In Don Valley East, thousands of people do not have a family doctor. Meanwhile, my riding has hundreds of foreign-trained doctors who can’t get credentialed in Ontario—doctors who are forced to sit on the sidelines when they should be on the front lines.

Our local hospital, Michael Garron Hospital, is bursting above capacity. We have insufficient acute care beds to meet our current needs, let alone the projected needs, as my riding sees unprecedented development around the intersection of two new public transit lines. We’re in desperate need of funding for expansions and upgrades, and we’re not getting it.

But if the situation is dire in Don Valley East, it’s worse in northern and rural Ontario. Even fewer have access to primary care, and hospitals are collapsing one by one: Minden, Muskoka, Strathroy Middlesex and now Durham hospital.

It started with sporadic ER closures then more regular ones. Now, their emergency room is only open 12 hours a day. This is because this government has ushered in the worst health care worker shortage in our province’s history, and last week, the Minister of Health had the audacity to say she’s not concerned about it.

Now it has suddenly been announced that all of Durham hospital’s in-patient beds will be removed in a couple of weeks—no warning, no consultation and no conversation. Today, the mayor of the municipality of West Grey and over 60 Durham residents have travelled to Queen’s Park to express their opposition to this decision, which will compromise diagnostic testing, cause doctors to leave and put patient care at risk.

Mr. Speaker, the people of northern and rural Ontario and across our province deserve a government that will protect their health care system and give them answers. Fully fund health care and stop the closures.

Today I rise to express the disappointment of my constituents in Don Valley East about this government’s unacceptable lack of progress on public transit.

Mr. Speaker, the still-under-construction Eglinton Crosstown will serve my riding from six stations. My constituents see this construction and feel all of its problems and delays. This government has shared no details about the progress and its estimated completion date. My constituents deserve answers about the status of the line, the problems it faces, what’s left to be done and when the government expects it to be open. And they want to know why half of all Metrolinx employees are on the sunshine list, despite the complete lack of accountability and progress.

Also in my riding are two stations on the Ontario Line. Metrolinx has promised consultation about the transit-oriented communities being built around them. However, they’ve been less than forthcoming about what sort of community benefits will be made available, how businesses will be protected, and they have yet to see any real evidence of employment opportunities apart from job fairs advertising entry-level and junior positions.

It’s important to have housing, especially near the Eglinton Crosstown and the Ontario Line. But under the chaotic and unpredictable housing environment created by this government, my constituents are seeing rampant demovictions, unacceptable above-guideline rent increases, and appalling wait times for the Landlord and Tenant Board.

We need to make sure all the infrastructure that makes communities feel like home—schools, parks, libraries and more—are an integral part of that development.

The government must take action and provide the people of Don Valley East information about the progress of both the Eglinton Crosstown and the Ontario Line.

To the member for Don Valley West: I must admit I found it very amusing to see the taxpayer-funded advertisements by this government trying to sell their mismanagement as prudent financial work.

Could I ask you to elaborate a little bit on how their poor fiscal mismanagement has contributed to this province’s paltry economic growth?

Today, I rise to discuss an issue affecting many of my constituents in Don Valley East: demovictions.

Demovictions occur when, under existing regulations, landlords evict their tenants to demolish and rebuild. Under the current government’s lack of oversight and tenant protections, this often leaves tenants with nowhere to go, and if they can ever return, it’s to significantly higher rent.

This is the case for tenants of 10 different buildings in my riding. These tenants have a limited safety net under current regulations, predicated on something called rent-gap payments. In this, developers can pay the rent gap between a tenant’s current rate and, in most cases, the CMHC’s 2022 average rate for a similar apartment. The problem, though, is rents have skyrocketed since 2022, meaning the present rate is entirely insufficient for my constituents. At 48 Grenoble Drive, a low-rise apartment in Flemingdon Park, the rent-gap payment falls $1,500 short of competitive pricing. That’s not right.

My community is made up of new immigrants, seniors, people dependent on fixed incomes. These buildings represent stability in troubled waters. We need more housing, but we’ve got to protect tenants and lighten their load so they’re not left high and dry. That means fixing rent-gap payments, ensuring tenants have the right to return and making sure that no tenant is ever left behind as we fight to ensure everyone in this province has access to affordable housing.

I’ll be sharing my time with the member from Don Valley West. It’s always an honour to rise in the House to discuss matters of importance to the constituents of Don Valley East and, more broadly, across the entire province. Today, of course, we’re discussing Bill 146 and the fall economic statement, and I have to admit that it is clear this government has been so busy covering its tracks and reversing its commitments that they have not been able to focus on the matters of real importance to Ontarians. Indeed, they’ve been so preoccupied with a range of things—the greenbelt debacle, an RCMP criminal investigation, a special prosecutor, an urban boundary flip-flop, three ministers resigning—that they have not been able to take meaningful action on real issues relating to affordability.

