The most important thing that we can do to protect our children and protect our hospital capacity is to keep up to date on our vaccinations.

If you qualify for a booster, get that booster. Get that flu shot. Make sure you protect yourself so that you can protect vulnerable people in our society.

We have SickKids nurses who are leaders in childhood and pediatric RSV and flu innovations. They are now offering that expertise to nurses in community hospitals, because they understand that, working together, we will get through this flu season; we will get through this higher rate of RSV. They are doing it because they work together and they are innovating.

It is very unfortunate that the member opposite is suggesting that nothing has been happening, because in fact there have been many positive innovations that have—

Interjections.

Speaker, again, I will reinforce how critically important it is to protect patients like Chloe—and that is to make sure that you get that booster shot when you qualify, that you get a flu shot if it is appropriate for you, in consultation with your primary health care practitioner.

Speaking specifically to what we have seen, what we have anticipated in the fall rise with influenza and RSV, we have given—and we will continue to support our hospital sector. And I must say, this is not just about the SickKids and the CHEOs of the world. We are making sure that we are collaborating with our community hospitals to ensure that they are able to step up, just as SickKids and other children’s hospitals stepped up when we were dealing with COVID-19, at the height of the pandemic.

We have seen an unprecedented level of co-operation between hospitals to make sure that when SickKids, when CHEO is experiencing a challenge, when they are seeing more children than they normally do, there are community hospitals that are stepping up and doing the right thing and accepting those older pediatric patients—to make sure that wherever you need help in the province of Ontario, your government and your community hospitals will be there for you.

Anyone who reads a newspaper or watches the news also knows that there is an increase internationally in RSV and influenza. We’ve seen that. We’ve prepared for that. We’ve worked with our hospital partners.

I’m going to again say that when children’s hospitals and the staff within them stepped up and helped when our hospitals were being challenged with COVID-19 patients—we are now seeing those same hospitals reciprocate and assist children’s hospitals with pediatric patients. That work will continue. That innovation will continue.

I have spoken to all four sick kids’ hospital CEOs. I’ve said, “Whatever you need, however we can help, please let me know.” We have given those investments. CHEO, in particular, in Ottawa—transferring a ward room and making it into a pediatric ICU within weeks is an incredible innovation and shows leadership and shows people understanding that where there’s need, we will find—

We have made sure that investments are happening in our health care system as recently as four months ago, with the passage of our budget, which included an increase of $5 billion. We are making the investments. We are working with our health care partners. We will continue to do that work because we understand that people want to have a health care system that is healthy and ready for them when they need it. And that is happening in the province.

My question is for the Premier.

In today’s Ottawa Citizen: “Children’s Health Crisis: Seven Kids Resuscitated at CHEO”—and today’s Hamilton Spectator says that McMaster Children’s Hospital is running out of cribs and infusion pumps for medication, and it is only expected to get worse.

We know that children’s surgeries are being cancelled across the province and that emergency rooms and ICUs are more than overwhelmed.

The Chief Medical Officer of Health said that if surgeries are being cancelled and hospitals are in crisis, he would consider mandating masks. Anyone who reads a newspaper or watches TV knows we’re already there.

So, through you, Speaker, will the Premier require universal masking in our schools and on public transit, or at the very least, do what he’s asking others to do, which is to wear a mask whenever possible?

Interjections.

I can tell you, there is nothing more frightening than watching your child struggle to breathe. There is nothing more powerless than that feeling. Right now in Ontario, there are hundreds, thousands of parents in hospitals and at home feeling exactly the same thing.

The people who are caring for them, the people at CHEO, are asking us to do something very simple: to wear a mask. That’s all they’re asking us to do. They need other help, but that’s a simple thing we can all do right now.

Speaker, will the Premier do the right thing and require masking in schools and on public transit, and wear a mask himself?

