My question is to the Premier. People in Durham need health care and need to know that a new Durham hospital is coming. Lakeridge Health convened an expert panel to site a future hospital, and Whitby was chosen.

Premier Ford was a guest on our own local CKDO radio and said, “There is going to be a Whitby hospital. Is it going to be tomorrow? Not tomorrow, but down the road, very shortly, we’ll be issuing the planning grants.”

We didn’t see any planning grants in this year’s budget, but since the Premier clearly promised on the radio to everyone waiting for a Durham hospital, my question is, when will Durham get the planning grant for the new hospital at the proposed Whitby site?

The Premier is dragging his feet on this decision and seems to be backing away from his promise, which is making people very nervous. This Premier gave away MZOs and greenbelt chunks as wedding favours to PC donor developers, so surely he can appreciate that trust feels like too much to ask of people.

PC donor developers are chomping at the bit to develop the environmentally sensitive Carruthers Creek headwaters, and they want the Premier to put a hospital in northeast Pickering. Speaker, make no mistake; allowing development of the Carruthers Creek headwaters is about speculative profits and not health care.

So my question is whether this Premier will come good on what he told Durham folks and put the Durham hospital in Whitby to meet growing health care needs or if his flip-flopping means that donor developers will be making this decision—

Interjections.

As we are debating the budget, we should be debating the priorities of the government for the province. I would have hoped to have seen tangible health care investment for folks in my neck of the woods.

Specifically, something missing from this budget was what would be about $3 million—the cost of a planning grant to allow Lakeridge Health to begin the advanced planning and design work on a much-needed hospital in the Durham region. An expert panel selected Whitby. The Premier said we’d be getting a planning grant soon.

So my question to the Minister of Finance, who happens to be the MPP for Pickering–Uxbridge: When will the minister let Lakeridge Health get that planning grant, get started with that grant to begin the design work and start the wheels turning for health care in the Durham region?

I listened to the Minister of Tourism, Culture and Sport talk about the budget, and one of the things he mentioned was that we have to have smart public investment in key public services. That’s what he said. And just now, he talked about how this health care is funded by this government; I’ll remind the member that it’s actually funded by the people, the taxpayers. That’s why this government has the money to fund health care.

But what this government has done is actually not use the money correctly—hasn’t been wise. Because Bill 124 is an unconstitutional bill that you wasted taxpayers’ money—you lost that case. Now you actually have to make up for those wages. That is an oversight of—a far supreme error. The other one that this government has wasted money on is spending $1 billion on agency nurses.

These are not investments in our public system; these are wasteful acts of this government. Can you explain why this happens under your government all the time?

There is no new money for increased mental health supports for students. I want to just repeat that very clearly, because this government has talked about mental health supports. There is no new money in this budget for mental health supports for students.

I’ll tell you what I’m hearing from parents are tears and calls of rage. They have reached their wits’ end. Why, Speaker? I’ll tell you. Because the $18 million that’s allocated in this budget doesn’t even come close to the actual need that our communities are looking for.

The TDSB, in 2022, spent $67 million more on special education than they received—$67 million more. More than half of the secondary school principals and nearly two thirds of the elementary principals have reported that they’ve asked their parents to keep their children with special needs at home. Don’t even bother sending them to school, because they don’t have the capacity to support them and there’s nothing in this budget to actually change that.

I really appreciate this government’s persistence. They love to re-announce announcements. So once again, we hear about the York University medical school, which is great, but they’ve announced that before. What they forget to tell us is that there’s no associated funding attached to it.

We are also hearing that post-secondary institutions are running deficits. They were very loud and clear in their pre-budget consultation. They’re running deficits; they’ve raided their reserves; they’ve sold off their assets. The well is dry and they need a partner that is going to step up, and multi-year funding that’s sustainable and predictable, and that’s not here in this budget.