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May 13, 2025

44th Parliament, 1st Session

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Hansard Transcripts

vol. A

Hansard Transcripts

vol. B

Votes and Proceedings

Orders and Notices

Hansard Transcript 2025-May-13 vol. A (PDF)

L013A - Tue 13 May 2025 / Mar 13 mai 2025

LEGISLATIVE ASSEMBLY OF ONTARIO

ASSEMBLÉE LÉGISLATIVE DE L’ONTARIO

Tuesday 13 May 2025 Mardi 13 mai 2025

Orders of the Day

Primary Care Act, 2025 / Loi de 2025 sur les soins primaires

Members’ Statements

Taxation

Fiesta Week

National Nursing Week / Job creation

Pathways Health Centre for Children

Riding of Windsor West

Dutch liberation anniversary

Services gouvernementaux / Government services

Homer Tien

Government investments

Kari Williams

Introduction of Visitors

Question Period

Automotive industry

Automotive industry

Health care

Health care

School boards

Youth unemployment

Public transit

Labour dispute

Job creation

Land use planning

Public safety

Public service delivery

Autism treatment

University and college funding

Legislative page

Request to the Integrity Commissioner

Notice of dissatisfaction

Gérald Lacombe

Introduction of Visitors

Introduction of Government Bills

Supply Act, 2025 / Loi de crédits de 2025

Introduction of Bills

Patient-to-Nurse Ratios for Hospitals Act, 2025 / Loi de 2025 sur les ratios patients-personnel infirmier dans les hôpitaux

Taxation Amendment Act (Promoting Leisure Activities for Youth), 2025 / Loi de 2025 modifiant la

Loi sur les impôts (promotion des activités de loisir pour les jeunes)

Gilda Investments Limited Act, 2025

Protect Our Food Act, 2025 / Loi de 2025 visant à protéger nos aliments

Petitions

Emergency services

Endangered species

Health care

University funding

School facilities

Labour legislation

Cancer treatment

Soins de la vue

Health care funding

Subventions aux résidents du Nord pour frais de transport à des fins médicales

Orders of the Day

Safer Municipalities Act, 2025 / Loi de 2025 pour des municipalités plus sûres

House sittings

Adjournment Debate

Government accountability

The House met at 0900.

The Speaker (Hon. Donna Skelly): Let’s take a moment for silence, inner thought and personal reflection.

Prayers.

Orders of the Day

Primary Care Act, 2025 / Loi de 2025 sur les soins primaires

Resuming the debate adjourned on May 12, 2025, on the motion for second reading of the following bill:

Bill 13,

An Act respecting primary care / Projet de loi 13, Loi concernant les soins primaires.

The Speaker (Hon. Donna Skelly): Further debate?

MPP Robin Lennox: It’s my pleasure to speak on the Primary Care Act. As a family doctor, any time I hear of an initiative to try to expand access to team-based primary care, it’s incredibly exciting. We know that in Ontario, we have a crisis in terms of the availability of family doctors and so any effort to try to address that is very laudable, and I appreciate seeing this bill.

As an NDP caucus, we believe that everyone in Canada should have access to an interdisciplinary primary care team and expanding access to this model of care will ensure that patients receive the right care at the right time from the right health care professional. We know that primary care is the foundation of a high-functioning health system, and data from around the world shows that team-based models of primary care have lower costs, improve access to the most appropriate types of services and reduce inequities in a population’s overall health status, including making sure that populations such as First Nations and rural populations have access to exceptional qualities of care.

We also know that having more family doctors in the community has been proven to actually increase life expectancy by ensuring that people have access to preventative care and earlier intervention for disease, and all Ontarians deserve to be able to experience that benefit. And yet 1.7 million people across Ontario lack a family doctor, and we know that there are significant disparities in access to primary care based on geography and income status in our province.

While approximately 12% of the highest-income residents are without a family doctor, that number actually increases to 20% when we look at our lowest-income residents. So ensuring that when we talk about expanding team-based primary care we are doing it intentionally to try to meet the needs of our less-resourced people in our province is extraordinarily important.

We also know that health human resource challenges are a key part of the problem that we face today. We know that family doctors have been retiring or burning out at high rates, with many choosing to leave primary care clinics for other forms of practice.

Despite these challenges, Ontario has some examples of high-quality, comprehensive, team-based primary care that we can learn from. For example, family health teams in Ontario provide patients not only with a regular family doctor but also access to other primary care experts like nurses, social workers, pharmacists and physiotherapists, who work together to improve health outcomes. Unfortunately, as it stands, only 20% of people in Ontario have access to such a model of care, leading many to turn to emergency departments or walk-in clinics when their needs are high.

We know that integrated, team-based care is the way forward, and it’s laudable to see team-based primary care proposed as the vision for this province moving forward. We support the expansion of comprehensive team-based primary care. We believe that everyone in Ontario should have access to an interdisciplinary team of health professionals who are working to the top of their scope of practice with team members reflecting the needs of the patient population served in each individual community.

We know that family doctors, in partnership with health care professionals like nurses, nurse practitioners, social workers and others, will constitute essential members of such a team. And we know that such a model has been shown to increase the number of patients that a primary care practitioner can take on, including family doctors and nurse practitioners, which improves patient outcomes, increases the joy at work for providers and optimizes the scarce health human resources that we have. With this model, patients can receive the right care at the right time from the right health care professional.

To enhance access and delivery of team-based primary care, we need to think geographically, similar to public schools—rather than relying on chance or personal connections to find a family doctor, relying on people’s postal codes and neighbourhoods, ensuring that everyone knows that no matter where they go, they are going to be automatically connected to high-quality care. This gives patients the same reassurance and convenience of primary care close to home, similar to how children attend their neighbourhood public school. Imagine how much comfort this would give to patients.

I would also say that I am going to be sharing my time with the member from Nickel Belt today.

Instead of the geographic system that I would propose, right now and in recent months, we’ve seen that with every new opening of a primary care practice, we see hundreds of people forming a line, desperate to try to access care, and people still unable to access care in their communities. We need to be able to deliver better care than that.

A universal, accessible and comprehensive approach is in keeping with the initial vision for medicare in Canada. As Tommy Douglas envisioned universal health care, its first phase was the removal of financial barriers for those receiving care, a stage that was achieved for physician and hospital services already.

However, this first phase of medicare was meant only to be a prelude to a more comprehensive second phase that still remains to be realized. It encompassed a fundamental restructuring of health care delivery, with a greater focus on illness prevention, health promotion and the policies related to addressing the social determinants of health. Expanding access to comprehensive, team-based primary care located in patients’ communities is an important step to achieving that vision.

The Primary Care Act, as proposed, sets out six clear objectives for Ontario’s publicly funded primary care system to ensure that people know what they can expect when connecting to primary care. As I’ve said, there are many things in this proposal that are a commendable vision, and certainly Dr. Jane Philpott is a visionary in primary care.

The six clear objectives are to ensure that primary care is province-wide, that it’s connected, that it’s convenient, that it’s inclusive, that it’s empowered and that it is responsive. Again, each of these six objectives on their own are good things that we should be working towards. But we need to ensure that this plan doesn’t just include a broad vision or a dream, but also includes a road map as to how we get there and how we deliver on this promise for Ontarians. I would hope that as we see this move towards implementation, we see that road map, and rather than big ideas and promises, we ensure that this doesn’t remain an empty promise and we actually work to fulfill it.

The act also talks about providing accountability by ensuring an annual report is produced to demonstrate how many patients have been attached to team-based primary care and how many are still left unattached. With any method of reporting and data collection, we must ensure that we are using the right data to measure the outcomes for our problem.

What concerns me about this is that in its recent primary care funding call to expand team-based primary care, our province identified postal codes at highest need based on Health Care Connect data. For those who might not know, Health Care Connect is quite an old system, used to register patients who are unattached and attempt to connect them to care. What’s happened in recent years is that because it became such an obsolete, cumbersome system, many regions are not actually using the Health Care Connect system to register unattached patients.

So what we saw in feedback from this recent funding call was that if we’re relying on old, outdated data, many unattached patients are going to be missed—we’re going to think that we’re doing better than we are and we’re going to lose the opportunity to actually direct resources to places in greatest need.

I think we should respond to that community feedback by ensuring that as we work towards this accountability in these annual reports, we are also working towards garnering data that is going to better reflect the scope of the unattached patients in our province so that we can better direct the resources where they need them. This is something that I would like to see addressed in the next iteration of funding calls for expanded care, including the one we expect this fall, as per the Minister of Health.

We can’t talk about expanding province-wide primary care and ensuring more connected, convenient and responsive care without talking about the health care professionals who will be delivering that care, particularly family doctors, nurse practitioners and interprofessional health disciplines working in a team-based model.

Family doctors practise one of the most complex specialties with the most enormous scope. We are trained to see anyone for any concern and be able to appropriately assess, diagnose, treat and identify any necessary investigations or referrals to specialist care. I’d like to walk you through what a day of an average family doctor looks like in practice so we can better understand how we might actually support them in expanding their care for their communities.

As a family doctor in a fairly standard community clinic, you might start your day with 24 or more patients booked, with room for a few more to be squeezed in who have urgent issues that require same-day attention. In the first room that you walk into, you might be seeing a newborn just home from the hospital. You’ll complete a thorough newborn exam, provide counselling to the parents on safe sleeping, on feeding and reassure them that they’re doing a good job and that their baby is going to be just fine.

Fifteen minutes later, you’ll enter your next patient room. It’s a 58-year-old man who was squeezed in your

schedule today because he’s been having a pressure sensation in his chest since last night that just seems to be getting worse. As you examine him, the most likely diagnosis becomes a myocardial infarction or a heart attack. So you and your team quickly work to stabilize him, administer aspirin and nitroglycerin spray and call emergency services to transfer him to the emergency department. And because you know this patient better than anyone else, you’ll call the emergency physician ahead of time to make sure that they know your patient is coming, that they know his history and that they know how to best meet his needs.

But because you’ve done all that, now you’re 20 minutes behind. Your next patient is a 28-year-old construction worker who was injured on the job and needs a WSIB form filled. You take time to ensure the forms are filled correctly because you understand how burdensome it is for claims to be rejected on the basis of bad paperwork.

You move on to the next room. It’s a parent and their 14-year-old child who has been struggling with depression and anxiety. They booked the appointment today because of worsening self-harm and suicidal thoughts. They’re out of school now, and the whole family is struggling. The parents are terrified to leave the child at home. You do everything you can, treating their symptoms with medication, offering take-home strategies and cognitive behavioural therapy workbooks and connecting them with counselling and social work.

You’ll call them in a couple of days to see how things are going and make sure everyone is feeling okay. You promise to check on that referral for child psychiatry again, but you know all too well that the wait-list is 18 months and you’ll have to see this patient for many more visits to try to carry this family through the next few months before they actually get there.

Then you’ll see a pregnant patient for prenatal care, then a diabetes checkup, then a skin biopsy for potential cancer, then strep throat and then maybe a few others for chronic pain.

Your final patient of the morning is an elderly couple, an 88-year-old man with cognitive impairment and his wife. His wife tells you that his dementia is getting worse. He’s starting to leave the house and got lost last week. He’s looking for the car keys even though he’s not allowed to drive. And more and more, his memory changes are giving way to an increased mood lability and outbursts. They haven’t noticed much change with the medication and it’s becoming increasingly difficult to cope at home.

Your patient’s wife is now struggling. She’s not sleeping. She’s not eating. She’s trying to be a nurse, a PSW and a wife all in one while waiting on the long-term-care wait-list that we know can be two or more years long.