I move that:

Whereas staffing shortages in Ontario have forced emergency room and ICU closures across Ontario, reducing access to complex and potentially life-saving care in many communities; and

Whereas other hospitals have been forced to close units, redirect patients to other facilities and reduce beds, contributing to ER wait times of up to 36 hours for patients that require a hospital stay; and

Whereas health care job vacancies have more than quadrupled since 2015, resulting in more than 45,000 openings in primary care, and research by the Financial Accountability Office of Ontario underscores the urgent need to train and hire tens of thousands of extra nurses, PSWs and allied health professionals to meet the government’s own 2024-25 long-term care targets for hands-on staffing care, while the College of Nurses of Ontario reports over 15,000 nurses in Ontario are licensed and not practising; and

Whereas health care workers are overworked, underpaid, subject to violence, and distressed by their inability to provide the care patients need due to poor working conditions and inadequate staffing, driving many to leave the profession in record numbers; and

Whereas Ford government policies such as the Protecting a Sustainable Public Sector for Future Generations Act, 2019—previously Bill 124—and other stopgap measures have failed to fix the problem, leaving nurses, allied health professionals and other front-line health care workers with wages falling far short of inflation, while the government of Ontario chose not to invest over $1 billion of the money allocated for hospitals in the 2021-22 budget; and

Whereas this government allowed the health human resource crisis to persist while billions of dollars in unspent public funds have been allocated to discretionary funds instead of Ontario hospitals that are struggling to maintain quality of care because they are dramatically understaffed; and

Whereas the Ford government has failed to develop a comprehensive health care staffing plan to train, recruit and retain sufficient numbers of health care workers and have ignored the advice of health care professionals on how to solve the staffing crisis in hospital and primary care; and

Whereas the Ministry of Health’s inadequate temporary retention bonus for nurses fails to address systemic issues in the sector and falls far short of the efforts to retain, retrain and recruit front-line health care staff in Quebec, British Columbia and Atlantic Canada; and

Whereas the Minister of Health’s recent directives on internationally trained health care professionals fail to provide the funding, education spaces and internships needed to help address the staffing shortfall, and fails to implement many of the painful lessons learned during the pandemic; and

Whereas nursing vacancies in Ontario hospitals increased by almost 300% between March 2020 and March 2022, the turnover rate for nurses has increased by 72% since 2020, and the turnover rate for RPNs, PSWs and other health care workers more than doubled since 2016;

Therefore the Legislative Assembly calls on the Ford government to create, in consultation with unions and other health sector stakeholders, a multi-layer health care worker recruitment and retention incentive package that includes short-, medium- and long-term solutions to recruit, retain and return workers across the health sector with full-time, public, unionized positions and immediately repeals Bill 124, restoring workers’ right to bargain for wages that reflect their worth and the significant impact of rising inflation.

There is a severe shortage of health human resources in Ontario, and it’s brought our health care system to its knees. We haven’t seen a crisis like this in generations. Health care is something that happens between two human beings. When one of them is burnt-out and cannot continue to work, our system collapses.

If it was even possible, across the province, hallway medicine has worsened; people are waiting 24, sometimes 48, hours on a stretcher in a hallway in an emergency room before being admitted. We’re talking about people that are sick enough to need admission into our hospital waiting in a busy, noisy emergency room for days on end, Speaker.

According to Ontario Health, in September this year, the wait times in our emergency rooms across Ontario hospitals reached a record high. On average, every single day—they take it at midnight—there were 946 patients waiting for a hospital bed in an emergency room. Think about it: 946 Ontarians who were sick enough to go to the hospital, who were waiting to be assessed by a physician and a team of caring health professionals who have told you that you need to be admitted, and they are waiting in our emergency rooms.

That number in August was 884, but I am sure that as soon as the numbers for October come out, it will be even higher than 946 people.

Since this summer alone, Ontario emergency rooms have shut down more than 86 times, Speaker. In October, the emergency room in Chesley announced that it was forced to shut its doors until December. This is over eight weeks where there is no emergency department available to the good people of Chesley. Speaker, would you say that this is normal?

This comes after years of neglect by previous Conservative and Liberal governments that have brought us to where we are today—add on top of this a pandemic. We are at the point where people are afraid of falling sick. They are afraid to seek medical support. They are afraid to go to our emergency rooms, because they know that they are going to wait too long.

Now this crisis has landed in our pediatric hospitals, and families—young children—are paying the price for a crisis created by Conservative and Liberal governments’ neglect. Parents are scared, Speaker.

SickKids, a world-renowned pediatric hospital, had to shut their intensive care unit. The intensive care unit is where you care for the sickest of the sickest of the children. Right now, over half of the kids in intensive care are on a respirator. This is unheard of. SickKids cannot care for all of the kids. Their intensive care unit is full, at 130% capacity, yet here we are. They’re sending kids as young as 14 years old outside of the pediatric hospital into general hospitals, because they have no room to care for them. In a province as rich as Ontario, it is incomprehensible that we have come to that.

