FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
December 2, 2025
QUEEN’S PARK — MPP John Fraser, Ontario Liberal Parliamentary Leader, and MPP Dr. Adil Shamji, Ontario Liberal Critic for Primary Care, say the Auditor General’s latest report confirms a government focused on self-promotion while Ontarians struggle to access basic health care.
Fraser said the Auditor General’s findings expose misplaced priorities.
“The Auditor General confirmed this government uses taxpayer dollars to help itself,” said Fraser. “Instead of investing in health care, schools, and jobs, the government spent nearly $112 million on self-promotional advertising that didn’t fix a single problem.”
“Their priorities are completely out of touch,” he added. “Ontario stockpiled the wrong kind of PPE, let hundreds of millions of masks sit in warehouses, and then had the bright idea to burn them all — instead of donating them, selling them, or getting them into communities that needed them.”
Dr. Shamji said the health-care findings should alarm every Ontarian.
“Behind the government’s announcements, there is no working system to deliver primary care,” said Shamji. “More than two million Ontarians still don’t have a family doctor — and millions more can’t get care when they need it,” said Shamji.
“The government isn’t even measuring whether its plan is working. Timelines and targets are not being accounted for — and 70 per cent of Ontario Health Teams report that more than one in ten people are still unattached to care,” he added. “Unbelievably, primary-care teams were approved and then starved of funding. Seventy-five teams were funded at only a fraction of what they requested, and in some cases, communities lost doctors as a result.”
“It gets worse: the government promised to train more doctors and delivered only 44 per cent of the medical school seats they committed to, and Ontario is the only province without a centralized physician recruitment system, forcing communities to compete for doctors.”
The Ontario Liberal Caucus believes Ontarians deserve a government that invests in health care before self-promotion.