I also want to welcome some good people from Durham, Dawn McNab and Kris Kennedy, who are the co-chairs of the Save the Durham Hospital committee, as well as everybody else who came to join us. Thank you for being here.

To make sure that we understand, we’re talking about the town of Durham, not the region. Those good people are here today.

We’ve seen this all before with the closure of Minden hospital last June. This government starved rural hospitals and emergency rooms with chronic underfunding. They blamed the workers. They blamed the community. They blamed everything but themselves. After being ignored and dismissed by this government when the community of Minden asked for help, their local hospital officially closed their doors last June.

The good people of Durham are here today. They are living the same nightmare that Minden lived last year. Will the Premier assure the good people of Durham that their hospital will stay open?

It gives me great pleasure to welcome people from Durham, including Kris Kennedy as well as Dawn McNab, who are the co-chairs of the Save the Durham Hospital Committee. Thank you for being at Queen’s Park and thank you for fighting to keep Durham hospital open.

MPP Wong-Tam moved first reading of the following bill:

Bill 196, An Act respecting the use of correctional facilities and mental health crises / Projet de loi 196, Loi concernant l’utilisation des établissements correctionnels et le traitement des crises de santé mentale.

What happened, Speaker, is that the hospital in charge of the Durham hospital—it’s in charge of four different hospitals—has decided to, first, move all of the in-patient beds out of the hospital. The hospital in Durham used to have 24/7 emergency care; they’re now reduced to 10 hours a day, seven days a week of urgent care. We have seen this before.

The good people of Durham are here today. Many of them are part of a vulnerable population. They are at least 30 kilometres away from the nearest other rural hospital. This hospital has been there for over 100 years, and they want it to continue to be there. They want to have equitable access to our health care system.

We know that medicare consists of hospital services and physician services. Those services are offered to us for free. If the hospital in Durham is no longer there, it will mean longer transportation time to a hospital further away.

The people of Durham want to be able to speak to the Minister of Health, want to be able to speak to the Premier, so that they fully understand that they need to keep their hospital open.

I support this petition, Speaker, will affix my name to it and ask page Sophie to bring it to the Clerk.

I’m glad to present this petition to support access to spine care in Ontario. There are many people suffering from complex spinal problems that require spinal surgery, including things like scoliosis, that could be debilitating for people. We have surgeons that have the skill, that have the knowledge to do those surgeries, but they face many barriers. The biggest one is that they cannot get access to our operating rooms in our different hospitals because of how the hospital is compensated: paid by procedure. Surgeries take precedence because they bring more money to our hospitals that are always stretched for dollars.

Some of those people, including children, have been waiting for years to have those surgeries. This is not fair. They deserve equitable access. So I support them in their call for this petition, will affix my name to it and ask Rhys to bring it to the Clerk.

More and more data are showing us that although the government pays for those surgeries, they pay more if it’s done in a private clinic. Plus, many private clinics will have add-ons where people need to pay thousands of dollars to gain access to those surgeries. They also show that other jurisdictions that have introduced private clinics for routine surgery did not decrease the backlog in hospitals—that Ontario hospitals have many operating rooms sitting empty that could do those surgeries if the money was to flow to our hospitals rather than to the private clinics. So they petition the government to make sure that all medically necessary surgeries are allocated exclusively to public hospitals.

I support this petition, will affix my name to it and ask page Charlise to bring it to the Clerk.

The petition is about improving the care for people with amyloidosis. This is a disease that affects many people in Ontario. It is an incurable disease, but there are new treatments that are finally available to help people who suffer with that disease.

They ask for the Legislative Assembly to make sure that Ontario follows suit with other provinces: to make the diagnosis more seamless and make the treatments that are available also available to people who live in Ontario. They would like March to be recognized as an awareness month for amyloidosis, so that more people know about it and receive the treatment that they need.

I support this petition, will affix my name to it and ask my good page Charlise to bring it to the Clerk.

Point of order?

I have been up in this House many, many times asking for funding for Highway 69. Highway 69 is the only highway that goes from Toronto to Sudbury. It is used by hundreds of trucks every single day. For 68 kilometres on Highway 69, it is not a highway; it is a two-lane road, with very few opportunities to pass—so you go from a four-lane highway that is at 110 kilometres an hour to a two-lane pathway that goes just awful to make it to Sudbury.

I have been in this House for 17 years. Your government has been in power for six years. You are spending billions of dollars on the Bradford Bypass, on Highway 413, on Highway 7, on Highway 401 in southern Ontario. When can we expect a few million dollars out of those billions to four-lane Highway 69?

The housing crisis is throughout the province. That includes in my riding of Nickel Belt. As you know, Speaker, there’s a brand new gold mine, Iamgold, that has opened. They’ve started to get some gold out of it. I’m going to the grand opening on Wednesday.

But two years ago, we had the ribbon-cutting for the starting of the mine. The Premier was there at the time, and I told him that the government owns homes, beautiful homes, in Gogama. They closed down where the OPP officers used to live—beautiful homes. The MNR office that they closed—beautiful homes. Those homes should be put up for sale. I’ve asked the ministry to put them up for sale for the last two years, and they have not. Do you think it would be a good idea for those homes, rather than to stay empty—

I was so happy that the member had a chance to talk about the wonderful nurse-practitioner-led clinic that she has in her riding. Hers is one of the oldest ones, but the oldest one is in Sudbury. We had the very first nurse-practitioner-led clinic in Sudbury.

My question to the member has to do with: All 25 nurse-practitioner-led clinics in our province have asked for extra staff so they can help the 2.2 million Ontarians who don’t have access to primary care. The nurse-practitioner-led clinic from Thunder Bay is one of four that has received confirmation that they will be getting a little bit more money. Do you think that this will help with the thousands and thousands of people in Thunder Bay that don’t have access to primary care?