There are presently 32,000 job vacancies in our hospitals, long-term-care homes and residential care facilities. Add to this another 10,350 job vacancies, for a total of over 42,350 vacancies in our health care system right here, right now in Ontario. Things have to change. We cannot continue this way. Ontario has the lowest per capita investment. We have the lowest nurse per capita in Canada. We have the least hospital beds.

There are solutions: Repeal Bill 124 and give our nurses and everybody else who works in health care the respect they deserve. There will be many other solutions coming forward by my colleagues, and I hope they will be acted upon.

Today, I want this Premier to hear from people in my community, to hear from my hospital and health care professionals. I want this Premier to stop and listen and understand that his sycophantic echo chamber of yes men are not listening to women in care fields or health care workers who are desperate for support to care for their patients.

I wish this Premier cared about parents who are terrified that their kid will be one of the growing number of children who need to be resuscitated or ventilated or whose surgery will be postponed because there isn’t enough room or staff to care for them.

This government is allowing folks to get sick and to suffer. Day after day, listening to the health minister talk about the fact that they knew the surge was coming is enough to make anyone sick. How is it that they declare proudly that they anticipated this surge, but don’t understand that the terrifying and deteriorating situation we find ourselves in was not the foregone conclusion that they have accepted, knowingly, and, I would argue, invited with complacent and complicit arms.

Speaker, we are hearing terrible stories from real people. Here is a wrenching email that I received:

“Hi Jennifer. I’m sending this email because our health care system is falling apart. The hospital is understaffed with only half the amount of staff working. I’m currently at the hospital having a miscarriage and I have waited seven hours to see a doctor. This is insane, and we need to do something about this. There’s people laying on the floor who have been here before I got here waiting to see a doctor. We should not have to wait this long for health care. The hospital staff shouldn’t have to be under this much stress trying to give care to people, short-staffed.”

Imagine that.

It was only this past July that Lakeridge Health had to make the difficult decision to temporarily close and relocate the Bowmanville ICU in the middle of a significant staff shortage. Speaker, while that ICU is thankfully again operational, things are not better. Just a few days ago, the Region of Durham Paramedic Services and Lakeridge Health put out this joint statement:

“Lakeridge Health’s emergency departments continue to experience critical staffing shortages and high patient volumes. This is impacting overall wait times for less acute patients and increasing the time that the Region of Durham Paramedic Services is able to offload ambulances at Lakeridge Health hospitals.”

Hospitals are struggling with a staffing shortage and are handcuffed by Bill 124. The government is fine with them being held hostage by private nursing agencies who can demand any amount for their nurses, but the hospital isn’t allowed to pay their own employees to retain them, to bargain competitive wages or to even remotely pay them what they’re worth. Breaking the system apart to privatize it is reckless, self-serving, backwardly ideological and not what leadership looks like.

What could leadership look like, Speaker? This government needs to repeal the wage-suppressing Bill 124. The government needs to work with unions and health sector stakeholders to create an effective plan to recruit, retain and return health care workers, and restore workers’ rights to freely bargain for fair wages. That would not only be leadership, but also responsible government.

People are not only sick and tired of this government’s bully tactics, they are sick. And this government needs to listen to the health care sector and the hurting public who are rightly demanding funded and supported not-for-profit health care.

I stand today in support of this motion because it supports health care workers, and, by retention, seniors, children, families and hospitals in Niagara and across Ontario. In Niagara, we have seen the cost of staffing shortages. We have seen a Niagara Health system that has buckled under the pressure. The results have been closures of emergency rooms in our region.

We have also seen the cost for families seeking pediatric care having to wait hours to get the help they need. Niagara has seen sexual assault survivors that are seeking justice having to be redirected to other communities, often more than an hour away.

We are well into half a decade of majority PC government and I think everyone will agree that health care access is worse now than it was five years ago. If the problem is getting worse—which it is—this government must take responsibility: Do more. Take action.

Nursing vacancies in Ontario hospitals have increased by almost 300% between March 2020 and March 2022. Health care workers and Ontario patients need immediate and sustainable solutions. At this point, the weight of the response needs to match the crisis.

