My question is for the Premier. Mr. Speaker, $1 billion of taxpayer money is currently on its way to the Premier’s wealthy, well-connected friends at the Beer Store and LCBO. This isn’t about convenience. This is about favouring insiders, furthering political agendas and justifying an early election.

Meanwhile, due to this government’s historic underfunding and stunning incompetence, the township of Durham has the latest rural hospital to find itself on the chopping block. This is the same playbook that shuttered Minden hospital’s emergency department and which now threatens the collapse of Bracebridge’s hospital.

First, the Premier and Minister of Health neglect the needs of rural and northern hospitals. And staffing is foremost amongst those needs. Yet, the Premier and Minister of Health have deliberately chosen to underpay health care workers, drag them through court, let temporary staffing agencies run wild, and ignore the issues of burnout, mental health and workplace safety.

When hospitals like the one in Durham no longer have enough staff to function, what does this government do? They give a billion dollars to the Beer Store and LCBO. That was easy.

Mr. Speaker, why is the Premier paying off big beer rather than doing anything to—

At a time when more health care workers are leaving the profession than ever before, this government is telling us that things have never been better. The amount of people without a family doctor has increased by more than 800,000 since this government took office, and they want to talk about beer.

That doesn’t cut it for patients in Durham whose emergency department now operates on banker’s hours, who will have to be driven out of their community, often in dangerous winter conditions and away from loved ones, just to get a hospital bed. Soon, diagnostic services will dry up, and doctors are already leaving.

But it doesn’t end there. Developers were planning two residential communities in Durham that would have totalled 500 homes. When news broke out that the community could soon be without a hospital, those developers pulled out. The Minister of Health’s failures are now turning into the Minister of Housing’s failures.

Mr. Speaker, how does the Premier expect to meet his housing targets if he can’t even ensure that health care needs are met in every community across Ontario?

Interjections.

My question is for the Premier. It seems that every time the Premier makes a major public policy decision, wealthy well-connected insiders always seem to come out on top. We saw it with the greenbelt, where a small group of insiders became billionaires overnight. Are we really supposed to believe that this decision was about 1.5 million homes and not about $8.3 billion? Accordingly, when it comes to the Premier’s expansion of private, for-profit health care, can we blame Ontarians for wondering where his priorities truly lie?

Mr. Speaker, this week, a walk-in clinic in Ottawa is operating that will charge patients desperate for primary care $400 a year just to have the privilege of paying for visits. We know that’s not the only one of these kinds of clinics popping up in Ontario.

To the Premier: While cash-for-access arrangements may be commonplace within this government, is it fair that he expects the people of Ontario to count this as the norm within their own health care system?

But I’d like to remind the Premier of a saying he has burned into the minds of Ontarians this year. He said, “All you need is your OHIP card—never your credit card.” It kind of reminds me of that famous video where he promised not to touch the greenbelt, and then he did.

History is repeating itself. Walk-in clinics like the one in Ottawa are just the beginning. Bill 60, which was executed swiftly just like the greenbelt, was said to be about clearing the surgical backlog, but it’s just another cash cow. It opens the floodgates for private clinics to profiteer on publicly funded surgeries, meaning the people of Ontario will be bankrolling clinics that have a financial incentive to provide the lowest-quality care possible.

Mr. Speaker, the Premier said that real leadership is about being able to admit when you’ve made a mistake. Will he reverse his decision on private, for-profit health care, the same way he reversed his decision on the greenbelt?