Before I ask for oral questions, I want to inform the members that they have an important memo on their desks with respect to the lower galleries and the upper galleries, as to how we’ll accommodate guests in the future. I’ll ask you to take a look at it. If you have any questions, get back to our office. Thank you very much.

To reply, the Deputy Premier and Minister of Health.

Minister of Health.

The supplementary question.

Good morning, Speaker. My question is for the Premier.

Yesterday, this government had a chance to show their commitment to ensuring that primary care for everyone is a priority, by supporting our motion to put patients first. They voted against it. Instead of working with health care professionals, they are making weaker funding announcements that amount to a drop in the bucket, and it is a leaky bucket. Doctors and health care workers say it shows the government doesn’t understand the scale or urgency of the problem.

So my question is to the Premier: Why are you refusing to listen to the clear demands of patients and doctors?

Back to the Premier: We gave you the solution. So to the Premier: Why did you vote against the solution that everyone else supports?

Interjections.

Back to the Premier: How many more emergency rooms and urgent care clinics need to close before this government takes this health care staffing crisis seriously?

So, to the Premier: When will this government implement safe staffing ratios in Ontario, like the NDP government in BC has done?

In BC, they’re taking action and they’re getting results. They’ve seen improvement in recruitment and retention among health care workers. They are only the second jurisdiction in North America that has implemented these same staffing ratios, but here in Ontario, it’s pretty clear that this government is not taking this staffing crisis seriously at all. That is not only having an impact on those overworked health care workers, but it’s having an impact on the patients that they serve.

I want to go back to the Premier again: Will Ontario join BC and become a leader in health care by implementing staffing ratios, or is he content with the status quo?

Yesterday, we had an opportunity to choose primary care multidisciplinary clinicians and health care professionals. You chose administrative staff. We are going to stand with our clinicians, with our primary care providers, to ensure that across Ontario, we continue to expand primary care in the province of Ontario.

While the NDP cut by 10% the number of physicians who were able to train in the province of Ontario, while the Liberal government of the day cut physician services and seats by 50 per year, we are making the expansions necessary to get it done.

That was the day that I stood with the member from Peterborough and made the announcement of 78 primary care announcements, and since that day, we have had community health care, family health teams and CHCs standing with us and saying, “Thank you for making a commitment to primary care. Thank you on behalf of the patients in Ontario, the clinicians in Ontario and, ultimately, the health care system in Ontario.”

The OMA, the OHA, the family doctors of Ontario understand what significant investment this means to the people of Ontario. It is sorely disappointing that the NDP and the Liberals don’t seem to get it.

We have absolutely made those investments, whether it is in colleges and universities, with the Minister of Colleges and Universities expanding the number of health care physicians available; whether it is for nurse practitioners, for family physicians, for primary care paramedics in northern Ontario. These are significant investments that are going to make an impact in the decades to come—

Ontario is leading Canada in our wait times. Now, can we do better? Absolutely, which is why I am happy to put our record of increasing access to training to internationally educated primary care practitioners and clinicians against any other jurisdiction, because we are leading Canada.

We now have 1,235 more nurses reporting for employment and registered with the CNO than we did previously. Why? Because we are making the changes necessary to make sure that people have access to good employment, good jobs in the province of Ontario, in our health care system, and we’ve made those changes—

The member opposite can throw around all the insults she wants, but the facts actually paint a very different story. Last year, we had a record-breaking 17,000 new nurses registered in Ontario. Nearly half of those are in fact internationally educated. Some 30,000-plus nurses are studying in Ontario colleges and universities, and 24,000 new physicians.

Even the expansions that we’ve made to ensure that we have more physicians training in the province of Ontario—we have set aside 60% of those to be primary care practitioners. Why? Because we see the value in primary care, because we see the value in those multi-disciplinary teams. We will continue to do that work. It sounds like the member opposite and her party will continue to oppose those changes, but we’re getting the job done to make sure that people have access to multidisciplinary teams and primary care physicians in the province of Ontario.

Thank you.

Supplementary question?