This is why I was shocked this week to learn that in the fall economic update there is not a single new penny in the government’s economic update for nurses and health care workers as the staffing crisis shakes our hospitals.

Ford is refusing to spend in critical areas like public health and yet sits on billions. Nurses need support. They are being run off their feet. Families are facing the fear of what it will mean if their loved ones—a child or a senior—get sick and have to go into their local hospitals. Instead, we have seen the government put in policies like Bill 124, which has been widely recognized to make the health care staffing crisis worse.

The previous PC government under Mike Harris met the moment of a health care crisis with privatization and cuts. Those actions led to fewer nurses and a provincial long-term-care sector that was one of the worst performers in Canada throughout the pandemic.

Over the last five years, we have had opportunity after opportunity to fix the staffing crisis in hospitals. It is about time we do that, and it is why we need to pass this motion and fully commit to solutions to retention and recruitment in health care right now.

It’s my honour to rise today to discuss our NDP motion to recruit and retain more front-line health care workers. This is an incredibly important motion. When you have a government that introduces legislation like Bill 124 during a global pandemic, capping the wages of our burnt-out front-line health care staff, you end up with a crisis in staffing.

In September of this year, the president of Niagara Health released a statement about the challenges created by the staffing crisis in health care:

“There is no bigger issue facing Ontario hospitals today than the serious shortage of health-care workers.

“These challenges are unprecedented and something we will be dealing with for years to come.”

This comes after another statement from Niagara Health in July, noting that the Niagara Health system was trying to fill a total of 608 positions, 608 vacancies, across the region of Niagara in our hospital system. Think about that. There are almost 5,000 patients awaiting non-emergency surgeries that have been postponed. Across the province of Ontario, emergency departments have had to close more than 86 times due to staffing shortages just since this summer. We see the results of the staffing shortages almost every day in my office.

This government introduced Bill 124, and it was a slap in the face to our brave front-line health care workers and other workers in the province of Ontario. It should be immediately repealed. This legislation has no place in a province of Ontario that respects workers.

We know that this government does not respect workers. They attack workers’ rights all the time. The labour minister, Monte McNaughton, supported Bill 124, the attack against workers, the attack against collective agreements, the attack against seniority. Also under a Conservative government, under Harris, they laid off 6,000 nurses.

Speaker, we know about how the province’s vacancies from nursing jobs have increased almost 300% since the start of the pandemic. Turnover rates for RPNs and PSWs have doubled in the last six years. Why do you think that’s the case? Maybe my colleagues can help me. Can we all say “Bill 124”?

Early retirements of nurses have doubled. Our health care staff are burnt-out, exhausted, leaving the profession they love because they just can’t do it anymore. They’re the people who showed up every single day of the pandemic to protect us—front-line health care workers.

This is a crisis. And where is this government? Nowhere to be found. Front-line health care workers have been telling them directly that they need to act to address this crisis. Five of the biggest health care unions wrote a joint letter to the Premier—think about this—asking him to address this crisis. As of last week, no response from the Premier—no mask, either. This government would rather attack the collective bargaining rights of workers than fix this problem.

Speaker, we need a serious plan for the staffing crisis in our health care system. And do you know how to start? It starts by repealing Bill 124. That’s the first step in fixing this incredible problem. Because Bill 124 froze wages, including for nurses, they have taken—think about this—with the rate of inflation, a 6% pay cut during this time. It’s unacceptable. Frankly, it’s another attack on the collective bargaining rights of workers. We need to repeal Bill 124 immediately—

Interjection.

It’s a real pleasure to speak to this very important motion that would launch a massive recruitment and retention plan to address the health care staffing shortage in our province, a shortage that has resulted in the worst health care crisis in generations.

For the last few months, I’ve been travelling around Ontario, from North Bay to Nepean, from Fort Erie to Whitby, from Brampton to Sault Ste. Marie, and just last weekend to Kingston. A few weeks back, I was up near Chesley. We’ve heard Chesley talked about a lot in this place. Back in October, they announced that they were going to be closing their ER until December. And if it wasn’t already bad enough, that situation—for this government to take some kind of urgent action, surely the desperate pleas of parents whose children are stacked up in overcapacity children’s ICUs should be enough, you’d think, but no, Speaker. In the midst of this, this government chose not to spend a single new dollar to address this situation—absolutely shameful.

