As parliamentary assistant to the Minister of Health, I’d also like to introduce the Nurse Practitioners’ Association of Ontario. Thank you to the member opposite for announcing all their names.

Nurses from across the province are here to meet with MPPs and government officials today to highlight the critical role of nurse practitioners across the province.

Welcome to Queen’s Park.

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.

I rise today in support of our opposition day motion because it’s clear that Ontario is in the midst of an unmitigated health care crisis. Recently, the member for London West and I had the opportunity to meet with the Registered Nurses’ Association of Ontario at their event Queen’s Park on the Road. I’d like to share some of the information that we gleaned from that evening, because it’s important that we listen to the front-line workers who are dealing with this crisis day in and day out, and who are not affected by this government’s spin.

We heard stories about a fourth-year nursing student who was paired with a nurse as their mentor who had just two months of experience. Asking nurses who barely know how to be a nurse to perform as an educator—that’s the staffing crisis that we are in.

This government has introduced legislation that has had a dramatic and drastic impact on nursing morale and the amount of people who have decided to leave the profession altogether. In fact, RNAO shares that 69% of nurses, of respondents, are choosing to leave the profession entirely, and 95% want to go into another field somewhere else.

There are stories about people who had been on a wait-list for seven days in home and community care. Another example is of a patient who needed daily wound care and had to wait 28 days to get their care. In fact, they had to turn to an emergency room.

Because there is a lack of a health human resources strategy from this government, it’s no wonder we’re in the crisis that we are in. People who are waiting for home care are left in no position but to go to an ER because they’re simply waiting far too long.

We talked to emergency room nurses who shared that they had upwards of 46 patients by 5 p.m. and they had nowhere to put people. We’re talking that the hallways were full; the closets were full. There were people who were waiting for care and there was simply no place to put them, because ERs, unfortunately, cannot turn people away from the health care they need. When they’re not able to get the home care in their community, they simply turn to an ER.

They also mentioned that the London Health Sciences Centre had recently posted that there was a 20-hour wait for people to be seen in emergency rooms, and, unfortunately, that’s not an accurate portrayal. They shared with us that it was up to 48 to 72 hours before people received the care they needed.

I urge this government to support this motion because we need a health human resources strategy to make sure that we’re responding to the health care needs of Ontarians immediately.

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.

Last week, the member for London North Centre and I met with RNAO’s Middlesex-Elgin chapter, and we listened to the nurses who attended that meeting. These were nurses who worked in home care, long-term care. They worked in emergency and pediatric emergency. They worked in the ICU. They worked offloading patients from ambulances. They worked in public health. It was a mix of experienced nurses, student nurses, nurse educators. They told us that they are exhausted, they are burned-out, they are done, and they have no faith that anything the government is going to do will help make a difference. They saw the growth of hallway medicine under the Liberals, and they have seen the weaponization of Bill 124, legislation that directly targets a predominantly female workforce and tells health care workers, tells nurses, that this government does not value them, does not respect them and does not care about the demoralization they feel after almost three years of a pandemic and the workload pressures, the stress and the violence that they face every day on their job.

Speaker, I hear daily from Londoners who contact my office who can’t find a family doctor, whose routine screening tests were cancelled, whose surgeries were postponed. I hear from worried parents who are reaching out to my office, asking me what is going to happen if their child becomes seriously ill and they have to take that child to a children’s hospital in London where there are waits of hours—hours-long—with a desperately ill child. Imagine how you would feel as a parent, knowing that if that child had to be admitted to an ICU bed and they’re over 14 years of age, it may be to an adult ICU bed or it may be to an ICU bed in another community altogether.

Speaker, we have heard the Minister of Health say that this surge was expected, that the overwhelming of pediatric emergency rooms is not a surprise to this government, that the number of children being ventilated is nothing to worry about, that they have a plan, and that plan, this government claims, is so good that no additional resources or measures were necessary in the fall economic statement.

We just heard the parliamentary assistant talk about the recruitment programs that this government has put in place. But I have news for this government: Investing public dollars to recruit workers who don’t stay in the health care profession won’t do a thing to shore up the health care workforce.

What we need to do is compensate them fairly. We need to improve their working conditions. We need to support them with appropriate mentorship programs, training programs, other programs. We need to repeal Bill 124. These are the measures that would really make a difference.

I call on this government to support the motion before us today, to consult with unions and health sector stakeholders to develop a multi-layer health care worker recruitment and retention incentive package that includes short-, medium- and long-term solutions. We need to do everything possible to recruit, retain and return health care workers.

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.