Over lunch, you catch up on phone calls that have come in, patients who want to speak with you, pharmacists that need med clarification, a request for a home visit for your palliative care patient trying to live out their final days in the comfort of their home. You’ve also accumulated, by this time, about 50 pieces of admin work, X-ray results to review, blood work, specialist reports, forms, med checks—you try to chip away at those too.

And then the afternoon starts and another round of a dozen or more patients with any number of concerns and areas of attention, and each one needs your 100% care and attention in that moment.

By the end of the day, after you’ve seen all of your patients and you’ve done what you can, you’re left with, on average, three to four hours of charting and documentation, forms, medication renewals and administrative work that needs doing. Luckily, it’s a day that you’re not on call, so you’re able to stay late and get it done into the evening.

On top of all this, many family doctors are also responsible for billing each and every patient visit and ensuring that from those OHIP billings, they’re able to pay their staff, pay their rent, pay their supplies and their other business costs. Most family doctors don’t want to have to do all that. They don’t want to be small business owners. They just want to be clinical experts. They want to provide care. Trying to do both is just not sustainable and it’s not what they’re trained for.

That’s what we’re seeing with most family doctors entering practice today. They don’t want to be small business owners; they just want to be clinicians providing the care that they can to their patients. They’re asking for alternative funding models to support them in delivering that care to the communities that need it. We know that family doctors provide an incredible service to their patients, and as I’ve demonstrated, when practising at full scope, they can provide a vast array of essential services to their patients. We can’t take that for granted.

In addition to the office-based clinical care, many family doctors also provide obstetrical care, cover emergency department shifts, hospital shifts, do surgical assist work or take on any number of other tasks in the community, like caring for people in long-term care. Our family doctors are holding up our health care system, but we need to take care of them just like they’re taking care of the people of Ontario. To do that, we need to commit to making a few, very substantial improvements to our primary care system.

Because I care about this so much, I’m going to offer to you some advice from the many conversations I’ve had with family doctors about what would actually make a career in family medicine sustainable for them, and what would help you realize the dream of this Primary Care Act that you’ve put forward.

First and foremost, we need to move away from business entrepreneurship models and fee-for-service practices and transition every doctor to capitation alternative funding models or salaried positions that provide more reliable compensation without the additional stress and workload of running a small business. These positions already exist in family health teams and community health centres, but we need to expand them and bring all family doctors into those funding models so that we end a system of haves and have-nots within primary care.

We also need to compensate family doctors for indirect primary care. Right now, indirect primary care, for those who might not know, is basically anything that you do to care for your patient that doesn’t include you sitting in front of them. Right now, family doctors are only compensated for the exact amount of time that they are sitting with their patients, but we know that providing care includes much more than that. Indirect patient care includes the time it takes to send specialist referrals, to review blood work and test results, to complete forms, to arrange home care, to send prescriptions and much more.

As it stands now, almost all of that work is unpaid labour. It also takes a huge amount of time. The average family doctor reports that administrative work takes up to 20 hours a week. That’s like adding a part-time job onto your full-time job and it contributes to burnout. That’s why, in a recent Ontario Medical Association survey, administrative burden was one of the main reasons why physicians were choosing to retire or transition out of full-scope primary care.

In other provinces, there are models that we can learn from: We don’t have to reinvent the wheel. In British Columbia, the longitudinal family physician payment model was launched in 2023. This model compensates family physicians with an hourly rate for indirect patient care services. It recognizes that the work they are doing, even when they’re not sitting with a patient, is still work in service of their patients and has value. It recognizes the value of the work that family physicians are putting in every day and also makes the work more financially sustainable for doctors considering their career choices.

This is something that we could work to implement to model after our colleagues in BC, who have already seen the benefits. But I haven’t seen this mentioned in any of the primary care funding models that our government had put out this far. I hope that this is something we can expect in the incoming funding as it comes along later this year.

While providing compensation for essential indirect patient care, we also need to do what we can to actually reduce the administrative burden on family doctors, not just pay them for that extra part-time job. One thing that we could do is create a streamlined, centralized referral process for specialist referrals. Our current system for specialist referrals is completely obsolete. Right now, if you wanted to refer your patient to a cardiologist in Hamilton, for example, you have to manually refer to an individual cardiologist in your region, and usually that happens by fax.

Then you wait an average of two to six weeks to hear back from that cardiologist about whether they can accept the referral or whether that referral is rejected. And then you have to send it to a different cardiologist in your region and wait another two to six weeks to hear if that one’s going to take on your patient. And so on and so on it goes. Usually, you have to refer to several specialists before you find one that’s actually accepting referrals.

Every time this happens, it increases the burden back on the family physician, who’s basically tossed the hot potato once again. Patients, in the meantime, are left waiting, getting increasingly frustrated, sometimes getting increasingly ill and waiting for an answer as to when they’re actually going to see their concern seen. By moving towards a centralized referral system, we could eliminate the administrative burden on each individual family doctor’s office trying to navigate this referral system.

By making a centralized or regional referral system, we could provide real-time updates on referral status, ensure that wait-lists can be tracked regionally so we understand where the gaps are and where we need to direct specialist resources and we could actually ensure that patients are seen in a more timely manner with expectations that can be met. This is what family doctors have been calling for, and it’s something that we could easily implement that would off-load administrative burden, streamline specialist access to care and improve patient care outcomes.

The other thing that we could do to eliminate administrative burden is to eliminate unnecessary paperwork. For example, we can start with sick notes. We need to clamp down on employers asking for sick notes from a health care provider. Most people who take a sick day don’t need to be rushing in to see their doctor or trying to book a last-minute appointment; they just need a day of rest.

When we see patients trying to book in with their doctor to get a sick note that’s unnecessary, that takes away an appointment spot from someone else who could really need it, or it means that our family doctors are trying to squeeze in additional patients in their day just to write a note that wasn’t necessary in the first place. This is something that we could legislate that would have both enormous benefit for workers while also reducing the burden on family doctors.

When we talk about eliminating unnecessary administrative burden, we also need to talk about MedsCheck forms. We heard this week that Shoppers Drug Mart alone has billed $62 million in MedsCheck forms over a 14-month period. For those who don’t know what a meds check is, it’s meant to be a pharmacist review of medications to identify any contraindications, any need for medication monitoring and any medication flags that a family doctor should know about. Medication reviews were already standard practice for any good pharmacist, but what changed was that pharmacists are now able to bill for MedsCheck even if it’s just a five-minute phone call.

When private companies like Shoppers got a hold of this tool, they became an avenue for profiteering. So we’ve now seen numerous pharmacists who have come out and said that Shoppers Drug Mart imposed corporate quotas on MedsCheck, forcing pharmacists and staff to cold-call patients, fraudulently asking non-pharmacist staff to call patients to complete these meds checks and bill them, and doing meds checks over the phone and billing $75 for five minutes of unnecessary work. It’s a tremendous waste of money.

But what happens to those meds checks after Shoppers has made that $75 is that they get faxed to family doctors. In my family practice, I would get dozens of meds checks in my inbox every single day, each taking several minutes to review to make sure that there wasn’t information there that I actually needed to know. Those minutes add up throughout the day, and it adds to the hours of admin work that you are already doing.

Do you know how many meds checks $62 million can buy? It’s 827,000. That’s 827,000 pieces of administrative work that family doctors have had to review so that Shoppers Drug Mart can make a profit. By the way, family doctors don’t make a single dime for reviewing those meds checks. Their labour is free. But because Shoppers Drug Mart wanted to exploit our system, we’ve increased the workload for our doctors.

The Minister of Health said months ago that the MedsCheck Program would be investigated for any signs of corporate abuse, but we’ve heard nothing since then. And yesterday, when it was asked about in questioning, we also had no updates as to what the investigation into MedsCheck has actually yielded. This would be a very concrete step the Ministry of Health could take to eliminate unnecessary administrative burden on family doctors, while also sending a message that corporate profiteering in our health system will not be tolerated.

Lastly, to reduce administrative burden, we need to expand access to digital tools that can reduce the amount of time spent on administrative tasks. This can include transcription tools, open-access electronic medical records and working towards integrated electronic health systems that are province-wide and connect community care providers to hospital care providers more seamlessly.

Digital tools could also ensure that all family health teams are supported with the technology to facilitate online appointment bookings and patient-centred communication tools. But we must improve access to these digital health technologies without imposing onerous reporting requirements that actually increase the administrative burden for family health teams.

Lastly, we need to ensure that all family doctors are able to join team-based primary care. We need to ensure that the team-based primary care model is an open invitation for any practising family doctor to be able to join, and that is something in this bill that I find very commendable. The commitment to moving towards team-based primary care province-wide is a very important one. And as I’ve said, Dr. Philpott is certainly an extraordinary leader, and I’m glad to see that her advice is being listened to.

But in order to realize the vision of province-wide team-based primary care, we also need to pay attention to the details and ensure that we get the implementation right. In addition to addressing compensation for family doctors, we must also ensure that the wages of community-based allied health care, including nursing, are fair and commensurate with the value of the work they are delivering in our communities every day.

One of the main criticisms of the province’s primary care funding call that just went out was that while it offers to fund more interprofessional health team members, it does not address the issue of low wages and low retention rates of those same allied health team members. As it is, many family health teams are struggling to retain their staff because of the low wage levels set by the ministry. Community nurses are already paid markedly less than nurses in hospital, and we see more and more nurses leaving the public sector to work in private agency nursing, and then those private agencies gouge our health system by charging a premium.

If we want to expand team-based primary care, we need to ensure that our teams are well compensated, including nurses, physiotherapists, system navigators, social workers, mental health counsellors, administrators and others. We won’t be able to realize the dream of expanded team-based primary care without investing in our actual teams.

The other thing that this Primary Care Act is missing is a province-wide, coordinated physician recruitment strategy. Despite the challenges in recruiting and retaining family doctors in nearly every municipality across Ontario, our province has yet to put forward a comprehensive physician recruitment strategy to actually off-load the burden from our municipalities. As a result, we see municipalities trying to cobble together financial incentives and other benefits to try to recruit family doctors to their region.

In some cases, this means some municipalities are able to offer hundreds of thousands of dollars from municipal budgets direct to family doctors as recruitment bonuses or to off-load start-up costs. For many new graduates leaving family medicine residency with hundreds of thousands of school debt, this is a major factor in determining where to set down roots and start their career. But the result is that some municipalities are disadvantaged compared to others.

For example, in some municipalities like London, there are no financial incentives to recruit family doctors to the region, and as a result there is a tremendous deficit and a high number of unattached patients in London compared to other regions. In other municipalities, physicians might be offered $200,000 or rent-free office space to set up a practice. With this kind of discrepancy across the province, we can see how the absence of a province-directed strategy is creating have and have-not municipalities across Ontario.

It also means that municipal funds are being used to supplement what should be a provincial responsibility of ensuring that we have an equitable distribution of health professionals across Ontario.

We could address this with a comprehensive province-wide strategy for physician recruitment. A good strategy would include the province setting a standard and footing the bill for financial incentives and debt repayment for new family doctors setting up a full-scope family practice in Ontario.

As part of this strategy, the province could identify areas across Ontario that are underserved, that have the highest number of unattached patients and adjust financial incentives to support targeted recruitment to those areas in greatest need. It would be a win-win, because municipalities would be able to use their budgets for items that are actually within their mandate and our province would be able to fulfill the promise of equitable access to primary care across Ontario. Without a province-wide strategy, we will continue to see what the OMA has described as a rat race in physician recruitment.

