My question is for the Premier. Last year, paramedics in Ottawa set a new record, but it’s not a good one: 1,806 times the Ottawa paramedics hit level zero. There were no paramedics available to respond to calls for more than 73,000 minutes. Paramedics spent 93,000 hours at emergency rooms in off-load delay.

The city is requesting provincial funding to help alleviate the off-load delay problem at Ottawa’s backlogged emergency rooms in our hospitals. Will the government step up and provide the funding Ottawa needs to keep more ambulances on the road?

The off-load delay at the Ottawa Hospital means that paramedics are waiting two and a half hours at the emergency room to get back on the road. For two consecutive years now, the Ottawa Paramedic Service has failed to meet the legislated response time of six minutes for sudden cardiac arrest. Last year, they only hit their legislated requirement 48% of the time.

Mr. Speaker, imagine watching your loved one die of a heart attack right in front of you because there’s no ambulance available to come.

Will the government do the right thing and get Ottawa the resources it needs to keep paramedics on the road responding to 911 calls?

It’s so great to see everyone tonight. It’s an interesting debate. It’s a lot nicer in here than it is outside at the moment, so I’m glad to be here and honoured to be here to debate this important legislation about the future of changes to health care.

Madam Speaker, I don’t think anyone would tell you that our health care system is working the way we want it to right now. Emergency rooms are backlogged, causing those in need to wait hours and hours and hours to see a doctor. The backlog in our emergency rooms is causing off-load delays with our ambulances, because when an ambulance arrives at a backlogged emergency room, the paramedic has to stay with their patient. That in turn means that ambulances aren’t out on the road helping those who are calling 911. Of course, when there are no ambulances left, this is called level zero.

Now, the city of Ottawa’s Emergency Preparedness and Protective Services Committee was told last week that there were 1,819 level zero events in Ottawa in 2022. Some 1,800 times last year, the Ottawa paramedics had no ambulances to respond to 911. That’s more than double the number from the previous year. And of course, Madam Speaker, when there are no ambulances in Ottawa to respond to 911 calls in Ottawa, 911 deploys the ambulances from Renfrew; they deploy the ambulances from Kemptville and Arnprior and Hawkesbury and Rockland to service the city of Ottawa. So it’s not just an Ottawa problem; this is an eastern Ontario problem, and it’s caused because of the backlog in our emergency rooms.

We also know, Madam Speaker, that millions of Ontarians don’t have access to a family doctor. This is a problem that’s only getting worse. Some 400,000 more Ontarians didn’t have access to a family doctor last year when compared to when this government took office.

So millions of Ontarians don’t have access to a family doctor. When they go to the emergency room, they end up waiting hours and hours and hours. And when they call for an ambulance, there is a growing likelihood that one won’t be available to respond to them in their time of need. So no, I don’t think any Ontarian would agree that the health care system is working the way they would like it to. The question before us really should be about how to solve these problems. How do we improve and guarantee primary care access and access to a family doctor? We figured out how to guarantee access to schools, but we still haven’t figured out how to guarantee access to family doctors, and that’s a problem.

Now, there is also certainly a problem with surgical backlogs and surgical delays. It doesn’t mean that what the government is proposing is the solution to that problem, though. There are some over here to my right who think operating rooms should run 24 hours a day, seven days a week, like some kind of assembly line. And while I have no doubt that you can get a little more efficiency and capacity out of operating rooms in hospitals, it is not at all clear to me that you can get the amount you need to really address the problem that exists.

The hospital CEOs I’ve spoken to are very open to the idea of moving some elective—at least, non-critical—surgeries out of hospital. For many, if not most Ontarians, what they care about the most is that access is timely, that it’s as close to home as possible, that it is, of course, safe and professional, and that when they leave, they pay with their green health card, not their gold or their platinum credit card. There are some who are ideologically opposed to that entire idea, but ideological entrenchment won’t help us solve the health care crisis we’re facing. Everyone needs to take off their partisan blinders so that we can offer Ontarians the best guaranteed and universally accessible health care services possible.

Now, what I’m worried about in this legislation, Madam Speaker, are the safeguards. Are the safeguards in place to ensure that facilities are safe and professionally operated? Are the safeguards in place to ensure equal access is guaranteed, that Ontarians aren’t asked to pay out of pocket for services that would otherwise be covered by OHIP in some other setting, that there are not pressure tactics employed to receive medically unnecessary but profitable services and procedures? Those are the types of safeguards we need to see, Madam Speaker. Those are the types of questions I hope that this government will answer throughout this process of debating this legislation and the committee hearings that I’m sure will follow. Those are the questions that we’ll be pressing the government to provide answers to.

I’d like to take a moment to address the growing challenge of “level zero”—sometimes “code black”—here in Ontario. This is the complete absence of ambulances available to respond to 911 calls.

In 2021, Ottawa paramedics spent more than 49,000 hours in offload delay at area hospitals. This resulted in 750 incidents of level zero. The 90th percentile hospital offload delay was 97 minutes, which far exceeds the 30-minute benchmark. This means that paramedics are waiting for over an hour and a half to transfer their patients to hospital—two paramedics and an ambulance stuck at the hospital because the hospital is too backlogged to take them.

In the first seven months of 2022, the Ottawa Paramedic Service experienced more than 1,125 instances of level zero. In some cases, Ottawa had 11 consecutive level zero hours—11 hours of consecutive level zero, Madam Speaker—and some low-acuity patients waiting seven hours before being transported to hospital.

Level zero isn’t just a problem in Ottawa, of course. It’s happening right across the province. The province and municipalities pay for paramedics to be assisting residents needing urgent medical attention. They do not pay them to wait at the hospital to offload their patients. It’s imperative that the government provides the funding necessary to municipalities, in particular the monies requested by the city of Ottawa, to hire the paramedics needed to end level zero events and better serve our friends and neighbours.