The homelessness crisis is worsening, encampments are growing, and it’s taking a devastating toll on people in communities across this province. It has gotten so bad that in Toronto hospitals, cold-weather ER visits by people experiencing homelessness skyrocketed by nearly 70% in the last few years. These are people who are in the waiting area of emergency departments. They don’t need medical attention, but they’re there because they need a safe place to stay warm. There’s nowhere else for them to go. Hospitals are becoming shelters. What is also worrisome is that there are thousands more who are just a few hundred dollars away from losing their home and ending up on the streets.

There is such an urgency on this issue, and yet this government is so consumed with things like delivering a luxury spa. You’ve completely lost touch with reality. Your priorities are not what people need you to be working on.

As we recess the House for the winter, I ask Conservative members to reflect on this and ask yourselves, are you up to the task? This is not a partisan statement. You have the opportunity. You have the power. You have the majority votes. You have everything it takes to solve this problem.

We know the solutions. Stop wasting time and energy on things that are not helping people, and just do the right thing.

Just a gentle reminder to the member opposite that in fact hospital base budgets were increased by an average of 4% in our last budget. We invested $44 million in every single hospital. This is unheard-of, never happened before. We invested $44 million to make sure that those hospitals, including smaller hospitals across Ontario, had sufficient resources to ensure that their emergency departments remained open.

We have invested in our paramedic services, with dedicated off-load nursing programs that ensure paramedics can quickly be able to transfer their patients to a nurse, a respiratory therapist or a paramedic who is stationed in the emergency department to make sure that those paramedics get back out into community quickly.

We have so many programs that have made an impact in hospitals across Ontario and we will continue to work with our hospital partners.

What does that mean, Speaker? It means that people who had to wait, who had to be transferred to other hospitals, now have an MRI machine in their community. That allows those physicians to get that diagnostic piece that is so important to make sure that we have health care close to home. We’ll continue to make those investments. Unfortunately, if your history is any indication, you will continue to vote against it.