I’m going to ask the independent members and the government front bench to stop pointing fingers at each other and heckling while the Leader of the Opposition has the floor.

Please start the clock. Minister of Health.

Speaker, the minister needs to get out of the backrooms and start listening to Ontarians. If she thinks that we’re doing well in the province of Ontario, boy—2.2 million Ontarians without access to primary care; operating rooms collecting dust. We have some of the best health care workers in the world, but we can’t retain them. They’re leaving faster than we can recruit them.

This government has no strategy to recruit and retain and return nurses to our hospitals and our long-term-care homes. Our long-term-care homes, our hospitals are relying increasingly on staffing, on private agency nurses that are bleeding the system dry.

I want to go back to the Premier again. How many more emergency rooms, how many more urgent care centres have to close before this government implements solutions that actually work in the province of Ontario?

Interjections.

Speaker, my question is for the Premier. The Information and Privacy Commissioner’s office has ordered the Ministry of the Solicitor General to turn over records of which OPP officers worked at the Premier’s family stag-and-doe event. We know these are the records that the government has refused to share with journalists through freedom-of-information requests. We know the RCMP is also investigating this matter. The Premier has denied there were extra officers on the site, but he’s going to great lengths to withhold the details.

So to the Premier: Can he confirm how many OPP officers were assigned to work at his family’s stag and doe event?

I want to remind the Premier that he’s not above the law, that the police don’t work for him and that they work for the people of Ontario.

We’ve already seen two explosive reports about this Premier’s family’s stag and doe. The reports revealed a deeply troubling pattern of a government that continues to help a select few of their friends at the expense of everybody else, and now we’re waiting for the results of an RCMP criminal investigation into this government’s conduct.

So my question is to the Premier: Did the RCMP have to step in because of concerns about the Premier’s close relationship with the OPP?

As I said in previous questions, we’ll allow the authorities to continue their work, and I have every faith that they can do it on their own.

I am keenly aware that the opposition consistently advocate for policies that would defund the police. They consistently advocate for positions that would make it easier for people who commit violent crimes to get on the street. They support the Liberals who have done that.

Look, Progressive Conservatives will always stand with our front-line officers, who do extraordinary work each and every day. I will leave it up to the opposition leader and her friends in the Liberal Party to explain to the people of the province of Ontario why they support catch-and-release policies, why they have reduced bail, why they don’t support us when we want to build more jails. When we want to ensure that our communities are safe, they want to defund police, and they’re helped in that by the Liberals, Mr. Speaker. We’ll go in a different direction.

My question is for the Minister of Energy.

The carbon tax is making life more expensive for everyone. Last week, as I was knocking on doors in my great riding of Newmarket–Aurora, every single door, every person I spoke to spoke to me about their concerns and their frustrations about the impact of the federal carbon tax, that it’s having on their daily lives, specifically their essential needs. They want the federal government to address their concerns and make life more affordable for them and for all Ontarians. But the federal Liberals and opposition parties only want to hike this regressive tax. After next month’s increase, Ontarians will be paying 17.6 cents extra on every litre of gas, costing them hundreds of dollars each year.

Speaker, can the minister please explain how the federal carbon tax negatively impacts the people of Ontario and what our government is doing to provide financial support?

Speaker, can the minister please explain more about the negative impact that the carbon tax is having on so many Ontarians?

Minister of Health.

Minister of Health.

Remarks in Anishininiimowin. Northern Ontario hospitals have been struggling to keep their emergency room doors open for years now. The program that allows them to hire locum doctors from southern Ontario as a temporary fix is coming to an end. What is this government going to do to make sure our ERs in the north stay open?

Speaker, March 31 is 12 days from now. What is the status of this program?

Interjections.

My question is for the Minister of Economic Development, Job Creation and Trade. When it comes to attracting investments, the competition from across the globe is very fierce. Governments are pulling every lever at their disposal to secure investments that create good-paying jobs and strengthen their economies. We know that fostering the conditions for a robust, low-cost business environment is crucial to landing important investments. But unfortunately, we’re playing a bit of tug-of-war with the federal Liberals when it comes to taxes and costs. We’re lowering taxes and cutting costs while the Liberals continue to hike taxes and continue to drive up costs every chance that they get. Their upcoming carbon tax increase on April 1 is just another example of this.

