For the Minister of Health: There is a fundamental principle in emergency medicine that says following any major trauma or accident, patients have a one-hour window in which the right care means the difference between life and death. That hour is called the golden hour—just 60 minutes to save a life.

Yet, under this government’s watch, millions of Ontarians are being denied and robbed of their golden hour by the Premier and the Minister of Health. Under their watch, we’ve seen 911 calls go unanswered, ambulances dispatched too late, rampant and unpredictable closures of emergency departments—nearly 900 in 2022 and almost 500 by last August, and it’s only getting worse.

While the RCMP has rightly launched a criminal investigation into the Premier’s greenbelt misconduct, we are watching yet another scandal unfold in this government’s mismanagement of health care. When will this government do more than lip service and take a single concrete step to reopen shuttered emergency departments across this province?

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?

I rise on a point of order to correct my record. In my supplemental response, I made the comment that the government hadn’t done anything to keep ERs closed, but of course I meant they haven’t done anything to keep ERs open.

Deferred vote on the motion for second reading of the following bill:

Bill 151, An Act to amend various statutes regarding infrastructure / Projet de loi 151, Loi modifiant diverses lois relatives aux infrastructures.