Thank you to my colleagues opposite for your contributions to this debate. I am excited to talk about this today. I wanted to start by saying that I am really proud of our government, and particularly our government’s health care recruitment, retention and training strategy, which has been in place now throughout the pandemic, and we keep adding and enhancing it. We have short-, medium- and long-term solutions to recruit, retain and train our health care workers, and I am proud that we brought in the elements of that strategy at the beginning of the pandemic and ongoing throughout our term in office. So I am really excited to have an opportunity to speak today about the investments in our health human resources and our health human resource recruitment, retention and training strategy—the largest of its kind in Ontario’s history and probably the largest of its kind across Canada, given that Ontario is a big part of Canada.

First off, I want to reiterate how I am amazed every day by the ongoing, remarkable commitments, dedication etc. of all of our health care workers, all of our health care providers, to give every Ontarian the best care possible, often under trying circumstances. They do that every day and I think we all owe them at least a little applause for that, because they do such a great job.

But I can certainly tell you that, from the outset of the COVID-19 pandemic, our government has been taking deliberate action on a health human resources recruitment, retention and training initiative that is, as I said, the largest of its kind. We’ve done everything we can to meet the health needs of Ontarians, and our commitment to that goal has not wavered in any way. We have worked and we will continue to work tirelessly to ensure that Ontarians’ health workforce is supported, equipped and able to respond to the needs of patients across our health care system.

Since the beginning of the pandemic, programs launched by our government have already added over 12,000 health care professionals to the system, including acute care settings, including long-term-care homes and including our home and community care settings that help to preserve hospital capacity, and we’re still doing more of that. After our initial work to create additional capacity through the Ontario matching portal, we invested $52.5 million to recruit, retain and support over 3,700 health care workers and caregivers, to ensure continuity of safe care for patients and long-term-care residents in the province.

In addition to the work we’ve done to increase the supply of health care workers to the province, we have worked to support and retain our existing workforce. We introduced temporary pandemic pay as a measure to recognize the dedication and the long hours of working to contain the COVID-19 outbreak. We introduced that, and Ontario’s pandemic pay program is one of the largest of its kind in the country, and it’s unprecedented in the province’s history. Under that, over 375,000 of Ontario’s front-line workers are receiving or have already received pandemic pay, of which over 225,000 are in the health care sector. On average, a nurse receiving pandemic pay received $12,000—on average, each nurse—of temporary pandemic pay during the period of the heart of the pandemic. From, say, March 2020 to March 2022, they received that $12,000 extra in temporary pandemic pay.

And the government has continued to invest in Ontario’s health care workforce. Since October 1, 2020, the government invested more than $1.3 billion to provide a temporary wage enhancement to more than 158,000 personal support workers and direct support workers providing publicly funded services in hospitals, long-term-care homes, home and community care, and social services. We’re now investing $2.8 billion over the next three years to make this temporary wage-enhancement program permanent.

In February 2022, to retain nurses across the health care sector and to stabilize the current nursing workforce, the government announced that it would invest, over two years, $764 million to provide Ontario’s nurses with a retention incentive of up to $5,000 per nurse. Taken together, then, during the period from March 2020 to March 2022, the average nurse in Ontario received $12,000 in pandemic pay and $5,000 in a retention incentive, for a total of $17,000 extra during that period of time—which, of course, they earned, because they all were working so hard, but this is important to recognize, that that was during that period of time.

In the summer of 2020, our fall preparedness plan invested $52.5 million to recruit, retain and support over 3,700 health care workers and caregivers, to ensure continuity of safe care for patients and long-term-care residents. Amongst other things, we supported the Nursing Graduate Guarantee program, providing nursing graduates, registered nurses and registered practical nurses in Ontario with temporary full-time employment above staffing complement, to support their successful transition to practice and to full-time employment. The program provides 20 weeks of funding for each new nurse approved to participate in the program, and includes 12 weeks of funding for the nurses’ transition-to-practice period and eight weeks of funding to reinvest in existing front-line nurses and their professional development.