From March 2020 to March of this year, nursing vacancies increased by 300%. Health care professionals are clear about what’s happening—the terrible working conditions; overworked, stressed, underpaid, underappreciated; unable to provide the quality of care that they know their patients deserve; hospitals forced to close emergency rooms and ICUs. Speaker, I know that many people out there have been told by this government and governments before them that this is the best they can expect, but I can tell you one thing: Waiting in an emergency room for 14 or 20 hours, that’s not normal, and we should not be forced to accept that in this province.

This government wants to tell you that’s as good as it gets, but the answers are right here in this motion. Get rid of Bill 124—there’s a start. Get rid of Bill 124. Restore health care workers’ rights to bargain for wages that reflect their worth. Work with us. Work with health care stakeholders to develop an incentive package. This government needs to do better and they need to do it urgently.

I appreciate the opportunity. I want to thank all my colleagues who have spoken so far today and who I know will be speaking further to this opposition day motion this afternoon.

Speaker, there is no doubt whatsoever that we have a crisis at our hospitals. You are well aware of this. McMaster Children’s Hospital in Hamilton is strained to the limit. We’ve had ERs shut down this past summer alone more than 86 times. In October, the emergency room in Chesley was forced to shut its doors for eight weeks.

The reason for this strain or crisis on the system is not mysterious: We have a body of workers—nurses and health care workers—who have been pressed to the limit through the pandemic, who were suffering under a huge strain before the pandemic and who have been put in a box of a 1% wage increase per year. These people who risk their lives, who risked the lives of their families, were told that they were heroes, yet their financial needs, their aspirations to live a decent life, have been kicked to the side, have been forgotten.

Until we get rid of Bill 124, until we actually bring in compensation that will retain these people that we need to have, until we actually bring in compensation that will bring back some of the early retirees, we will not be able to make up for the number of people that we’re losing in our health care system, in our hospitals. That will mean the crisis that we face will continue.

Speaker, this motion to set in place an approach to retention and to recruitment is going to be critical to make sure that any of us in this room and our families will be able to get the urgent medical care they need when they need it, will be able to get the surgeries that they need when they need it—not delayed six months, not delayed a year or two years, but when they need it. If we fail to do this, we are putting the people of Ontario in an impossible position, a position where their lives are at risk, the lives of their children are at risk, the lives of their friends and family are at risk.

I am urging the government to not only vote in favour of this motion today, but, upon passage, to actually take the steps necessary to implement these very critical measures so we have a health care system that works, that will deliver and once again will be the envy of people around the world.

Ontario needs a human resources strategy for our health care system, which is why we brought forward this motion.

“There are more vacant positions for nurses than nurses working in one GTA” hospital, as CTV reported last week, “a sign of how dire staff shortages are ‘deteriorating’ a medical system already on edge.

“A consultants report for Lakeridge Health calls the situation at its Oshawa hospital a ‘crisis’ as it lays out how” workers are leaving the system en masse, primarily because of “low morale, misaligned incentives, and EMS offloads,” which are compounding the problem.

The chief emergency room doctor said, “Normally we would internally try to work on solutions and try to improve our efficiencies ourselves, but realistically the government is not coming in on a stallion to fix everything for us,” which means that they do feel abandoned.

“He said that the hospital is far from the only one feeling the shortage of nurses who, because of stress and overwork, are choosing to retire or leave at faster rates than they can be hired or trained....

“It’s extremely troubling that there’s a majority of vacancies. More vacancies for nurses than there are nurses.”

They are going south of the border.

Natalie Mehra of the Ontario Health Coalition said this “is indicative of what’s happening in large hospitals all across Ontario. We’ve never seen anything like it. It is really serious.”

As the finance critic, I want to point out that the government, just this week, said in their mini-budget that there’s no new money for health care in their economic update because they already prepared for the surge in illness. Parents are being sent home from my local hospital of Grand River Hospital, which is at 150% capacity in our pediatric ICU unit. It doesn’t sound like you’re prepared, it doesn’t sound like you invested, and it doesn’t sound like you are fighting for health care.

