I say distinctly to my friend over there that I will vote against any bill this government brings before the House that puts the interests of CarePartners executives, Bayshore executives and ParaMed executives over the interest of seniors and workers. They are all going to be voted against, because we know on this side who we work for. We don’t work for the executives who come into this building and put on open bar receptions and try to cozy up to politicians so they can line their pockets. We work for the seniors, we work for the persons with disabilities, we work for the PSWs, and we won’t apologize for it. That’s who we are. That’s who the NDP is.

I take what my friend has said to heart. I think people do want to live at home. They want to be at home. They don’t want to be in hospitals. A number of persons with disabilities and seniors I’ve spoken to don’t want to be admitted into long-term care. That is a personal choice they’ve made.

But what you’ve said and what the government has introduced to date has not done anything about the fact that we are losing 30% on the dollar of every—there’s a billion dollars contemplated with this bill, as I understand it. We are losing a third of every dollar we’re spending because we’re lining the pockets of the for-profit companies. So all the good work that you’re going to do to take those thousand people and bring them back home into the community—if they can’t get a care worker to show up on time, if those care workers are double-booked, if their travel isn’t covered, if they’re not making decent salaries, if they have no pensions and no benefits, then I believe your bill is set up to fail.

What I’m going to do just to punctuate the point for my friend from Oshawa is to say this: Can you imagine an Ontario where there was an agreed-upon minimum standard of compensation for all PSWs? The government, through Ontario Health, could do it right now. That is what Denmark does. There is one standard of pay, one standard of benefits, one standard of travel being covered. Can you imagine that?

I can tell you, for any lawyer working for this government right now—you better believe there’s a minimum standard that they expect to be paid. Any deputy minister? Oh, there’s a minimum standard of what they expect to be paid. And they work hard. Why can’t we do the same for PSWs? Why do we have to watch them be gouged by greedy companies that have been ripping off the public purse for too long? That, I believe, my friend, is what’s hurting Cindy, and we need a government that’s going to stop that and stop it right now.

What I would say to all of those homes that are being built that are culturally appropriate homes—I want the workers who are going to work in those buildings to know that they have the right to join a union. We had SEIU Healthcare in this building not long ago. They should sign up to SEIU Healthcare, because right now there’s no government that’s willing to guarantee a standard of living and wages.

The member is a nurse, and I respect the work that she has done in the province of Ontario. The member benefited from that work done by the associations representing her profession.

I want to see PSWs valued more and paid more. That is the missing piece, honestly. Back to my friend: We can build homes. Homes and beds are great infrastructure. But what makes them come alive are the people who work in them. So that is the thing we need a government to do. And if this government isn’t prepared to do it, believe me, in 2026, there will be a government prepared to pass laws to ensure PSWs are paid appropriately, their travel is covered, they have pensions and benefits just like all of us in this building.

When I left off the debate, I was talking about the fact that we have a home care industry that works really well for private executives seeking to take money—like the billion dollars proposed by Bill 135—and channel it into investors and private profit. The studies that I’m familiar with have shown that we lose up to 30% of every dollar the province invests in home care in for-profit companies and the dividends they pay to shareholders and the fantastic salaries they lavish on their executives.

I was talking about Linda Knight at CarePartners, someone who has been in this building a lot, lobbying politicians—the $140 million that her company enjoys in contracts.

I want to talk about this from the more important side of the home care spectrum, from the standpoint of personal support workers who work for Linda Knight and CarePartners. I want to quote Dyana Forshner-Juby, who spoke to a reporter three years ago. This is what she had to say, “I’m just sad that I’ve done [care work] for my whole career. My whole career has been taking care of people and trying to uphold a certain standard of care. And to come to this stage, so close to being able to retire and of course, I’m retiring with nothing. I got nothing. There’s no pension plan. And I’m sitting here with a toothache because I don’t have dental coverage, and I’m like, I take my whole life to take care of people. And nobody’s taking care of me.” That is home care, sadly, in the province of Ontario.

The folks on the front lines who are directly delivering the care to persons with disabilities and seniors are getting the shaft by Linda Knight. They’re being told, “Come work for me and enjoy a career” in the glossy brochures. When Dyana shows up for work, she shows up without dental coverage, without a pension plan and without travel being covered, and she goes from client to client. In what province do we treat care workers this way? I’ll tell you what kind of province, Speaker: It’s the kind of province that over the last two decades has seen Conservative and Liberal governments take this critical industry, home care, and hand it over as a gift to the private sector, hand it over as a gift to Linda Knight and CarePartners.