Speaker, can the minister explain to the House how, by lowering costs and cutting taxes, we’re able to secure important investments?

I’ve heard from plenty of businesses, plenty of households in my riding, who are concerned about the increase in the carbon tax, and I’m positive that Liberal and NDP members were hearing the same thing when they were in their ridings last week.

Speaker, can the minister please share with us what he’s hearing about the federal carbon tax?

When it comes to the economy, we have shown the Liberals that lowering taxes is how you create those conditions.

Now, here are some new facts this year, Speaker: In 2023, Ontario attracted 137 foreign direct investments. That brought in $11 billion from outside of the country into Ontario. That has created 12,000 new good-paying jobs right across our province. In fact, a new statistic today: Ontario has the largest number of FDI projects in Canada, and from 2018 to 2023, more jobs were created from foreign direct investment into Ontario than every US state and every Canadian province. That’s what happens when you cut taxes, lower taxes. Scrap the carbon tax.

Speaker, through you to the Minister of Health: Yesterday morning, I was at a rally in Niagara for EMS workers who are members of CUPE 911. They were sounding the alarm about ambulance wait times and code zeros that are happening far too often. They’re telling us that, in Niagara, there are not enough ambulances due to off-load delays and inadequate staffing to the point it is putting the public in danger.

What does the minister have to say to the workers in Niagara EMS who are asking for help and support because they’re working in dangerous situations every day and don’t have the resources or staffing to answer calls on time or do their jobs safely?

The member opposite raises an important issue. There is no doubt that our temporary locum programs have been a very effective tool that we have been able to use, working with Ontario Health, to make sure that emergency departments in northern Ontario, but frankly across many communities in Ontario, have emergency department coverage physicians. I will say, as a result of that program, we have seen no closures in northern Ontario EDs in the last year. Without a doubt, it has been a program that has had value.

We are in active conversations with the Ontario Hospital Association and the Ontario Medical Association to see how we can come forward with a more permanent solution. But I will keep the member updated because it is an important issue.

When we made additions and expansions in the Northern Ontario School of Medicine, when we ensured that we had 60% of those seats set aside for family medicine, that’s 100 additional seats where people are training in northern Ontario. The statistics show that where you train, where you ultimately practise and where you continue to practise are close to where you learn. We know that making those investments in primary care health care teams in northern Ontario at the Northern Ontario School of Medicine is going to make an impact in your communities in northern Ontario and indeed across Ontario.

In terms of wait times and ensuring that ambulances and paramedics can very quickly and effectively get back out onto the road into our communities, we have a number of programs that the member opposite, I hope, is aware of, which of course is the Dedicated Offload Nurses Program, a program that is funded 100% by our government and that ensures that we have a dedicated staff member, whether it is a nurse, a respiratory technologist or a paramedic, who stays with that patient until they can get service in their ED department. That program alone has made significant increases in decreasing the number of wait times.

Supplementary question?

I’m going to caution the member on his use of language. “Baloney” is pretty close to the line—especially before lunch.

Start the clock.

The Minister of Health.

The next question.

Supplementary?

Speaker, I can tell you that those workers don’t feel that this government has been there for them. Joey Durocher reached out to my office in Welland. In January, his knee pain became so unbearable that he had to go on modified duties at work. X-rays showed he had severe arthritis. When he was referred to a clinic, he was told the process would take well over a year. He said, “I don’t understand how people can be expected to suffer through something like this.”

Yesterday, this government had a chance to free up thousands of doctors to see more patients and chose not to. What specifically will this minister do to ensure people like Joey can get timely access to a doctor and the care they desperately need?

For the Minister of Health, Mr. Speaker: I’m tired of the people of Ontario getting ripped off by this government’s health care privatization agenda. When the Minister of Health welcomes private for-profit clinics with open arms, that’s not actually a surprise anymore. But when the Minister chooses to ignore blatant violations of the Canada Health Act, that is another thing entirely.

