It’s with regret today that I rise to speak to Bill 60, the government’s plan to introduce two-tier health care in Ontario. Public health care is a key component of our identity in Canada. Unlike our neighbours to the south, we made a decision that we weren’t going to let wealth determine people’s access to vital health care. We created a public medicare system that ensures everyone is able to get the health care they need, when they need it, without any question of how much money they have. People don’t have to go deeply into debt or sell off homes or businesses just because a family member got sick. People without money don’t need to worry that people with more money are going to come along and bump them out of the way. Access to health care is based on the urgency of your condition instead of your bank account.

Conservatives have never liked this system. They’ve always hated the fact that you can’t buy your way to the front of the line, and we know there have always been many people lobbying them, salivating over the opportunity to make a lot of money off of people in need. So, over the past four years, they’ve been hard at work generating a crisis.

Admittedly, the past Liberal government wasn’t great at managing health care either. They cut and underfunded until people were being treated in hallways—hallway medicine, everyone called it. But, under this Premier, we’ve gone from hallway medicine to no medicine. Emergency rooms are closed, so people can’t even get into the hallways. We’ve got beds and operating rooms that are empty despite the demand for health care, the long wait-lists, because we don’t have nurses and health care workers to staff them.

I guess it’s “mission accomplished” for the Premier and for the private, for-profit health care industry that has been lobbying him so hard for the past few years. Now that he has made the crisis so bad that nurses are leaving the profession in droves, now that people are waiting 12 hours at the emergency room, now that the wait-lists for surgeries are so long, the Premier has decided that this is the moment to really stick the knife in public health care and introduce two-tier health care in Ontario.

Make no mistake: This is deliberate. This government has set up public health care to fail so they could replace it with a for-profit model to line the pockets of their wealthy friends. And it is Ontarians—as always, with this government—that will pay the price, that will have to pull out their credit cards to pay for health care at these private facilities, that will wait even longer for health care in our public system as they bleed even more health care workers out of our hospitals, that will have to pay the taxes that are going into the pockets of private shareholders instead of to strengthening and expanding our public health care system.

This is part of a pattern with this government. Whether it’s the development of the greenbelt, the refusal to invest in public education or the destruction of public health care, we see this government constantly make decisions that don’t help people with the very real challenges that they face every day but somehow manage to make a bunch of friends and lobbyists around the Premier a lot of money.

We’ve seen this pattern with health care throughout this government’s time in office and throughout the pandemic. They took away public oversight of home care, leaving people vulnerable to the whims of for-profit companies. They granted licences to for-profit long-term-care providers that had hugely disproportionate death rates and they took away the rights of family members to sue. They contracted out PCR COVID testing to for-profit companies, leading to Ontarians having to pay $200 out of pocket to be tested because publicly accessible tests were so tightly rationed—unless you happened to attend a private school. And they’ve been expanding private clinics.

This most recent bill is not the innovative, bold or creative solution to surgical backlogs the health minister has claimed it is. It is the oldest trick in this government’s book: Put further pressure on an already struggling sector and offer privatization as the only way out.

If this government really wanted to address the current concerns in the health care sector, they would actually listen to nurses and health care workers about why they are leaving the health care sector and stop their appeal to try to save Bill 124, a bill that the courts found unconstitutional, a bill that nurses and health care workers have told this government they found profoundly disrespectful—humiliating, even—at a moment when they were working so incredibly hard throughout the pandemic, with their wages capped well below the rate of inflation.

I was at the pre-budget hearing in Ottawa, where nurses said that they were leaving the profession because of Bill 124 and that they found Bill 124 profoundly humiliating. Instead of listening to them, government members of the committee got into arguments with them. Nurses were literally telling them, “We’re leaving because of Bill 124,” and the government was saying, “No, that’s definitely not it.” How profoundly disrespectful is that?

What’s even more disrespectful is that government members tried to claim that it wasn’t Bill 124 that’s causing the shortage, because other jurisdictions also have a shortage of health care workers. Well, if other jurisdictions also have a shortage of health care workers, then how foolish is it to cap the wages of our health care workers and drive them away when there are job opportunities in other provinces?

If the government actually wanted to improve health care, they would focus on recruiting, retaining and returning nurses to our health care system—and personal support workers and other health care workers—providing them with better pay, better working conditions and the respect they deserve.

The government could work on licensing tens of thousands of internationally educated nurses and doctors already in Ontario, who are waiting years and paying thousands to have their credentials certified. The government could also fund hospitals across the province so that they have enough staff on every shift and on every ward, so that rooms don’t sit empty due to understaffing.

Make no mistake: The bottleneck for the surgical wait-list in Ontario is not due to a lack of operating space, it is due to a lack of staff for these operating rooms. Operating rooms are sitting empty because hospitals don’t have the resources to staff the ORs they already have. And now this government is trying to create a parallel system which will pull more staff out of our publicly funded system.

This move is also going to cost our health care system more. Services in private clinics receive more money than our public hospitals do for the same service, meaning that when private facilities perform surgeries, Ontario tax dollars will be going right into the pockets of shareholders that have invested in these facilities. The government’s actions will lead to investors making large profits off the backs of sick Ontarians.

Meanwhile, our hospitals depend on economies of scale to be able to fund more complex surgeries. So when we pull services out of the hospital, we leave the hospital trying to provide the more complex surgeries and the people with complications requiring longer surgeries, but we’re paying the hospitals less money than the private facilities are getting for simple surgeries, so we’re actually making it harder for the hospitals to pay the cost of these surgeries.

And while these clinics are able to charge our health care system more for the services they provide, they can also charge extra fees directly to the patients who are being sent there by this government. These fees take the form of consulting fees or membership fees that patients are made to cover in order to receive the health care they desperately need. We also know that many patients are upsold by doctors keen to make a profit.

