We here in the official opposition NDP believe everyone deserves a family doctor. We believe the people in Kiiwetinoong deserve a family doctor. Les gens à Hearst méritent un médecin.

The 2.3 million people in Ontario who are being denied access to the basic right of primary health care—they deserve a family physician.

There has been a 66% increase in the number of children and teens with no family doctor, and that’s shocking. Sixty thousand people in Hamilton right now have no family doctor, and that number is scheduled to double in two years.

I’d like to talk about a constituent, Kathy Archer, who shared her heartbreaking story. She’s a senior living in Hamilton who hasn’t had a family physician in over five years. She has multiple chronic conditions, and she said, without a family physician, “I’m begging for help ... I don’t want to die.”

Without a family physician, people miss out on life-saving preventive screenings to catch deadly cancers early. Undiagnosed heart diseases like Afib—we know that they go unchecked. Some 300,000 people right now are on a waiting list for a mammogram. I would just like to say, I welcomed grandchild number eight, and I can’t imagine, without access—

Interjection.

Access to primary care is the bedrock of our health care, but as we have been describing here, it’s in crisis. If you listened to the government side, you would think everything is fine and rosy. But here we listen to people, and we know that people are struggling without access to family doctors.

What we are proposing here today is a very clear, very practical solution that this government could pass, and you could implement that today. We are proposing that you invest in administrative staff so that we can unlock more time for doctors to take on an additional two million patients.

Instead of rereading endless talking points, we call on this government to act with urgency. Pass this motion and save lives. Pass this motion and end the pain and suffering of so many that don’t have access to doctors—2.3 million Ontarians. Pass this motion and join us in saying that everyone in Ontario deserves a family doctor.