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.