Last week, I had the great privilege of standing with the Premier and my York region caucus colleagues to announce a brand new medical school just north of Thornhill, in the city of Vaughan. This school will be the first medical school to focus on primary care physicians—so important. It will include up to 80 undergraduate and 102 post-graduate seats starting in September 2028, with up to 240 undergraduate and 293 post-graduate seats on an annual basis once operating at full capacity.

This project is in partnership with York University and will be situated beside the state-of-the-art Cortellucci Vaughan Hospital and the soon-to-be-built long-term-care home. Together, these projects will significantly improve the quality of care our families and seniors have, bringing health care closer to home.

Speaker, our government is launching the largest expansion of Ontario’s medical education system in more than a decade. Parents, students, grandmothers, grandfathers, bubbes and zaydes, this is so exciting because our students will now have more opportunities to attend medical school locally, just a few minutes north in the city of Vaughan, a little bit north of Thornhill, and that is such positive news.

I want to thank my friend and colleague the member for King–Vaughan for being a strong champion for this project and a great advocate for the people of Thornhill and Ontario.

I thank the member from the opposition for allowing me to speak about Ontario’s world-class health care system. Our government has taken bold action through the Your Health plan. Ontario is leading the country, with over 90% of Ontarians having a family doctor or primary care provider. Since 2018, we’ve registered over 12,500 new physicians in Ontario, with 10% of those being family physicians. But we do understand more needs to be done.

The NDP, when in office, cut 10% of medical enrolment seats, and the former Liberal Premier in 2015 removed 50 medical residency positions, leaving Ontario with hundreds less physicians practising in our province today.

We also just announced the York University investment, where it will be exclusively towards family physicians. We will continue doing what is needed for the people of Ontario to ensure that we have the best publicly funded health care.

Our government will not tolerate clinics taking advantage of a loophole created by federal legislation. We need the federal government to take action to ensure all people of Ontario and Canadians can access publicly funded primary care. The ministry reviews all possible violations that come to its attention, to ensure that all OHIP-insured patients who are charged for an insured service are reimbursed in full.

If the NDP is serious about expanding access to primary care, we invite them to vote in favour of our budget that will connect hundreds of thousands of people to primary care in their communities for years to come.