We stand categorically against Bill 60 and the way in which it gives way to corporatize profiteering in our health care system. There is absolutely no room for that. We have been clear. I campaigned as a Liberal in the last election saying that there is room to move some surgeries out of hospitals in a not-for-profit model with adequate guardrails. That remains our position. To be clear, we are entirely against the profiteering and corporatization being proposed under this legislation.

We’ve seen the corrupting effects of profiteering in our health care system. We’ve seen how Bill 124, for example, has pushed nurses out of public health care. Things like temporary, for-profit nursing agencies, which have proliferated under this government, have subsequently pulled nurses out of public health care.

It’s why, in my unwavering commitment to protect our public health care system, I introduced legislation that will hold these nursing agencies to account, that will commit to and strengthen our publicly funded health care system. It’s what I have done as a physician, it is what I am doing as an opposition critic, and it is what I and the rest of the Liberal caucus will always do.

The member across also made the allegation that nothing happened under the previous 15 years of Liberal government. I would point out that the most immediate five years of performance under this Conservative government have been the worst years in this province’s entire history. I would caution the member about any sort of chest-thumping, given the current state of our health care system.

On repeated occasions, the Minister of Health has been very clear that she didn’t believe that there was a problem in the first place. I recall quite vividly that she cited a 1-800 number, I believe, to anyone who believes that they have been upsold and upcharged, in frank contradiction to what the Auditor General has been telling us.

And so, amidst that backdrop, amidst this problem that we know is objectively a problem, this government now expects us to believe that, coming out of that fantasy land, they can be trusted to protect against upcharging and upselling with this new fallacy of a plan? It simply is not credible.

Thank you for your question.

Report continues in volume B.

I’m pleased to rise in the chamber today to speak to Bill 60. I’d like to point out, at the outset, that I’ll be sharing my time with the member for Kingston and the Islands—

I’d like to begin this debate by pointing out something that the member from Simcoe–Grey just remarked on, which is that medicare has four principles. That’s not true. Medicare has five principles, and the one that he missed was accessibility. For as long as there are fundamental differences on objective facts like the number of principles that we hold dear in the Canada Health Act, then it is just not credible that this government can be trusted to manage public health care in the first place.

Bill 60 remains the latest in a series of poorly conceived, superficial policies lacking thought, detail or any semblance of understanding about the challenges in our health care system. It continues with a series of failed policies, like the failed effort to increase credentialing of foreign-trained health care workers; the failed effort to regulate temporary for-profit nursing agencies; and the failed effort to reassure us that Ontarians will always pay with their OHIP cards, not their credit cards. We don’t need to look further than virtual primary care to discover that OHIP services are locked up in this province behind paywalls and credit cards already.

As a brief overview—what’s wrong with Bill 60?

(1) It completely misses the point of our health care crisis. Notably, it doesn’t address any of the challenges with our health human resources. It doesn’t address the massive underinvestment in our health care system under the current government.

(2) It only pays lip service to the things that actually matter in our health care system—oversight, protection against upselling and upcharging—but it delivers none of the details and leaves far too much to the regulations.

(3) Finally, I will say that it has failed even before it has passed, because we are seeing for-profit corporatization across our health care system, to the detriment of our patients and having surgeries and procedures addressed in a timely manner.

This government loves to rail against the status quo, without acknowledging that they are the status quo. The moment they took power five years ago, our health care system embarked upon a significant nosedive. They cut hundreds of millions in public health funding. They cut staffing solutions like the practice-ready assessment program for foreign-trained family doctors. And they enacted the unconstitutional and wage-constraining Bill 124, which they continue to support and now appeal in the courts, to the cost of millions of dollars to the citizens of Ontario.

Bill 124 is the rate-limiting step that is preventing us from enhanced performance of our health care system. For those who don’t believe me, I invite you to consider this quote from the Ontario Hospital Association, that very same organization that this government loves to go to when they need quotes to support their policies: “The OHA has consistently advocated that Bill 124 should not be extended nor should additional restrictions be imposed due to its impact on availability of HHR and other impacts on hospital operations.” That’s from their buddy.

It will come as no surprise, then, because they have persisted in defending Bill 124, that Ontario Health data reveals that under the Ford government, our health care system performance has been the worst in this province’s history, ever. To be clear, every year of this government’s so-called leadership has resulted in worse performance than the last.

What I’m here to argue today is that rather than throwing the baby out with the bathwater, what we need to be doing is moving our health care system from neglected under you guys—sorry; neglected by the current government—to protected.

Let’s also not forget that by 2028, this government will have underinvested by over $23 billion, according to the Financial Accountability Officer. I have heard that the government contends they disagree with the FAO, but I will also add that this opinion simply can’t be trusted, considering their own estimates of this province’s deficit swing by billions of dollars every few weeks.

Amidst this comedy of incompetence, we have a murky new bill whose impact really won’t come into focus until it has passed, because so much of the stuff that matters isn’t actually in the bill and is instead left to regulation. Who, for example, will perform the oversight? Is that body external or internal? And without such details, how could we possibly believe that there are credible protections against upselling or overcharging? After all, this government has insisted throughout the entire year that upcharging isn’t actually even a problem, although the Auditor General has said that it is, and instead ignored her recommendations while reassuring us that everything is okay.

Madam Speaker, this bill really could have spent some more time cooking in the oven. For example, in schedule 2, the definition of “nurse” is thrown out the window and is instead replaced with the following: “‘registered nurse’ means a member of the College of Nurses of Ontario who holds a certificate of registration as a registered nurse under the Nursing Act, 1991 or another person prescribed by the regulations....” So the definition is changing, but we have no clue what that definition will be. It is simply left to the regulations. How can we have a discussion about redefining an entire profession without any details about what that will be? The reality is that this is likely an approach to introduce as-of-right legislation, without affording anyone an opportunity in this Legislature to have an actual debate about it.

I’m going to talk very briefly about moving surgeries out of hospitals. There is some precedent that in Canada and around the world, surgeries can be moved out of hospitals, but in order for that to be successful, it has to be done with adequate guardrails. Most importantly, time and time again we have learned that not-for-profit initiatives consistently outperform for-profit ones. This is not an ideological position. Apart from the fact that it has been demonstrated in journal after journal after journal, it is also the position of the Ontario Medical Association. In their report on integrated ambulatory centres in 2022, they made it clear that their position is that such centres should operate on a not-for-profit basis. So they should be not-for-profit, and they must have credible protections against profiteering, upselling and siphoning of health care workers out of the publicly funded system. Bill 60 doesn’t do any of these things, and instead, it leaves massive gaps. Until such gaps are credibly filled, this bill is nothing more than window dressing and does nothing but threaten the quality of health care in this province.

With that, I yield the remainder of my time to the member from Kingston and the Islands.