I want to thank the member for Mississauga–Erin Mills for your comments, and also the member for Kitchener—

Interjection.

This is the Working for Workers bill. I was at a protest recently at city hall with gig workers, and they were talking about how they’re making $6.37 an hour because this government passed another Working for Workers bill that stripped them of their protections under the Employment Standards Act. In fact, it actually makes them—gig workers—a separate category of workers that are not entitled to the protections, such as minimum wage protections. Some of these gig workers are making $6.37 an hour.

My question to the member is, should this government repeal that legislation and allow gig workers protections under the Employment Standards Act? I’ll ask it to the member from Mississauga–Erin Mills.

This government is bankrupting our hospitals and they’re creating a crisis in our public health care system in order to privatize it. If you want to see a health care professional in Ontario, well, you can see a nurse practitioner at the South Keys Health Center in Ottawa and just pay $400 for the first visit. Or you can go online to Maple, a virtual care app that charges $70 for a visit.

This government is undermining our public health care system and creating a two-tier system, and the victims of this are the 2.3 million Ontarians who do not have a family doctor. That number is growing; by 2026, it will be four million patients who do not have a family doctor.

This government refuses to take simple measures so, today, our leader Marit Stiles has proposed a simple solution to address some of this problem. I’ve met with family physicians, I’ve met with medical students, and they say the reason that people don’t want to go into family practice is because they end up spending 20 hours a week—40% of their work time—filling out paperwork.

The solution proposed by Marit Stiles that we’ll be voting on today and which the government has said that they’re going to be voting against is simply to hire administrators to do the paperwork so that doctors can see patients. This simple solution would free up the equivalent of adding an additional 2,000 doctors to our system.

In my riding of Spadina–Fort York, we’ve lost two walk-in clinics and seven doctors in Chinatown, and thousands and thousands of patients are affected. I’ll give you just a couple of examples:

Ye is an elderly woman in the riding. She was dizzy and could not sleep for four days, so she went to a pharmacy and asked for meds, but there were no more refills. Then she went to the emergency. She waited in emergency room for seven hours, but she couldn’t get the prescription because she doesn’t speak English.

Amanjeev, another resident, says, “I have experienced US health care, and there is nothing amazing about it. Public health is needed to make sure there is equitable health care access for everyone. And funding this public health care system means that nurses and doctors who got into this profession to help actually” can do it without burning out.

The simple solution that we are proposing today and that I’m asking the government to support is to hire administrators so that family physicians can see patients.