I’d like to present this on behalf of the Ontario Nurses’ Association. The petition is entitled “Petition for Better Staffing, Better Wages and Better Care in Ontario’s Public Hospitals.” It reads:

“To the Legislative Assembly of Ontario:

“Whereas registered nurses and health care professionals are the backbone of Ontario’s public health care system; and

“Whereas nurses and health care professionals are fighting for better staffing, better wages and better care in Ontario’s public hospitals; and

“Whereas the government has the power to direct the funding and priorities for the Ontario Hospital Association in this bargaining process;

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

“Support nurses and health care professionals represented by the Ontario Nurses’ Association in their collective bargaining with the Ontario Hospital Association (OHA) by demanding the OHA reach a negotiated agreement with nurses that results in better staffing, better wages and better care in Ontario’s public hospitals.”

I fully support this petition. I will affix my signature and deliver it with page Sophie to the Clerks.

Resuming the debate adjourned on May 16, 2023, on the motion for third reading of the following bill:

Bill 85, An Act to implement Budget measures and to amend various statutes / Projet de loi 85, Loi visant à mettre en oeuvre les mesures budgétaires et à modifier diverses lois.

I’d like to thank the member for Waterloo for her comments. Listening to her comments as a whole, they were insightful, they were incisive. But I would say that it’s doing this budget a kindness to call it as exciting as a three-pack of socks. It’s disturbing because we see a deliberate and calculated way that this has ignored the issues that are facing Ontarians after the many deputations we heard at the pre-budget consultations. We see that the gravy train of this Conservative government is going full steam ahead, whether it’s bad business decisions through the privatization of the 407, the Ontario Place lease, online gambling, the greenbelt, all of the legal losses, Bill 124. My question, though, to the member is, I wonder if they could speak about the agency nurses, yet another example of privatization that this government seems in favour of.

Working without thought of self or thought of reward is the true nature of service. On Saturday, I had the honour of attending the London Central Lions and East London Lions Clubs’ Colour the Night Gold event in support of Childcan—two great clubs working together for a wonderful cause.

I sat with Greg and Catherine Millar, who had sent me many petitions about optometry since 2021. It is a small world sometimes, as I also ran into Greg and Catherine face-to-face at their home when I was out knocking on doors, speaking with the good people of London North Centre.

At our table, Luca told me about how nurses should be paid what they’re worth, allowed to bargain fairly and that there should be incentives to bring back retired nurses whom this government has insulted, demeaned and pushed out of practice. Luca also told me, “I used to be anti-union. But since Premier Ford, I am pro-union. You can tell him that.” Message delivered, Luca.

I want to thank the Lions for supporting Childcan. Families of children who receive the diagnosis of cancer are on the most difficult journey one could imagine. We heard about how Childcan helps families right from diagnosis, treatment, and through their recovery or bereavement journey. This great organization helps take the burden of external worries, allowing families to focus on what matters most: their children and their care.

Thank you once again, Lions and Childcan, for your true service to people in our community.

It’s my honour to present a petition entitled “Health Care: Not for Sale.” It reads:

“To the Legislative Assembly of Ontario:

“Whereas Ontarians should get health care based on need—not the size of your wallet;

“Whereas Premier Doug Ford and Health Minister Sylvia Jones say they’re planning to privatize parts of health care;

“Whereas privatization will bleed nurses, doctors and PSWs out of our public hospitals, making the health care crisis worse;

“Whereas privatization always ends with patients getting a bill;

“Therefore we, the undersigned, petition the Legislative Assembly of Ontario to immediately stop all plans to further privatize Ontario’s health care system, and fix the crisis in health care by:

“—repealing Bill 124 and recruiting, retaining and respecting doctors, nurses and PSWs with better pay and better working conditions;

“—licensing tens of thousands of internationally educated nurses and other health care professionals already in Ontario, who wait years and pay thousands to have their credentials certified;

“—10 employer-paid sick days;

“—making education and training free or low-cost for nurses, doctors and other health care professionals;

“—incentivizing doctors and nurses to choose to live and work in northern Ontario;

“—funding hospitals to have enough nurses on every shift, on every ward.”

