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.

It was a real pleasure for me to meet with the nurse practitioners yesterday and hear directly about how an innovation that, frankly, wasn’t in existence in previous years has been such an integral part of our medicine and health care system.

I often talk about how it is critical that we have regional health teams that work together, that coordinate that care no matter—from diagnosis through to treatment and, ultimately, palliative, if that is necessary.

It is heartening to hear the member opposite acknowledge that innovations, like nurse practitioner-led clinics, are an important part of how we can assist patients in the province of Ontario.

We will absolutely, as I said yesterday, continue to expand that model because we see it working very valuably.

I will repeat what I’ve said. When we have these innovative programs that are working, that are providing care in our neighbourhoods, in our communities, we obviously want to embrace that and endorse it. It’s why Ontario health teams are such an important model that ensures individual organizations are working together to treat the patient first and foremost—it’s not about stand-alone operations; it’s about ensuring our Ontario health teams are doing the appropriate care and coordinating that care around patients. We will continue that work because we know it’s working.

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.

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.

This is about health care, and there are often times when members of the opposite side won’t listen to us, so I’m going to read some letters that I have about the real crisis in health care. I’m going to ask my colleague to let me know when I start running out of time.

The first one is from an RN: “I am a registered nurse in the province of Ontario and I do have a deep appreciation of the current situation in our diverse sectors of health care. I am reaching out this afternoon, not as a nurse but as a very concerned patient currently in the system. Last summer I was diagnosed with bilateral pulmonary embolisms from which I almost died.

“During this hospital stay, I was made to wait 24 hours in the emergency department as no critical care beds were available.

“While I survived this ordeal, I am still not fully recovered and need further testing done and possibly surgery to remove the blood clots in both of my lungs.

“I had to wait at least a month to have a CT scan of my lungs.

“My biggest concern at this time is that I will need surgical intervention that cannot be done close to home. I will need to travel to southern Ontario for this procedure.

“With the current state of our health care system, how long will this be?

“How many times will this procedure be cancelled and rebooked due to a lack of physicians and nurses?

“Will I need to pay for the procedure and for any further diagnostic tests that I my need?

“I cannot afford to pay for expensive procedures and test if the” Conservative “government moves ahead with privatization of our health care system.

“While all of this was happening, I was also laid off from my full-time job. I am only able to find part-time work and therefore I have no benefits, no sick time, and I must pay out of pocket for medications, which total roughly $400 every three months.

“I am having to make the hard choice to remain on my medications and not be able to purchase enough groceries. At times, I have to deny myself meals in order to pay for medications and maintain my household expenses.

“Please help not only myself, but the many ... patients who are in similar situations.

“When will” the Premier and the Minister of Health “realize that our system is in crisis now and this crisis will not improve unless Bill 124 is repealed and they are willing to listen to the people who are currently facing such challenges?

“The plan to privatize the health care system is not the solution.”

Karen is an RPN. She reached out to me.

“I am a constituent in your riding of Sudbury.

“I am ... one of Ontario’s 50,000 registered practical nurses (RPNs) who has been working on the front lines of this pandemic, providing critically needed care for the people in your community. I am writing today to share my concerns that RPNs continue to be undervalued for the important care we provide, despite going above and beyond the call of duty.

“Ontario’s RPNs are college-educated, regulated nurses who combine nursing skill, knowledge and judgment to deliver exceptional care....

“I work alongside RNs and perform the same care, and am paid considerably less....

“Though the RPN role is much more similar to our registered nurse (RN) colleagues, our compensation continues to be more closely aligned with personal support workers (PSWs)....

“RPNs are continuing to be squeezed by growing workloads as they care for an increasingly complex patient and resident population, while facing stagnant wages. We have also seen inflation grow to over 4.5%”—higher since she wrote this. “I am paying more for gas, groceries, insurance as well paying my licensure and mandated liability insurance through WeRPN. This is over $700 per year.

“More and more nurses are considering leaving the profession at a time when we need them most. As my elected official, I am urging you to take action to recognize the extremely challenging realities that RPNs like myself are facing.... As a first step, I am asking that the government take immediate steps to increase the wages of RPNs to align with the current realities of their role.”

I am asking on behalf of her for the government to repeal Bill 124.

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.

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.

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.