In October of 2023, it came to light that a nurse practitioner walk-in clinic in Ottawa was charging a $400 annual subscription fee to access fee-for-service care. And at the time, the minister told us that she would investigate. That was almost half a year ago, and in that time, many more clinics have popped up across Ontario, like the one in Ancaster that was announced just last month.

Mr. Speaker, her inaction is literally creating a market for health care profiteering in Canada and in Ontario. We must make good on the promise of primary care. How can anyone trust this government to manage our health care system, if it cannot even enforce the basic tenets of the Canada Health Act?

Even if we overlook the fact that it took six months for her to come up with that response, the fact of the matter is that closing the loophole, either through provincial or federal legislation, should be easy. Instead of taking the many measures at her disposal to make family medicine more attractive and accessible, to credential more foreign doctors, all the minister can do is brag about the conversations that she is supposedly having with the OMA and CPSO, with literally nothing to show for it. This government is more than happy to make patients pay while they appease private interest.

Mr. Speaker, will the minister stop placing the financial burden of primary care on patients and commit to funding it for everyone so that no one ever faces a fee, regardless of whether they’re seen by a family doctor or a nurse practitioner?

Interjections.

At the risk of stating the obvious, expanding primary care multidisciplinary teams by 78 teams in the province of Ontario—three times the amount that we initially committed, because we know that there is need.

We now have, because of investments that our government has made with the Minister of Colleges and Universities, 300 new student paramedics training in the province of Ontario, including in northern Ontario where there is a Learn and Stay program available for them to get their training for free in exchange for staying in communities that are underserved.

We will continue to make these investments while the member opposite, their party, continue to oppose them every time we vote on these investments. But we’re getting the job done, Speaker.

We have had conversations with the federal Minister of Health saying if there is an opportunity, if there is a wedge that is allowing these clinics to happen, then perhaps the member opposite could pick up the phone and call their federal counterparts, because that’s what I’ve been doing. And I’m making the case that if the Canada Health Act allows these for-profits, then we will be shutting them down with the changes to the Canada Health Act and federal government involvement.

When I sent a directive to the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Ontario in August of 2022, less than two months after starting my role as Minister of Health, the CPSO was able to assess, review and ultimately license—when appropriate—the historic highest number of internationally educated primary care physicians in the province of Ontario. So actions do make a difference. We did the same thing with the minister’s directive for the College of Nurses of Ontario. Again, two years running, Speaker, we have had historic high numbers of internationally educated nurses wanting to live, practise in the province of Ontario. Those are concrete changes that we are making to impact people’s lives and increase access to publicly funded health care.

Just for the record, I’m a roast beef guy, so I’ll thank you for that.

My question is to the Minister of Energy. Speaker, the federal carbon tax—

Interjections.

The federal carbon tax makes life more expensive for the people of Ontario. After years of punishing energy costs that are sky high, the Prime Minister announced that he was pausing the carbon tax but only on home heating oil and only for three years.

Families and businesses in my riding of Perth–Wellington that grow the food, that build our province every single month are being punished by this carbon tax. They can’t afford the high taxes of the opposition and the NDP members. Our government understands this, that the carbon tax only takes money out of hard-working people’s pockets. That’s why we fought this ludicrous tax all the way to the Supreme Court, and we will continue to fight it, keep going forward.

Speaker, can the minister please tell this House why the federal government’s selective carbon tax exemption hurts Ontarians?

As families across Ontario continue to struggle with the rising cost of living, our government continues to do everything we can to make life more affordable. But the queen of the carbon tax, Bonnie Crombie, and the independent Liberals don’t seem to care about the harmful impacts the carbon tax has on the lives of our constituents. We need members on the opposite to work with us. In fact, the member from Kanata–Carleton is the caucus liaison to the Liberal Party of Canada and the federal Liberal caucus, but she refuses to call her federal Liberal colleagues to halt the carbon tax.

Thankfully, our government will continue to act to keep costs down for families in Ontario. Can the minister please share with this House what we are doing?