This province has the money. That’s the important part I want to tell you. The FAO has forecasted a $100-million surplus just this year. He is projecting surpluses for the foreseeable future. If the political will were there, if this government cared, they would use the unallocated contingency funds, which the FAO has said, over the next six years, will balloon to $44 billion. This is not about money; this is about political will and this is about not having a human resources strategy which recognizes how important our health professionals are to maintaining a publicly funded health care system.

I urge the government to listen to this motion and to work with the NDP—His Majesty’s official opposition—to bring forward solutions to serve the people of this province.

I’m proud to rise and speak on behalf of my good people of Scarborough Southwest to speak to this bill to recognize the staffing shortages that we’re facing in our province and, frankly, propose solutions, because this government—seeing the crisis that we’re facing in our health care sector, seeing the crisis we’re facing in our hospitals—does not have a clear plan to respond to the health human resource crisis that we’re facing in Ontario.

Hospitals, long-term-care homes, home care and community care settings are all reporting critical staffing shortages, and it is causing major damages across the board. When we look at the Health Quality Ontario report, they reported the average wait time was seven times the provincial target of two days in Kingston and six times the target in Milton, Oakville, London, Toronto and Scarborough. And 13 hospitals reported that patients have waited over 24 hours on average—and that’s just the average.

I was recently in an emergency room and I have seen first-hand what people are facing, what kind of injuries people are sitting with and the amount of excruciating pain people are having to go through. I just look at the faces of the nurses and the doctors and how hard they’re trying to be able to just keep up and the amount of time they would come back and say, “We’re trying our best. We’re trying our best.” You could see the stress in their faces, their eyes. They want to help, but we are failing them and we need to do better, and this does that.

I heard from a constituent, Farzana Ghani, recently. Her husband has cancer and he was diagnosed at Michael Garron Hospital. He waited for months for an oncologist appointment, and now they are waiting another month just to get a PSW and a caregiver. This family had to lose their income just to take care of him because they are waiting for a caregiver. We don’t have enough PSWs and caregivers.

Another constituent in Scarborough Southwest reached out. Her adult daughter has experienced trauma recently. There is an 18-month waiting period to access the trauma program at the Women’s College Hospital—18 months. That’s the norm that she was told.

Another mother actually wrote, and because I have a short time, I am just going to say that all she asked is, “Can you ask this government, ‘Has everyone given up? Are we accepting this as the norm? Has everyone given up?’” Because if we look at the government’s fiscal update, it looks like they have given up. They don’t see the health care crisis.

We need to have a multi-layer health care worker recruitment and retention incentive package that includes short-, medium- and long-term solutions to recruit and retain workers across all health care sectors with good jobs. We need to repeal Bill 124. It is the number one thing that’s causing so many health care workers to leave our province and go to other professions, because they do not feel respected and they do not feel appreciated. Even though we’re calling them heroes, we’re not paying them the wages that they deserve.

We need to restore workers’ rights to bargain for wages that reflect their worth and we need to recognize the internationally trained professionals, the internationally trained health care workers, who are waiting to contribute to this province, who have waited for years. There are workers across this province who are Canadian citizens, are Ontarians, who can be contributing right now to this province, but we’re not making it easy for them.

We need to do better by all of these people and we need to do better by all the kids who are waiting in our hospital rooms. We need to do better for our seniors who are waiting to have better care and we need to do better for all our health care workers.

Please pass this. I hope the government will listen and, this time, come up with a strategy.

They’re asking me where I was. Well, I wasn’t elected then, so I couldn’t make a change. But you could have, sir. You could have made a change, and you did nothing.

If the members opposite truly wanted to improve access to primary care at that time or at any time, they could have made it a condition of their support. Yet they chose not to do that.

The former Premier admitted to freezing hospital spending for years and, in 2015, eliminated 50 medical residency positions from Ontario. They defended their decision to eliminate the 50 positions, when 800,000 Ontarians were without a family doctor, by saying they were, “scaling back to make better use of scarce health care dollars.”

This reduction came in the same year that 250 nurses would be laid off from hospitals in communities across the province, including Newmarket, Sarnia and London. If the members opposite were committed to improving our health care system, they could have done it then, and yet they did nothing.

Madam Speaker, I get tired of listening to some of the complaining going on. I get tired of listening to people trying to make a crisis and make fear in the population at a time of pandemic even worse by using words and expressions like “the worst crisis in generations” and “oh my God, the government is going to privatize,” trying to scare people. I think it’s irresponsible to be talking like that at a time when the health care system is of course under strain.

