I will always appreciate that the member from Waterloo refuses to be comfortably numb in the face of the evidence. A lot of us got out to see nurses in our communities, because it was Nursing Week last week.

I had occasion to visit with a bunch of nurses for breakfast last Friday. What really disturbed me is a lack of investment, in particular—it’s across the nursing sector—for community health centres. We talked to nurses who are working—because they can’t get enough hours, can’t get enough compensation from the community health centre, they’re working shifts at our hospitals and making 30% more doing the same work.

I’m wondering if this is something you’re hearing in the pre-budget hearings across the province. Why wouldn’t we not be comfortably numb and help those nurses?

I want to thank the member for Waterloo for her thoughts on the government’s financial plan.

I’m looking at transit across this province, and what I’m seeing is upsetting. In the city where we’re from, we just heard that OC Transpo is cutting 74,000 service hours because of cuts from the province. We have a transit strike going into its fifth day in the city of Hamilton, and the city is telling this government there’s not enough funding coming from the province to pay those operators and mechanics. We have a transit strike potentially forthcoming in Peterborough on the 17th of this month.

I don’t see anything in the government’s fiscal plan to deal with the $500-million hole that we have in operating transit in this province, when we have jurisdictions like Brampton operating at 130% of its capacity.

Does the member from Waterloo believe this government has to get serious about funding transit so we can get people on the bus, on the train, on the streetcar, in the subway, and not throw our municipalities under the bus?

They need a better tailor—the member from Waterloo is right.

What I was hearing was an improperly designed light rail system. That’s what the engineers told me.

And worse, what I was told on one occasion at the doorstep—we were just doing a community canvass to see how people were doing and check in on health care concerns—I was told by an engineer that normally, you replace those wheels, the undercarriage of the trains, about every 90,000 kilometres. But in the maintenance shop for the consortium now running stage 1 of our LRT, they’re being swapped out every 12,000 or 13,000 kilometres. It dramatically increases the costs of operating the train.

It’s posing some fundamental questions back home. Do we have to rip up this track and start from square one again? Why did we hire these public-private partnership consultants? Why did we hire Mr. Guest? And I guess by “we” I mean the decision-makers at the time at the city of Ottawa and the province of Ontario. Let’s be fair to the current government, Speaker: This goes back to the Liberals. This doesn’t go to the current government. This decision with Ottawa’s LRT goes directly to the Liberals. Why did we believe they could deliver a transit project in Ottawa, a light rail project we desperately need, for $2.1 billion? It was by far the lowest bid of the bids available.

So the good people of Toronto right now, having heard that absurdity of a press conference earlier this afternoon, are furious. My social media is filling up. I don’t check it; I’m blessed to work with people who look at the social media. That’s not my job. But the people who represent transit riders in this city, the people who represent the folks working in the system, are furious. So it falls to this government to seek accountability. And if Mr. Verster still has a job when I get back here next Tuesday, I will be very disappointed, because I don’t know anybody who can fail upwards better than this guy right now. I don’t know anybody who can have a salary expand by a factor of five while presiding over failing transit systems.