Thank you to the member from University–Rosedale for your comments. Now, we know that the Ontario Medical Association was also very concerned about fixing the crisis in primary care and expanding and integrating home and community care. There are a number of serious concerns about the privatization of community care. I’m also wondering if perhaps you could speak to the need to expand nurse practitioner-led clinics.

Mr. Speaker, in January, this government forced the walk-in clinic in Mallorytown to close after they changed how virtual clinics bill OHIP. It was the only one of its kind in Leeds-Grenville, and over 1,000 rural residents were left without another option.

In April, a funding application was submitted for a nurse-practitioner-led clinic, another option for rural residents. An announcement was supposed to be made in September, and then October, and then the fall economic statement—crickets. The mayor just called it “a very deathly silence.”

In the meantime, you’ve still got rural Ontarians without access to primary care. More people with more complex problems crowd the Brockville emergency room. How many times is this kind of thing being repeated in rural and northern Ontario?

Mr. Speaker, innovative ideas for primary care are ready to roll across the province. Why can’t this government make up its mind and get rural Ontarians access to primary care?

The minister is probably going to make up some attack on the Liberal record in her answer to this supplemental question, so let me just say here that the first nurse-practitioner-led clinic in Canada was in 2007 in Sudbury, in the first term of a Liberal government. Team-based primary care began in 2005 in the first term of a Liberal government.

Mr. Speaker, the government’s MPP for Leeds–Grenville–Thousand Islands and Rideau Lakes has been standing up and asking about this critically important rural health care issue in this Legislature. To the minister: Why does the Liberal MPP next door have to fight for health care in rural communities?