It’s always an honour to rise in the House—and today, specifically, in support of the leader of the NDP’s motion. I’d like to read the last “therefore” into the record once again: “Therefore, the Legislative Assembly calls on the government to fund and fully utilize public operating rooms instead of further privatizing hospital operating room services.”

In my part of the world, in northern Ontario, Health Sciences North is the hub hospital. They have 17 modern operating rooms, and they’re using 14. The question I have for the government is, why wouldn’t the focus be on using all 17? They’re there. They’re built. The need is there. We all agree—everyone on all sides of the spectrum agrees—that there is a backlog of surgeries. I’m going to focus on these three operating rooms: We have those operating rooms in place. They’re modern. What’s the holdup? Staff and funding. Who provides the funding? The Ministry of Health, through the provincial government. Yet that seems to be not the focus, and the focus is now providing surgical suites through the private sector.

You have to ask yourself—and I pride myself; I’m fairly business-minded. From the business perspective of the province, the smart thing to do would be to use the facilities that you already own and control. That would be—I hate to say this—the small-c conservative thing to do.

Interjections.

This government is focusing on someone else’s business model—and that is the question that needs to be asked: Why does this government not use the facilities that we already own and control? All they have to do is fund them. Put the same focus on funding those facilities as they are putting on funding the private sector facilities, and also put the focus on making sure that they keep staff in the public sector by not capping their wages, knowing full well—and I don’t blame the individual staff people, the nurses, for moving to the private side. They’re being forced to the private side. The government knows this is happening, and they’re either turning a blind eye or they know full well and have a reason to do it.

Thank you to the member for Barrie–Innisfil for your question. What I am very much in support of, when we’re talking about expanding public health care, is making sure that hospitals in Toronto, University–Rosedale, across Ontario—ensuring that their operating room capacity is at their maximum.

In University–Rosedale, we have the UHN network; we have SickKids. I have reached out to them and asked them what their operating room capacity is and they were all very clear with me: They said that they are not able to have all their operating rooms full—especially in the evenings, certainly on weekends—because they have a human resources shortage. And this human resources shortage doesn’t just exist when it comes to nurses; it exists in every single department that they’re experiencing, from human resources to finance to cleaners to personal support workers.

It’s a reason why our party has introduced this motion earlier today, calling on the Ontario government to increase capacity in operating rooms that are run by public hospitals in order to meet the need and address the surgery backlog.