My question is to the Minister of Health. For years, the Ontario Medical Association has been sounding the alarm on the shortage of doctors in the province. In Kitchener, there are currently 55 open physician positions on the provincial recruitment program.

The KW chamber of commerce has said, “There are somewhere between 60,000 and 70,000 people in Waterloo region right now who don’t have ... a ... doctor.”

Kitchener is not alone; there are 2.2 million Ontarians who do not have a family doctor, and that number is going to surge to 4.4 million by 2026.

Speaker, my question to the Minister of Health: When will this government prioritize the patients and families waiting for care in Waterloo region.

A shortage of doctors causes more people to visit the emergency room, increasing wait times and putting further financial strain on this already overburdened health care.

KW is not alone; there are currently 32,000 people in Peterborough alone without a family doctor, another 28,000 in Kingston, another 10,000 in Sault Ste. Marie. This Conservative government is failing to provide Ontarians with access to primary care that they definitely deserve.

Back to the Minister of Health: When will this government finally address the crisis in Ontario and the 2.2 million people who do not have access to a family doctor?

Sorry?

And bring back the late career initiative—there are nurses who would come back into the workforce. They really would. But they’re not going to come into this particular environment right now, and I honestly can’t blame them. I want them to feel supported, I want them to be encouraged and I want them to have the financial support to do the upgrading and the upskilling, but I don’t blame them right now for not being there.

The other example that we had at committee, another solution that this government definitely could employ, is increased funding for nurse practitioners and community health centres. The fact that this province is not utilizing the capacity of nurse practitioners who can alleviate a wait-list by 900 patients—one nurse practitioner can carry a workload of 900 patients. Nurse practitioners are keen to work in smaller communities and rural and northern communities. Our health critic, the member for Nickel Belt, has been talking about the value and the capacity of nurse practitioners for years, and it truly is astounding. As I said, I really do hope that on Thursday in the 2023 budget we see a significant investment in nurse practitioners.

The third piece is around ensuring the safety of nurses and health care professionals. This speaks to recruitment, because nurses are still fighting to get the appropriate personal protective equipment. ONA says, “Guarantee access to N95s or a higher level of protection.” They want to stay healthy. They want to stay healthy so that they keep their patients healthy, so that they can keep showing up to work.

Then, tackle head-on the growing epidemic of violence in health care settings. What we have heard in our local ridings, what nurses have experienced first-hand around physical and also emotional abuse—because people are so frustrated, that environment has been so demoralized. I think that’s what we heard. We heard Bill 124 has been humiliating for them, and yet this government stubbornly, callously holds on to this legislation, fighting for it in court, even when the very people that you call heroes tell you that it is untenable. If you want to fix the problem, there are solutions here.

The last point from ONA is to stop the privatization of Ontario’s health care system. This is a huge concern for this workforce. I would argue that you’re kind of working at odds with yourself. You’re trying to recruit nurses into a system, but you’re creating a parallel system as well. That parallel system is now competing with the public system, and you have all the research and all the evidence which demonstrate that this will undermine the goal of staffing up our hospitals.

Why does the government not fund our current surgical suites, expanding those services? They are the public infrastructure in 100 public hospitals in this great province. Why would you not reach the potential and ensure that the capacity of those surgical suites is met? You could address the 12,000 children who are waiting. You could address the 90,000-surgery backlog of long-haulers—which is kind of a terrible name, but these are people who have been waiting so long that the optimum time to receive surgery and to have a really healthy outcome has come and has gone.

I can’t imagine the finance minister knowing all of this now—and I want to thank the good staff at the Financial Accountability Office; they broke down these numbers for us. They laid it right on the line, Madam Speaker. They said the investment needs to happen, or we will get to a point in time in the province of Ontario where—and these aren’t my words—we will fundamentally lose whatever we have left of our public health care system.

I don’t know about you on that side or this side, but these people here—these 31 people now, because we just won a really good by-election in Hamilton—we think that public health care is worth fighting for. It gets us up every day to come to this place, and even to have to listen to the rhetoric that we had to this morning during the non-answer-period time—lots of questions but not a lot of answers. When that does happen, it is essentially demoralizing, but at the same time, I think that the people we serve truly know what we’re fighting for, because they see what’s actually happening in Ontario. It doesn’t matter what the press release says. It doesn’t matter that you have some awkward nurses and doctors behind you in the photo op. The fact of the matter is that people know what’s happening in our health care system and they’re very concerned about it. Even the people who have money are concerned about it, Madam Speaker.

I want to talk about this one story that I just caught wind of on Friday. It’s really good that the member from Hamilton Mountain has come into the House, because she has stood in her place for years now talking about the tsunami of complex-medical-needs children who age out of being a child into adulthood.

Cynthia Mulligan did a story last week. These parents came forward to tell their story. I believe they’re from Simcoe: Michelle and Sean Crooks. They have twins who are 23 years old. Both boys have autism. During the pandemic, when the routines got broken, the supports fell apart, and Aidan, one of the boys, became very violent. It became too much for the parents.

We all know some parents who are, really, at the breaking point. If you’re meeting with parents and they’re in this state, you have this genuine feeling of helplessness because there is nowhere for them to turn.

So I just want to say, their son Aidan, for the last eight months, has been in a psychiatric unit because there’s no place else for him. As a parent, it’s heartbreaking to watch these stories, because the solutions are there, and there actually even may be some resources, not in their genuine community—but the rules are so broken, the community supports are so fragmented, that there is no safety net. It is frayed, it is torn and it has been that way for a long time, which is why when you see that you underspent in community and social services by $603 million—that money is needed.

Those agencies and the support services, they’re ready to scale up. They want to be able to pay their people very well. They do. I don’t know why people would be shaking their head. That money needs to get into the community. The government budgeted. They said, “We acknowledge that the need is there,” but the money has not gone into the community.

