The Royal Bank of Canada’s research recently warned that the housing crisis is going to get even worse if governments don’t act. This government, because of their measures, have only created 8% of the housing that they promised will be created by 2025. In fact, since 2018, their measures have only created 1,100 units of affordable housing. RBC has indicated this: that drastic measures need to be taken right now by government.

So my question for the member from Hamilton Mountain is: Should the government return to its historic responsibility, do the heavy lifting, pick up their shovels and actually build the affordable housing that Ontarians need right now?

After six years of this Conservative government, the housing crisis has gone from a fire to a raging inferno. People are struggling, and yet Conservatives made new roadblocks for municipalities to access provincial housing funding. Conservatives even admitted that, to the government, building affordable housing is like “taking power away” and would “destroy the integrity of the free market.”

This Legislature is full of words about housing and little action. Speaking of words, at a time when no one can afford housing, would the Premier please provide a definition for his term “attainable housing”?

Back to the Premier: Across the province, the finance committee heard from municipalities who are breaking under the burden of providing affordable and supportive housing, yet this government has spent 18 months trying to figure out what their own words meant. It’s pretty embarrassing that this government uses slogans that literally mean nothing—literally nothing, even to themselves. It kind of reminds me of the kid who tries to give themselves a cool nickname, and nobody—and I mean nobody—actually uses that name.

When will this government stop using empty words and make good on their promise to make municipalities whole?

They’re just leaving it up to chance.

It has been very clearly stated that there is a limited pool of talented, trained health care workers, that there’s a limited pool of nurses. Many have left the profession, and this opening up of these private, for-profit—predatory, quite frankly—clinics will drain yet more resources from the public system. That also should be a tremendous concern, but yet it seems to be this crisis by design. It seems to be as though that is exactly what the government wants. They want the public system to fail, because they want their insiders, the people who are talking to them in the backrooms, the people who want to skim off the system and want to make money—apparently, this government wants them to have their pockets filled. That’s not fair. Our public health care system is the definition of democracy, it’s the definition of fairness, because it ensures that people are going to get the care they need regardless of their ability to pay. Just like education, it’s a democratizing force, and this is completely undermining it.

I wonder as well, is this an attempt to change the channel from recent news? I can’t be sure.

As I begin to close my remarks, I think it’s important that we recognize that we cannot go backwards in terms of public health care. We can’t sit and watch government after government undermining and strangling—it’s like this government is strangling the health care system and then asking it why it’s not able to breathe. It needs to be funded properly.

Let’s look for solutions. Let’s repeal Bill 124. Let’s have a health care human resources strategy, like has been recommended across the province, to recruit, to retain and to return nurses. Treat them with respect, treat them with fairness, and hopefully they will come back. But that’s on you. You need to listen to Ontarians.

I want to conclude my final remarks by again quoting Tommy Douglas. He stated: “Health services ought not to have a price tag on them, and ... people should be able to get whatever health services they require irrespective of their individual capacity to pay.” I could not agree more, Speaker.

I hope that this government will change course. I hope it will listen to Ontarians, who want to see nurses treated well, and embark upon a comprehensive plan to have a health care human resources strategy to recruit, retain and return nurses and fund the system properly.

Don’t maintain your status quo of cuts. Don’t maintain your status quo of not keeping up with inflation. Take that $20 billion you’re hiding and spend it where people need it the most.

What we have here is a question of oversight. There is no reason to think that these different surgical suites could not be within the hospital’s purview. In London, there are operating rooms which are able to operate at this capacity—but the key difference here, and one that I wish you could understand, is that it’s publicly funded and publicly delivered. Nobody is skimming money off the top and putting it in their pocket. I know that’s what you love, but that’s something that is wrong. It’s care or profit—you stand for profit, we stand for care.