I fully support this petition, will affix my signature and deliver it with page Mikaeel to the table.

I’d like to thank the member for London West for her excellent comments and her analysis of the current plights of working people, whether it’s gig workers or temporary foreign workers, and also the importance of equal pay for equal work. In this government’s legislation, they talk about “scumbag” employers, and in some ways it’s almost as through this government doth protest too much.

I would like to ask the member, is it a scumbag move to block collective bargaining? Is it a scumbag move to waste money in a losing court battle, and is it a scumbag move to engage in a costly appeal and withhold what’s fair for nurses?

I’d like to thank the member from Kitchener–Conestoga for his question. I also have a great deal of respect for that member.

I would like to remind the member that in my discussion, I was talking about the pre-budget consultations. In the pre-budget consultations, we heard from numerous delegations, all of whom were deeply, deeply disturbed by Bill 124. They cited the labour shortages that it created, how it was humiliating, and how it also caused a great deal of disparity in certain hospital departments. This government has thrown good money after bad. They are really disinvesting in our public system by allowing this focus on temp agency nurses. Within the same department, there will be a nurse who is paid twice as much as a nurse who has been there for many years.

We also had the opportunity within this budget to address wage parity between home care, long-term care and acute care, and it’s something that this government has ignored, because they don’t care about nurses.

We also know that, in London, one in four children live in poverty. With so many people waiting on an endless list for supportive housing, it is unconscionable. The government has it within their power to address this by making sure that there is a public builder, by actually creating these units and not leaving it up to private industry to create them themselves. There are many great people who are doing wonderful work within the space of providing those supports, but this government has chosen not to fund it properly.

We also heard from CMHA across the province, who are calling for an 8% increase to their services. This government blinked and gave them 5%.

Speaker, I rise today to support this motion. My colleagues have explained some of the many reasons why this is necessary.

We have operating rooms that are sitting empty because we don’t have the workers needed to staff them. At best, this is incredibly problematic, fiscal mismanagement on the part of this government.

In Ontario, when you look at our operating rooms—it’s like a person who has a beautiful, high-end car and decides to go and park it out in a field so they can get into somebody else’s tired old limousine that won’t take them where they want to go and will charge them extra once they get there.

Bernie Robinson, ONA’s interim president, said it best: “There is no health care without the dedicated care from nurses and health care professionals. A bed is just a bed without the staffing and support to ensure the patient is receiving quality care.”

It’s clear that this government has no plan to actually address the health care crisis. Look at what happened in Walkerton. Look at what happened in Chesley. Look at what happened in Listowel. They are shortchanging rural and small hospitals, and they’re shortchanging health care. Look at the 80 ER closures over the summer.

Across the province, we heard during the pre-budget consultation that Ontarians want this government to invest in a health care human resources strategy. We have the lowest nurse-to-patient ratio per capita in the entire country.

Shortly after I was elected, I was approached by seniors who had been waiting years—years—in pain for joint replacement surgeries. They were left languishing on that wait-list as a result of the Liberal government, who put those arbitrary caps on the amount of time that they could spend in those ORs. And this government is going down the same path. It’s not the answer.

This government could say yes today—they could say yes to a plan that can be implemented immediately—but they keep saying no. They want people to settle for a system that’s less effective and that will cost them more. They want to waste money. It’s wasteful to underuse our public health care infrastructure. We on the official opposition side want people to expect more. Let’s not go backwards.

I urge my friends across the aisle to protect our values, protect Ontario’s integrity, protect our health. Let’s build a province where companies want to invest. What is required is a publicly funded, publicly delivered health care system so companies know they have a healthy workforce, so they don’t have to pay for that extra—an educated workforce, so they don’t have to always retrain.

Support this motion today. Say yes.

They’re just leaving it up to chance.

