My question is to the Premier. Seniors in hospital are being fined $400 a day if they refuse to be sent to a long-term-care home they didn’t choose, even if it’s up to 150 kilometres away from their families.

This government repeatedly denied the use of this cruel practice under Bill 7. The Conservatives claim that Bill 7 gives hospitals the authority to charge seniors $400 a day in order to force them out to clear out beds and create hospital capacity. But we know wait times in hospitals remain historically high, and one senior recently was slapped with—listen to this—a $5,200 bill.

Was the Premier actually unaware of the charges being billed to seniors, or did he purposely withhold that information from the media?

Our government believes that a hospital is not a home. We repeat: A hospital is not a home. Under the same legislation that the member is referring to, 99.96% of those people he is referencing have gone from being patients in a hospital to residents in long-term care—17,339 people now have the dignity of calling a home a home.

But I guess we shouldn’t be surprised by the attitude from the member opposite, right? Because this morning, the Leader of the Opposition mocked long-term-care homes as counting as homes, mocked student housing as counting as homes and, one step further, equated them to being jail cells.

We see things very differently. Our seniors took care of us. That’s why we’re building a record capacity, fixing the mistakes that the Liberals made when they failed to build: 611 net new beds when they exited government in 2018. We will continue to not only build capacity, we’re ending hallway health care in Ontario.

Minister, a senior had to pay $5,200 to a hospital, as your party continues to ask question after question over affordability. There are not a lot of seniors in the province of Ontario who can afford a $5,200 bill. I don’t care if it’s one or 10, they shouldn’t have to pay that kind of money.

We’ve learned the minister has allowed nearly 300 seniors to be bullied and forced to move to a long-term-care home without their consent—think about that; without your parents’ or your grandparents’ consent—and he chooses to hide the information or is completely unaware that seniors are being fined $400 a day under his legislation. And he still refuses to apologize to the seniors and their families they have hurt and intimidated, including the thousands of seniors that died of COVID in long-term-care homes under the government’s watch.

Speaker, are the seniors simply cash cows, dispensable to this government, or will the Premier repeal Bill 7?

The member doesn’t want to listen to me, but maybe he will listen to his colleagues on the opposition benches: “Alternate level of care. It’s a fancy word that means ... you really would like to be supported someplace else, but you have no choice but to” be in a “hospital.”

Here’s another one, the MPP for Waterloo: “These are patients who should not be in a hospital. They should be in long-term care or in retirement or assisted living options.”

So, Speaker, I have a question. I mentioned the 17,000 seniors who are no longer patients in a hospital, now residents in long-term care. What about the 8,838 in Ontario Health West, including Niagara region, who have gone from hospitals to now living in long-term care? Would the member like to go with me and tell those members, all 8,800 of them, that they’re better off in a hospital? I’m not going to do that. If the member wants to do it, go ahead. Will the member apologize to seniors for ignoring them for decades upon decades, as this government is finally taking care of them and picking up on their failures?