We need to be strategic, and in this bill we have an opportunity to think about how we could implement a comprehensive recruitment plan province-wide now.

We also know that as it is we have a dire shortage of family doctors, with 2.5 million Ontarians lacking a family physician. We know that, with anticipated retirements, the number of Ontarians without a family doctor is projected to increase to 4.4 million in 2026. For context, that would be about one in four Ontarians lacking a family doctor. While this bill does not address physician recruitment or retention, we know that in order to realize the vision of team-based primary care, we need to have enough family doctors to staff them.

We’ve heard a lot about potential strategies to increase the number of family doctors that we have, including reducing barriers for international medical graduates and licensed physicians from other countries who are new to Canada. I agree that these are important areas to examine and that we could do much more to recertify internationally trained health professionals in our province.

But the lowest-barrier, low-cost strategy that we have is ensuring that every physician that we train in Ontario actually chooses to stay in full-scope family medicine in Ontario. And even further, we need to ensure that we create sustainable work conditions so that all family doctors we currently have practising are able to continue practising for the full duration of their career. If we could only accomplish those two things, we would be able to enhance our family medicine workforce substantially without spending a single dollar on advertisement or recruitment campaigns in other provinces or in other countries. It would be a great place for us to start.

Last year, we saw 246 family medicine residency spots go unmatched in the first round. That number was reduced to 94 spots by the second round, indicating that we were able to fill some spots largely by opening up to international medical graduates. But 94 spots is still far too many, and if we invest in expanding the number of primary care teaching sites and residency spots, we need to ensure that we’re actually able to fill them.

Each year, I supervise dozens of family medicine residents and medical students, and we talk about where they see themselves going in their careers. Many of them entered into medical school with a dream of becoming a family doctor and serving their communities. But that dream has become eroded over time by the hidden curriculum that tells students and trainees that family doctors have become a dumping ground in an overburdened medical system.

They look to their family supervisors as models, and they’re inspired by the incredible clinicians that they see taking on family medicine education as well as providing exceptional care to their patients. They see the great impact that a family doctor can have on their patients, their communities, and they want to emulate that.

But they also see those same supervising doctors staying hours late, catching up on paperwork. In the teaching practice where I worked, it was common for all of us supervising physicians to still be in the clinic at 9 p.m. at night, sitting alongside each other, catching up on paperwork and on calls. Our residents and our medical students were watching us and they were asking whether or not this was the career that they wanted for themselves.

Recruiting Ontario-trained family doctors into full-scope family medicine should be our top priority. We’ve already paid for their training; they are already certified. So it’s a low-cost, high-yield intervention to enhance our family medicine workforce.

Expanding team-based care is a great place to start but we need to ensure that the working conditions for the family doctors in those teams are actually sustainable, and many of the system changes I’ve already described would help achieve this.

As I’ve said, there are many laudable components of the Primary Care Act, but there’s one word that is repeated over and over and over throughout the legislation. That word is “insured.” It’s mentioned over and over again that the promise of equitable access to convenient, patient-centred primary care is a promise only offered to those who are insured in our province. But we know that there are hundreds of thousands of people in Ontario who are uninsured and have no access to primary care or other health services. Many of those who are uninsured are newcomers or migrants to Canada who we know face additional barriers to accessing care when they need it.

When we don’t provide health coverage, we know what happens. People are unable to access early preventative or interventional care and we end up seeing them in hospital only when they’re critically ill and needing much more expensive services. Or, our health care providers and our hospitals are put in the terrible position of handing a sick person a bill and seeing if they can get it paid. Often those bills aren’t able to be paid, leaving our health care providers and our hospitals losing money for services rendered.

In 2020, our province implemented the temporary Physician and Hospital Services for Uninsured Persons Program. I’ll give a compliment when a compliment is due: I think that was a very good program and that was a great step.

This was part of our pandemic response and allowed physicians and hospitals to directly bill the government for uninsured services offered to people who lacked coverage. The temporary funding for uninsured persons was in place until March 2023, and over those three years, 7,000 physicians billed 400,000 services under the program, costing only $15 million. For $5 million a year, we were able to address a gap in uninsured services that we have been struggling with for decades. It was so cost-effective.

And $5 million a year is just 8% of what Shoppers Drug Mart billed us for MedsCheck last year, and somehow, we’re able to find that money. It’s staggering to think that our government would consider that a more worthy investment than ensuring health for all and offering access to health care for every single person in our province.

We need a true universal health system and reinstating funding for the Physician and Hospital Services for Uninsured Persons Program would be a substantial and commendable step in realizing that promise.

On that note, while the Primary Care Act sets out very laudable goals and a vision for province-wide primary care that is publicly funded, it stops short of affirming whether or not that care will be publicly delivered. We have seen time and time again how opening up our public health care dollars to private corporations has led to abuse and exploitation. We cannot continue to bleed money into the private sector while our hospitals and community clinics see cuts and budget freezes.

We need to ensure that all public health care dollars are invested in publicly delivered services that improve care for all Ontarians. I would hope that our government would commit that every dollar of taxpayers’ money spent on expanding team-based primary care will be invested in publicly funded, publicly delivered health care.

As I’ve said, there are many good things to work with in this Primary Care Act. There is a good vision for team-based primary care. But if we don’t pay attention to the details and implementation, we are at risk of failing to meet that promise, of losing money to the private sector and of leaving people behind.

The Acting Speaker (MPP Andrea Hazell): I recognize the member from Nickel Belt.

Interjections.

M me France Gélinas: Thank you, Speaker. I was very proud of the member for Hamilton Centre, so I thought I would clap a little bit. Thank you for recognizing me.

The bill,

An Act respecting primary care, basically sets out the hope for what the primary care sector would look like, but I want to talk to you about what exists right here, right now in Ontario and what we could build upon. Did you know that there are 299 interdisciplinary primary health care teams that exist in Ontario right now? There are 75 community health centres, there are 27 nurse practitioner-led clinics, there are 10 Aboriginal health access centres, Indigenous health care teams and there are 187 family health teams. If you add those all up, that’s 299 organizations. They serve over 3.5 million Ontarians.

That’s almost one in four Ontarians that has access to an interdisciplinary primary health care team, where most of the new graduates want to practise.

Those organizations got together. They were at Queen’s Park in December 2024, just before the House rose—on December 5, to be exact. They told us that all of them have long wait-lists of people who want to gain access. I mean, over 2.5 million Ontarians don’t have access to primary care. Many people will put their names at the community health centre, the family health team, the nurse practitioner-led clinic, the Indigenous primary health care centres in their community. All of them know that they would be able to take on way, way more patients if only they would get the funding.

They shared statistics with us that I will share in the House. Did you know that, right now, 82% of those organizations currently have staffing vacancies? Why? Because they cannot recruit and retain a stable workforce because they haven’t seen base budget increases in about seven years, and they haven’t been able to keep up. And 18% of them had recently laid off staff due to funding shortfalls; of this, 50% could have retained this staff if they had received funding for a modest wage increase. Did you know that 80% have not received retroactive Bill 124 payments?

Some 73% of staff who left their role said they are taking a job in a hospital setting; 83% are seeing challenging staff workloads and longer wait times for patient/clients because of staffing challenges; over 50% anticipated having to make service cuts or staff layoffs in the next two years in order to continue paying their staff a living wage; 80% identified funding and financial constraints as the biggest organizational challenge they are facing; and 72% identified difficulty in recruiting and retaining staff.

This is the situation right here, right now in Ontario. We can have a bill that talks about respecting primary care all we want. We have 299 interdisciplinary primary care organizations. How about we start with respecting the ones that are already there, the ones that look after 3.5 million Ontarians right here, right now, and help them to expand? But none of that is in the bill, of course.

I want to talk more specifically about community health centres. I’m proud to say that it was Elizabeth Witmer, a Conservative health minister, who funded the community health centre in Sudbury where I worked for over 12 years. As the executive director of the centre, I was able to expand. We were in Sudbury. We opened a site in Chelmsford, a site in Hanmer, then we opened a site in Gogama and in Foleyet, then we opened a site in Noëlville and in St. Charles. Then we opened the homeless clinic downtown, because even back then there were a lot of people who were homeless.

We opened many, many centres for the elderly to keep them connected, to keep them active throughout the huge region that the community health centres serve.

All of this was possible, as I said, under a Conservative government. It was Elizabeth Witmer who funded this. She understood the importance of interdisciplinary care way back then. And it hasn’t changed; it has been proven to be a very, very successful model that needs to continue.

But, again, community health centres came to Queen’s Park. They told us that they haven’t been paid for Bill 124. They are having a recruitment issue. But even through this, in northern Ontario, often if a physician leaves—we are short 350 physicians as it is—your chart stays with the team. It stays with the community health centre, with the family health team, with Indigenous primary health care or with the nurse practitioner-led clinic. The members who are still there, they still know you. They continue to care for you while recruitment is going on for either a new physician or a new family health team.

Why don’t we give them a base budget increase? They are asking, as a group, for close to a $500-million increase to stabilize the system and to be able to keep the staff that they have and bring in more people who are waiting on their wait-list. All of this is feasible right here, right now.

We don’t have to wait. We have a budget coming on Thursday. I hope that the budget will show an investment in the 299 integrated primary health care teams that exist in Ontario right here, right now.

As I said, the 75 community health centres, there are 75 sites, most of them have a satellite office so that they are as convenient as possible, which is one of the purposes of the six purposes of the act—“Convenient: Insured persons should have access to timely primary care” province-wide. “Insured persons” across Ontario “should have the opportunity to have a documented and ongoing relationship with a primary care clinician or team.” All of this is feasible with the 299 organizations that we have now.

Don’t get me wrong, there are parts of northern and rural Ontario that are not served and could benefit from having a new interdisciplinary team or a satellite of an existing team, but we don’t have to wait for years to do this. They are ready right here, right now to move on.

The nurse practitioner-led clinic also came to Queen’s Park. They left a little leaflet behind. I will share some of that with you. There are 5,156 nurse practitioners working in Ontario, and they work in every part of our health care system.

Did you know that in nurse practitioner-led clinics, they score above the Ontario average on all standard quality indicators? The nurse practitioner-led clinic average is 97.3% for patient involvement in care versus the Ontario average at 86.4%.

We have seen a growth, year over year, in the number of nurse practitioners. In 2010, there were 1,592 nurse practitioners in Ontario. In 2024, we now have 5,156 nurse practitioners in Ontario.

In Ontario, we had 25 nurse practitioner-led clinics for the longest time. It was George Smitherman who actually funded the first one. The very first nurse practitioner-led clinic was funded in Sudbury. Let me tell you, we worked really hard to bring this to Ontario and to convince, at the time, a Liberal minister to fund this, but it grew to have 25 nurse practitioner-led clinics. The present Conservative government has funded two more, so we’re now at 27.

Nurse practitioners are part of 299 interprofessional primary health care teams that help over five million clients—so we’re now at five million.

The nurse practitioners are found in every single interdisciplinary team that exists in Ontario. Of the 5,156 nurse practitioners we have in Ontario, over 4,000 of them work in primary care, mainly interdisciplinary team-based: 783 specialize in adults, 284 specialize in pediatrics and 28 others have multiple specialties.

For those who don’t know, a nurse practitioner can diagnose illness, they can order and interpret diagnostic tests, they can refer clients to other health care professionals and specialists, they can provide counselling and education, they can provide treatment, they can prescribe all medication and they can manage chronic disease. If you have a team where you have a family physician working with a nurse practitioner, add a dietitian, a social worker, somebody working in mental health, a bit of health promotion, and I guarantee you, you will change that community within months. Within years, people will be healthier.

