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.