The interim leader for the NDP said that the reasons for the crisis are not mysterious. And the first two he listed, I agree. People worked hard before the pandemic in our health care system, and they worked very hard throughout the pandemic. That is true. That is why we continue to work to improve the system and pay them back.

But let’s remember that these waits in emergency rooms for health care have been going on for many, many years. I personally have waited—what was the example given, 14 hours and 20 hours? Is that normal? No, it’s not normal, but I have personally waited that long over 10 years ago with my parents in the emergency departments. So that is not new, unfortunately, in Ontario. That is why this government is taking steps to address it.

At the same time, in 2019, before the pandemic arose—November 2019, as I recall—emergency rooms were being closed in Nova Scotia. I remember the story on the national news. It said there’s a sign on the door in the emergency department of this town in Nova Scotia: “Don’t go to this emergency room because no one is here. Drive to the next town.” That is not a new issue. It was a pre–pandemic issue, and it’s a staffing challenge.

Why do we have a staffing challenge? The members opposite are correct. There is some pressure in our staffing, but let’s talk about that. It’s not a funding issue. It is a staffing issue because there are not enough health human resources—

I just went through a lot of things we’re doing to fix that problem, but let’s just talk about this for a second. Part of the reason that we need so many new staff is because we have so many more jobs for them, because we’re trying to hire more, right? We’re trying to hire 27,000 new PSWs and nurses for our long-term-care homes. That will make more jobs available. So, yes, there are more vacancies. And we’re trying to hire nurses. We’ve just added—

Interjections.

Somebody over there said, “We’ve never seen anything like this before”—

Interjection.

I think you’ve heard loud and clear from all my colleagues during our oppo day where the needs are and where the answers are also located. There are many answers that have been provided to this government, many suggestions that have been provided to this government.

This government continues to force hospitals and long-term-care homes to use agency nurses, which are three times the cost of what we know would work effectively. Give that opportunity for individuals to return to the workforce, to return under good working conditions: Repeal Bill 124 to remove those conditions that are there, but add 10 paid sick days so individuals can go back to work without any worries and care for the people who they work with, but also stay at home when they need to stay at home.

This government has created a self-imposed crisis. We ask ourselves, “Why did they create this crisis?” The simple answer to it is to accept them doing an action. What is that action? A lot of it comes down to privatization of those services. This government can stand in their place and deny it, but you can see it happening in all of the communities. It’s apparent this is your path. It’s in your DNA. There’s no changing it, and you cannot continually stand in this House and continue to deny that.

In Algoma–Manitoulin, a lot of the hospitals are operating their ER departments. Why? Because they have locums. We’re paying high fees for those locums to make sure that our ER—thank goodness that we have the ability, but that’s not the answer, because primary care is being set aside. Patients in their communities are not getting the care that they need. There are nurses—we had an excellent breakfast this morning with registered nurses who have the answers for this government. You need to sit with them, listen, provide them with the opportunity to expand their services. That’s part of the answer.

I am pleased to rise on this motion today calling for a solution to the health care crisis, especially after we have just heard the government side say, “Crisis? What crisis?”

Let me tell you about the crisis in Ottawa, Speaker, a crisis which the chief of staff of CHEO has just called an “unprecedented” crisis. The pediatric ICU at CHEO is at 280% capacity. This weekend we saw seven kids resuscitated. A child who went to the hospital by ambulance for a severe allergic reaction waited 13 hours to be seen. That’s “what crisis” we are seeing in Ottawa.

And it’s not just limited to CHEO. At the Queensway Carleton Hospital this weekend, there are 22 beds in the ER. There were 24 patients admitted and waiting for a bed in the hospital, yet the emergency room staff still had to see an additional 240 patients with no beds in the ER available. Wait times at Ottawa hospitals are as long as 17 hours. These are people in pain. These are people struggling to breathe. These are people experiencing some of the scariest moments of their lives, and they’re not getting the support that they need from this government.

At the same time, Speaker, I am hearing heartbreaking stories from the nurses and health care workers who are supporting them day in and day out, the nurses of ONA Local 83 and ONA Local 84 at the Ottawa Hospital and the Queensway Carleton Hospital: stories about nurses being assigned to units that they are not trained for, including the ICU and the emergency room; about a nurse who had served only a few short months being asked to take responsibility for a unit by herself overnight; about nurses who are beginning every shift in tears because they’re being asked to do work they don’t feel qualified for or that they are not being supported to do.

