I’d like to introduce a number of visitors to the chamber this morning.

First, I’d like to introduce Michau Van Speyk, an important autism and mental health advocate.

I’d like to introduce Rameez and Sana Mufti, who are the siblings of my outstanding OLIP intern, Alia Mufti.

Finally, I would like to introduce the following people from the community of Chesley and the Ontario Health Coalition: Brenda Scott, Ian Scott, Hazel Pratt, Jennifer Shaw, Faye Bell McClure, Sharon Burley, Doug Walsh, Audrey Walsh, Isobel Bell, and Natalie Mehra.

Welcome to the chamber.

My question is for the Premier. Yesterday, this government presented a plan for health care that inspired zero confidence that it would protect patients or ensure fair, equitable, timely access in our province. It avoided the root causes of our crisis and made a series of promises that we have no reason to believe will be acted upon.

I mean, why should we? This government promised they wouldn’t touch the greenbelt, and then they carved it up. They promised they would sign up 8,000 children to the Ontario Autism Program this year, and instead they just let the wait-list balloon and stopped reporting data. They told us there wasn’t a crisis in health care, even as at least 158 emergency departments closed across our province.

And now, the government is presenting a superficial plan for health care that makes vague promises about guardrails for some of the very same problems they have been consistently ignoring since they came into power. Mr. Speaker, why should anyone trust anything this Premier and government have to say?

We have already seen the poisonous effects of profits in long-term care, in which seniors died in droves. This government did nothing except introduce legislation to protect the most negligent operators and then award them more contracts. Now this government is enabling for-profit operators to siphon health care workers out of our public health care system. As Bill 124 pushes them out, temporary nursing agencies are pulling them out.

Many of these agencies engage in unscrupulous recruiting practices, like hiring out of parking lots, or they institute harmful contractual obligations that stop nurses from working in the location of their choice. Others engage in rampant price gouging, allowing hospitals to be charged three or four times the normal rates.

Will this government explain why they have not fulfilled their promise to take action on temporary, for-profit nursing agencies?

This summer, Ontarians told us that the health care system was in crisis, but the Premier and Minister of Health were nowhere to be found for six weeks.

Then, in August, the CEO of Ontario Health went on record admitting that the health care system was under tremendous strain.

Despite this, we kept hearing from the government that patients were getting care in the time that they needed even though they weren’t. This month, I discovered leaked Ontario Health data revealing that for the month of August, ER wait times, lengths of stay, ambulance off-load times, and time to in-patient bed were the worst that they have ever been, going all the way back to 2008. The health care system took a nosedive in the last 12 months alone.

Yesterday, the member for Eglinton–Lawrence quoted Dr. Ronald Cohn to justify her position that our health care system has adequate capacity, yet Dr. Cohn’s quote was incomplete. In the same article she referenced, he conceded that, faced with mounting patient volumes, “I am worried about how much more we can do.”

Will the Minister of Health explain why, in each of these examples, the government’s position has disagreed with the positions of their own sources?

The plan that she references, a Plan to Stay Open, is the most unambitiously titled plan, I think, in history. It’s a plan to stay open; it’s not a plan to deliver great patient care. It’s a plan to merely stay open, and it’s already failing on that mandate.

Anyway, I would like to expand on the Ontario Health data I revealed on October 12, which for the first time revealed the incredibly bleak and deteriorating state of our health care system. The people of Ontario used to get weekly updates from the Chief Medical Officer of Health. They used to have transparent access to Ontario’s science table.

Now the only way to get real data portraying our health care system is to get leaked information from the courage of people who are willing to share documents. I’m hearing now from health care workers that there is deafening silence from the Ministry of Health, and also that this weekend there were multiple GTA emergency departments on redirect because they were full.

Will the Minister of Health or her designate explain why this government refuses to be accountable to the people of Ontario about the state of our health care system?