The people who suffer when we line the profits of home care executives are the workers like Dyana. They are also the patients—patients like Mike McLean. Mike McLean, who, back home, had to receive—wait for it—palliative care not from the Bayshore worker assigned to him as he tried to die with dignity in his own home, but he had to receive palliative care from his daughter, who happens to be a nurse, because more often than not, PSWs working for Bayshore were double-booked and they couldn’t show up.

Can you imagine, Speaker, a situation in which the McLean family does what they’re supposed to do, gets on the roster, files for at-home PSW care for palliative care—a very difficult situation that I’m sure some of us in this House have had to deal with—people aren’t showing up, and the daughter of the family, who happens to have medical expertise, is filling the gap? Filling the gap—why? I submit, for our debate on Bill 135, she’s filling the gap so Bayshore can make profits at the expense of the Ontario public, at the expense of the Ontario taxpayer.

It is shameful that we aren’t—I can’t even remember; I’m looking at my colleagues here for some help. How many times have we debated home care in different pieces of legislation in the last five years? At least three or four. Not once has the government proposed taking home care out of the for-profit hands of Bayshore, of ParaMed, of CarePartners so that the McLean family wouldn’t have to rely on their daughter to administer palliative care to her father in his last days.

Speaker, I was at the social policy committee in the last iteration of Parliament, and the CEO of Bayshore deputed to the committee. I asked that gentleman, “Can we see all of the contracts that you currently have with the Ministry of Health? Can we scrutinize how much Bayshore spends on administrative costs, on management compensation, dividends to shareholders? The Auditor General has seen some of those reports, and she has told us that we’re losing up to 30% of every dollar Ontario is investing in home care in frivolous administrative costs, executive compensation and dividends to shareholders.” That gentleman told me in the course of that meeting, “Oh, MPP Harden, yes, I would be happy to give you some of those records.” We followed up once, we followed up twice, we followed up three times, through the Chair of the committee, to Bayshore. We heard the sound of one hand clapping—not a single document released, not a single effort made on behalf of this discredited corporation, in my opinion. And I am talking about the leadership here. I’m not talking about the hard-working PSWs and community care nurses who are doing their best to provide the care that we deserve here in Ontario. I’m talking about the greedy, pocket-stuffing executives we have been subsidizing in this province for far too long.

Frankly, I am embarrassed that we are debating home care again in this province and there’s no proposal from the government to do what great countries like the country of Denmark have done, which is to take home care out of private, for-profit companies and to make sure that there is an immediate care coordinator available to every single family in that country; that they can sign folks up; that people are never double-booked as PSWs or care attendants; that the people providing the care have decent pensions, have decent benefits; that being a personal support worker, being a community nurse, is a desirable occupation.

Do you know, Speaker, I was saying to the member for Niagara Falls before we started debate—I don’t think he would mind me sharing this with the House—that I had a private conversation with the former mayor of Ottawa, Jim Watson. We were at one of the many events the city runs to celebrate achievers in our community, like the city of Ottawa awards. And every time the mayor does this, they bring out the colour guard, the marching band for the police and the fire and the paramedics. It’s always a really wonderful bagpiping ceremony. It adds a certain air of professionalism. I said to the mayor at the time, given what we had been through in the pandemic, “There should be a personal support worker colour guard. They should be as honourable and celebrated a profession as those other first responders”—because every personal support worker I know in the city of Ottawa, that’s how they think of themselves often. They are first responders. They are the ones who look in on people. They sometime find people who have fallen and hurt themselves. They often go into homes in dangerous situations, where people have behaviours—they may be living with dementia. They may not want to lash out and hurt a PSW—but it might just be a function of the job.

I would love to see the province of Ontario devote a lot of attention to not just talking about all the awful situations in which PSW members have found themselves, because that scares people out of the occupation, but I would like to see us promote it, to say that a PSW, a community nurse—these are critical occupations, and we need people going into colleges, we need people going into universities, we need people choosing that as their path.

A government that I, personally, would love to be part of is a government that did exactly what the country of Denmark has done: create a systematic home care system, funded by the public, accountable to the public—all disclosures are made available to the public—where the workers were proud of their work, and seniors and persons with disabilities got to live in their homes for as long as they chose. They got to choose the moment, if they wanted to, when they would require 24/7 frailty care—high-acuity care. But that’s not the situation right now. We have situations in which persons with disabilities and seniors are choosing to go into private, often for-profit long-term care with shoddy records—not on the workers’ side, but again, on the management side, and how money is squandered for private profit. They are choosing to be admitted into these institutions because they can’t afford home care or there’s no home care available.

I’m going to round this out by saying this again to my friends in government: If we are serious about home care—because I think it actually is one of the critical industries of our province—we have to stop treating it like the neglected cousin of health care.