It’s always the same: The demand for more expensive care—that is, care in emergency rooms—goes way down. Why? Because people have access to health promotion. They have access to disease prevention. They have access to primary care. They have access to the continuum of care from mental health to palliative care to end-of-life primary care. Interdisciplinary primary care teams can do it all. But at the centre of many of those teams are the challenges of recruiting family physicians.

I want to talk a little bit about the Northern Ontario School of Medicine. The Northern Ontario School of Medicine is celebrating their 20th anniversary today—yay.

Interjections.

M me France Gélinas: Absolutely, absolutely.

They have changed health care in northern Ontario. Did you know that for half of the people who live in northern Ontario, their primary care physician comes from the Northern Ontario School of Medicine? Half of the people in northern Ontario would not have a family physician if it was not that we had the Northern Ontario School of Medicine. They have been announced to be able to increase the number of new students they admit every year to 100, but in order for that to happen, they will need our support.

I’m very happy to say that 90% of the learners at the Northern Ontario School of Medicine University come from northern Ontario. Half of the physician graduates stay in northern Ontario to practise, and that number goes up to 90% if they are able to do their residency training in the north.

How do we fix the 350 vacant physician positions in northern Ontario? Let’s make sure that the students who go to the Northern Ontario School of Medicine to become family physicians have an opportunity to do their residency in northern Ontario, and then—the stats are there—90% of them will stay in the north.

NOSM University-trained physicians have enrolled over 400,000 patients. That is half of the population of our region. On average, 57% of Northern Ontario School of Medicine University graduates have pursued family medicine training, which is way higher than what exists in all other faculties of medicine.

One of the reasons for their success is that they have an innovative distributed learning model that is specific to the Northern Ontario School of Medicine. They place most of their 450 undergraduate and postgraduate learners into over 90 communities all across the north throughout the year, exposing their learners to life and practice in the region and increasing the likelihood that they will stay in the north.

To give you a bit of context, in northern Ontario, we have an unprecedented number of physicians who are retiring due to their age. We are, as I mentioned, short 350 family doctors and specialists, and that does not include the anticipated retirements. In order to correct this trend, the province has increased both the undergraduate and postgraduate physician seats in all medical schools—that’s residency.

In order for NOSM University to almost double its overall learner numbers, which will start to yield a positive impact by 2029, they need money. They say that 85% of the money that goes to NOSM comes from the government. They have very limited revenue growth options. They need one-time funding to support the expansion that the government has announced so that more doctors can be trained in northern Ontario.

They say very clearly that without an increase in government funding, Northern Ontario School of Medicine University will not be able to expand its teaching capacity, and they require updated, long-term, sustained funding to support its core operations as an independent medical university.

You will remember, Speaker, that the Northern Ontario School of Medicine is the only independent faculty of medicine—they are a university of their own. Every other faculty of medicine is part of a big university that has opportunities that the Northern Ontario School of Medicine does not have. They want to place learners in many of its northern rural teaching sites—therefore creating more challenges with physician recruitment and retention in many underserved communities, if they don’t get the monetary support that they need.

We all agree that the Northern Ontario School of Medicine is a gem. It has changed access to health care in northern Ontario in a very positive way. It has been identified as one of the faculties of medicine that will be getting more students, but they also need the funds to accept those students.

They mentioned that their funding has not changed since they were first—“our ongoing challenges is securing sufficient, sustained provincial funding to continue our work, and to facilitate the extensive but critical expansion of” their residency programs.

They mentioned that their per-learner funding from the province has not increased since 2009. This is 2025—this is 16 years. Speaker, what you could buy with a dollar 16 years ago versus what you can buy with a dollar in 2025 has changed dramatically, but the funding for the Northern Ontario School of Medicine has not.

So the act respecting primary care basically is there to recognize that “primary care is the foundation of Ontario’s publicly funded health care system and that primary care should be the first point of contact and the ongoing point of contact for insured persons seeking health care within Ontario.” We fully agree with this.

They will repeat through the bill “publicly funded” health care, but they never say “publicly delivered.” I can tell you that when this bill comes up for clause-by-clause, we will make sure that we add into the bill “publicly delivered,” because we see what this government is doing, whether it be with staffing agencies, where $9.2 billion of hospital budgets have gone to for-profit staffing agencies—who tell us that if they are able to recruit 500 nurses they can easily secure a $5-million profit. Not-for-profit, not only publicly funded but publicly delivered, has to be in that bill.

The bill also talks about recognizing that “team-based primary care can increase system capacity and improve health outcomes for patients while also enhancing the satisfaction of team members.” We fully agree. Solo fee-for-service physicians—don’t get me wrong, there are some really good physicians out there who do that, but the model as a whole is a thing of the past.

The way to provide high-quality primary health care is through interdisciplinary teams where every team member—family physicians, nurse practitioners, nurses, social workers, dietitians, health promoters, physiotherapists, mental health workers, all get to work to their full scope, share a medical chart and work as part of a team to support a patient, their family, their community as best as they can.

The bill says they envision a “primary care system that is based on a set of objectives based in evidence and best practice.” They talk about the belief that “empowering individuals with the knowledge and information to support their well-being is an essential component of health promotion and an effective health care system.” I wanted to read this because this government has been in power for close to eight years and it’s the first time that they mentioned “health promotion.” So I’m really happy that health promotion is in there, but we could do a whole lot more than just mention it on a one-page bill.

Next is the purpose. The objective: “The government of Ontario shall have the following objectives in its design, implementation and maintenance of the publicly funded”—I would add “publicly delivered” but it’s not in there—health care “system within Ontario....”

First, that it be province-wide: That is, “Insured persons across the province should have the opportunity to have a documented and ongoing relationship with a primary care clinician or team.” I fully agree. As I said before, even if a physician leaves or a nurse practitioner, your charts stay there. You continue to be a patient of the interdisciplinary team and will continue to receive care, although one of the care providers may be gone and recruitment is going on.

Second, “Connected: Insured persons should have the opportunity to receive primary care services that are coordinated with existing health and social services.” This is something that interdisciplinary teams do very well. If you happen to have a social worker on your team, even better; they will connect you to all of the social determinants of health—helping them get on ODSP if they have a disability, on Ontario Works if they don’t have it, helping them with housing. So, income, housing, top social determinants of health—as well as all of the other community-based agencies, whether we talk about mental health agencies, long-term care or home care. They are very good at that.

“Convenient: Insured persons should have access to timely primary care services.” We all know—because if you call and get an appointment three weeks from now for your child who’s been crying all night, you will go to the emergency room. But if you call and you’re able to get a same-day appointment, it changes everything. A same-day appointment or next-day appointment is the standard that most of the 299 organizations that exist in Ontario right now for interdisciplinary care already have as a standard.

“Inclusive: Insured persons should have the opportunity to receive primary care services that are free from barriers and free from discrimination prohibited by the Human Rights Code or the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms.” Not everybody feels welcome in all settings. That’s why, as I said, when I was the executive director of the community health centre in Sudbury, we opened the corner clinic.

The corner clinic was a welcoming place for people who were unhoused, was a welcoming place for the homeless population, was a welcoming place for persons who had severe mental health and addictions, who did not feel comfortable going to another site but because of the location, because we had made it as it was, it did very, very good work. The people that were there were a very good team.

The fifth is, “Empowered: Insured persons should have the opportunity to access their personal health information”—absolutely. We should be able to book our appointment online. We should be able to have access to our health records.

“Responsive: The primary care system should respond to the needs of the communities it serves, and insured persons should have access to information about how the system is performing”—I agree with that. The insured person—my colleague talked about this—there are some uninsured people in Ontario. They do get sick. We need to have a system where they can gain access, but the idea that responsive—the needs of the community change. The interdisciplinary care model is usually able to change to meet that need.

The Acting Speaker (MPP Andrea Hazell): Questions?

Ms. Lee Fairclough: I really want to commend both of the members for your very data-driven approach to your response to this bill. I really enjoyed listening and learning some more.

My question is for the member for Hamilton Centre. You gave some good examples of the administrative burden. I heard a lot about that as I met with doctors for OMA’s doctors’ day and also OMSA, the students. They had also given some other examples, such as can we streamline referrals to physio? Do we really need to be giving referrals for massage—these areas where we’ve got registered professionals. I just wondered if you might speak a little bit more to ways that we could streamline things that would be better for patients and better for doctors.

MPP Robin Lennox: Thank you so much. I think you brought up some really great points that often—even for people who have benefits, for example, for allied health services like physio or massage or foot care—they require a physician’s note in order to access those services. Certainly, those are other very well-trained health care professionals who can do an assessment to determine whether someone would benefit from those services. It would be fantastic to reduce that burden on family physicians, so I think that’s a great point to highlight, and also improving the care and access for people who have benefits for those services, as they don’t have to wait to get a note.

The Acting Speaker (MPP Andrea Hazell): Questions?

Mr. Matthew Rae: My question is to the member from Hamilton Centre. I appreciate her remarks this morning. I have six family health teams in Perth–Wellington, which is probably one of the higher amounts of our individuals here. So I’m obviously a big supporter of that sort of care locally and seeing the benefits of that. My own family physician is obviously part of a family health team.

I know this member is new to this place, but we do have a provincial budget later this week and looking forward to seeing some of those investments in there. I was wondering if the member will be supporting our continued investments in primary care. The expansion she alluded to—$120 million in a previous provincial budget. Minister Jones has alluded to further investment in that, and I was wondering if the member for Hamilton Centre will be supporting those investments in that provincial budget.

MPP Robin Lennox: Of course, I’m very curious to be seeing the budget and seeing what our government has decided would be worth investment. I think any investment in our public health care system certainly is very welcome. I think, as we’ve said many times before, the devil is in the details, and so I would want to ensure that the money is responsibly going to team-based primary care and that we aren’t seeing any loopholes left open or intentional pathways left open for privatization and the drift of public funds into private sector coffers.

So, yes, I’m very excited to see the budget.

The Acting Speaker (MPP Andrea Hazell): Questions?

Mr. Chris Glover: I want to thank the members from Nickel Belt and Hamilton Centre. It’s wonderful to have your expertise.

I hope the government is actually listening, because the solutions to our family health care crisis were given by our members here today.

One of the solutions you talked about, the member from Hamilton Centre—you said that during the pandemic, the government had a program to make sure that doctors or hospitals who treated people who were uninsured would get compensated, and it cost $5 million a year. It meant that people would get care on time, before their conditions got worse and became more expensive and more complicated. And you said that this is 8% of the cost of the Shoppers Drug Mart MedsCheck billing that is bogus and just creates paperwork for doctors.

So can you speak a little bit more to how it would benefit the government if they were to invest that $5 million a year to make sure everyone who’s uninsured in Ontario can get cared for at a hospital or with a doctor?

MPP Robin Lennox: Thank you very much for the question.

We always look at the old adage, “An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.” Similarly, when we talk about funding for uninsured persons across Ontario, we have to recognize that while we currently don’t fund preventative care or routine care, what we do fund is emergency or critical care. We’re not investing in the ability to actually intervene early, which is much, much cheaper for our system. We’re letting things languish until someone is in critical condition and then saying, “Okay, we will care for you.” So it would save us a tremendous amount of money.

A good example, and this is a common one, is if a migrant woman is in Ontario and she’s pregnant, we will not pay for any routine prenatal care. We will not pay for her to have her blood pressure checked. We will not pay for any assessments. But if she ends up in hospital with pre-eclampsia and needs a Caesarean

section and it’s a life-threatening condition, we will pay for that. It’s not good for that person, and it’s not good for our health system.

