I listened to the government’s presentations closely this morning. I know in this bill there are provisions to deal with inefficiencies in the reporting requirements of physicians and their work. I want to ask either the parliamentary assistant to the Minister of Health or the minister: I know the Ontario Medical Association was in the building recently asking for this, but I’m also aware of the fact that we have a critical shortage of primary care physicians in this province. I don’t see anything in this bill to signal that the government’s prepared to work to open up, immediately, more residency opportunities for internationally trained physicians, and that is something we urgently need.

Speaker, when I was a professor for a brief time at Nipissing University in North Bay, I was told by my faculty head, “If you want a family doctor in North Bay, Joel, hail a cab in Toronto.” We’re wasting talent. So I’m wondering, to the minister or the parliamentary assistant: Do you have a plan to open up more residency opportunities for internationally trained physicians now?

I also rise, as my colleagues have done, to grieve collectively the five folks whom we’ve lost in Sault Ste. Marie and to acknowledge that we have a responsibility in this Legislature to reach out to anybody who, right now, is living in a violent home.

I’m sad to say, Speaker, the Ottawa Police Service has just confirmed there has been a double-digit increase in intimate partner violence charges in our city. Across the river in Gatineau, the increase is up 300 in police officers having to intervene in domestic assaults in violent homes.

Right now, Cornerstone women’s shelter in Ottawa has had to turn away 360 people who have called them for help in accessing their shelter because their shelter is full. Shelter Movers Ottawa has had a double-digit increase in their folks who try to call Shelter Movers Ottawa so that they can move out of a violent home, free of charge for women and their children in low-income circumstances.

So I call upon this government—because I know we all care about it in this place—to send a message imminently out of this Legislature that intimate partner violence has reached epidemic proportions, to agree with the Renfrew county inquest report and to send a signal, through funds that we will allocate to organizations in all of our ridings, that you can leave a violent home, that the province of Ontario is behind you and we believe you have the right to live free of violence.

I have a petition here that reads, “To the Legislative Assembly of Ontario:

“Whereas the province of Ontario requires a minimum but no maximum temperature in long-term-care homes;

“Whereas temperatures that are too hot can cause emotional and physical distress that may contribute to a decline in a frail senior’s health;

“Whereas front-line staff in long-term-care homes also suffer when trying to provide care under these conditions with headaches, tiredness, signs of hyperthermia, which directly impacts resident/patient care;

“Whereas Ontario’s bill of rights for residents of Ontario nursing homes states ‘every resident has the right to be properly sheltered ... in a manner consistent with his or her needs’;

“We, the undersigned, petition the Legislative Assembly of Ontario as follows:

“Direct the Lieutenant Governor in Council to make regulations amending O. Reg. 79/10 in the Long-Term Care Homes Act to establish a maximum temperature in Ontario’s long-term-care homes.”

I’ll be very happy to sign this and send it to page Saniyah to the Clerk’s table.