But it’s not just people who are getting surgeries or procedures at private clinics who will be paying a price for this government’s policies; patients using the public system will also pay a price. They’re already paying a price now for Bill 124, with 12-hour wait times or longer at emergency rooms.

The Ottawa Hospital has had many times over the past year where they have been short as many as 800 nurses. They’ve had to get creative, and these absences are filled with unregulated, unlicensed care providers, not trained, professional registered nurses. In January, the Ottawa Hospital lost more nurses than they were able to recruit. While this is happening, this government has chosen to suppress nurses’ wages, ignore their concerns and undervalue their profession, while people are working in unbelievable conditions.

Here’s why this really matters, Speaker: There’s not a magical pool of nurses and health care workers that we just haven’t tapped yet who are suddenly going to appear and fill these positions in private health care facilities. These nurses and health care workers are going to come from our public system. And when we’re capping their wages in the public system, when we are putting them into unsustainable and dangerous working conditions, when nurses are already leaving to work at Costco because it’s less stressful, then why wouldn’t they leave to take a job at a private facility that only works weekdays from 9 to 5 and doesn’t have a wage cap?

This move is only going to pull more nurses and health care workers out of our system, leaving public health care in an even more precarious state, lengthening wait times for everyone, and the minister’s toothless staffing plan requirement isn’t going to address that, as we’ve already seen at the Riverside hospital in Ottawa, because that’s not a magic wand that can miraculously create more health care workers.

Ontario’s public health care system needs fixing. It absolutely needs fixing, but by allowing for-profit companies to offer health care services that were originally done by the public sector, this government is instead ensuring that sooner or later, those with more money will have access to better health care faster than other Ontarians, and this is unacceptable.

And so, Speaker, here we see another pattern emerging: Ontario residents are demanding better, health care workers are demanding better, but instead of listening to them, working with them and investing in the system, the government is enriching some private, for-profit corporations that lobbied really hard. Shame on them.

Thanks to the member for Sarnia–Lambton for the question.

The crisis that this government has created in health care extends to all parts of our health care system. We have incredibly underfunded community health centres that haven’t seen an increase in their base funding. We have family physicians who are leaving the practice mid-career because they just can’t take the workload anymore and are struggling with burnout. We have health care workers and nurses who are leaving the profession. We absolutely need to improve conditions for all workers across this system.

Expanding the number of doctors who are working in family health teams could be part of the solution, but we need to make sure that this continues to be part of the public health care system and we are not directing the funds that should be going to health care into the pockets of investors instead.

This is part of another pattern that we see from this government. Our public health care system, as you say, is absolutely a competitive advantage. So is our publicly funded education system, and we also see the government making decisions there that are undermining the quality and the strength of our public education system.

We’ve seen in the United States what happens when public systems are allowed to erode—kids are no longer getting health care, they’re no longer getting a decent education—and what that does to a country, what that does to an economy. The only explanation when we see these kinds of examples around us is that this government is more motivated by ideology than by the actual needs and concerns of Ontarians and by the evidence that exists around us about what practices would actually support Ontarians in getting the health care and education they need.

I listed the solutions in my remarks. We had a two-hour debate yesterday on the solutions. I suggest that the member consult Hansard if he didn’t hear my remarks clearly, but the answer is to invest in our public health care system and stop driving our nurses and health care workers away from it.

I know the community service agencies in my riding that provide preventative health care that keep people from getting sick and from ending up in the hospital are desperately underfunded. I know the Queensway Carleton Hospital is asking for an urgent care centre in Ottawa, which would keep people from needing to go to the ER for conditions that can’t be dealt with in their family doctors’ office but don’t need the emergency room.

We know there are models for stand-alone surgical facilities like the one you described, and instead of looking at any of these solutions and investing in the solutions that we have in our public health care system, this government is bound and determined to go down the road of putting profits in the pockets of private investors, and the only answer can be that those investors lobbied them really, really hard.

Let me share my own little story. In December, I visited the Queensway Carleton Hospital, which is actually closer to my home than any pharmacy, and it was hell on earth. There were people sitting in every chair in the emergency room. There were people sitting on the floor. There were people lined up on the walls. There was a lineup of people outside the door. There were seven stretchers in hallways outside of the ER and there were six ambulances waiting to off-load patients. Nobody wants to be in the ER right now. That’s the crisis that your government has created. That’s the reason that people are not being able to get the health care that they need. What I want to see is investments in our public system, to see investments in preventative care, to see everyone have access to a family doctor so that people get incredibly quick, timely care when they need it.

In the midst of that incredibly hard and difficult work, this government capped their wages well below the rate of inflation. It’s incredibly disrespectful and, as nurses said, humiliating, and we absolutely need to do better.

During pre-budget hearings in Ottawa, we heard from the Ottawa-Carleton District School Board about the resources they need for a strong education system that meets the needs of Ontario students. In particular, we heard that schools are unlikely to meet the 2025 deadline for full accessibility set out by the Accessibility for Ontarians with Disabilities Act because funding for building repairs and retrofits has fallen short over the last 25 years.

Making sure that every student has equal access to education is a priority for Ontarians. Will this government provide the necessary funding to make schools accessible in this year’s budget?

The finance committee also heard about the importance of ensuring that children can access mental health programming through their schools. Unfortunately, a new report has shown that less than one in 10 schools have access to a regularly scheduled mental health specialist or nurse.

Ensuring that children have the support they need to succeed in the classroom and that teachers and education workers have the support they need to do their jobs is a priority for the people of Ontario. Is it a priority for this government? Will they include funding for mental health supports in schools in this budget?