It has been very clearly stated that there is a limited pool of talented, trained health care workers, that there’s a limited pool of nurses. Many have left the profession, and this opening up of these private, for-profit—predatory, quite frankly—clinics will drain yet more resources from the public system. That also should be a tremendous concern, but yet it seems to be this crisis by design. It seems to be as though that is exactly what the government wants. They want the public system to fail, because they want their insiders, the people who are talking to them in the backrooms, the people who want to skim off the system and want to make money—apparently, this government wants them to have their pockets filled. That’s not fair. Our public health care system is the definition of democracy, it’s the definition of fairness, because it ensures that people are going to get the care they need regardless of their ability to pay. Just like education, it’s a democratizing force, and this is completely undermining it.

I wonder as well, is this an attempt to change the channel from recent news? I can’t be sure.

As I begin to close my remarks, I think it’s important that we recognize that we cannot go backwards in terms of public health care. We can’t sit and watch government after government undermining and strangling—it’s like this government is strangling the health care system and then asking it why it’s not able to breathe. It needs to be funded properly.

Let’s look for solutions. Let’s repeal Bill 124. Let’s have a health care human resources strategy, like has been recommended across the province, to recruit, to retain and to return nurses. Treat them with respect, treat them with fairness, and hopefully they will come back. But that’s on you. You need to listen to Ontarians.

I want to conclude my final remarks by again quoting Tommy Douglas. He stated: “Health services ought not to have a price tag on them, and ... people should be able to get whatever health services they require irrespective of their individual capacity to pay.” I could not agree more, Speaker.

I hope that this government will change course. I hope it will listen to Ontarians, who want to see nurses treated well, and embark upon a comprehensive plan to have a health care human resources strategy to recruit, retain and return nurses and fund the system properly.

Don’t maintain your status quo of cuts. Don’t maintain your status quo of not keeping up with inflation. Take that $20 billion you’re hiding and spend it where people need it the most.

What we have here is a question of oversight. There is no reason to think that these different surgical suites could not be within the hospital’s purview. In London, there are operating rooms which are able to operate at this capacity—but the key difference here, and one that I wish you could understand, is that it’s publicly funded and publicly delivered. Nobody is skimming money off the top and putting it in their pocket. I know that’s what you love, but that’s something that is wrong. It’s care or profit—you stand for profit, we stand for care.

And perhaps they’ll stay.

As a result of Bill 124, we heard from multiple delegations and we’ve heard from many different organizations that nurses have left in droves because they feel insulted. For many years, as I’ve said, as the past Liberal government strangled and underfunded the health care system, they have been holding up that system by the virtue of their good nature, by the virtue of their hard work. That’s absolutely wrong. Ten years to go without a raise? It’s unconscionable. It’s an honourable profession. It’s a caring profession. It takes a strong and a capable person—but I don’t think that anyone deserves to be treated the way that this government has. Bill 60 could have taken the opportunity to rectify that, to admit that mistake—it’s not.

We also heard from multiple delegations about the wage disparity between home care, long-term care and acute care within hospital settings. This does nothing to do that—in fact, as I’ll get to in my comments if I have time, it actually makes it yet worse.

In terms of profit-making, no one should look forward to or hope for somebody else to become ill because that will line their pockets. That’s disgraceful. I think we should all be able to agree with that. But this bill opens the door for these profiteers, people who will be doing just that. It’s almost worse than ambulance-chasing. When someone is sick, our health care system pays for that care. These are people who want to skim off the top. When they skim these public dollars off the top to put in their own pockets, that means yet less care. They latch on to the public system, and they’re going to slowly bleed it of resources.

We saw this with home care and long-term care. When privatization was suggested as a model for that, it was touted as the greatest thing since sliced bread. They said, “There’s going to be choice. There is going to be competition, and prices will stay down.” Well, we know that the exact opposite is true. The COVID-19 pandemic exposed what has been going on for many years. The Wettlaufer crisis exposed what has been going on for many years. And yet, this government refuses to treat seniors with respect.

Conservatives and Liberals have always been very comfortable bedfellows. There has long been a Liberal-Conservative consortium when it comes to this for-profit care model.

In 2017, Liberals tried to pass legislation to allow for community health facilities, and guess who supported them? The Conservatives. Of course they did, because they have always been in it together when it comes to wresting public dollars from our health care system into private pockets. Fortunately, this bill died at committee. That was 2017. Here we are, in 2023. Oh, they’re not called “community health facilities”; they’re now called “independent health facilities.” It’s old wine in new bottles, but it’s the same program, isn’t it?

