Oh, there’s 20 minutes on the clock; I thought there would have been 10 minutes by this point. Good stuff; excellent, because I have a lot to say when it comes to this bill.

I’m pleased to have the opportunity to be able to speak up to this government to the concerns I’ve heard from my community when it comes to privatizing—profitizing—our health care system, which is exactly what is happening here in Bill 60—oh, it is 10 minutes. Now I’m disappointed because this is an important bill. We have definitely seen the crisis that has been happening in our health care system for years. Under the Liberals, we’ve seen hospitals underfunded, not kept up with inflation, and that was happening year over year.

The Conservatives come in in 2018 and continued and furthered that train even further. We’re watching emergency rooms that are exploding at the seams, surgeries that have been cancelled. Sure, COVID definitely played a huge part in the struggles that we see in our health care system, but investment into our health care system would have helped alleviate some of those issues, and this government is sitting on billions of dollars that could be invested into our empty operating rooms. They could be investing into the empty beds that we see in our hospitals. It could be invested into the nurses in the health care system that we have relied on our entire lives here and who put everything on the line for each and every one of us during COVID and were thanked with a pay reduction—with legislation that forced their wages to receive 1% or less in raises. As we know, the cost of living has definitely increased, inflation has gone up, and we have put nurses, who did everything for us, further behind, and we’re seeing the effects of that.

To me, knowing that the Conservatives have always believed in small government and a privatized health care system, this is by design. We know that the government has starved our health care system and now created the scenario where people think that it’s better—that it will be better, that it will be easier for them to receive the health care that they need if it’s a private system, if we’re “innovative,” as the government likes to call it.

Well, if they would have funded the public system, our public system would not be in the disrepair that it’s in. And they have billions of dollars to be able to do that and, instead, they’re choosing to sit on it, and what money they are investing into health care, they’re investing it into for-profit institutions to be able to pick up those surgeries—the same surgeries that could be done in the public system if the dollars were there.

So the government is putting the money where they’re choosing, and it’s not in our public health care system so that everyone can get the health care that they need when they need it. Instead, they’re going to put it in a for-profit investment system.

When people are building and creating these surgical centres of excellence, that they’re going to be called—integrated community health service centres—they’re doing that with their own money. They’re doing that with investor money. When you invest in something, you’re expecting a return, and that return is going to come from our collective health care dollars. Those collective health care dollars get there by the public’s taxes. And so, to be taking those valuable taxes and giving them to profiteers to fix a problem that you created instead of just putting those into the public coffers and paying for our public health care system—that’s a mess. That’s definitely the wrong direction and nothing that I know my community wants to see.

I hear it on a regular basis of how disheartened they are with this government—I know they never really did have much faith in the Conservative government in my riding of Hamilton Mountain. That’s why they don’t vote for them and—I get it, and I’m grateful, because I’m here. But I’m here to speak on their behalf and through their voice. And that’s exactly what the plan here is, and it is making sure that we are fighting back against the profitization of our health care system.

We hear from families who are struggling on a regular basis. This morning, I had the opportunity to go downstairs and to have breakfast with the rare disease folks, and I ran into someone who has been known here for quite some time, definitely to me: Sherry Caldwell. She’s from the Ontario Disability Coalition. She is an advocate. She is a mom. She is a mom with a now young woman daughter, who has had critical needs for her entire life, and that has forced Sherry to become an advocate. Because you can’t just be a parent and sit back in Ontario when you have a child who has needs, because you will literally drown in the bureaucracy and in the wait times and in the not being able to get the services that your child needs. So these parents have to take on extra and become advocates to be able to work through our system.

She talked about the poverty that people with disabilities face. She talked about the struggles. And if you want me to expand on the poverty portion, a mom who has a severely disabled child—probably trach, feeding tubes, constant care—not able to get enough nursing care into the homes for these critical kids was definitely a story that she was telling me. And so mom has to stay home, and a lot of times, it’s a single mom, and now she’s forced to be on Ontario Works—she can’t even get on a disability program or a caregiver program—to be able to care for her critical-needs child because she can’t go to work because the government is refusing to provide the services and the funding that she needs.

It’s a broken, broken, broken system, but privatizing the system is not going to fix it. It is not going to help these moms who are struggling and kids who are on wait-lists to get surgeries. Some 12,000 kids waiting for surgeries in the province of Ontario—how is this humanly possible? Where is the heart in any of this government when it comes to taking care of our children? Because when we’re not taking care of them now, we’re destining them to a life of need, to a life of more services, to more supportive housing, to more social services.

Not providing kids what they need when they need it is a problem, and I wish I could get that through to this government. Our most valuable resources, our future, are our children. They are the ones who are going to lead us in the future. Without providing them with the resources they need when they need them, you’re setting them up for failure. That is a big message—that has to happen.

Privatizing our health care system is not going to fix any of this. It is not going to alleviate the wait-lists. It’s the same pool of nurses, it’s the same pool of doctors that we have that have to be able to manage the public system and the private system. What are those same nurses and doctors going to do? They’re going to go to the private system because they’re going to get paid more, and they’re going to get paid more out of the same pot of dollars that you’re refusing to pay them with in the public system. How does this possibly make sense, other than it’s buddies, it’s friends, it’s investors, it’s “How do you help your friends make more money?”

There’s no other explanation for investing in a for-profit system instead of into our precious, precious public health care system. I know I’m out of time. I’m looking forward to questions from the opposite side and members on my side. I appreciate the opportunity of being able to speak to Bill 60 today.

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.

My question is to the Premier. When pre-budget consultations came to Windsor, we had the opportunity to hear from Hiatus House about the life-saving and life-changing work of shelters for women and children escaping domestic violence. These shelters are grossly, negligently underfunded. All they’re asking for is some stability in their funding and the ability to focus on the work they do for the community instead of needing to fundraise or apply for grants or beg this government for money.

Will this government finally break the cycle of violence against women by providing stable, long-term funding to organizations like Hiatus House in this budget?