Thank you so much to my colleagues from the official opposition. Our proposal is the equivalent of introducing 2,000 new doctors in the province of Ontario tomorrow to see two million more patients. What could possibly be wrong with this?

Listening to the government members opposite address this motion, I felt a little bit like Alice down the rabbit hole. But there’s no waking up from this nightmare. We’ve listened to Liberal and Conservative governments over so many years—the last 20, 30 years—with half measures and cuts. Let’s just call the Liberal and Conservative governments Tweedledee and Tweedledum for the purposes of this argument. Nothing has been adequate and the writing has been on the wall all of that time.

Six years into this government’s mandate I would urge them to do something for the people of Ontario, listen to the 2.2 million Ontarians who do not have a family doctor, listen to the voices of Ontarians who are saying, “Please, do something right now.” We are serving you up a solution. You are not approaching this with the urgency that it requires.

If this motion were to pass—and we are forcing a vote on this this afternoon—again, 2,000 more doctors—the equivalent—two million more Ontarians could actually see primary care delivered immediately. It would relieve the administrative burden on family physicians. It will get patients the access they need and then relieve the pressure on our emergency rooms. You have a choice to make. Make the right one today. Vote in favour of this motion.

Back to the Premier: Primary care providers and patients know that this is just a drop in the bucket; it’s not going far enough. And the government knows this too. They’re making a choice. They’re choosing to expand private, for-profit care in this province to line the pockets of private, for-profit corporate shareholders. That’s what this is all about.

Doctors in this province, on the other hand, are spending nearly half their time filling out forms and doing administrative follow-ups. Our motion would unlock thousands of hours of direct patient care by investing in new supports for health care providers. It’s about putting patients first instead of paperwork.

So back to the Premier: Is he content to govern a province where millions are going without basic care, or will he listen to the primary care providers and take this simple step to get people the care that they so desperately need?

Interjections.

I want to use my last supplementary to ask about another emerging health care issue. This government’s privatization-for-profit scheme is leaving patients across this province frustrated and very, very deeply worried about being charged for medically necessary services.

The Minister of Health has stood there and said that they are expanding private cataract surgeries, but we have more reports today that dozens of patients are being overbilled and charged for additional lenses and services that they did not ask for. This is exactly what we warned about: Patients being told they will only have to use their health card are just being handed a bill for thousands of dollars after their treatment.

The minister’s response has been incredibly disappointing. She recognized this practice as a violation of the commitment-to-medicare act, but has not offered, to this date, any solutions to protect patients.

I’m going to ask the minister, and I don’t want to hear that these patients consented to it, because it’s clear that patients were misled by this clinic. Minister, when will you enforce your own regulations and stop companies profiting off the backs of patients?

Interjections.

Yesterday, we kicked off National Nursing Week. Doesn’t it say so much that just yesterday, this Conservative government passed a law that’s going to sell off our health care system to corporations that can make money off the backs of sick people? I want to remind everyone here that this is something that the nurses of this province deeply oppose.

The Conservatives are going down a path that both Quebec and British Columbia already found was a dead end. It cost everyone more—the government, individual patients. It worsened health outcomes. In the end, it made it harder as well on health care workers.

To the Premier: How will you stop the hemorrhaging of nurses out of our public health care system when there was nothing in the legislation to prevent it?

I want to remind the government members opposite that it’s not just the people in this room who are watching carefully; it’s people all over Ontario. From Thunder Bay to Minden, from Chesley to Kingston, they are all rallying against Bill 60. They know that this bill is going to make their health care worse and not better, and they’re either going to have their voices heard today or at the next election.

Will the Premier listen to the voices of Ontarians or will he continue to put their health care ahead of companies trying to make a profit on the backs of sick people?

Speaker, he doesn’t have to take our word for it. We’ve already seen private delivery of surgical services fail Canadians. Quebec handed billions to private health care providers, only to see their workforce depleted and exhausted, with higher costs and worse outcomes for patients. BC changed course because of rampant illegal overbilling by private for-profit providers.

Speaker, the Premier has a chance to stop this scheme before it’s too late. And so, back to the Premier: Will he pull Bill 60 and instead invest in our health care workers, our public hospitals and patient care?

Speaker, if this is such a good deal for the people of Ontario, why is this Premier keeping the details a total secret?

It’s been revealed that the government is now working on a sole-sourced backroom deal with Zlatko Starkovski and his nebulous company Ontario Live.

To the Premier: Does he or does anyone in this government have an existing or a past connection with Mr. Starkovski?

