It has been over two years since 28,000 ACTRA members have been locked out of the national commercial agreement by the ICA. ICA walked out on negotiations. This illegal lockout has been propped up by this government’s hiring of union-busting ad agencies to create ads that further stab ACTRA members in the back by using non-unionized replacement workers, pitting workers against one another.

Speaker, there are over 100 ACTRA members here today advocating. They’re actually fighting for their livelihood. The question is to the Premier. Will the Premier and Ministers of Labour and Culture attend the We Rise Up Rally here at Queen’s Park and hear how their illegal lockout is affecting ACTRA workers, help get ICA back to the table to negotiate, stop using union-busting ad agencies and support our Bill 90 to protect these workers, some of the most precarious workers in Ontario?

Stand up and save the workers.

I’d like to welcome Masani Montague to the House. She is the CEO and president of Rastafest Incorporated. Masani is doing a wonderful event for World Mental Health Day on October 10 in Little Jamaica. We would certainly welcome every member of the House to join. She is such a trailblazer in Ontario tourism. If you get to meet her today, you are very, very lucky.

I would also like to welcome to the House Lyn Adamson, one of our very own community members in St. Paul’s. She’s with ClimateFast. There isn’t a bigger climate justice activist in this world, probably, than Lyn Adamson.

The Conservative government is eroding our public health care system. With medicare, our health care is based on our needs, not on our ability to pay. This Conservative government is jeopardizing that by not prioritizing public health care and publicly funded operating rooms. Their bill, ironically entitled Your Health, puts profit over people, over your health, and literally allows big corporations, private shareholders and private clinics to make big profits off the backs of sick people. And make no mistake: Those sick people include the very burnt-out front-line health care workers—mostly women, mostly Black and racialized—that this government has attacked since the beginning of this pandemic by not providing them with the N95 masks they needed desperately to save their lives; by not legislating the paid sick days they needed so they didn’t have to go to work sick; and bleeding them dry with Bill 124, which attacked their wages, while ensuring they worked in chronically understaffed, under-resourced and unsafe working conditions, and while this government simultaneously created legislation to protect bad-faith, for-profit long-term-care operators from being sued by families of deceased elders left to die in their own feces—starving, dehydrated, alone.

Friends, this government has never prioritized your health. Instead, their master plan is the privatization and the profitization of health care.

This government’s health care privatization bill does nothing to address the staffing shortage crisis in our public health care system, and in fact it’s making the surgical backlog and wait-lists longer.

Rather than invest in our public hospitals, this government underfunds public hospitals, which has caused a mass exodus of our nurses, RPNs, doctors, surgeons, PSWs and health care professionals into the for-profit private clinics and hospitals, where, yes, they’re paid two, three, four times—maybe sometimes even more. But the oversight and patient protections, should something go wrong in these independent health facilities that are not connected to hospitals, are severely compromised, if present at all.

All this is happening while this Conservative government has sat on, and is still sitting on, hundreds of millions—billions—of contingency funds they could be using to invest in public health care. How do you hoard cash while people are literally dying—and dying in pain—waiting for years for surgeries, while operating rooms in our public hospitals sit empty? ERs are shutting down left, right and centre. Seniors are being charged thousands of dollars for OHIP-covered surgeries. I don’t know how the Conservatives sleep at night.

I’ll end with the words of thousands of ONA nurses and health care professionals I joined last week: Beds don’t save people; nurses save people. Safe staffing saves lives. Better staffing, better care, better wages will save our public health care system—not this Conservative government’s health care privatization scheme.

Mental health care is health care, and it should be part of medicare. It must be made accessible to all those in need of it when they need it, regardless of their financial situation, especially as we’ve seen spikes in depression, anxiety, eating disorders, evictions and other mental health challenges during the pandemic and as a response to the pressures of the affordability crisis and the trauma of systemic discrimination. Here in Ontario, every Ontarian should be able to access mental health supports with their health card and not their credit card.

My bill, Making Psychotherapy Services Tax-Free Act, 2023, co-sponsored by our fantastic health critic, the MPP for Nickel Belt, will immediately remove the 13% HST tax from registered psychotherapy services as a critical, cost-saving first step and an immediate change this government can make to move our province in the right direction towards mental health care being fully incorporated into our publicly funded health care system.

Ms. Brady moved first reading of the following bill:

Bill 62, An Act to provide for the development of a farmland and arable land strategy and an advisory committee on farmland and arable land / Projet de loi 62, Loi prévoyant l’élaboration d’une stratégie en matière de terres agricoles et de terres arables et la création d’un comité consultatif des terres agricoles et des terres arables.

I’d like to thank the Ontario Medical Association for a wonderful meeting today, and especially Dr. Naomi Macrae, Dr. Victoria Young, Dr. Hava Starkman, Dr. Kunal Kolhatkar, Dr. Ali Kajdehi, Dr. Inna Ushcatz, Dr. Raghu Venugopal, and Dr. Lorne Sokol. Thank you for your outstanding work and for meeting with me today. Welcome to Queen’s Park.