I rise to support our motion to free up doctors from their administrative burdens. It’s an important opportunity.

In the north, where I live, accessing primary health care, or accessing any health care whatsoever, is often a challenge—we are at about 45,000 people in Thunder Bay who don’t have access to primary health care.

We know that the Ontario Medical Association named administrative support as one of their key asks, so we think that needs to happen.

Now, nurse practitioners: I want to talk a little bit about that, because the NDP actually started them, and they’ve been a fantastic model of team-based work. The problem is, there aren’t enough positions for nurse practitioners, and they’re leaving the province, they’re going to the United States, or, in some cases, they’re joining for-profit clinics, which is exactly what has happened in Thunder Bay. The moment Bill 60 dropped, we got a for-profit clinic. It started at $100, now it’s $200, now it’s $400 a year.

I’ve just heard from health care teams in the region, and they’re saying they’re much worse off than they were two years ago. The OMA also notes that patients in the north experience persistent inequities in the care they receive and in their health outcomes.

Then we have the Northern Health Travel Grant, which this government voted against. All we were asking for was a review, and yet the member from Kenora, the member from Thunder Bay–Atikokan, along with the rest of the government, voted against it. Where’s the money? Well, we know that the cataract clinic in Kingston is getting 56% more than public clinics for the same work.

I’d just like to close by reading something here. Krystal Shapland said that she was initially seeing a nurse practitioner but had to stop once the practice started charging fees higher than she could afford. She now has been diagnosed with cancer and is only able to go to walk-in clinics because she can’t afford to pay for the for-profit clinic that’s now available. She says she believes the government is deliberately underfunding primary care and feels all but the healthiest patients will become casualties of a failing primary care system.

To close, I don’t know that everybody knows, but the ask from health services across the province was $700 million; the government gave out $90 million. There’s a lot of money that’s going into private health care. If it wasn’t going there, it could be going to support publicly funded primary health care that we need right now.