I’m proud to rise and speak on behalf of my good people of Scarborough Southwest to speak to this bill to recognize the staffing shortages that we’re facing in our province and, frankly, propose solutions, because this government—seeing the crisis that we’re facing in our health care sector, seeing the crisis we’re facing in our hospitals—does not have a clear plan to respond to the health human resource crisis that we’re facing in Ontario.

Hospitals, long-term-care homes, home care and community care settings are all reporting critical staffing shortages, and it is causing major damages across the board. When we look at the Health Quality Ontario report, they reported the average wait time was seven times the provincial target of two days in Kingston and six times the target in Milton, Oakville, London, Toronto and Scarborough. And 13 hospitals reported that patients have waited over 24 hours on average—and that’s just the average.

I was recently in an emergency room and I have seen first-hand what people are facing, what kind of injuries people are sitting with and the amount of excruciating pain people are having to go through. I just look at the faces of the nurses and the doctors and how hard they’re trying to be able to just keep up and the amount of time they would come back and say, “We’re trying our best. We’re trying our best.” You could see the stress in their faces, their eyes. They want to help, but we are failing them and we need to do better, and this does that.

I heard from a constituent, Farzana Ghani, recently. Her husband has cancer and he was diagnosed at Michael Garron Hospital. He waited for months for an oncologist appointment, and now they are waiting another month just to get a PSW and a caregiver. This family had to lose their income just to take care of him because they are waiting for a caregiver. We don’t have enough PSWs and caregivers.

Another constituent in Scarborough Southwest reached out. Her adult daughter has experienced trauma recently. There is an 18-month waiting period to access the trauma program at the Women’s College Hospital—18 months. That’s the norm that she was told.

Another mother actually wrote, and because I have a short time, I am just going to say that all she asked is, “Can you ask this government, ‘Has everyone given up? Are we accepting this as the norm? Has everyone given up?’” Because if we look at the government’s fiscal update, it looks like they have given up. They don’t see the health care crisis.

We need to have a multi-layer health care worker recruitment and retention incentive package that includes short-, medium- and long-term solutions to recruit and retain workers across all health care sectors with good jobs. We need to repeal Bill 124. It is the number one thing that’s causing so many health care workers to leave our province and go to other professions, because they do not feel respected and they do not feel appreciated. Even though we’re calling them heroes, we’re not paying them the wages that they deserve.

We need to restore workers’ rights to bargain for wages that reflect their worth and we need to recognize the internationally trained professionals, the internationally trained health care workers, who are waiting to contribute to this province, who have waited for years. There are workers across this province who are Canadian citizens, are Ontarians, who can be contributing right now to this province, but we’re not making it easy for them.

We need to do better by all of these people and we need to do better by all the kids who are waiting in our hospital rooms. We need to do better for our seniors who are waiting to have better care and we need to do better for all our health care workers.

Please pass this. I hope the government will listen and, this time, come up with a strategy.