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.

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.

It’s my honour to stand in support of our NDP opposition motion calling for a health staffing shortage strategy so we can recruit, retain and respect—and pay, quite frankly—HCWs, who are supporting our community, supporting those in St. Paul’s and across Ontario.

Let me be clear: Any new beds or hospitals this government has promised do not mean anything without the staff, without the front-line health care workers, in place—not burnt-out, not stressed out, not sick themselves—there to do the caring work.

In order for the Conservative government to do what they need to do, they must repeal Bill 124, a wage-suppressing bill, a bill that takes away workers’ collective bargaining rights. And frankly, these workers are predominantly women and BIPOC folks, as I have said over and over. Bill 124 is driving our front-line health care heroes, our workers, angels—whatever you want to call them—out of the profession.

We need to ensure that internationally trained professionals can enter the workforce. The Conservative government had a chance to support the member from Scarborough Southwest’s legislation, and they chose not to. The government has had opportunities to support the member from Sudbury’s PMB to raise the wage floor for hard-working PSWs so they can simply make a livable income.

The government is not listening. The impact of them not listening means that our ERs are closing down. Children are being turned away. Parents like Lisa, a mom in my riding—she has pulled her 15-year-old daughter from school because the risk of her contracting COVID in a mostly unmasked classroom, thanks to the Premier, is too high and life-threatening given her lifelong cardiac and respiratory medical complications. If this 15-year-old needs service, she will be triaged into an adult facility, because there’s no space in child ICUs.

In the Niagara region: Myself and the MPP for St. Catharines wrote to the Minister of Health in September about the crisis happening there with sexual assault survivors who cannot access kits, because, frankly, there aren’t enough specialized staff, the sexual assault nurse examiners, to administer those kits. September 29—I’ve got the letter right here to the Minister of Health; no response. We need a response.

This government needs to give health care workers 10 paid sick days so they can actually heal and stay in the profession when they’re sick.

And finally, Speaker, they must end the scheme—because this is a scheme. Their Christmas wish is to privatize health care, and there isn’t a single Ontarian who is on board with that and neither are any of our health care workers. The government needs to create a health care strategy to keep our front-line health care workers on the job, happy, respected, paid and protected.

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.

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.