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.

Good morning. I’d like to welcome the representatives of the Canadian Society for Medical Laboratory Science to Queen’s Park today. These laboratory specialists are a critical part of Ontario’s health care system and were vital to tackling the COVID-19 pandemic. Lab specialists from the Canadian Society for Medical Laboratory Science are a trusted partner of the Ontario government and our work together is directly benefiting Ontarians. They will be meeting with MPPs throughout the day to discuss their policy recommendations, and will be hosting a reception in the legislative dining room from 5 p.m. to 7 p.m. this evening. Welcome.

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.