments we can make to make sure that the system is serving the people of Ontario properly.

There is no commitment from the government to increase funds to the Patient Ombudsman, but I feel like there needs to be a specialized response to Ontario consumers who are using these new services in integrated community health service centres at least for a few years, to make sure that things are working well.