The Acting Speaker (MPP Andrea Hazell): Questions?

M. Anthony Leardi: La députée de Nickel Belt a parlé du modèle de rémunération à l’acte, ou les frais de service. Il existe encore de nombreux cabinets médicaux qui fonctionnent selon ce modèle et peut-être souhaiteraient-ils continuer à fonctionner selon ce modèle. Est-ce que la députée voit un rôle à jouer dans l’avenir pour que ce modèle se poursuive?

M me France Gélinas: Comme j’ai mentionné, il y a des médecins qui travaillent dans des cliniques par eux-mêmes et facturent le système de la RAMO et offrent des soins de très haute qualité. Souvent, c’est des médecins qui ont 10, 15, 20, 25 ans d’expérience. Ils ont toujours travaillé comme ça. Elles prennent soin de milliers de personnes et offrent de très bons soins primaires. Je ne veux surtout pas qu’ils s’en aillent et je ne veux pas qu’ils prennent leur retraite tôt non plus, parce qu’on a besoin d’eux. On a besoin qu’ils demeurent dans le système aussi longtemps que possible.

Mais lorsque l’on se tourne vers l’avenir—je parlais de l’université du nord de l’Ontario—les médecins de soins primaires sont formés pour travailler en équipe interdisciplinaire, donc les nouveaux médecins qui graduent préfèrent une équipe multidisciplinaire. Ceux qui sont là, je veux les garder et je ne veux pas qu’ils prennent leur retraite.

The Acting Speaker (MPP Andrea Hazell): Questions?

Mr. Terence Kernaghan: I’d like to thank my colleagues for an excellent presentation on this bill.

I’d like to direct my question to the member from Nickel Belt.

Around the time of the election, I had the opportunity to once again visit a great nurse practitioner-led clinic in my riding, Health Zone, and visit with Heather Osborne and a former student of mine, Melani Popovic, who is now a nurse practitioner herself.

I wonder if the member could please speak to the quality of care that is provided at nurse practitioner-led clinics.

M me France Gélinas: This is something that the Nurse Practitioners’ Association of Ontario and many other associations will brag about, that if you do analysis of the quality of care and if you get the patient’s view of the quality of care that they receive, they always rate nurse practitioner-led clinics the highest—because of the model of care, because of who they are, because of the way that they look at primary care. It’s something that people appreciate. It’s something that people like. The data is there to show that they have a positive impact on the health of the people that they serve, as well as their families and their community, and they always rate very high.

Don’t get me wrong, community health centres as well as Indigenous primary health care teams and family health teams do very well, but nurse practitioners always manage to be a few points higher than the rest of them.

The Acting Speaker (MPP Andrea Hazell): One more quick question?

Ms. Lee Fairclough: My quick question is for the member for Nickel Belt. You’ve highlighted a lot of the existing team-based models that we have in Ontario. It’s something for us to build off. We’ve got to make sure we fill in some of the deserts that we have in access to primary care.

What are your thoughts on how we should be able to measure whether we’re achieving any impact through this bill and this big effort to ensure people are getting access to primary care and team-based models?

M me France Gélinas: In the 20 seconds that I have, the first thing I would look at is the wait-list. Why is it that all 299 interdisciplinary primary health care teams that exist in Ontario all have long wait-lists? That’s number one. I have no problem with having a look at people who registered with Health Care Connect, but I can tell you that in my neck of the woods, most people don’t bother because it serves nothing.

The Acting Speaker (MPP Andrea Hazell): It’s now time for members’ statements.

Second reading debate deemed adjourned.

Members’ Statements

Taxation

Mr. Anthony Leardi: I routinely keep in touch with the constituents in my riding, and I get feedback from my constituents on a regular basis. I sent a flyer out to all of the constituents in my riding, asking them to rank the number of government initiatives that they appreciated in accordance with personal importance to themselves. I had hundreds of and hundreds of responses coming back from the constituents across the county of Essex.

Speaker, the responses were overwhelming. The people of the county of Essex overwhelmingly chose the freezing of taxes and no new taxes as their number one most-appreciated initiative of this government.

Now, I understand that the government is going to be tabling a budget on Thursday. I have a message for the Premier of Ontario and I have a message for the Minister of Finance from the taxpayers of the riding of Essex: The feeling is overwhelming. The taxpayers of the riding of Essex, in the Thursday budget, want no new taxes.

Fiesta Week

Ms. Jennifer K. French: The weather is warming up, and in Oshawa, that means it is almost time for Fiesta Week. For 51 years, Oshawa has been host to our annual multicultural Fiesta Week, one of the longest-running cultural festivals in the country.

This year, there will be 11 cultural pavilions across our community open to neighbours to come and enjoy food, music, culture and each other. I attended the Queen’s Court Ball, where ambassadors from cultural pavilions who have been crowned the queens of their culture clubs spend a week engaging with community and showcasing their home pavilions.

Each year, a Miss Fiesta is crowned. Miss Fiesta is always a tremendous representative and an impressive young woman who is a leader in her cultural community, and the broader community of Oshawa.

Congratulations to Victoria Kay, Miss Italia, who is this year’s Miss Fiesta 2025.

I want to acknowledge the remarkable work that goes into Fiesta every year and thank the Oshawa Folk Arts Council for their dedication, heart and work. Everyone is invited to Oshawa for the Fiesta street festival and concert on Father’s Day, Sunday, June 15, followed by Fiesta Week from June 16 through the 21.

Buy your Fiesta passport and get it stamped at all of our pavilions. Enjoy pierogies, pasta, pretzels, potatoes, Portuguese tarts and many other delicious favourites while you enjoy music and dancing and vibrant performances.

Thank you to the folk arts council and the many volunteers who make Fiesta such a success in Oshawa. Happy Fiesta Week.

National Nursing Week / Job creation

Mr. Adil Shamji: This nurses’ week, we celebrate the heart of our health care system: our nurses. For Ontarians, our nurses are a vital lifeline, a source of support and care in so many settings, not just in hospitals but in our primary care clinics, our homes and our communities. For me, nurses are also friends, colleagues and, very literally, family—nurses like my sister, a poison specialist and ER nurse who serves with expertise and compassion. To all nurses in Ontario, we see you, not just this week but throughout the year. For as long as I am a member in this Legislature, you will have a champion.

Next, I would like to rise on behalf of my constituents regarding a major issue. Ever since becoming elected, I’ve watched the number of people struggling with unemployment rise dramatically in my community. On a near daily basis, we are inundated with people asking for help seeking new jobs, better jobs or ones more closely aligned with their skills and training.

This front-line feedback from our office directly mirrors this government’s unacceptable track record of employment—or, more accurately, unemployment. Just last month, Ontario shed nearly 35,000 jobs, even as almost every other province gained them.

Between the rising cost of rent and home buying, and the growing number of people resorting to food banks, one thing is clear: The one-time $200 cheques that cost us $3 billion before an election have failed to address their affordability crisis. It’s time for this government to take real action.

Pathways Health Centre for Children

Mr. Robert Bailey: On May 14, Pathways Health Centre for Children in Sarnia will be hosting an open house to celebrate 50 years of service to families in Sarnia–Lambton. Since opening its doors in 1975, Pathways has always been a cornerstone in our community, serving children and their families in Lambton with physical, developmental and communication needs. Today, Pathways’ staff support nearly 5,000 children and youth at the centre and in local schools and First Nations communities.

To commemorate its half century of service, Pathways has organized a series of special events and initiatives throughout the year. These celebrations aim to honour the organization’s rich history, recognize the contributions of its dedicated staff, volunteers and partners and highlight the many ways Pathways has made a positive impact on the lives of children and families in the region.

The celebrations will also serve as an opportunity to raise awareness about the vital work that Pathways continues to do and to generate support for its ongoing mission. As Pathways looks back on 50 years of service, it also looks forward to a future of growth and innovation, ensuring that it can continue to meet the evolving needs of the community for many years to come.

I encourage everyone to join me in congratulating the Pathways Health Centre for Children and all current and former staff, volunteers and supporters on this significant milestone.

Congratulations, Pathways. May your next 50 years be even more successful, fulfilling and joyous than the last.

Riding of Windsor West

MPP Lisa Gretzky: I am honoured to rise in this House again after recently being re-elected for the fourth time with a stronger mandate from my constituents, despite the Premier’s extensive efforts to the otherwise. Thank you to my team for a job well done and the voters for trusting me to be their voice in Windsor West and at Queen’s Park.

Families in Windsor West are worried, now more than ever, about their jobs, the cost of living, as well as their ability to put food on the table and keep a roof over their head. According to StatsCan, the unemployment rate in Windsor is 10.7%, the second highest in the country. The number of unemployed people in Windsor is now approximately 28,600, up nearly 47% from this time last year, when the number stood at 17,100.

Yet the Premier and his government are focused on out-of-touch legacy projects that no one asked for, charging Windsorites nearly $65 million to pay for a foreign-owned luxury spa in downtown Toronto and the Toronto area fantasy tunnel underneath the 401, costing upwards of nearly $100 billion. They are wasting hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars, instead of making the necessary investments to save jobs and provide workers and families with the stability they need right now.

Shifts are being cancelled at the Windsor Assembly Plant and feeder plants. Local businesses are feeling the impact too. The economic uncertainty is being felt in every sector of my city. The people of Windsor West deserve better from this government, and I am here to continue fighting for them.

Dutch liberation anniversary

Mr. Will Bouma: Speaker, I rise today in recognition of Dutch Liberation Day. On May 5, 1945, 80 years ago, Allied forces led by the First Canadian Army accepted the surrender of the remaining German troops in the Netherlands. Speaker, this victory came at great cost—more than 7,600 Canadians gave their lives for it.

Liberation of the entire Netherlands was not strategically important, and yet Canadians fought and died for months to win back every town and every field. The Canadians brought the locals critical supplies, support and, crucially, they brought peace and freedom after five years of brutal occupation. Dutch people across Canada and the Netherlands remember these soldiers’ sacrifices and what they brought with them. To this day, the graves of thousands of Canadian soldiers are venerated each year and tended with great care.

No event defines the bond between two countries like the Canadian army’s liberation of the Netherlands, and few others better define what it means to be Canadian. During times like ours with tariffs and a trade war threatening our country, let the legacy of the men of the First Canadian Army be our example. Canadians are brave. Canadians are kind. Canadians love peace, and Canadians will always stand up for freedom and resist oppression.

Services gouvernementaux / Government services

M. Guy Bourgouin: Aujourd’hui, je me lève pour dénoncer le manque de services essentiels de ServiceOntario dans le Nord. Dans des communautés éloignées le long de la côte de la baie James, il n’y a pas de bureaux de ServiceOntario. Les résidents doivent parcourir des centaines de kilomètres pour accéder à des services gouvernementaux de base comme recevoir le renouvellement de leur permis de conduire, la carte de santé et les certificats de naissances.

Even along Highway 11 there are huge gaps in service between Thunder Bay and Sudbury. There are no offices where residents can complete their functional assessment to renew their licences. That means travelling hundreds of kilometres and staying in hotels, on top of paying private fees for service. There are residents in my community who have gone years without their licence because they just can’t get to the office to renew it.

Ce n’est pas une nouveauté pour nous, dans le Nord. Nous manquons souvent d’accès aux services essentiels. Je me lève aujourd’hui pour vous sensibiliser à ce manque d’accès, car c’est un problème que nous pouvons résoudre ensemble. J’invite le gouvernement à assumer pleinement ses responsabilités en répondant concrètement aux besoins du Nord et en assurant un accès équitable aux services pour tous les Ontariens, peu importe où ils vivent. Merci, madame la Présidente.

