It’s great to stand and talk to this bill.

One of the things that we were first electing on in 2018 was reducing hallway health care. Obviously, with COVID, there were some changes that had to happen, some things that we had to do differently. Let’s be honest, there were 214 countries dealing with it, and they all had to do things in a different way.

Now that we’re transitioning out of COVID—it’s not the pandemic; it’s become more of an endemic—we can get back to dealing with some of the challenges that we had. But COVID did do something that created a negative for us, as well, and that was to increase the backlog of surgeries. One of the things that we did earlier on was to increase funding to hospitals, to their operating rooms, to try to clear up some of that backlog. I’m going to give you some statistics on it, and I’m kind of averaging and rounding it—not giving the total number, but an average of what they were. Roughly 260,000 surgeries is what we had as the backlog; prior to COVID, we had a backlog of about 200,000. We’ve brought that back down to about 200,000. It has taken almost three years to bring that down. So about 20,000 extra per year is what we can handle under the current system. That means it would take a decade to clear the backlog that we currently have under status quo. I’m not a rocket scientist, but I can look at it and say that 10 years is not realistic—status quo cannot remain.

I’ve heard some of the opposition members talking about this, and they’ve thrown these scare tactics out—“Oh, my goodness, the sky is going to fall if the ophthalmologist who does the surgery in the hospital does that same surgery someplace other than the hospital.” What we’ve heard from ophthalmologists is that they can do more surgeries in the same length of time if they’re not using the hospital operating room. We’ve heard the opposition say, “Well, they’re only going to do the easy surgeries.” Yes, that is correct. They are only going to do the surgeries that do not require hospitalization after surgery.

If you think of it from a common-sense approach—common sense doesn’t seem to be something that I’m hearing an awful lot from the opposition on this—would you want to have a surgery outside of the hospital if you were going to have to be hospitalized directly after the surgery? The answer to that would be a resounding no. But, if you’re going to have a surgery that’s going to take roughly 20 minutes, and 15 minutes after the surgery you’re in a condition that you could go home, wouldn’t you prefer that? Wouldn’t you rather come to the clinic, have your surgery fairly quickly, go through the appropriate processes to make sure there aren’t any side effects, and then go home? Or would you rather go into the hospital; spend some time waiting, prepping; go into the surgery room; leave the surgery room or the operating room; and follow the hospital’s protocol, which is probably closer to an hour? You’re going to spend roughly a three-hour time frame for a 35-minute process that wouldn’t be at the hospital. To me, it makes logical sense. If I only have to spend 35 minutes someplace to accomplish exactly the same thing, I’m going to want to do that. And if I only have to spend 35 minutes instead of three hours, wouldn’t that tell you that more surgeries could actually be completed?

It seems like this is something that’s a stretch for the opposition, and I truly do not understand why, because the same doctor who would operate on you in the hospital is the doctor who’s going to operate on you in the clinic. They’ve said things like, “Oh, my goodness, it’s going to cost millions of dollars more to do that.” The doctor gets paid the same, whether they’re in the hospital or their clinic for the surgery portion of it. And then they say things like, “Oh, my goodness, you’re doing this instead of doing it in the hospital. We should be opening it up so it can be done in the hospital.” Obviously, they have not read the legislation or, conveniently, they skipped over parts of the legislation, because nowhere in the legislation does it say the hospital can’t apply for this. Nowhere does it say, if a hospital has extra capacity and wants to do it and has the staffing to do it, they can apply for this and do it—nor does it say that they can’t; the reality is, they can.

I then turn to my opposition friends and say, what’s the issue? If the hospital can do it and the hospital says, “We can do it,” and the hospital applies to do it, they get approved to do it. But if the hospital says, “Right now, we’re at capacity and we can’t,” or “We have some higher-risk surgeries that we need to get completed, so we would like to have some of those low-risk things moved out so that we can have the capacity to do things like a valve replacement surgery”—as one of our colleagues has had done to him. Or perhaps they’re looking at it and saying, “Our backlog for cancer surgery is too long. We could do more cancer surgeries if we take these non-invasive, non-medically critical surgeries and move them out.” Wouldn’t that be something to which the average person would say, “This is a good idea”? Those who need medical intervention, those who need to have hospitalization after their surgery, those who have those critical illnesses that are more complex that should be done in a hospital will have faster access to it. Don’t you think the average person is going to say, “That’s a good idea”?

Now the sky is going to fall because your OHIP card is going to be used to pay for this someplace else—because that doctor who is doing the surgery in the hospital suddenly is an evil person for doing that same operation someplace else and getting paid by OHIP. Where they were getting paid by OHIP to do it over here, it’s evil for them to get paid by OHIP to do it over here—and if we only kept status quo, nobody would be evil. Of course, our backlog would take a decade to get cleaned up. I’ve had a number of people reach out to my office and say that’s just not acceptable. They want service.

I find it so ironic that the opposition members stood up last term and presented all kinds of petitions to save eye care, because those evil optometrists, as my seatmate described, who get paid by OHIP to do eye exams, were selling glasses to those people or selling contacts to those people—we can’t trust those doctors because they’re getting paid by OHIP and they’re selling something as well. Perhaps what we should have been doing is having petitions by the opposition saying, “Optometrists should never be able to sell glasses to people because OHIP is going to fund them to do the eye exam, and they should only ever do eye exams, and we should have glasses sold someplace else because they can’t be in the same building as each other, because that would be evil if we were to do something like that.”

The logic the opposition has put forward just doesn’t make any sense. At the end of the day, you’re getting the care you need, when you need it, where you need it, and you’re paying for it with your OHIP card.

With that, Speaker, I move that the question now be put.