My question is to the Premier. Good morning, Premier.

Speaker, 2.3 million Ontarians currently have no access to family physicians. Our communities are aging—including burnt-out physicians—and recruitment and retention of professionals is waning. The Ontario Medical Association referred to this as “the perfect storm.” They need support now to establish interprofessional, team-based models of care. Right now, only 70% of doctors have access to a team. Family doctors have said that access to an interprofessional team would help reduce their workload so they can see more patients, the fundamental basis of our health care system. But this government is moving at a glacial pace to approve new primary care teams.

Why won’t this government act with the urgency that the primary care crisis requires?

She went on to say, “I want my tax dollars to be allocated to the part of the health system that affects me and every citizen most—access to family doctors. Enough is enough, Premier. Value the family physician and compensate them fairly!”

Kathleen is also very worried about this government’s health care privatization scheme, as we all are here in this Legislature.

Will the Premier tell Kathleen his plan to attract, recruit and retain family doctors, while also paying the health professionals properly and not scamming them the way he has done nurses?

Interjections.

Speaker, 2.3 million people in Ontario do not have a family doctor. That’s 2.3 million Ontarians who cannot access the basic humane right of seeing someone whose expertise is in taking care of sick people. Many of those 2.3 million people have ended up on the doorsteps of our already understaffed, underfunded and overburdened emergency rooms—some of which have experienced shutdowns under this Conservative government due to its ongoing health care privatization scheme.

The goal should be to keep people out of ERs as much as possible, for as long as possible, but to do that, people need access to family doctors, so they can manage their physical and mental health needs. Statistics show that those without access to primary care are more likely to receive late diagnoses, which directly impacts both short- and long-term health outcomes. Without family doctors, if you need a specialist appointment, good luck on that journey, because you’re out of luck.

Every Ontarian deserves access to care. I say this as an MPP representing my community of St. Paul’s, I say this as a family member of folks in my own family who don’t have family doctors, and for many in this community—and many are racialized, let me tell you that. Many are in communities that are already underserved; many are rural; many are northern.

Today, we, the Ontario NDP official opposition, are giving this government yet another opportunity to help patients, to put them first. We are giving this Conservative government a solution to help our doctors get back to what they do best, that is, seeing patients, not having to fill out 19 hours a week of necessary, critical administrative work and paperwork. Help patients access more doctors by reducing the amount of time doctors spend on administrative work. That’s what we’re asking, Speaker. Help patients access more doctors by reducing the amount of time doctors spend on administrative work.

We are calling on this government to invest in administrative support staff and integrated health teams. By doing so today, we can add the equivalent of 2,000 more family doctors here in Ontario and help up to two million additional Ontarians get the help they need.

This should not be a partisan issue, Speaker. Saving lives should be about humanity. The NDP has put forth a solution. The government has the opportunity today to save people’s lives. Will the government accept our proposal today? Yes or no?

Thank you to the Minister of Health for that response, and I do hope that you will respond to the letter that I sent to you by hand on long COVID.

Anyway, back to the Premier: Hospitalizations for COVID-19 have increased, but Ontario seniors can’t find vaccines and boosters. People in Haliburton were told they would have access to shots by early October, but their local pharmacies say they haven’t received the doses. Did we learn nothing from the chaotic and inequitable distribution of vaccines in the early stages of the pandemic, courtesy of this Conservative government?

My question is back to the Premier. COVID-19 vaccines were promised by October. Why are seniors across this province still unable to access them?

My question is to the Premier. My caucus colleagues and I have heard from a number of seniors in our communities who are struggling to find flu shots, RSV vaccines and COVID-19 boosters. From reports of limited eligibility for seniors in my own riding of St. Paul’s to RSV doses costing seniors $200 to $300, this government is once again failing to support vulnerable Ontarians, especially those in rural communities, quite frankly, heading into another respiratory illness season.

My question is for the Premier, and hopefully he’ll answer today: Why haven’t you ensured all seniors in Ontario have reliable access to vaccines to keep them healthy?

Some 689,000 people in Ontario have eating disorders and they disproportionately impact women and girls. Sherri is one of them. Sherri has been waiting for a publicly funded adult in-patient bed since 2021. Why? Because there are only 20 publicly funded beds in Ontario. People who cannot afford to pay $30,000, $50,000, $60,000 for private care are dying on wait-lists. Last we spoke, she was still on a wait-list that was closed. I don’t want Sherri to die.

My question is to the Premier. Will this government increase adult ED beds, address the specialized staff shortage, make the temporary 14 pediatric beds permanent and create billing codes to ensure ED survivors and families aren’t paying out of pocket for the physical and mental health care they so desperately need?

This Conservative government claims its privatization of health care bill, Bill 60, will give Ontarians more access to health care they need when they need it. The reality is, only those who can afford to pay to play will get the care they need in private clinics and private hospitals. Bill 60 leaves vulnerable patients without deep pockets in dangerous situations where diseases will go undiagnosed and surgeries will be delayed, all while they live in chronic pain and depression as their illnesses get worse.

Speaker, my question is to the Premier. Why does this Premier believe that access to health care should depend on one’s ability to pay?