Homer Tien

Mrs. Michelle Cooper: Madam Speaker, I rise today to recognize an extraordinary Ontarian, Dr. Homer Tien, who will be awarded the King’s coronation medal this Friday at Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre. Dr. Tien has led a life defined by service to his country and to the health and well-being of others. He is a former colonel in the Canadian Forces, having served as a staff general surgeon and medical officer in Afghanistan, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia and Myanmar. His work on the front lines of conflict zones saved countless lives and exemplified courage and compassion.

After his military service, Dr. Tien continued his leadership here at home as medical director of the Tory Regional Trauma Centre at Sunnybrook, Canada’s largest trauma centre, and now as president and CEO of Ornge. He has ensured Ontarians receive world-class emergency care no matter where they live.

He is also a mentor, a researcher in trauma medicine and an educator at the University of Toronto. His career has been marked by excellence, earning him the Order of Military Merit, awarded to members of the Canadian Forces who go above and beyond the call of duty.

Madam Speaker, this Friday we will honour Dr. Tien on the very helipad where so many lives have been saved. I invite this House to join me in thanking him for a lifetime of selfless service to Ontario and to Canada.

Government investments

Mr. Matthew Rae: It’s a pleasure to rise in this House today to highlight several important investments in my riding of Perth–Wellington. Recently, I had the honour of announcing over $300,000 in support for local festivals and events through the Experience Ontario program, an investment that celebrates our vibrant rural communities and boosts local tourism. Our government is also investing more than $800,000 to support rural public transit in our region through the gas tax program, ensuring our residents remain connected to the services that they rely on.

In addition, we’re investing over $1.8 million to create 31 new emergency shelter spaces and 35 new affordable housing units across Perth and Wellington county, helping to address the urgent housing needs in our rural communities.

Before the last provincial election, I was proud to share that the Listowel Memorial Hospital was approved for a planning grant to support this much-needed expansion and modernization. This is a significant step forward for rural health care in our area.

Later this week, the Minister of Finance will table the 2025-26 provincial budget. I look forward to seeing how our government will continue to support rural Ontario and protect the people of this province during these challenging economic times. I remain committed to working with my colleagues to ensure that Perth–Wellington receives its fair share of provincial support and continues to thrive.

Kari Williams

Ms. Aislinn Clancy: This past week, my community mourned the loss of an amazing community leader. Kari Williams, a regional councillor for the city of Kitchener, passed away on April 29 at the age of 40, after a long battle with cancer.

Kari was a sharp, loving and determined leader. She was a dedicated mother to Piper and Bennett and a loving wife to Nathan, and she was a role model for all of those in our community. I was grateful to have known her and admired her focus on reducing poverty, addressing climate change and being a voice for her community.

Thank you to the Williams family for sharing Kari with us. Kari, you are loved, and you will be missed.

Introduction of Visitors

Hon. Michael Parsa: Madam Speaker, I’d like to take this opportunity to not only welcome some guests that are here, but on behalf of the Minister of Tourism, Culture and Gaming, I’d like to wish the Minister of Education a happy 29th birthday. Also, as a special gift, the minister and I have asked the Toronto Maple Leafs to deliver the Stanley Cup for him as a birthday gift.

MPP Lisa Gretzky: It is my honour and privilege to welcome Ryan Donally and Matthew Dumouchel from the Windsor Essex Chamber of Commerce. Their office is just down the street from my office in Windsor West, and I am thrilled to have them here at Queen’s Park today. Welcome to Queen’s Park.

Ms. Mary-Margaret McMahon: Good morning, everyone. I have some good news and sad news. The good news is, Neil Pakey is in the House. The sad news is, the CEO of Nieuport Aviation is retiring, heading back to England. But the other good news is, he’s doing so with his partner, Helen Downes, a force in her own right. Welcome to the chamber.

Mr. Ernie Hardeman: I’d like to introduce Shane Curtis and Ashley Edwards, from the Tillsonburg District Chamber of Commerce; Andrew Malcolm and Rocio Salinas, from the Township of Norwich Chamber of Commerce; and Karen Sample and Kim Whitehead, from the Woodstock Chamber of Commerce. Welcome to Queen’s Park.

Mr. Steve Clark: I have two representatives from the united counties of Leeds and Grenville: first, Warden Corinna Smith-Gatcke, who’s also the mayor of the township of Leeds and the Thousand Islands, but I also want to introduce the CAO, Alison Tutak, who is retiring after 33 years. I want to thank Alison for the great work that she’s done for the people of Leeds–Grenville.

MPP Jamie West: I’d like to welcome Marie Litalien, the president and CEO of the Sudbury chamber of commerce. Welcome to Queen’s Park.

Mr. Mike Schreiner: I’d like to welcome Andy Veilleux, the president and CEO of the Guelph Chamber of Commerce. Welcome to Queen’s Park.

Hon. Nina Tangri: I want to welcome Dan Tisch and the entire contingency here from the Ontario Chamber of Commerce, and a special welcome to Trevor McPherson and Brett McDermott from the Mississauga Board of Trade. Welcome.

Hon. David Piccini: I want to welcome, from the Eastern Ontario Wardens’ Caucus, Bonnie Clark and Steve Ferguson, the vice-chair of the wardens’ caucus. I look forward to meeting with you later today. Thank you for the wonderful reception.

And also Brenda Whitehead, who’s here with the Port Hope chamber of commerce, with the team of chambers here today. Welcome to Queen’s Park.

MPP Lise Vaugeois: I would like to welcome Harry Goslin, president of CUPE 1750—this is a union representing front-line workers at the WSIB—and David Peddle, also from CUPE 1750.

I would also like to welcome Fred Hahn, president of CUPE Ontario; William Chalupiak, CUPE Ontario; Faiz Ahmed, CUPE Ontario; and Corey Nageleisen, CUPE national. Thank you for the work you do.

Hon. Nolan Quinn: I would also like to welcome, from the Eastern Ontario Wardens’ Caucus, Martin Lang, the warden from Stormont, Dundas and Glengarry, as well as Maureen Adams, the CAO. Welcome to Queen’s Park.

Hon. Sylvia Jones: I would be remiss if I did not welcome, from the Dufferin Board of Trade, Diane Morris. It is great to see you.

Ms. Jennifer K. French: I’d like to welcome Isabelle Foley of the Greater Oshawa Chamber of Commerce to Queen’s Park today. She, of course, is here as part of the Ontario Chamber of Commerce’s 10th annual advocacy day. Welcome to Queen’s Park.

MPP Alexa Gilmour: I’d like to welcome an exceptionally good geologist by the name of Theron Finley, who is in the gallery. He was also my favourite cousin to babysit when we were younger, so welcome to the House.

Ms. Laurie Scott: I’d like to welcome Terry Guiel from the Lindsay and District Chamber of Commerce; East Ontario Wardens’ Caucus, Mayor Doug Elmslie; and CAOs Gary Dyke, from Haliburton county, and Ron Taylor, from Kawartha Lakes.

Hon. Graydon Smith: I’d like to welcome Norah Fountain, the executive director of the Muskoka Lakes Chamber of Commerce here today, and all our riding members here from the chambers of commerce from my riding. I can’t see all of them, so I’m sorry.

Hon. Rob Flack: I would like to welcome Paul Jenkins, the president of the St. Thomas chamber of commerce, and his team. They’re doing a great job.

Hon. Sam Oosterhoff: We have three constituents here from Niagara West today: Rebecca Shelley, from the Grimsby chamber of commerce; Alejandra Wichartz, from the Grimsby chamber of commerce; and Rodney Bierhuizen, who’s here today with the Ontario Greenhouse Alliance.

Hon. George Pirie: [ Inaudible ] Robson—she’s the CEO of the Timmins Chamber of Commerce—along with Tom Faught, who is the president of the Timmins Chamber of Commerce, and Kristin Murray, who’s also in the House with us today. Welcome.

The Speaker (Hon. Donna Skelly): We’ve run out of time for the introduction of visitors. You can introduce your visitors once again at 1 o’clock.

I would, however, like to draw your attention to the Speaker’s gallery and introduce Steve Peters, who is from Elgin–Middlesex–London. He represented that riding in the 37th, 38th and 39th Parliaments. Of course, he was also the Speaker in the 39th Parliament. Welcome.

Question Period

Automotive industry

Ms. Marit Stiles: It’s a tough morning for a lot of folks in Ontario. We just learned that Honda is postponing their electrical vehicle project in Alliston. They have said this isn’t going to result in job losses, but that’s really a bit hard to believe given the circumstances. Just last month, they said there was going to be no change in their Canadian auto production, but here we are with production stalled for at least two years.

So my question to the Premier is, what is the Premier going to do to make sure that Honda stays true to their word and prevents any job losses?

The Speaker (Hon. Donna Skelly): Response? The member for Bay of Quinte.

Mr. Tyler Allsopp: Thank you to the member opposite for the question.

In the face of global economic uncertainty, our government has been clear: We will do whatever it takes to protect Ontario’s world-class workers, businesses and industries. We are in close contact with Honda, who have reaffirmed their commitment to their operations and planned expansion here in Ontario. They have assured us that their announcement will have no impact on their current employment levels and their production at their manufacturing plant in Alliston.

Ontario’s auto sector has been revitalized over the last four years, with $46 billion in new jobs and new investment. We are going to fight every single day to protect the progress that we have made in our auto sector and right across our province.

The Speaker (Hon. Donna Skelly): Supplementary?

Ms. Marit Stiles: I appreciate the parliamentary assistant’s response. I’d like to hear from the Premier, maybe the Deputy Premier—I don’t know, maybe the Minister of Finance.

You just can’t take a company at their word, not in a situation like this. This was a company that also said there would be no change in production, and yet here we are.

The best way for us to protect against a chaotic US President and tariffs is to strengthen our own domestic market. Honda says it’s not about the trade war, but it’s about the slowdown in the EV market. So let’s try something, right? The government could take a bit of responsibility here. They made it more and more difficult for Ontarians to switch to EVs: They eliminated rebates, removed requirements for buildings to have chargers and the bill that they tabled just yesterday gets rid of green standards for new buildings.

To the Premier: Will the Premier bring back EV rebates and commit to accessible charging infrastructure?

Mr. Tyler Allsopp: Thank you to the member opposite for the question. I’m glad that the member wants to talk about EVs.

Let’s talk about the report that came out in 2019 saying that globally companies are going to spend $300 billion on the EV supply chain. Zero of those dollars were slated to come to Ontario or to Canada. This government sprang into action. We brought in $46 billion of EV investment, securing hundreds of thousands of jobs and creating tens of thousands of new jobs in the automotive sector. We have saved that sector, we have continued to invest in it and we believe that the future of the Ontario vehicle-production sector is going to be bright.

We’re going to continue to bring in high-quality investments that lead to good-paying jobs, making great products right here in Ontario. That’s how you protect Ontario.

Interjections.

The Speaker (Hon. Donna Skelly): Supplementary?

Ms. Marit Stiles: I mean, you can keep praying for something to come, but the reality is that today Honda is stopping production; this is all halted. I don’t know if you got the memo.

Look, it was Ontarians—Ontario taxpayers—who invested $2.5 billion into this EV project so we could create good jobs in the sector. Honda promised 1,000 more jobs for people in Alliston. Ontarians also invested in Brampton, in Windsor, in Oakville, where production has also stalled and put jobs at risk.