For example, they could have instituted rent control. They could increase the Ontario Child Benefit. They could look into potential collusion around grocery prices. But no, sadly, they have failed to do any of these things. Indeed, it is so clear that the Premier is a conductor on his own gravy train on which he’s yelling “all aboard” to donors, friends and people who stand to benefit from for-profit private corporations.

Now, as it relates to the fall economic statement, very clearly this government has not taken action. Rather than dealing with real issues, they proposed a $3-billion infrastructure bank with very, very questionable prospects.

As it relates to health care, we have a number of issues. Amidst the FAO reporting a $1.7-billion period of underspending in the last financial quarter—no action. They are leaving hundreds of millions of dollars from the federal government on the table rather than raising the wages of health care workers such as PSWs. It was actually really difficult to hear the member across speak about the government’s so-called work on increasing hospitals in our province as we see unprecedented emergency department and hospital closures ever since this government took power.

In fact, on health care the number of things the government has done has been, frankly, minuscule. We saw a $72-million investment that is targeted specifically towards private, for-profit clinics. And just yesterday, we learned the consequence of investing in this manner. We learned that a private, for-profit hospital is being paid two to four times what the public hospital is being paid to provide the same service—the same surgery, the easiest surgery with the least complex patients at the most convenient times with the least oversight, and yet they are making the most money. This is how our budget is being mismanaged.

Moving forward, we now also see a number of so-called investments on home care, supposedly $569 million, which is, by the way, not at all a new investment into home care. It is merely a recommitment of hundreds of millions of dollars that were already supposed to be spent.

Let’s not forget that this government is merely dragging its feet. There is much more that I could say around the fall economic statement’s shortcomings on northern development, on Indigenous affairs, on colleges and universities, but I’d like to surrender the rest of my time to the member from Don Valley West.

It’s always a pleasure to rise in the House to discuss the issues that worry my constituents in Don Valley East and across Ontario, especially as it relates to something that is as important to all of us as health care.

On this occasion, I’m speaking about Bill 135, the amendments to the Connecting Care Act, which aim to provide some material changes to home and community care services here within Ontario.

My remarks will focus on five things: (1) the status of home and community care here in Ontario; (2) how this poor status came about; (3) some of the recommendations from stakeholders; (4) how Bill 135 doesn’t meet any of those recommendations; and finally, (5) exactly what is wrong with Bill 135.

Let’s begin with the status of home care here in Ontario. There’s no way to mince words here. It is a dysfunctional system marked by severe staffing shortages, high staffing turnover, frequent changes to nurses and personal support workers, and a remarkable—not in a complimentary way—amount of rationing of care, with less time spent per patient visit.

In order to illustrate this, I’d like to share the story of one of my constituents, and this constituent happens to be my constituency assistant. His father is bed-bound. His boss—me—is a member of provincial Parliament. His boss is a family and emergency doctor. Despite all of those levers, we still cannot get my constituency assistant’s father the home care services he desires—that he requires. This is a situation that has arisen the moment this government got its grips on home care.

How did this come about? Well, it boils down to a few things. We have a demoralized workforce that is burnt-out from the pandemic, that has moral injury from rationing care. They’ve been rationing care because this government hasn’t been able to retain health care workers—doesn’t have a strategy to retain health care workers.

We also have a problem with the proliferation of for-profit, private health care, again, impacting the retention of health care workers; imposing wage restriction and wage suppression to squeeze out profits; offering part-time work instead of full-time work so as not to pay out benefits; delivering lower quality, rushed care—public pain for private gain.

Then, of course, we have systemic underfunding, marked by Bill 124, leading to the proliferation of for-profit nursing agencies and staffing agencies. We have a government—this government—that isn’t even willing to accept money on the table from the federal government, $1.7 billion to raise wages for PSWs. They will not do it because they do not respect health care workers. And, of course, we have consistent and repeated overpromising—commitments of $1 billion given in the 2022 budget for home care, of which only about $150 million was released, and then in this year’s budget, a promise to deliver $569 million, although the last time the FAO reported on this government’s spending, they had already underspent by $1.2 billion.

So this is how we got there—ignorance, a lack of competence by the current government. We also already have a road map from many stakeholders—stakeholders such as the Ontario Community Support Association, which has said that a mere 10% wage increase would result in an extra almost 1,300 PSWs, would retain one in five PSWs who are about to leave. They said we need to achieve wage parity between home care, community care, long-term care and the acute-care sector. And they have said—and I agree—that we need to pay workers for all the hours worked, not just the ones in direct patient care.

This year, we’ve seen an increase to 76% of organizations saying that the health human resource crisis and inflationary pressures have forced them to either cut services or increase wait-lists.