So then you have parents—there’s a cost to actually not investing. That’s the other part. So because the money didn’t get out the door, because it’s not in the community, because Aidan doesn’t have any options, he’s in an eight-by-eight cell, a padded cell, in a psych unit. That is not the appropriate place for a 23-year-old who has complex medical needs and autism. It is cruel, is what it is. His parents have said, “I think we broke, and now we’re trying to put ourselves back together” again.

But the fact that there is an opportunity to change the course of Aidan’s life to help these parents, the fact that you could do something on housing—you really could. The developers are not going to build affordable, attainable housing. Developers and home builders are in the business of business. The government of the day has a moral responsibility to do the right thing for the vulnerable people of this province. And in doing so—and I think that this is the frustrating part about it—you save money down the line, because the fact that Aidan has been in a psych unit for eight months costs a lot of money. It costs a lot of money for people to get so sick that they move past the emergency room and then they’re in long-term care. It costs a lot of money to not get an assessment for a child in the education system and to see that child become so frustrated that they’re excluded from school and end up in the justice system—the justice system that you also underspent and underinvested in to the tune of $88 million just last quarter.

I have a young woman in my riding who was assaulted three years ago, at the age of 15. She has not had her day in court. But the person who assaulted her has already confessed to the assault. So that person is still out there in the community, and you wonder why women don’t come forward and tell people about their experiences.

If the system does not respond in an ethical and trusting way, if the system is not transparent, then you don’t have trust. So as the government stands in their place and talks about how great they are, it is my job, it is our job as the official opposition, to speak truth to power, and that is what we do every single day in question period. Now, we don’t get the answers, because you have your talking points. But what we have is the people in our communities who know why we are fighting, and we are fighting for a strong public education system. We are fighting for a strong health care system. We are fighting you on the further profitization of the health care system. We’re fighting on transparency and trust around the greenbelt.

This really has mobilized people. Perhaps the government is surprised by this. I personally am not surprised, because there have been a series of decisions that this government has made which have whittled away on goodwill. Goodwill and trust are also very much connected, and when you do follow the money, you see that the priorities are auto subsidies versus housing. You make some municipalities whole—you gave the city of Toronto some money—but then we heard today about a $1.2-billion shortfall on housing. I don’t know if you’ve seen Toronto housing lately, but who makes an investment in Toronto housing stock and then not maintains it, not keeps it up? It’s like throwing good money after bad. You invest, but then you don’t take care of the investment, when we cannot afford to lose any more affordable housing in Ontario.

That truly is the most frustrating piece, Madam Speaker: The opportunity here to create good local jobs—because you can’t send those jobs on housing offshore; those are good local community jobs. The educational system is clamouring for new folks. We heard Bill 124 has had a cooling effect on labour, full stop. And so people are looking for jobs that are less complex and that make more money, because those people who work in the public system—those people who go to work every single day to uphold our public services, to serve children, to serve seniors—those opportunities are not seen as true opportunities anymore. They were at one point, I would say. They genuinely were.

In fact, I have this crest in my office. It’s actually my father-in-law’s. He served in national defence for 40 years. Do you know who signed that certificate? Brian Mulroney. He thanked him for his service. This government is failing the people who serve in the public service. You are pushing them out.

In fact, the out-migration for the province of Ontario has never been higher. You are losing between 50,000 to 130,000 who are going to school here, but they’re taking their skills and their talents to other jurisdictions, where they can afford a house, where their family can find child care, where their family can actually reach their potential. You can’t blame people for doing that, but I can tell you, while you have Bill 124 on the books—which is, as we’ve heard, humiliating for workers; which caps them at 1%—people are going to leave the system, and you will never be able to recruit those people back into the system, because once they’re gone, they’re gone. They’re not coming back to an unaffordable Ontario.

And so, while you have Bill 124—stubbornly, callously fighting for an unconstitutional piece of legislation in our courts, wasting taxpayer money—and while you have Bill 23 on the books, when 444 municipalities have said, “This is not helpful. This is disrespectful to the people who elected us, and this will not help with the affordable housing crisis in Ontario,” and while this government stubbornly refuses to admit that homelessness is a crisis in Ontario—when all those conditions are at play, you have a chance on Thursday. You have a real chance with budget 2023, and that’s what we’re going to want to see.

We put in a dissenting opinion to the finance minister. We gave him some solutions and some suggestions, and we’re going to be looking for those suggestions, because we want Ontario to be stronger. We want the people in public service to be respected. We want our health care system to be there. We want Aidan not to be in a psychiatric unit; we want him to be in a residential home, where he is loved and he is supported. Ontario can be that place, but it will take strategic investment.

While you sit on $2.9 billion in unallocated contingency funds, while you basically say, “Yes, we have this slush fund, but we’re just going to hold on to it for a rainy day,” what you need to know is that it is raining in this province for so many people. The storm is here. You helped create it. You helped create it when you froze the minimum wage in 2018-19 all the way through a pandemic, which, costed out, was $7,000 a year for vulnerable workers.

You have the opportunity on Thursday to do the right thing, and we are hoping and praying on this side of the House that you do it.

The real crisis is within our health care workforce, which this government continues to disrespect with Bill 124, appealing the decision which found this legislation to be unconstitutional and a violation of charter rights. The workers who are in the health care system right now are overworked and they are underpaid. The government can talk about their so-called recruitment strategy, but you can’t recruit people into a broken system. You should be focusing on retaining those workers.

The Financial Accountability Officer expects the province will need 33,000 more nurses and PSWs to keep up with the needs of our growing and aging population.

Back to the Premier: How does this government expect to recruit thousands more nurses and PSWs when, last year, wages for Ontario nurses were among the lowest in the country?