The Premier likes to talk about attracting investment to Ontario with tax breaks and subsidies, but when those companies break their promise to workers and to communities, he just throws up his hands in the air. The Premier allowed the market to dry up with his reckless decisions.

Back to the Premier: If you won’t bring them back, what is the Premier prepared to do to shore up the EV sector?

Mr. Tyler Allsopp: I’ve already stated that we continue to work with Honda, who has reaffirmed their commitment not only to this new investment but also to the current production and the current employees at their plant in Alliston.

And just to correct the member opposite, no funds have flowed yet from the Ontario government or the federal government to support this project. We very much look forward to this investment continuing. It will continue to bring in good jobs, keep people employed, putting food on the table and paying their bills because that’s what matters to the people of Ontario, and they know that this government will always stand up and prioritize their needs and their livelihoods.

We are going to protect Ontario. That’s what we were elected to do, and that is exactly what we’re going to deliver for the people of Ontario.

Automotive industry

Ms. Marit Stiles: I’ve got to say, Speaker, I often feel like I’m living in the twilight zone here. This government hasn’t woken up to the reality of what we are facing today.

Now, I want to be clear—and I want go back to the Premier on this question. When you made these deals with these companies, we said, “Where are the strings that are attached?” We warned you that if there were no strings attached, this was what was going to happen. You need to attach some strings to the investments if you’re going to take $2.5 billion of Ontarians’ hard-earned taxpayer dollars and invest it. It is not your money. There needed to be strings attached. People are worried, and all we get from this government over and over again are platitudes.

I want to go back to the Premier again: You said this morning that you would hold these companies accountable, what is the Premier’s plan to do that?

The Speaker (Hon. Donna Skelly): Response? The member for the Bay of Quinte.

Mr. Tyler Allsopp: Thank you very much for the question, and thank you, Speaker, for recognizing me.

We know that under the previous Liberal government that was supported by the NDP, absolutely nothing was going to happen in the EV sector. We were going to sit back and let the future of automobile manufacturing pass us by. This government said, “Not a chance.” We sprang into action, securing $46 billion in EV investment, shoring up those 100,000 jobs and creating tens of thousands of more jobs.

Look at what we’ve done in life sciences: $6 billion of investment, generated over 4,800 jobs, and in phase 2, we’re looking to bring in 13,000 more jobs.

We’ve also brought in tens of billions of dollars in tech investments, in ridings all over the province—

Interjection.

The Speaker (Hon. Donna Skelly): The member for Don Valley West.

Mr. Tyler Allsopp: —including Hitachi Rail in your riding—as you heckle me right now; including building Ottawa into the number one tech hub, with the highest concentration of tech jobs anywhere in North America. And Toronto has brought in more tech investment over the last five years than any other major North American jurisdiction. We will continue—

Interjections.

The Speaker (Hon. Donna Skelly): Supplementary?

Ms. Marit Stiles: Back to the Premier—but I got news for you: You are the previous government.

Interjections.

The Speaker (Hon. Donna Skelly): The government side will come to order.

Interjections.

The Speaker (Hon. Donna Skelly): Stop the clock. The government side will come to order.

I apologize to the Leader of the Opposition. You may continue.

Ms. Marit Stiles: As I was saying, Speaker: You are the previous government and you’re the government before that too, right? There is anxiety and uncertainty in the province of Ontario and that is on you.

We have the highest unemployment rate in the country right now: 33,000 manufacturing jobs lost in April—in April alone. That is more than half the job losses in the entire economy. What planet are you living on if you don’t think we have a problem here?

My question to the Premier is: How long will this government continue to wait and see more people lose their jobs without a plan?

Mr. Tyler Allsopp: I had a business teacher back in college named Bill Crowe, who used to say, “What interests the customer should fascinate you.” You want to talk about jobs? Let’s talk about jobs. Let’s talk about the over one million jobs that we have created in this economy since 2018. Let’s talk about the 140,000 jobs that we created just last year.

In the first two months of this year, 55,000 more jobs were created in the province of Ontario because of the economic conditions that we have put in place, not because of the work of the previous Liberal government, supported by the NDP. Your credit rating was downgraded twice; our credit rating has been upgraded twice.

We are building a stronger economy that works better for everyone in Ontario, everywhere in Ontario, and we are not about to apologize for doing that.

The Speaker (Hon. Donna Skelly): Supplementary?

Interjections.

The Speaker (Hon. Donna Skelly): The government side will come to order.

Ms. Marit Stiles: I will say, Speaker, that I would not have given that a standing ovation, if I were you. The highest unemployment rate in the country: 33,000 jobs lost in April. This is on your government. Every one of those jobs that are lost is on your government. The anxiety that people are feeling right now: That is on your government.

We have been asking every single day since this House returned about those job losses. Every single day, this government has had no real answer, no plan at all. We warned you over and over again to attach strings to those investments, those Ontario dollars that were attached to companies like Honda. You shrugged it off. You trusted them implicitly.

Well, you know what? People of Ontario are tired of your platitudes. They need action. Will the Premier actually take action and be accountable? What is the Premier’s plan, I ask again, to address these job losses?

Mr. Tyler Allsopp: Thank you to the Leader of the Opposition for the question. Perhaps I didn’t project enough last time; maybe you didn’t hear me. The funds have not flowed. You’re talking about strings on investment that has not flowed yet. This is the problem with having scripted questions, I suppose.

Back onto the subject matter: We have sprung into action immediately. We put forward $11 billion in supports to keep businesses operating, to keep them profitable and to keep people employed. We put over $1.3 billion more for the manufacturers’ made-in-Ontario tax credit. We put forward $1 billion through the Skills Development Fund to retrain hundreds of thousands of new workers. We put forward tens of millions of dollars for trade-impacted communities.

We asked the people of Ontario an important question a few months ago: Who do you want to guide you through this economic crisis? And they were unequivocal that it was this party and this Premier that was going to deliver for this province, and that is exactly what we are going—

Interjections.

The Speaker (Hon. Donna Skelly): Stop the clock. The government side will come to order or I will start naming people.

I apologize. Start the clock. I recognize the leader of the third party.

Health care

Mr. John Fraser: My question is for the Premier. But before I get started, the folks from Dresden are down in the media studio right now. I’m sure if the Premier or the Deputy Premier could happen on downstairs, they would like an explanation as to why this government turned its back on them and their MPP.

So my question is for the Premier. Does the Premier think that spending more than a billion dollars every year on private nursing agencies is the right way to spend our health care dollars?

The Speaker (Hon. Donna Skelly): I recognize the Minister of Health.

Hon. Sylvia Jones: Of course, as we continue to invest in our health care system, we are going to make sure that those investments are targeted—things like insuring, through the colleges and universities, to expand the Learn and Stay program that allows more nurses to actually train and ultimately practise in the province of Ontario. We’ve licensed over 100,000 nurses since 2018, 30,000 who are currently in our post-secondary institutions. Those are the impacts that we are making.

As we expand the opportunities for nurses, for other allied health professionals, we will see that those opportunities to live, earn and practise in the province of Ontario expand under the Ford government.

The Speaker (Hon. Donna Skelly): Back to the leader of the third party.

Mr. John Fraser: The government has known about this problem for about three years and they’ve done nothing about it. While Quebec actually has moved to sanction some of those agencies that weren’t good operators, this government has done nothing about that, and the only thing they have right now is a weak measure in Bill 11 that asks them to report to the minister.

These agencies have increased dramatically. Hospitals have only increased their employment by about 6%. These agencies have almost doubled, and all this government has is a weak, “Send us a note”—no action, no enforcement, no penalties, no real action.

I guess the question isn’t any different, because I didn’t hear the answer in your response. Does the government think that spending all this money, more than a billion dollars every year, on private nursing agencies—shareholder-driven corporations—is the right way to spend our health care dollars?

Hon. Sylvia Jones: If memory serves me correctly, the member opposite actually was the parliamentary assistant to the Minister of Health under the previous Liberal administration and would know full well that temporary staffing agencies have been in operation in the province of Ontario for decades. They are a very important tool to make sure that we have qualified clinicians working in our hospitals, in our long-term-care homes, in our community care systems. So is the member opposite suggesting that we should cut out that pathway and that opportunity for hospitals and long-term-care homes to actually regulate when they need additional staff and bring them in when appropriate?

There is no doubt that this is an important tool for our health care professionals, and I’m frankly shocked that a previous parliamentary assistant to the Minister of Health needs that explained to him.

The Speaker (Hon. Donna Skelly): Supplementary?

Mr. John Fraser: I knew I had something to look forward to this morning: getting schooled by the Minister of Health.

The reality is these agencies are a reality. The problem is that you basically just let them run amok. You’re spending more than a billion dollars. I guess the minister’s answer to that is, “Spending a billion dollars—well, that’s appropriate.” We don’t think it’s appropriate.

We should be investing in Ontario’s hospitals, in our people. That’s what we should be doing here. And every year you’re sending a billion dollars—a billion dollars—to shareholder-driven private corporations, and that’s not making our health care system any better.

I guess my question is, will we see anything in the budget to actually put an end to this, to reverse the trend and make sure that we have some sort of balance or normalcy in how these agencies are used?

Hon. Sylvia Jones: As you know, we have legislation on the books currently, that we are debating, that is actually going to give us more additional data to ensure that the appropriate use of temporary staffing agencies is happening.

But, Speaker, let’s talk about what we expect to see in Thursday’s budget. What we expect to see is more investments in health care. We have $50-billion worth of capital that is going into our hospitals and our health care system. Why? Because it was neglected for too long.

Whether you live in Mississauga, Windsor, Sault Ste. Marie or Ottawa, or indeed, south Niagara, you are seeing investments that our government is making to ensure that our world-class primary care providers and allied health professionals have the appropriate services and equipment and capital that they need to do the job in Ontario.

Health care

Mr. John Fraser: The minister would know that the problem is not in building hospitals, it’s actually what happens inside them. Wait-lists are longer, we’re using private nursing agencies and now, while the Premier sends billions of dollars every year to private, shareholder-driven corporations, Ontarians are being asked every day to use their credit card instead of their OHIP card to get the basic services that they need.

So I guess my question back to the minister is, in this budget, will there be measures to stop the trend of more and more people every day being asked to use their credit card instead of their OHIP card?

Hon. Sylvia Jones: As we expand access across Ontario, we will absolutely have more good news to share on Thursday.

But just a question, I guess: Bonnie Crombie is still your leader, right? So when she was in the leadership, she was actually talking, Speaker, about how the Liberal government of the day was spending too much money on health care—quite the opposite under Premier Ford. We have a government who is investing in its people, investing in its capital and ensuring that the people of Ontario continue to have world-class health care, unlike the previous Liberal government who decided that they had been spending too much money, when we obviously have seen gaps in the system that we are now repairing and replacing.

The Speaker (Hon. Donna Skelly): Supplementary?

Mr. John Fraser: Now that the minister is just okay with people having to use their credit card—doesn’t seem to be a problem over there—I didn’t hear anything about that in the response. The reality is that every day, people are being asked to do that. The Premier loves to say that: “You only have to use your OHIP card, not your credit card.” Just like everything else the Premier says, it’s a lot of empty words.

So in Ottawa, if you need an MRI, the doctor—the first thing out of their mouth is: “You’ve got two choices. You can pay a hundred bucks across the river, or you can wait in line for three or four months.” This happens with cataracts. It happens with appointments for optometrists. Every day, people are being asked for their credit card to get an earlier appointment.

Now, I don’t think that that’s the right thing to do—that people are asked to spend their own hard-earned money while they send you money to get basic health care services.

