Mr. Speaker, for the Premier: 60 seconds isn’t enough time to list this government’s failures in health care, but let’s give it a try. What if I told you emergency room wait times are the worst they’ve ever been, and ER closures have become the norm? That’s because we’re losing family doctors faster than we’re gaining them, and thousands of patients are losing primary care overnight.

On top of that, Bill 124 has shattered our workforce for nothing—you sure got that done—and there’s still no health care worker retention plan, so now temporary staffing agencies have stepped in and are burning a hole in our hospitals and long-term-care homes. But the Premier says, “Just let it burn.” As a result, hospital debts are ballooning, and they’re being forced to rely on high-interest loans because this government does not have their back. And now, desperate patients are being forced to turn to private for-profit clinics that are overcharging elderly patients while this government turns a blind eye.

Mr. Speaker, why should this government trust any of the Premier’s promises when all he has to show for his efforts is this long list of health care woes?

The government loves to brag about all the money it spent on health care, but what does it have to show for it? You wouldn’t see me bragging about spending millions of dollars on a car that doesn’t start. This government has created a problem that it cannot fix.

Through you, Mr. Speaker, to all Ontarians: They’re not thinking about your future; they’re thinking about their future. They don’t care about bringing your emergency room wait times down, and they don’t care about emergency room closures. They don’t care about keeping your family doctor or your nurse practitioner. They don’t care about anything unless someone is making a profit, whether it’s temporary nursing agencies, private for-profit clinics, developers drooling over the greenbelt, private companies like Staples, Shoppers Drug Mart and Loblaws. This government will always lead with greed.

Mr. Speaker, when will this government realize they could give the people of Ontario so much more if they would only focus on people, not profits?

For the Minister of Health: There is a fundamental principle in emergency medicine that says following any major trauma or accident, patients have a one-hour window in which the right care means the difference between life and death. That hour is called the golden hour—just 60 minutes to save a life.

Yet, under this government’s watch, millions of Ontarians are being denied and robbed of their golden hour by the Premier and the Minister of Health. Under their watch, we’ve seen 911 calls go unanswered, ambulances dispatched too late, rampant and unpredictable closures of emergency departments—nearly 900 in 2022 and almost 500 by last August, and it’s only getting worse.

While the RCMP has rightly launched a criminal investigation into the Premier’s greenbelt misconduct, we are watching yet another scandal unfold in this government’s mismanagement of health care. When will this government do more than lip service and take a single concrete step to reopen shuttered emergency departments across this province?

My question is for the Minister of Health. This summer, we have seen unprecedented levels of pressure placed on our hospitals like nothing I’ve seen in my career. Emergency departments, intensive care units and other critical services are closed due to severe staffing shortages. Nothing on this scale has ever been seen before in our province.

Imagine, Mr. Speaker, that you or someone you love had a heart attack or a stroke. Imagine that you are a mother and your newborn child suddenly seizes before you. And if that isn’t bad enough, imagine now that all of this happens in a community that just lost its emergency department. This is the reality for too many Ontarians this summer, and yet we’ve all heard the minister’s comments.

Speaker, through you, I ask: Can the Minister of Health please finally provide her assessment and explain why she doesn’t think that the current situation in our hospitals is a crisis?