My question is for the Premier. Mr. Speaker, $1 billion of taxpayer money is currently on its way to the Premier’s wealthy, well-connected friends at the Beer Store and LCBO. This isn’t about convenience. This is about favouring insiders, furthering political agendas and justifying an early election.

Meanwhile, due to this government’s historic underfunding and stunning incompetence, the township of Durham has the latest rural hospital to find itself on the chopping block. This is the same playbook that shuttered Minden hospital’s emergency department and which now threatens the collapse of Bracebridge’s hospital.

First, the Premier and Minister of Health neglect the needs of rural and northern hospitals. And staffing is foremost amongst those needs. Yet, the Premier and Minister of Health have deliberately chosen to underpay health care workers, drag them through court, let temporary staffing agencies run wild, and ignore the issues of burnout, mental health and workplace safety.

When hospitals like the one in Durham no longer have enough staff to function, what does this government do? They give a billion dollars to the Beer Store and LCBO. That was easy.

Mr. Speaker, why is the Premier paying off big beer rather than doing anything to—

At a time when more health care workers are leaving the profession than ever before, this government is telling us that things have never been better. The amount of people without a family doctor has increased by more than 800,000 since this government took office, and they want to talk about beer.

That doesn’t cut it for patients in Durham whose emergency department now operates on banker’s hours, who will have to be driven out of their community, often in dangerous winter conditions and away from loved ones, just to get a hospital bed. Soon, diagnostic services will dry up, and doctors are already leaving.

But it doesn’t end there. Developers were planning two residential communities in Durham that would have totalled 500 homes. When news broke out that the community could soon be without a hospital, those developers pulled out. The Minister of Health’s failures are now turning into the Minister of Housing’s failures.

Mr. Speaker, how does the Premier expect to meet his housing targets if he can’t even ensure that health care needs are met in every community across Ontario?

Interjections.

I may need more than one page for this one.

In April, the residents of Durham were notified that their in-patient beds at Durham hospital would be eliminated, in the wake of their 24/7 emergency department being reduced to essentially bankers’ hours. So they’ve put together this petition that has amassed over 3,700 signatures in less than 48 hours.

It calls for the following things: Number one, it orders the South Bruce Grey Health Centre to stop any and all action against the Durham hospital immediately and reverse their decisions. It asks for them to release any and all business analyses, financial projections and health care staffing data that have been used to justify the changes to the clinical services being provided at Durham hospital. And then, finally, it calls on the government to fully and urgently implement all recommendations from Auditor General of Ontario reports on hospitals in northern Ontario and on emergency departments.

I fully and wholeheartedly agree with and endorse this petition, and I’m thrilled to pass it over to page Soyul.

The Information and Privacy Commissioner, an independent and non-partisan officer, identified rampant confidentiality issues with this legislation and made a series of recommendations, all of which were declined by the government during clause-by-clause consideration. What action is this government taking to actually ensure that this bill provides any protection for patient confidentiality, recognizing that none has been identified, as written?

None of these things have done anything to keep ERs closed and have ignored entirely the root causes of what we’re facing, because right now patients cannot get access to primary care. They can’t get access to family doctors and family health teams. When they try to get out to nurse practitioners, many of them can only be accessed by paying $400 mandatory subscription fees.

This is about doing things like dropping the appeal of Bill 124 and putting in the work to retain health care workers with proper wages, benefits and mental health supports. This means regulating temporary nursing agencies. It means investing the billions of dollars this government is instead stashing away in contingency funds. We cannot afford to fail on this.

In September, three teens were stabbed at a house party in the middle the night. Rushed to the nearest emergency department, they found that it was closed. In the last month, there was a 10-day period where the emergency department in Chesley, Ontario, was open for only 10 hours.

What does the Minister of Health say to the people Ontario who live with the anxiety of not having an emergency room open in their times of crisis?

This morning, I would like to welcome the Nurse Practitioners’ Association of Ontario and my friend Krystal Fox.

I’d also like to welcome the Canadian Cancer Survivor Network, Lung Cancer Canada and the Lung Health Foundation—specifically, Jessica Buckley, CEO; Jess Rogers, VP of programs, research and public affairs; and Riley Sanders, manager of public affairs.

Welcome to Queen’s Park.

We’ve had many greetings for members of the OMA. As a member, I’d be remiss if I didn’t say something myself. I’d like to welcome all of you, specifically Dr. Andrew Park, president of the OMA; Dr. Rose Zacharias, our past president; my friends, Dr. Lisa Salamon and Dr. Audrey Karlinsky; my boss from my other job, Dr. Angela Marrocco; and all of the members of the Ontario Medical Association. I must admit, I don’t feel as lonely today because, very clearly, the doctors are in.

The members across love to speak about history, as long as it’s not their own history. They love to ignore the fact that they caused a mass exodus of health care workers. They love to ignore the fact that they created a backlog of 22 million services. They love to ignore the fact that the ALC beds ballooned under their administration.

So, to the member across, what would you have preferred—what should the throne speech have said in order for this government to have addressed its own failures?