Good morning, Speaker. More than two million people in Ontario don’t have a family doctor. The College of Family Physicians is projecting that by 2026, a quarter of Ontarians will be without a family doctor.

Doctors across the province have been raising the alarm about the physician shortage, but we have heard nothing from this government about help on the horizon. There is no plan to incentivize family doctors to stay in their practices or any sign of administrative support to ease their burden.

HealthForceOntario data is showing us that in Toronto we are missing 305 family doctors; Ottawa needs 171; Barrie and Muskoka, 118; and Hamilton is short 114 doctors. So my question is to the Premier: How can you ensure continuous care is going to be available for Ontarians when thousands of people are losing their doctors every year?

The primary care expansion that the Premier just mentioned, those 78 expansions and new—two of them are happening Sault Ste. Marie. We are committed to making sure the people of Sault Ste. Marie and across Ontario have access to primary care, and that is exactly why we have invested $110 million in expanding 78 primary care teams. Now, I contrast that to a previous Liberal government who actually cut residency positions in the province of Ontario. If they had not cut those residency positions, we would have upwards of 300 physicians practising in the province of Ontario today.

But we won’t stop there. We will continue to work with Sault Ste. Marie, with primary care practitioners, with nurse practitioner-led clinics, to make sure that access is there in community.

The member from Sault Ste. Marie has been working actively with his community to make sure that these patients are getting access. That work started immediately. I don’t know where the NDP have been. I can tell you since 2018, when we formed government, that work has been expanding. We will continue to be there for the people of Sault Ste. Marie and everyone in Ontario who wants access to a primary care physician.

We now have, for the first time in the province of Ontario, as-of-right rules that mean if you want to practise in Ontario, you can do that without the red tape of the practice-ready physicians. It’s concrete changes that we are making that we are seeing the impact of in our communities. Name me the last time we have expanded multidisciplinary teams by 78 in the province of Ontario. It’s historic.

Those are changes that are going to make a difference in communities like Chapleau, like Sault Ste. Marie, like Timmins, like Sudbury, like Innisfil, like Woodstock. These are communities that are getting expansions, that desperately want access to primary care. We’re giving it to them through an investment of $110 million.