We have to go on a mass recruiting drive in high schools right now to say, “Being a personal support worker and a community nurse is an honourable profession. You are going to be giving people dignity. You’re going to help people get out in their community.”

We have to partner with culturally appropriate care, so if a senior is coming from a particular community—the Chinese community, Muslim community, Jewish community, whatever that community may be—they have home care that is culturally appropriate for them.

And finally, please, can we stop lining the pockets of Linda Knight, of Bayshore, of CarePartners, of these companies that somehow managed to seize control of the home care industry, from the time that we had an NDP government in this province and we cared about that?

We have to retile the doors—retile the doors. Inside the house will be all the people who want to care for our loved ones, people who need the care—and the public prepared to pay for it. People on the outside, if we have our way, will be all the gougers, the profiteers, the people who should have never been there in the first place.

So the government, as I understand, in this bill—well, they move very quickly, so it’s hard to sometimes understand everything they want to do with this bill. But I want to begin on a charitable note and assume that the government, like the members of this opposition, care about the people who raised us; that we assume that every single part of this building, every single facet of this province, exists because elders have paid their taxes, they have gotten up in the morning and they have put one foot in front of the other and they have built our communities; and when the time comes that they get an opportunity to retire, they want to live with dignity.

And every single person I talk to from our community who talks about home care—it is not just a frill. Home care should be one of the most important things that the province of Ontario funds and cares about on a regular basis. And why? Because people want to live in the homes they have built for themselves and their families for as long as possible—that’s why. They deserve the right to live in the homes they have built for themselves and their families.

But what are we currently doing in the province of Ontario with home care? Absolutely clear, it’s on the record; the Auditor General previous to the current Auditor General issued two reports on the problems in home care in Ontario. We are losing, depending upon the agency hired by the Ministry of Health, between 27% to 32% of every taxpayer dollar we invest in home care to for-profit operators that care more about investors and the bottom line than the well-being of seniors and persons with disabilities.

It’s why it’s so hard for so many families to find appropriate home care. It’s why when persons with disabilities and seniors have some kind of a critical incident in their home—it could be a fall; it could be an injury of some kind—and they get admitted to hospital, they cannot be brought back to their home. Why? Because it’s unsafe for them to be there. So they get trapped in this awful cycle of emergency room admissions, being put into beds which emergency room staff need to deal with emergencies. But they get trapped into this cycle, and they get trapped into that cycle after a lifetime of caring for children, paying taxes, doing what everybody in this province says you have to do to lead a decent and meaningful life.

I’ve always thought, as someone middle-aged—I’m 51 now—that part of that social contract I have with elders in this province is to stand by them when they want to live in their own homes for as long as possible. But that’s not the case. We line the pockets of ParaMed, of CarePartners, of Bayshore. Linda Knight, a fantastic example of this: $140 million of contracts currently—CarePartners—with the Ministry of Health and the province of Ontario. We are losing 30% of every one of that $140 million we invest in CarePartners to profit, to investors.

There was a time in this province when there was an NDP government. We had a Minister of Health, and her name was Evelyn Gigantes, member of provincial Parliament for Ottawa Centre, someone I’m very proud to call a friend. Evelyn told me that when she stood in this esteemed House as the Minister of Health, 81% of the contracts signed with the Minister of Health for home care were with non-profit entities, by and large the Victorian Order of Nurses, a historic agency which now is called Carefor. Carefor still exists in Ottawa. It still plays a critical role in looking after people with disabilities and seniors, not just in my community. I see the member for Glengarry–Prescott–Russell over there, my friend east of where I serve. I know many seniors who benefit from home care services provided well outside of downtown Ottawa thanks to Carefor.

But what has happened over time when the Victorian Order of Nurses and non-profit care was 81% of home care? What has happened over time is the Conservative government of the mid-1990s introduced a market model for a competition for contracts for home care. That has driven down working conditions and it has driven down the standards of care, so seniors, people with disabilities and families cannot get the care they need.

Let me switch to the other critical part of this puzzle, and that is the largely women and men who work in this sector. If you can believe it, Speaker, their travel is not compensated when they work for a big company like Bayshore or ParaMed or CarePartners. Their travel is not compensated, so when they head out to Glengarry–Prescott–Russell and when they head out to Renfrew–Nipissing–Pembroke or when they head out to one of the rural areas of eastern Ontario, my neighbours, they are not compensated between destinations. Their compensation is between clients.

Just recently when I was at the grocery store, I had occasion to talk to a rural community care PSW who works for different agencies, piecing together a full-time employment. This gentleman called the care coordinator at Bayshore and said, “Do you know I’m being given 30 minutes to look in on somebody in Smiths Falls? I know the senior has not had a bath in a week, and I want to give that senior a bath, a very personal process—older lady.” The Bayshore care coordinator said back to the com-munity PSW, “Well, what can you do in half an hour, Paul?”