Now, another Conservative insider, Carmine Nigro—who was appointed by this government, by the way, to be chair of Ontario Place, who is a good friend of the Premier and attended his family’s wedding reception—is brokering a backroom deal with Starkovski—

Interjections.

My question to the Premier is, does he have any idea how bad it looks to have one family friend brokering a deal with another family friend on behalf of his government?

Again, Speaker, they’re totally out of touch and not listening to the people of this province.

There’s a whole bunch of seniors—

Interjections.

Speaker, to the Premier: Will this government stop the predatory upselling that is happening across this province?

Mountains of evidence show that patients have been repeatedly misled by for-profit clinics that have recommended procedures people just don’t need. It’s how they make a profit. This government’s health act is going to do nothing to stop this, so we have proposed amendments to outlaw upselling in any form.

Speaker, to the Minister of Health: Will the minister accept the NDP’s amendments to protect patients?

It is absolutely critical for Ontarians to believe that their government is acting in their best interest.

Ms. Cooper’s experience shows us how patients will suffer under Bill 60, because private, for-profit clinics are going to upsell and cherry-pick their patients—private, for-profit clinics, some of which just happen to be major Conservative Party donors.

Speaker, to the Minister of Health: Who is making health policy in this province? Your donors? When will someone start putting people like Lois first?

I want to start by thanking all the members of the official opposition here, in the NDP, for their very strong and effective arguments for why this government, the members opposite, should support this important motion. I’m very proud to sit here with all of you and to have your support.

Speaker, we heard this afternoon that the option is there—the option is, fully fund and fully utilize our public operating rooms, fully fund and support our staff to expand the number of shifts in the public system, keeping our nurses here in Ontario rather than having them become, as I’ve mentioned before here, Ontario’s greatest export right now. All of that is there. The option is there. But what is missing is the political will to get it done. This is about choice. This government has chosen not to spend money on public health care. They’ve chosen to create a crisis, and as the member from Waterloo said, they have, in fact, squirrelled away billions and billions of health care dollars rather than spend them to fix the crisis. This crisis could be fixed today. This problem could be solved today if this government chose to put patients ahead of profits, if they chose to put patients and public health care ahead of their political ideology. We could do better. We could serve the people of this province well. And we wouldn’t have people waiting for surgeries, looking to the private health care system now for solutions.

I hope I can count on the government to support this motion.

So the Premier is gouging patients, just more transparently. That’s what I got from that answer. Speaker, the Premier owes these patients and all of us an explanation. I have so many examples right here, which I will share with the Premier.

Back to the Premier: For-profit health care, like the kind that is being pushed by this government, requires a return on investment. That money is going to come from two places: extra charges to the public system that we’re all going to pay for, and upselling directly to patients at a time when they’re at their most vulnerable, while the cost of everything just keeps going up.

Why is this government opening the door to new fees and charges on people who are just looking to get the medical care that they deserve?

To the Premier again: Why is there no commitment to transparent public oversight authority in your legislation?

Ontarians cherish our greenbelt. We know that paving it over and paving over our vital farmlands and wetlands is going to hurt our province and its people for generations.

Instead of protecting it, this government has opened the floodgates for their well-connected personal friends. In fact, nine of the developers who benefit from the greenbelt land swap are top PC donors. Some even attended the Premier’s family festivities.

Did the Premier, his ministers or their staff tell developers about their intention to open up the greenbelt before their public announcement?

Interjections.

But now, thanks to the Premier’s actions, more land speculators are circling like vultures. One of the new requests to develop the greenbelt is linked to a former staffer of the Premier turned lobbyist.

How naive does the Premier think Ontarians are? Exactly what price did this government put on the greenbelt?

It really gives me great pleasure to welcome into the gallery here in the chamber former MP Peggy Nash and the Toronto Metropolitan University Women in the House program participants. It’s great to see you here.

This visit and this program are organized by former MP Peggy Nash, Dr. Tracey Raney and Zaima Aurony. Thank you so much for being with us here today.

This is already happening in private clinics and the government is working to expand it. What does the Premier have to say to these patients?

I’m happy to present this petition from Ontarians who are being served by Hamilton Health Sciences, and it reads as follows:

“Petition to Protect Patient Care in Operating Rooms at Hamilton Health Sciences....