Nurses want to provide great care, but the conditions this government is putting them in are not allowing them to do that. There are nurses leaving the health care sector for retail jobs because they are burnt-out and tired, and tired of feeling fundamentally disrespected by this government—this government which thanked them for being pandemic heroes and turned around and capped their pay, despite the fact that they were putting in long hours short-staffed; a government that has refused to budge on Bill 124, despite hearing of the impact on health care workers and on patients day in and day out; and a government that has seen this crisis in our health care sector—one that they won’t acknowledge is a crisis—and not put a single new dollar toward our health care system in the fall economic update.

That is why it is so essential that we take this time to acknowledge what is going on in our health care sector, to acknowledge the work of our health care workers and to actually ensure that we are providing the investments and resources and supports that they need, starting by repealing Bill 124 and giving them a decent wage; providing the investments in the health care sector; and recruiting, retaining and returning nurses to the sector so that they no longer need to be short-staffed and so that everyone who goes into a hospital in Ottawa and across the province knows that they are going to get the health care they deserve in a timely fashion.

Thank you, Speaker. I will be using my right of reply to the motion.

It was an interesting afternoon, where a lot of real-life stories that highlight the crisis in our health care system have been shared. There is a health human resources crisis in health care. Health care happens between two people. When the people who provide the care are burnt-out, when the people who provide the care feel demoralized and disrespected and just cannot continue to do their jobs anymore—jobs that they love, jobs that they are good at, jobs that they trained to do and want to do, but the circumstances in their workplace right now, whether it be in hospital, in long-term care, in home care, in primary care are such that they can’t take it anymore—we need to act.

We cannot continue to let this happen the way it is. How can anybody sit in their seat when you know that SickKids and CHEO—those are pediatric hospitals that are world-renowned. They provide the best children’s care. People come from all over to see what we do right here in Ontario. When we hear that their ICU is full, at 130% capacity, when we hear that there are little ones in every single ICU bed and bassinet and crib and there are no more ways to care for them, how come some people can stay there and say, “All is good. We have recruited 12,000 new workers”?

You don’t look at attrition. What is happening right now in Ontario is a mass exodus of health care workers who are afraid for their licence, who are afraid for their mental health, who are afraid for their own health, and who just give up. They would love to come back. In order for that to happen, we need to acknowledge what they have gone through.

We need to acknowledge that things were not good before. You’re absolutely right that there have been hospitals full, at 120% capacity, for years. There have been people admitted into TV rooms, lounges, ends of hallways, everywhere. There is a huge patient room in the basement of my hospital, next to the morgue, where eight people lay without a window, without a bathroom. We are full, over capacity—yes, our hospitals are—but don’t just sit there and say, “We’ve recruited 12,000 more,” because the exodus is there. Go on the website of any hospital in Ontario, go on the website of any long-term care, and you will see vacancies, 42,000 of them, right here, right now, as we speak, where there is nobody applying for those jobs.

And some of the programs that the government has put forward—yes, they took the training, they went and worked as PSWs, and four weeks later, half of them had given up on that job, because it was just too hard, too difficult for what they were getting out of it. They still could not pay the rent and feed their kids with the work that they were doing as a PSW.

What we’re asking through this motion is really a multi-layer approach that looks at how we solve the health human resources crisis. How do we bring people back? How do we respect them for the hard work, the important work that they do? This is what this motion is all about. We had nurse practitioners, who are here today, going into the different offices. They are telling you, right here, right now, that there are nurse practitioners underemployed right here in Ontario. Each and every one of them, if you were to fund the position in any nurse practitioner-led clinic, they would take on 800 patients that are unattached. You could do this right here, right now this afternoon.

But no, none of that is happening. They have recruited 12,000 new health care professionals. It doesn’t matter that there are 42 vacancies. It doesn’t matter that the exodus is continuing. We see a government that is very reluctant to act, and like everybody else, you have to wonder, “Why is that?” Well, the “Why is that?” is because they will come out with a solution of privatization. They’re not proud of it. They hide it. They don’t say it. But they do it.

Repeal Bill 124. Treat people with respect and you will be amazed what Ontario health care workers will do.