There has been an ideological blind adherence to this for-profit model, and I want to point out in my remaining time some of the myths about private health care that have been put forward, because this government has been relying on some very deep misunderstandings.

Our Premier said, “We just can’t as a province keep doing the same thing and expecting a different result.” Well, “doing the same thing” was underfunding health care and strangling it of resources. Of course, it’s not going to have a different result from the Liberals, but this is the result that he wanted.

Funding health care properly and ensuring health care would be different, ensuring that money was spent on front-line care, ensuring it was spent on those nurses would be different from the status quo. But you’ve maintained the Liberal status quo, so congratulations on that.

Myth number two: Private clinics are needed to clear the backlog. This implies by its very nature that publicly funded surgeries are at full capacity, but we know that hospital hallways are not full of people waiting for a knee replacement or a hip replacement. In fact, there is a complexity of care, but this government won’t fund that care properly.

I also want to point out some concerns that I have with this legislation.

Schedule 2 attempts to deregulate health care settings. It expands the definition of “regulated health professionals” to include those who are not part of a regulatory college. Just when you thought that this government could not attack, insult, degrade, demean and humiliate health care workers more, they’re trying to take away their titles. They’re actually making it so that, according to schedule 2, this definition of “physician” becomes nebulous; this definition of “registered nurse” becomes something different. Does that mean, by this, that anyone can be deemed to be this role within these settings? It will be interesting, because, quite frankly, the oversight isn’t going to be here, because that is something that is also not included properly within Bill 60.

Thank you for the presentation.

The Standing Committee on Finance and Economic Affairs just finished travelling the province for pre-budget consultations. We heard from many delegations who are deeply concerned about the impacts of Bill 124 and the health care human resources crisis that has been created by such. Not once did the committee hear any support for Bill 124. Not one delegation supported this demeaning, degrading and, as one delegation called it, humiliating piece of legislation. We heard about the nurses who left and the health care human resources crisis that needs to be addressed. There’s an opportunity here for this government to undo the damage through Bill 60 that they have created with Bill 124.

My question is: Why is this government more concerned about health care profiteers, instead of people who need care from highly skilled nurses?

I rise today in support of our opposition day motion because it’s clear that Ontario is in the midst of an unmitigated health care crisis. Recently, the member for London West and I had the opportunity to meet with the Registered Nurses’ Association of Ontario at their event Queen’s Park on the Road. I’d like to share some of the information that we gleaned from that evening, because it’s important that we listen to the front-line workers who are dealing with this crisis day in and day out, and who are not affected by this government’s spin.

We heard stories about a fourth-year nursing student who was paired with a nurse as their mentor who had just two months of experience. Asking nurses who barely know how to be a nurse to perform as an educator—that’s the staffing crisis that we are in.

This government has introduced legislation that has had a dramatic and drastic impact on nursing morale and the amount of people who have decided to leave the profession altogether. In fact, RNAO shares that 69% of nurses, of respondents, are choosing to leave the profession entirely, and 95% want to go into another field somewhere else.

There are stories about people who had been on a wait-list for seven days in home and community care. Another example is of a patient who needed daily wound care and had to wait 28 days to get their care. In fact, they had to turn to an emergency room.

Because there is a lack of a health human resources strategy from this government, it’s no wonder we’re in the crisis that we are in. People who are waiting for home care are left in no position but to go to an ER because they’re simply waiting far too long.

We talked to emergency room nurses who shared that they had upwards of 46 patients by 5 p.m. and they had nowhere to put people. We’re talking that the hallways were full; the closets were full. There were people who were waiting for care and there was simply no place to put them, because ERs, unfortunately, cannot turn people away from the health care they need. When they’re not able to get the home care in their community, they simply turn to an ER.

They also mentioned that the London Health Sciences Centre had recently posted that there was a 20-hour wait for people to be seen in emergency rooms, and, unfortunately, that’s not an accurate portrayal. They shared with us that it was up to 48 to 72 hours before people received the care they needed.