“To the Legislative Assembly of Ontario:

“Whereas patients requiring surgery have complex care needs, some of which are urgent or life-threatening diseases and under anesthetic can become unstable, unpredictable, quickly change or deteriorate; and

“Whereas a scrub nurse is a member of the surgical team who provides a surgeon with instruments while maintaining a sterile environment, acts on and anticipates their requests, prepares medications, assists with retraction of tissue, communicates to circulating registered nurses (RNs) patient care needs, and responds in emergencies; and

“Whereas more health care providers are needed to address the surgical backlog, but surgical patients need a regulated nurse in a scrub nurse role who has the education, training and qualifications of a diploma or degree and a specialized credential in surgical nursing that makes them knowledgeable, expertly skilled and experienced, and anything less puts patient safety at risk; and

“Whereas Hamilton Health Sciences’s new surgical model of care is to replace nurses who perform the scrub nurse role in operating rooms, with unregulated operating room assistants (ORAs); and

“Whereas Hamilton Health Sciences’s actions to replace nurses with unregulated health care providers erodes the standard of care that patients will receive because ORAs cannot respond to patient care needs and they are not accountable to the public for the care they provide; and

“Whereas the Operating Room Nurses Association of Canada (ORNAC) recommends that the scrub nurse role be performed only by nurses; and

“Whereas cutting nursing care in operating rooms means patients can suffer from unnecessary complications or death because of unrecognized care needs, delayed care, miscommunication, or errors;

“Therefore we, the undersigned, petition the Legislative Assembly of Ontario as follows:

“Immediately stop operating room assistants from performing the scrub nurse role at Hamilton Health Sciences;

“Stop any further plans to cut and replace registered nurses within the operation rooms at Hamilton Health Sciences;

“Cease the new surgical model of care that replaces scrub nurses with operating room assistants because it does not adhere to Hamilton Health Sciences’s mission to provide excellent health care to the community it serves.”

I am very happy to present this petition. There are 802 signatures on it, with 90% of them residents from Hamilton and the surrounding communities. I want to thank the registered nurses for advocating for patient safety. I’m proud to affix my name to this petition, and I’m going to send it to the table with page Mabel.

I’ve been listening to the member from Kitchener–Conestoga’s comments. The member wants the official opposition to support this legislation. Earlier today, the interim leader of the official opposition asked the Minister of Long-Term Care in this place if he would ban hospitals from billing for hospital beds for people who continue to stay there. And the member opposite talked about if people prefer to stay, they won’t—the long-term-care minister refused to answer that question. It was very notable.

Afterwards, in scrums—and I want to just share this with everybody here, because it’s coming out in the news reports as we sit here—the minister has been quoted as saying now, “If they refuse to move into their home of preferred choice, then yes, absolutely,” the hospital will charge them, “because we need those spaces for patients who need acute care.” The Minister of Long-Term Care has confirmed that those patients will be billed if they don’t take the spaces that are immediately offered to them. I’d like to know the member’s response. Please, give me a reason to support this terrible piece of legislation.

Good afternoon. I am really pleased to rise today to join the debate on this new bill, the so-called More Beds, Better Care Act, or, as it’s been called by experts, health care workers and seniors’ advocates: “morally repugnant,” “shameful,” and “a violation of patient rights.” It seems the government is feeling this negative response to this move as well, as they enter into—and we’ve seen it all week this week—serious damage-control mode here in the Legislature and in the press.

What I would like to start with, Speaker, is explaining and trying to understand a little bit about why there has been such a negative response out there to this legislation. Let me start by explaining that this bill seeks to amend the Fixing Long-Term Care Act, 2021, to include a provision that would allow hospitals to discharge patients determined to need what they call alternate levels of care, or ALC, without their consent—and I underline that: without their consent—to increase, allegedly, hospital capacity. It’s part of the ministry’s stated plan, and this is what they’ve said they’re trying to achieve, to move 200 people who have been in hospital for six months waiting for long-term-care beds, within the next three months, to a total of about 1,000 more by March 2023. By amending the Health Care Consent Act, this bill will provide authority for clinicians and placement coordinators to determine the eligibility for a patient to be transferred into long-term care, and that could be a location far, far away from their loved ones, from their caregivers, or it could be—and I think this is increasingly likely under this government—to a private care home. It could be, as we have all discovered, unfortunately, in the great tragedy that overtook this province during the COVID pandemic, to a private care home that could offer substandard care.

