Thank you to the member for Hamilton Mountain for that question. My riding is very diverse. We have people with complex care needs and opioid addictions. There’s a homelessness crisis in our riding. These are typically not people that private clinics will accept and operate on, which makes it even harder for our public health care system to deal with people who are suffering from complex needs.

We also have an aging population in University–Rosedale and they often need more care as well. Understandably, many of them are concerned about what the private delivery of surgeries will mean for them.

Thank you to the member for Barrie–Innisfil for your question. What I am very much in support of, when we’re talking about expanding public health care, is making sure that hospitals in Toronto, University–Rosedale, across Ontario—ensuring that their operating room capacity is at their maximum.

In University–Rosedale, we have the UHN network; we have SickKids. I have reached out to them and asked them what their operating room capacity is and they were all very clear with me: They said that they are not able to have all their operating rooms full—especially in the evenings, certainly on weekends—because they have a human resources shortage. And this human resources shortage doesn’t just exist when it comes to nurses; it exists in every single department that they’re experiencing, from human resources to finance to cleaners to personal support workers.

It’s a reason why our party has introduced this motion earlier today, calling on the Ontario government to increase capacity in operating rooms that are run by public hospitals in order to meet the need and address the surgery backlog.