My question is for the Premier. Sudbury has one of the highest opioid mortality rates in Ontario, and our only supervised consumption site, the Spot, just closed. It closed because the Conservative government chose not to provide any provincial funding. The Spot is health care. Health care is a provincial responsibility. And the Premier refused to fund it. The Spot has had an application in for two years and seven months. And the Premier refused to fund it. When it opened, the Spot ran for 16 months using only municipal funding and local donors, all because the Premier refused to fund it.

My question is, why did the Premier refuse to fund the Spot and save lives?

Interjections.

Let me tell you abut James Gough. James was a former addict. He told me that the Spot staff saved his life when he overdosed. He said that if the Spot wasn’t there, he wouldn’t be alive today. He said that without them, he would be one of the white memorial crosses downtown. The Spot saved James’s life. So James volunteered at the Spot to save more lives, so that we would have fewer memorial crosses.

My question is, why won’t the Premier help save more lives like James’s by funding Sudbury’s supervised consumption site?

I want to thank the Roth family for all these petitions and the member for Waterloo for sharing them with us. It’s the “Mental Health Services in Ontario” petition.

“To the Legislative Assembly of Ontario:

“Whereas there is currently a lack of consistent mental health intake policies and care across Ontario when people seek assistance at hospitals;

“Whereas staff training and readiness to support patients with mental health issues at Ontario’s hospitals lacks consistency and is not sufficiently trauma-informed or evidence-based;

“Whereas current discharge procedures often leave vulnerable people without access to adequate care or support;

“Whereas approximately 4,500 people die by suicide each year in Canada and suicide is the second leading cause of death among youth and young adults ages 15 to 34; and

“Whereas the experience of Waterloo’s Roth family in the death of their daughter Kaitlyn has brought to light serious flaws in mental health discharge procedures;

“We, the undersigned, petition the Legislative Assembly of Ontario to direct the Associate Minister of Mental Health and Addictions to earmark funding for dedicated training for staff providing mental health services with a focus on evidence-based, trauma-informed approaches, to review intake and discharge procedures to ensure consistency of care, and to provide funding for alternative destination clinics in communities across Ontario.”

I support this petition. I’ll affix my signature and provide it to page Emirson for the table.

My question is for the parliamentary assistant. One of the things I always look for in the budget is the four-laning of Highway 69 to Sudbury. It took till page 56 to find this phrase—here’s one sentence: “Continue to widen Highway 69 from two to four lanes, from Parry Sound to Sudbury.”

Interjection.

So are you doubling, tripling, quadrupling the amount of work you’ve done in the past? Zero times anything is zero. When are you going to get this done?

Thank you to the member for Waterloo on her debate. I always enjoy listening to her debate on the budget.

One of the things that stood out to me in this budget is the $1 billion that has been spent on agency nurses. That is a balloon of a massive increase of spending for agency nurses. There is a role for agency nurses, but it is exploding. How it has exploded is that instead of having nurses with a regular income and a 40-hour week, they’re hiring agency nurses that charge about double, and a lot of that money goes to the profit of these private companies. It’s a way for public money—your OHIP card—to be spent on private agencies and to fatten their pockets.

Could the member explain why in the world the Conservative government, if they were for the little guy, wouldn’t put a stop to this and curtail this back down so it wasn’t a balloon of $1 billion?