Bill 135 ignores all of those things. Rather than doing any of those things, it puts the proverbial head in the sand. It ignores the root causes of our problems. It’s the equivalent of throwing darts at a dartboard in the hope that something sticks. Every single one of the fundamental problems plaguing our home care system is completely ignored. It does this because it actually—well, if anything, it makes things worse. It demolishes the existing home care architecture, eliminates 14 local health integration networks and replaces them with a half-baked, poorly conceived monolithic alternative that hasn’t been fully thought out. It proposes to provide home and community care services to patients, proposes to deliver operational supports, proposes to provide information to the public about health and social services and proposes to provide placement management services. Those are lines on a piece of paper. How it supposes to deliver those things? No idea. I met with ministry officials and asked them to tell me concretely what it will do and was met with nothing but business power words like “integration” and “connected care.” What does that mean? Why does this monolithic institution think that it can perform these tasks better than local health integration networks? Never clarified. It might, but if history is a judge, that is an unlikely proposition.

We saw, when Ontario health teams were proposed, they were delivered in a patchy, lumbering rollout that took place in an entirely ad hoc manner, lacking in consistency. Now we actually see that was an attempt to decentralize services.

This is an attempt to centralize services. We can’t even figure out a consistent pattern on the direction we want our health care system to move in. And the point is to centralize services with an expectation that—I don’t really know.

What I can tell you is that the last time we faced a process like this was when we tried centralizing autism intake services under the umbrella of AccessOAP. That has subsequently proved to be an entire disaster, with skyrocketing wait times and a ballooning list of kids exceeding 60,000.

I could go on and on and on, but I don’t have the time.

When I asked the ministry for an example of a single concrete problem that this organization would solve, there was no answer.

So pick your metaphor for this bill—it’s centralizing at one level, decentralizing on another; lipstick on a pig, as my colleague said; shuffling the deck chairs on the Titanic; a tale of sound and fury signifying nothing. I don’t know. It centralizes powers and the minister, who can just reward her friends, as we’ve seen with the greenbelt—

Mr. Speaker, the people of Don Valley East have, as of late, unjustly had their voices silenced, discounted and cast aside. I’m referring to a string of decisions made about us, without us.

First, the Federal Electoral Boundaries Commission issued an unanticipated recommendation to eliminate DVE as a riding. The response from my constituents has been clear: They were not offered community consultation, they do not want this change to happen, and they know it will be reflected at the provincial and municipal levels. Arbitrarily dividing up our riding will tear apart neighbourhoods that are politically, socially and culturally intertwined.

Cutting and pasting ridings together negatively impacts people who rely on organizations, services, and uniquely tailored political representation.

Don Valley East is a distinct part of Toronto. It needs more than just representation; it also needs a soul.

The Ontario Science Centre is one of the crown jewels of Toronto, promoting culture, employment, prosperity, education, and recreation. Meanwhile, the government has been planning its demolition without a shred of consultation. The Minister of Infrastructure’s feeble machinations about a so-called “business case” fool nobody—and the Science Centre Station is the very definition of a bait and switch.

The people of Don Valley East deserve honesty and a chance to be heard, and the province is taking notice. On their behalf, I say, you will not tear down and relocate the Ontario Science Centre without a fight. It is a community institution, an architectural wonder, and the protector of our cherished ravine lands, which you must not pave over with so much new housing already being built in the area—

Thank you so much. Nothing would give me greater pleasure than to speak about my riding. Perhaps one of the things that I admire the most about it, and it’s not a physical—I wouldn’t call it a physical attraction. One of the things that is unmistakable as you come through the riding is just the incredible diversity and multiculturalism. We have people in the north of my riding that have lived in Don Valley East for many generations, and then, in the south of our riding, we have people who have literally just arrived and bring incredible stories about the lives that they have lived elsewhere around the world. They bring so many different kinds of celebrations, religions, languages. It is a vibrancy that one can feel as you literally come into the boundaries of our riding.

Now, of course, I alluded to other things. I truly admire our world-class museums. We have the famed Ontario Science Centre. We recently were fortunate to get a new museum, the Aga Khan Museum, which is a bastion of celebrating multiculturalism. It has proven to be a place of community and sharing new things. So we certainly have that. We have incredible amounts of—we a fair amount of shopping. And then, what I admire the most is our incredible greenery as well, and the opportunity to run, bike and do all sorts of things—

One of the things that has come up in a previous government was HealthForceOntario, a public sector marketing and recruiting firm. In fact, it’s been very successful in bringing family doctors into northern regions, both in the summer and throughout the rest of the year. I would encourage more public sector initiatives like that. And then to continue celebrating the stories of so many of the incredible family doctors who have worked and inspired all of us in—