Let me tell you, and I think we’re all hearing it—I know we’re all hearing it, and that explains, in part, why the government has been in damage-control mode this week. We’ve been hearing a great deal of fear out there from families with loved ones in this situation. I think many of us here at some point in our lives have experienced this, have had somebody in our families who were in long-term care. I certainly have. If we haven’t, then we will. You can be sure of that. It’s almost a given: At some point, you’ll probably go through this with your family, if not yourself, right? We’re hearing from so many of these families who have people in this situation right now. We’re also hearing from seniors and others in long-term care themselves or in hospitals right now who are terrified, absolutely terrified, that they could end up separated from their families, from their support networks.

Rainer Pethke, who cares for his 95-year-old mother while looking after his own kids—and this is the other piece of this; it’s often people who are sandwiched between those generations. He told CBC this week that his heart absolutely sank when he heard about the changes that were being made in this bill. And I wanted to quote him, because it really touched me: “My fear is they’ll move her into some location, Lord knows where, where I can’t support my son, I can’t support her” and “eventually, I wouldn’t be able to support even myself.” And that is reflective in a lot of what I’ve heard from people in my community—similar concerns.

The Advocacy Centre for the Elderly issued a statement on this bill, and I want to quote it as well: “We oppose today’s proposed amendments to the” legislation “revoking the right of seniors in hospital to consent to #LTC which will result in them being moved far from supportive family & community, again attempting to ‘fix’ health care to the detriment of #seniors.”

The Minister of Long-Term Care has been working really hard to walk back this element of this bill this week, spinning that this power has already existed. So why include the change in the legislation then, Speaker? That’s what I want to know. If this was already there, if they already—what is this all about? Really, I’ve been struggling all week to understand that spin. I cannot for the life of me get my head around it, because the fact in this bill is that most of the requirements, the criteria, the restrictions—even the geographic boundaries from within which ALC patients could be transferred into long-term-care homes is going to be determined in regulation. And what does that mean for those watching? That means behind closed doors, that’s what that means. Everything in here that really matters is going to be determined in the regulations. That’s my read on this bill.

Many, many people—I will say, as well, as I find it very concerning, although it’s definitely been a trademark of this government over the last few years—are just hearing about what’s happening, what’s going to happen here. And the reason that they’re just hearing about it is because, hey, it’s summer. A lot of people are hopefully taking vacations or spending time with their families, maybe not paying attention to the news every second of every day. And the other piece of it is that the government is actually, once again, trying to rush this legislation through. And you’ll know, anybody who’s been watching what’s been going on over the last few years, that this government has used every tool in the toolbox to try to limit the ability of opposition and the public to have their voices heard on debate and in discussion and to actually provide the time and the opportunity for real, fulsome debate and discussion and amendment of legislation, which is what we should all be here to do. We are legislators, right?

Ontarians who want to have their say on this bill won’t even have time to participate in the legislative process in any kind of fulsome way because the minister has already publicly stated he wants the bill passed by September 1. So, Speaker, here we are once again faced with significant changes to our long-term-care system, to our hospitals, being rushed through the House with little review, little oversight and with most details, again, to be determined after it has passed. This Premier and this minister are asking vulnerable seniors and their loved ones to simply trust them to respect their rights, their health, their autonomy. Well, Speaker, I can tell you that we don’t trust this government. I think most people do not trust this government. And, I tell you, where they really don’t trust this government? They don’t trust this government when it comes to long-term care because 5,000 vulnerable seniors died under this government’s watch. This “just trust me” approach isn’t going to fly.

This is a government and a Premier who claim to be building an iron ring—do we remember that? We remember that. They claimed to be building an iron ring around long-term care, while over 4,000 seniors died. They cut comprehensive inspections to a pitiful nine out of 626 long-term-care homes in 2019. Remember that? I remember that. They were cutting millions of dollars from long-term care even before the pandemic began.

This question is for the Premier.In July, I shared an internal memo from Toronto Western Hospital, frantically trying to keep their emergency department open. They narrowly avoided that closure that time, but they were just one of 25 hospitals across this province facing emergency room closures on a single weekend. From our smallest community health centres to our busiest urban hospitals, our system is being pushed to the breaking point while this government’s budget remains status quo. Speaker, to the Premier: How many more ERs and urgent care centres have to close before he finally admits this is a crisis?

Speaker, can the minister explain what she considers acceptable for a child to get emergency care? Is it 19 hours? Is it 11 hours? How is that even remotely acceptable?

I had an ER nurse from my community tell me just yesterday that the ICU they work in is at full capacity with only half the staff to care for a full roster of patients.

How can the Premier look our exhausted and demoralized nurses in the eye—those health care workers who are desperately ringing the alarm on staffing shortages—and tell them that Bill 124 is here to stay?