In 2021-22, more than 1,500 new nurses were matched to employers through the Nursing Graduate Guarantee program. So far, in 2022-23, more than 1,200 nurses were matched to employers through the Nursing Graduate Guarantee program.

The plan also supported the community commitment for nurses, which offers registered nurses, registered practical nurses or nurse practitioners a $10,000 incentive in return for a one-year commitment to practise in a hospital, long-term-care home or home and community care agency in high need.

While COVID-19 has been a testing time for the system and for all of us, the PSW return-of-service program and the Community Commitment Program for Nurses are examples of programs that will be instrumental to us in the future as we continue to work to distribute the workforce effectively, placing our precious resources where system gaps appear or where the demands are the greatest. We hope to place up to 3,000 nurses in areas of need through the program ever the next two years. Over 600 nurses have already been placed with employers through the program since it relaunched in May 2022, and the government is supporting important actions to attract our new nurses to where they are needed most in the province.

Additionally, the government has announced the new Learn and Stay program. Starting in the spring of 2023, up to 2,500 eligible post-secondary students who enrol in priority programs, such as nursing and paramedic and work in underserved communities in the region where they studied after graduation, will be eligible for grant funding.

I know the young pages around here are listening intently because they can see there’s some good opportunities in health care in Ontario.

Certainly our physician workforce needs to grow too, so that we can continue to meet demands in the system. In March 2022, the government announced a significant expansion of medical school education in Ontario—so pages, listen up; this could be you—adding 160 undergraduate seats and 295 postgraduate positions over the next five years. This is the largest expansion of undergraduate and postgraduate education in over 10 years. The expansion aims to increase access to family and specialty physicians all across the province. Training more doctors will ensure that Ontarians can access the health care they need, when they need it and wherever they may live.

Internationally educated health care providers are a large and important part of our health care workforce that has been neglected for many years, but we’re fixing that. This government is taking action to fix that. That’s why we’ve got lots of expanded opportunities for internationally educated providers across the province, including our supervised practice experience partnership program, which provides internationally educated nurses the opportunity to achieve their evidence-of-practice and language proficiency requirements to obtain their nursing designation. As of November 4, 2022, over 1,700 internationally educated nurses are actively enrolled in that program, and ever 900 have achieved their registration to practise through this program since it launched in January of this year.

That probably has been plaguing Ontario’s health system for years and has never been addressed until now. It is this government, fronted by a Premier who cares very, very much and a health minister who is willing to consider all options, that we’ve come up with these solutions, and we’re making a real difference for immigrant communities who come here with lots of talent and want to apply them, and we need them to work in our health workforce. So I’m so glad that we’ve managed to get that done. That is a serious plan to address our health human resource needs.

We are also approving regulation changes, including internationally educated nurses to register in temporary class and begin working sooner as they go through their full registration. As the pandemic has unfolded, of course, the government has recognized mental health challenges faced by our health workforce. In response, because we have a Premier who cares so much, we have invested a continuum of supports for health care workers, including in-person and virtual supports, with funding of $3.8 million in 2021-22 and $8.7 million in 2022-23.

These investments support existing and expanded mental health and addiction supports for our health care workers whose mental health has been adversely impacted by COVID-19 and workplace and occupational stress.

I find it interesting that the members opposite have chosen to highlight some of the challenges our health care system is facing without acknowledging the role that they played for 15 years.

Speaker, for years Ontario has been facing a rising number of individuals in the province without access to primary care physicians. After cuts to residency programs and caps on medical school spaces from the previous government, it’s our government with a Premier who really cares and wants to do something about it and is looking for solutions that is putting forward those solutions.

In the 2012 Auditor General’s report on health human resources, it was revealed that northern Ontario had a shortage of 200 physicians, or 40,000 hours of care, and yet little was done. And that was 2012. I know the member from Mushkegowuk is concerned about the lack of access in his community. These things existed in 2012, and yet, when the members opposite held the balance of power, when the NDP held the balance of power, they did nothing to solve this problem.

It’s important to note that at that time there was a minority Liberal government supported by the members of the NDP, many of whom are the same members here today complaining that nothing was done.

Interjections.