So my question again is, are you going to stop this practice, do something about it, or are you just going to throw back what you gave me in the last response?

Hon. Sylvia Jones: We had wait-lists that were out of control when our government came in.

Because the member opposite highlighted cataracts, I’m going to talk about cataracts. We had cataract waits that were out of control. What did we do? We invested in cataract community centres in Windsor, in Kitchener-Waterloo, in Ottawa.

As a result, I have spoken to a mother who received her cataract surgery in a community surgical diagnostic centre. Guess what? She talked to me about how she could drive again, how she could read to her grandchild again, how she could volunteer back in her community. The member opposite, in opposition, does not believe that there is a role for community diagnostic and surgical centres in the province. I diametrically oppose that because I’ve seen what the impact is to people in Ontario.

The Speaker (Hon. Donna Skelly): Final supplementary?

Mr. John Fraser: What I asked the minister was—I want people to get care. We all want people to get care. They just shouldn’t have to use their credit card, and they’re having to do that more and more.

In the case in Ottawa, I know of a constituent who needed cataract surgery—not urgent. Here’s what the optometrist said to her: “You can go to these private clinics and get it done soon,” even though it wasn’t a rush. “But you don’t want to be on the wait-list.” And to be fair, the wait-list is not that bad for cataracts.

Hon. Sylvia Jones: Because we fixed it.

Mr. John Fraser: The problem I have—and you don’t seem to understand, because you’re out of touch over there—is that people are being asked to spend their hard-earned money while they’re sending you tax dollars for something they can reasonably expect to get: basic health care, primary care. It’s ridiculous. The minister doesn’t get it.

Are they actually going to do something about this practice, or is it just going to be the Wild West in Ontario for health care and people can ask for a credit card any time they like?

Hon. Sylvia Jones: I’m pleased that the member opposite actually highlighted the fact that because of our investments in community cataract surgeries, we were actually able to decrease the wait-list for cataract surgeries. And I hope when we make expansions in other community diagnostic and surgical centres, like for orthopedics, that the member opposite will understand that when you expand community and surgical centres across Ontario you will actually see a corresponding decrease in wait times. It happened in cataracts, and it will happen in a number of other surgeries because we see the need.

People want that convenience in their community, and they have a government, under Premier Ford, that will give it to them.

School boards

Ms. Jessica Bell: My question is to the Minister of Education. In 2024, the Minister of Education brought in Deloitte to investigate the Toronto Catholic District School Board to find efficiencies, and the report is now complete.

The Toronto Catholic District School Board has to submit a school budget by June and has asked to see the Deloitte report numerous times so that they could look at the recommendations, yet the government refuses to give it to them. Instead, they’re launching another investigation, paid for by taxpayers, into the school board’s financial position.

Minister, my question is simple: Before you launch a new investigation, can you release the first report by Deloitte to the Toronto Catholic District School Board?

Hon. Paul Calandra: I thank the member for the question.

As a matter of fact, I have been speaking with the Toronto Catholic District School Board, and they are actually very anxious and encouraged to work with the investigators in the weeks ahead, so we’re going to continue to do that. I will have the basis of the initial report that we’ve already done. As you know, they have a significant deficit of—I believe it’s over $70 million in that. By the end of the month not only will we have the benefit of the investigator’s report, that will be based on some of the work that was done by the team that had already gone in there.

So the member will have to wait until the end of the month, but, as I said, we’re working very closely with the Toronto Catholic District School Board. They’re excited for the opportunity to work with us, and I’m encouraged by their openness to get to the bottom of their overspending.

The Speaker (Hon. Donna Skelly): Back to the member for the supplementary.

Ms. Jessica Bell: Minister, I think they’d be excited to see the first report.

It’s not just the Toronto Catholic District School Board that has already been audited; the Toronto District School Board has also been audited by Deloitte and the Auditor General. These audits have found, time and time again, that there’s no fat left to cut in our school boards. They’re cutting into muscle.

If Ontario wants to see improvements in schools—the repair of school buildings, pools to remain open and smaller class sizes—the only solution, the only long-term solution, is to secure more provincial investment.

My question is to the minister: Can this government commit to properly funding our schools so that our kids can succeed in the classroom?

Hon. Paul Calandra: Therein lies the difference between the opposition and this government. Every single year that we have been in office we have increased funding for classroom education across the province of Ontario. We’re continuing to do that.

The boards that she’s talking about have significant multi-year deficits. We have sent an investigator in to ascertain why these deficits continue. We expected to get multi-year recovery plans from these two boards. They did not provide us with that in a satisfactory fashion, and we’re sending an investigation team to tell us whether we should assume greater responsibility—whether the ministry should assume responsibility.

But as I’ve said in this House time and time again—and I’m not going to stray from this—I expect the money that we send for classroom education to be spent on classroom education, full stop. I’m not here to fund programs that aren’t part of classroom education.

What I want is teachers to have all the resources that they need to properly educate our kids for the jobs of tomorrow. If teachers don’t have those resources, then we will not graduate the best students that we can, so I’ll make sure that teachers get the resources and boards don’t stand in the way.

Youth unemployment

MPP Andrea Hazell: My question is for the Premier. The youth unemployment rate in Ontario has reached a staggering 15.2%. This summer alone, thousands of students are on their summer break and already feeling the wrath of this government’s lack of support for young people living in Ontario. There’s no income, no productivity, no hope, no future, and poverty continues to be an ugly reality for our young people.

My question to the Premier: Will the Premier commit to taking this youth unemployment crisis seriously, and can he assure the young people of Ontario that Thursday’s budget will include meaningful investments to support them?

The Speaker (Hon. Donna Skelly): I recognize the Minister of Labour.

Hon. David Piccini: I appreciate the member opposite and her passion for youth across the province of Ontario.

The Premier already announced at Skills Ontario, one of the largest gatherings of youth across Ontario and the largest skilled trades fair in this country, that he committed another billion dollars in the Skills Development Fund.

In that member’s own riding—and I encourage her to join me next time—we visited A Women’s Work. Natasha Ferguson is empowering a next generation of women entering apprenticeships.

What has the net result of programs like that been? A 30% increase in women registration in apprenticeships in Ontario. That’s going to support building a stronger province, and we’re going to get the job done under Premier Ford’s leadership.

The Speaker (Hon. Donna Skelly): Supplementary?

MPP Andrea Hazell: What this government fails to realize is that while they’re investing and while they’re planning, the youth of Ontario are suffering now. Where is the bailout for the young people of Ontario now?

This government continues to sound like a broken record for years to come, and the people of Ontario are tired of all the broken promises.

Through you, Madam Speaker, what is this government going to do to take Ontario from one of the highest youth unemployment rates in the country now to the lowest, and why did last year’s budget fail to deliver on that goal? That is why we are here today.

Hon. David Piccini: You saw right there a fundamental difference: The member opposite asked for a bailout for youth. There are no youth I’m talking to that are asking for a bailout. They want meaningful skills to achieve a job. They want better skills training. They want better school boards and schools that deliver for their priorities. That’s what the—

Ms. Mary-Margaret McMahon: Since when is a job a bailout?

The Speaker (Hon. Donna Skelly): I apologize to the minister.

Would the member for Beaches–East York please come to order.

Back to the minister.

Hon. David Piccini: Thank you, Speaker.

They want skills training; they’re going to get that in our K-to-12 schools. They want better colleges and universities—thanks to the largest investment in post-secondary education under that minister. They want a Skills Development Fund that’s employer-driven to match them to jobs of tomorrow.

We’ll continue making those investments to support our next generation. We’ve seen a historic increase in apprenticeships because we’re actually building again in this great province.

Public transit

Mr. Sheref Sabawy: My question is to the Minister of Transportation. For years, the Liberals talked about transit, but they never built it. They let our roads, bridges and transit systems fall behind while Ontario kept growing.

But our government is building. We are building projects like the Ontario Line, which will cut congestion and make it easier to get across the GTA. We are building the Eglinton West extension to give people faster, more reliable commutes. We are building the Yonge North subway extension to connect more communities to rapid transit.

These projects will cut gridlock and connect people to jobs. They will help businesses grow and keep our economy growing and strong.

Can the minister share more about how these projects will support Ontario’s growing population?

The Speaker (Hon. Donna Skelly): I recognize the member for Brampton East.

Mr. Hardeep Singh Grewal: Thank you to the member for that great question. For 15 years, the Liberals did nothing but make empty promises on public transit. Under this Premier’s leadership, we’re not just talking, we’re building.

The Ontario Line will cut congestion and connect major destinations across the GTA, providing relief to Line 1 and Line 2. The Eglinton West extension will take thousands of commuters off overcrowded buses, onto a new rapid transit line, seamlessly linking GO Transit and the TTC. The Yonge North subway extension, eight kilometres of rapid transit, will connect Vaughan, Richmond Hill and Markham to our broader transit network.

These projects aren’t just about getting people from point A to point B, they’re about creating jobs, reducing commute times and building the infrastructure Ontario needs to thrive. The Liberals had 15 years to act and did nothing. Our government is building for today and for generations to come.

The Speaker (Hon. Donna Skelly): Back to the member for a supplementary.

Mr. Sheref Sabawy: Our government knows that building transit is about more than just moving people; it is about creating jobs, supporting businesses and building strong communities. Projects like the Ontario Line will unlock new housing and commercial space, helping more families find a place to live close to work. The Hazel McCallion LRT will connect businesses in Brampton and Mississauga, bringing more customers to local shops and restaurants. The Scarborough subway extension will put tens of thousands of jobs within easy reach of public transit, making our economy stronger.

Speaker, can the parliamentary assistant share more about how this project will support jobs, local businesses and economic growth for the long term?

Mr. Hardeep Singh Grewal: Thank you again to the member from Mississauga–Erin Mills. He’s absolutely right, Speaker: Our government understands that investing in public transit isn’t just about moving people, it’s about fuelling economic growth and creating economic opportunity.

The Ontario Line will open up new corridors for housing and commercial development, attracting businesses and bringing jobs closer to where people live. The Hazel McCallion LRT will connect Brampton and Mississauga, driving foot traffic to local businesses and revitalizing our downtown cores. The subway extension in Scarborough will be bringing 34,000 jobs within walking distance of public transit, and it will be a game-changer for workers and businesses alike.

Speaker, while the NDP and the Liberals voted against these vital projects, Ontarians voted for progress. That’s why they chose our government to deliver these historic investments. We’re committed to building the infrastructure in Ontario and we’re going to get it done for the people of Ontario.

Labour dispute

MPP Lise Vaugeois: While giving billions of dollars away to employers, WSIB president Jeffery Lang stated, “We’re in the strongest financial position in our history,” and yet management has forced WSIB workers into a strike position and is demanding concessions.

Will the Minister of Labour instruct WSIB management to stop their anti-worker tactics, get back to the bargaining table and negotiate a fair deal for WSIB workers?

Hon. David Piccini: I appreciate the question from the member opposite. I want to first off start by thanking the workers at WSIB: 97% of claims receive a decision in 10 days or less; 88% of workers have returned to work within the three-month window, which is key to giving people a return to work, the dignity of a job. It’s the best performance in a decade.

We know that the best deals are done at the table, and that’s based off of a system of neutrality, where good-faith negotiations are underscored by a shared commitment to outcomes. As I’ve said in the past in this place, 98% of deals are done at the table. I’m pleased to say that the WSIB and union are at the table with the support of the Ontario Labour Relations Board, and I look forward to them landing a deal.

The Speaker (Hon. Donna Skelly): I recognize the mem