My question is to the Premier. Last week, we got to see the Conservatives’ long-term-care plan. Cruel doesn’t even begin to describe it. Hospital discharge planners have always been allowed to have conversations with patients. However, the new regulations give them power to assess a patient without consent, to send their personal information to a private care home without their consent, to discharge them from the hospital and admit them into a long-term-care facility without their consent.

Informed consent is a cornerstone of modern medicine and health care. My question is clear: How on earth did the Premier come up with this cruel scheme instead of just properly resourcing our long-term-care system?

Speaker, this bill seeks to send seniors out of their communities to homes with open beds. Do you know which homes are most likely to have open beds? They are private, for-profit long-term-care homes with terrible records of abuse and no air conditioning in their rooms—we have 79 care homes that have no air conditioning as of this weekend—the same private care homes with PC insiders on their boards.

How can this government even pretend to care about seniors when they are literally proposing to rip them from their families? Will the Premier accept responsibility when seniors deteriorate under this scheme and get abused like they have been for a couple of years now in these facilities?

Speaker, 5,000 seniors have died in long-term-care homes over the last couple of years, and 40 of them died last week—parents, grandparents, mothers-in-law, fathers-in-law. Under this government’s watch, we have seniors waiting in hospital because there are no long-term-care beds in their own communities. We have seniors roasting in long-term-care homes that are over 40 degrees because there’s no air conditioning in their rooms. Now the government’s own legislation says seniors will be sent to homes outside their community without consent.

When will this government admit they completely failed on this file and left seniors behind? Taking care of seniors shouldn’t be a part-time job. When will the Premier appoint a full-time Minister of Long-Term Care? Seniors deserve no less.