I urge this government to support this motion because we need a health human resources strategy to make sure that we’re responding to the health care needs of Ontarians immediately.

My question is to the Premier.

MPPs across the province have been hearing from constituents about the unmitigated crisis in our hospitals. But are Conservative MPPs truly listening?

My constituent Colleen told me about her mother’s ER experience: “My brilliant, independent, selfless, always-helping-others mom had to hope and pray for someone to walk down that hall to attempt to get help.” Her oxygen machine was empty. When Colleen brought this to the hospital’s attention, the nurses’ overwhelmed exhaustion was clear. It wasn’t their fault.

Will this government keep blaming others and keep neglecting public health care or fund it properly and pay nurses what they’re worth?

Just last week, LHSC in London posted a 20-hour delay for their ER and asked patients to bring a snack and activities. My constituent Tina told me about searching in vain for a nurse or doctor after her partner Rod’s major surgery. No doctors were available and nurses were run off their feet. Tina waited for days until she finally got a phone call.

The RNAO surveyed nurses and found that 69% are planning on leaving the profession in the next five years. When will this government admit they’ve created a crisis and spend money on front-line health care heroes?

Thank you to the member for Barrie–Innisfil for the question. It’s almost like she borrowed words from my speech and was trying to use them against me. It’s rather interesting.

On the official opposition side, we have always advocated to listen to the front lines in health care.

Throughout this throne speech, we don’t see any listening to the front lines of health care—we hear “working with system partners,” and we saw a government that worked with long-term-care owner-operators throughout the pandemic. They created legislation to protect them from legal liability for all the deaths that happened on their watch. That’s frightening.

Instead, we need to listen to the workers. We need to listen to the nurses. We need to listen to the PSWs. We need to listen to the patients who are actually being impacted. That would include having a committee so that we could actually discuss Bill 7 and hear from the people who are going to be impacted, the people who are going to be coerced and forced out of the hospital into a place where they don’t want to go, hundreds of kilometres away, away from their family. That would be listening. That would be your actions matching your words.

Instead, we have all sorts of talk in this throne speech—but it’s coded language; it’s hiding what is actually going on, and that’s increasing privatization. Quite frankly, that is something I believe Ontarians are frightened of.

Why don’t you just be forthright and tell Ontarians what you’re hoping to do—and that is to make health care for-profit in Ontario?

By listening to people, by actually engaging with Ontarians, the official opposition has been able to advocate on some very important pieces of legislation. Those include the member for Windsor West’s More Than a Visitor Act, something that would give essential caregivers more of a role within health care decisions that are being made for folks in long-term care. That was incredibly important, because, throughout the pandemic, we saw that many of these essential caregivers, these loved ones, these people who provided care, who helped buttress a system that has been woefully undercut and underfunded for many, many years—they were the ones who were actually providing that care, and they were shut out from these homes. They were not allowed to see their loved ones, and that’s so difficult on a senior, on someone with disabilities—the only thing that they look forward to every day is seeing that loved one.

Also, we had other legislation—like Till Death Do Us Part Act, to make sure that loved ones are kept in the same home, from the member for Waterloo, and so many other things.

We see a government that doesn’t want to work across party lines and that doesn’t want to work with each other.

My question is to the Premier.

Speaker, Ontario is in the midst of a health care crisis. Dr. Marc-André Blier, an intensive care and internal medicine physician with LHSC, has observed, “a steady uptick in the number of experienced nurses leaving intensive care,” and explained they are “the lifeblood of a critical care unit.” He told me about multiple cardiac cases being cancelled, and noted many bays with no nurses to staff them. In his letter, he asked the Premier and the Minister of Health to repeal Bill 124.

Will this government finally listen to front-line experts and repeal Bill 124?

Dr. Blier—just listen to the doctor who has seen empty bays while urgent surgeries are being cancelled. Wake up. According to front-line experts like Dr. Blier, the obvious reason is that a 1% raise annually cannot match the inflation rate. “Our health care professionals are worth it.”

My question is simple: Will this government be fair, show front-line nurses that they are worth it, and repeal Bill 124? Yes or no?