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“Doug Ford said he’d end hallway medicine. He didn’t get it done. He said he’d cut your taxes. He didn’t get it done. He said he’d build 1.5 million homes. He didn’t get it done,” she said Thursday in Scarborough.

Crombie — whose bright red campaign bus is emblazoned with the slogan “2.5 Million People Have No Family Doctor: This is Doug Ford’s Ontario” — has promised to cure the physician shortage through a slew of measures that could cost $3.1 billion.

They include spending $250 million over four years in targeted retention aimed at 2,400 doctors who have left family medicine or are nearing retirement, offering bonuses of $150,000 to repatriate Canadian doctors from abroad to Ontario, and recruiting 650 of the 6,000 family doctors currently working in other disciplines.

As well, she wants to help doctors by slashing “the administrative burden taking up 50 per cent of their time.”

“Let’s get rid of fax machines at long last and implement a centralized referral system and ensure that they have the right staff (and) offer more evening and weekend care,” she said.

In Waterloo, Ford, who is seeking his third term in office, blamed previous Liberal governments for the shortage of physicians. 

“If the Liberals didn’t cut nurses and they didn’t cut medical (school) seats, we wouldn’t be in this spot,” he told reporters after receiving the endorsement of the 25,000-member Ontario Pipe Trades Council. 

“We’ve hired Dr. Jane Philpott to connect every single Ontarian with a family doctor,” Ford said of the former federal Liberal health minister who is now director of the medical school at Queen’s University in Kingston.

On the eve of Ford’s snap election call, the PCs announced $1.4 billion in new funding to help Philpott expand the province’s network of primary health care teams with a goal of getting every Ontarian a family doctor by 2029.

“There’s no doubt that people have been waiting a long time, too long, frankly, to get connected to a family care practitioner in their community,” MPP Sylvia Jones, serving as Ford’s health minister, acknowledged on Jan. 27.

But that announcement raised questions as to whether the $1.4 billion is enough because there’s a huge discrepancy between numbers provided by Jones (Dufferin-Caledon) and the Ontario Medical Association.

The OMA says there are currently 2.5 million Ontarians without a family doctor, and predicts that figure will rise to 4.4 million next year as the population grows and doctors retire or leave the province.

But Jones maintained just two million Ontarians will need to be connected to a family doctor in the next four years.

Ford boasted his government approved two new medical schools in Ontario. However, students will not graduate from them for several more years.

NDP Leader Marit Stiles, meanwhile, was in Hamilton to promise “real rent control” that would further protect tenants from higher costs and renovictions.

“After seven years of Doug Ford, rent is higher than ever. It’s the biggest expense in your family’s budget and it’s only getting worse,” said Stiles.

Later, she headed to Sault Ste. Marie, where her party hopes to pick up a key northern riding vacated by the retirement of veteran Tory Ross Romano.

Also Thursday, Green Leader Mike Schreiner was in Guelph to tout his party’s plan to increase Ontario Disability Support Program and Ontario Works payments and build 310,000 affordable homes.

“Poverty in Ontario is escalating at an alarming rate,” said Schreiner, noting the Association of Municipalities of Ontario found 81,000 people were homeless in the province last year.

“Over the past two years, food bank usage in Ontario has increased by 78 per cent,” he said.

“Doug Ford isn’t just failing to solve the problem — he’s making it worse by keeping Ontarians with disabilities locked in legislated poverty.”

The Tory campaign is confident it has weathered the worst of his Monday gaffe when he was caught on a hot mic saying that he “100 per cent” wanted Donald Trump to win the American presidency last November.

“On election day, was I happy this guy won? One hundred per cent I was. Then the guy pulled out the knife and f—-ing yanked it in me,” Ford said at his campaign office in Etobicoke.

Since the misstep, the PC leader, who has framed the snap Ontario election as a referendum on who could best deal with Trump’s threatened 25 per cent tariffs against Canada, has faced questions about how he could have supported someone who had cut off personal protective equipment imports to Canada during the COVID-19 pandemic.

“There’s Trump 1.0 and then there was Trump 2.0,” he said Wednesday.