How revolting is that? Not only do you not pay Paul for his travel to Smiths Falls from Ottawa—he’s an Ottawa Centre resident; proud to call Paul a friend—you put the senior in the situation where they’re not bathed for a week—what is going to be, two weeks? Three weeks?

This government has a close relationship with for-profit home care agencies. They believe and they’ve said in this House for the five years that I have served here that they have to work with Linda Knight, with Bayshore, with ParaMed. We are losing 30% of investments in home care to for-profit agencies, and nowhere in Bill 135 is there a provision to deal with that—nowhere. People keep putting their Mercedes in the driveways and people keep dishing out dividends to shareholders, and people with disabilities and seniors continue to suffer. It’s not right.

Do you know what’s coming up soon? I’m proud to stand beside my friend from St. Catharines here. Remembrance Day is coming very soon. Everybody in this House is going to be putting on a red poppy because we honour the service of our veterans. But what about the veterans right now who need home care? What about them? Do we care about them when we get up and we hold our hand over our hearts, and we remember epic moments like D-Day or Vimy Ridge, or the sacrifices or the PTSD that veterans come home with after serving in the field in places like Afghanistan or elsewhere?

I know those celebrations by members in this House are heartfelt. I know we all share them, and we believe them. But it can’t end after Remembrance Day. We have to remember that the elders who built this province deserve every single cent that we can put in their hands to ensure dignified home care.

So if Bill 135 is about dignified home care, connected home care, but you are leaving intact a home care system that is bleeding out incredible amounts of money for profit, I believe you are failing seniors, persons with disabilities and caring members of families.

Speaker, I’ll never forget what it was like for me when I was a graduate student in this city and my grandparents, within five months of each other, both passed away—they went through that moment where they had to leave that family home and had to be in 24/7 assisted long-term care. They went to Maxville Manor, a wonderful, wonderful non-profit organization in Maxville with a social justice mandate that does incredible work. They looked after both of my grandparents, my grandmother who had dementia and my grandfather who had Lou Gehrig’s disease. They did the best they could to keep them together in that long-term-care facility, even though my grandma, who never met a bully she didn’t want to stare down in her entire life and wreaked fear and havoc in my town for any reason she believed was unjust—so when she was being asked to stay in the dementia ward for her own protection, she didn’t take kindly to that.

As a family caregiver, I ceased my studies and I went back home to live in Vankleek Hill with my mom for a bit and was in and out of Maxville, and I remember thinking, “How lucky is my family that there’s enough affluence in my family that I can just put my studies on hold and come down from Toronto and look after my grandparents, who spent their life looking after me?” But that’s our luck, our fortune. I was able to do that. My dad ran a very successful business. My mom was a music teacher. They both did whatever they could. But I came home. So did my brother. So did my mom’s second cousin. But not every family has that ability. Not every family can do that.

So many people in this province are struggling pay-cheque to paycheque to make ends meet today. It’s hard. Life out there is hard. So that’s where the province has to step up and offer consistent home care to every single person in this province who needs it. That’s our social contract with the elders who built this province. But instead, we’re lining the pockets of Linda Knight, we’re lining the pockets of Bayshore, we’re lining the pockets of CarePartners, and I think it’s a shame, Speaker.

I invite my friends in government to consider amending this bill to make sure we finally go back to the NDP legacy in this province where we had every or most of every dollar going directly into care and not into profit. That would be a proud day. I would love to work with this government to introduce them to organizations like Carefor, organizations back home like Hillel Lodge on the west end of the riding, a jewel in the crown of Jewish Family Services Ottawa that is there offering compassionate care—

Kanata–Carleton.

I listened to the member’s comments closely, and I’m going to ask her, through you, Speaker: Given that the government is proposing this billion-dollar expansion in home care, how does the member feel about the fact that we have an Auditor General report that tells us that we lose as much as 32% of every dollar we invest in home care when we do it through for-profit agencies? And what is the government’s answer to a guy like Paul, a home care attendant I met in a grocery store the other day who tells me that when he travels around the city of Ottawa—he doesn’t have a car; he uses transit—travel is not covered?

As the member from Nickel Belt said, in three different pieces of home care legislation offered by this government, no one is covering Paul’s travel. He is looking in on neighbours; he’s looking in on people with disabilities and seniors. My question to the member: Why are you allowing 30% of the government funding to be lost to for-profit agencies, and why aren’t we covering Paul’s travel? Doesn’t that matter to you?