Karen Bender is a 73-year-old senior in my community, and she needs eye surgery. She has been told that she’ll be waiting eight months to a year and that her vision will get worse, if not completely untreatable, the longer she waits. Karen knows of other seniors who were upsold in private clinics, and she’s also aware that the Premier and the Minister of Health admitted that their profitization of health care bill has nothing in it to protect patients like her from extra charges.

So my question is back to the Premier: What advice would this Conservative Premier give Karen and others without deep pockets waiting and desperate for surgery, while they’ve left our publicly funded surgical operating rooms empty and unstaffed in our province?

The Conservative government is eroding our public health care system. With medicare, our health care is based on our needs, not on our ability to pay. This Conservative government is jeopardizing that by not prioritizing public health care and publicly funded operating rooms. Their bill, ironically entitled Your Health, puts profit over people, over your health, and literally allows big corporations, private shareholders and private clinics to make big profits off the backs of sick people. And make no mistake: Those sick people include the very burnt-out front-line health care workers—mostly women, mostly Black and racialized—that this government has attacked since the beginning of this pandemic by not providing them with the N95 masks they needed desperately to save their lives; by not legislating the paid sick days they needed so they didn’t have to go to work sick; and bleeding them dry with Bill 124, which attacked their wages, while ensuring they worked in chronically understaffed, under-resourced and unsafe working conditions, and while this government simultaneously created legislation to protect bad-faith, for-profit long-term-care operators from being sued by families of deceased elders left to die in their own feces—starving, dehydrated, alone.

Friends, this government has never prioritized your health. Instead, their master plan is the privatization and the profitization of health care.

This government’s health care privatization bill does nothing to address the staffing shortage crisis in our public health care system, and in fact it’s making the surgical backlog and wait-lists longer.

Rather than invest in our public hospitals, this government underfunds public hospitals, which has caused a mass exodus of our nurses, RPNs, doctors, surgeons, PSWs and health care professionals into the for-profit private clinics and hospitals, where, yes, they’re paid two, three, four times—maybe sometimes even more. But the oversight and patient protections, should something go wrong in these independent health facilities that are not connected to hospitals, are severely compromised, if present at all.

All this is happening while this Conservative government has sat on, and is still sitting on, hundreds of millions—billions—of contingency funds they could be using to invest in public health care. How do you hoard cash while people are literally dying—and dying in pain—waiting for years for surgeries, while operating rooms in our public hospitals sit empty? ERs are shutting down left, right and centre. Seniors are being charged thousands of dollars for OHIP-covered surgeries. I don’t know how the Conservatives sleep at night.

I’ll end with the words of thousands of ONA nurses and health care professionals I joined last week: Beds don’t save people; nurses save people. Safe staffing saves lives. Better staffing, better care, better wages will save our public health care system—not this Conservative government’s health care privatization scheme.

This petition is entitled “Stop Ford’s Health Care Privatization Plan.

“To the Legislative Assembly of Ontario:

“Whereas Ontarians should get health care based on need—not the size of their wallet;

“Whereas Premier Doug Ford and Health Minister Sylvia Jones say they’re planning to privatize parts of health care;

“Whereas privatization will bleed nurses, doctors and PSWs out of their public hospitals, making the health care crisis worse;

“Whereas privatization always ends with patients getting a bill;

“Therefore we, the undersigned, petition the Legislative Assembly of Ontario to immediately stop all plans to further privatize Ontario’s health care system, and fix the crisis in health care by:

“—repealing Bill 124 and recruiting, retaining and respecting doctors, nurses and PSWs with better pay and better working conditions;

“—licensing tens of thousands of internationally educated nurses and other health care professionals already in Ontario, who wait years and pay thousands to have their credentials certified;

“—making education and training free or low-cost for nurses, doctors and other health care professionals;

“—incentivizing doctors and nurses to choose to live and work in northern Ontario;

“—funding hospitals to have enough nurses on every shift, on every ward.”

I couldn’t agree with the petition more. I’ve affixed my signature to it and will hand it to Mary for the table.

This is entitled “Stop Ford’s Health Care Privatization Plan.” I would like to thank the community members from St. Paul’s and across Ontario for signing this petition.

“To the Legislative Assembly of Ontario:

“Whereas Ontarians should get health care based on need—not the size of their wallet;

“Whereas” the Premier and the health minister “say they’re planning to privatize parts of health care;

“Whereas privatization will bleed nurses, doctors and PSWs out of our public hospitals, making the health care crisis worse;

“Whereas privatization always ends with patients getting a bill;

“Therefore we, the undersigned, petition the Legislative Assembly of Ontario to immediately stop all plans to further privatize Ontario’s health care system, and fix the crisis in health care by:

“—repealing Bill 124 and recruiting, retaining and respecting doctors, nurses and PSWs with better pay and better working conditions;

“—licensing tens of thousands of internationally educated nurses and other health care professionals already in Ontario, who wait years and pay thousands to have their credentials certified;

“—making education and training free or low-cost for nurses, doctors and other health care professionals;

“—incentivizing doctors and nurses to choose to live and work in northern Ontario;

“—funding hospitals to have enough nurses on every shift, on every ward.”

I thank our community for this petition. I have affixed my signature and will hand it over to Kennedy for the Clerks.