I rise today to speak on Bill 7, the More Homes, Better Care Act. I want to recognize the work of the many residents that have reached out to me: Kate Chung, Cassandra Ryan, the Advocacy Centre for the Elderly, the Ontario Health Coalition, health care professionals, caregivers and loved ones.

This bill gives hospitals more power to remove the elderly and the sick, and move them into a long-term-care home they do not want to go to, without their consent. This bill would allow hospitals and give them the right to charge up to $1,200 to $1,500 a day to a patient that does not move out of the hospital.

Let’s get a few facts straight: No one wants to stay in a hospital any longer than they have to, period. There are 38,000 people waiting for a long-term-care home in Ontario. The good homes are full. In my riding, we have Kensington Gardens. That home is full. The only long-term-care homes that do not have waiting lists are those that people do not want to move into. These are substandard homes. These are for-profit homes. These are homes where the building is aging, where people live four people to a room, where there’s not enough staff available to help people eat and to change them at a regular level or help them bathe. These are homes where basic standards are sometimes not maintained because this government has made the decision to not properly enforce the rules and have a sufficient number of inspectors go in to ensure those rules, those standards, are maintained. These are the homes that have had seniors suffer and die during the pandemic—nearly 5,000 seniors.

It is also a myth that patients in hospitals are waiting for a long-term-care-home slot. It is a myth that they are all waiting for a long-term-care-home slot. There are many people waiting to move into another type of hospital care, such as rehabilitation or mental health care, but they cannot move because these beds are full.

Hospitals don’t just provide acute care. Elderly people and disabled people—people in need of a hospital bed—should not be discriminated against, and I would like to thank Cassandra Ryan and Kate Chung for their very eloquent letters to me explaining that. These people have lived full lives. They’ve paid their taxes, they’ve raised their families, they’ve volunteered in their community, they’ve contributed to building Ontario. They should not be treated as a nuisance, or as undeserving, or as the reason why emergency rooms are somehow full. It is not ALC patients’ fault that Ontario’s hospitals have the fewest hospital beds per person of any province in Canada. It is not their fault. It is not their fault that nurses and health care workers in Ontario are leaving and quitting because they are not paid properly. And it is not their fault that hospitals are not provided with sufficient funding from this government to do what they need to do to care for the people of Ontario.

It was an honour to listen to my colleagues today speak about the solutions that experts and stakeholders and family members are advocating for, because the solutions are clear: Ontario needs to provide a holistic and kind solution to the health care crisis, which means addressing the staffing crisis by repealing Bill 124 and paying our health care workers properly. It means committing to increasing funding to home care—not for-profit home care, but home care that is provided so people can get their first choice, which is to stay at home. It means increasing caregiver allowances so family members can provide care to loved ones. And it means reforming the long-term-care-home model, moving away from a for-profit model where we warehouse our disabled, our sick and our elderly, and moving towards a long-term-care-home model where people are provided with the quality care they need so that they can lead good lives.

Bill 7 is not the direction that we need to go to. We have better solutions that are being proposed to us, and I urge this government to look at them and implement them instead of this.

I rise today with a deep feeling of frustration and disappointment that we’re debating third reading of Bill 7 without having had an opportunity to review this bill at committee, without having public input, and without having the opportunity for amendments. It’s not right for the vulnerable elderly in our province to pay the price for years of underinvestment in our health care system, especially after the last two years. After the last two years, where we’ve seen so many loved ones live in such tragic circumstances in our long-term-care homes, to now tell seniors—frail, elderly people—that we’re going to take away your rights, we’re going to force you to leave hospital without your consent if that’s what government chooses—we don’t have to approach it this way. We can fix the health care system and honour our elders at the same time.

It is true that we need better spaces for people in hospital who are alternate level of care, who would be better cared for at home or in a long-term-care home, but the reality is, if we’re going to provide that care, then we need to invest in that care. We need to invest in a better home and community care system. We need to ensure that we have proper staffing and those staff are paid well and recognized for things like their travel time so the elders who want to be cared for at home—and most would like to be cared for at home—can actually receive that care. We need to invest in better primary care that’s more accessible and available for elders who are being cared for at home. Finally, we need to invest in a long-term-care system that will prioritize care over profits, so that when those elders move to a long-term-care home, it actually is a home, a home that provides the level of care and dignity they deserve.

So, Speaker, how do we accomplish that? Well, you start by investing in the people who actually provide the care: the nurses, the PSWs and the front-line health care workers. For well over two years now those front-line health care workers have been overworked, underpaid and underappreciated. They have been saying over and over again, along with doctors and so many other health care experts, that we need to repeal Bill 124 so they can negotiate fair wages, fair benefits and better working conditions. Why don’t we start with that instead of having the government actually resist paying health care heroes as heroes?

Speaker, long-term-care administrators and advocates are saying, “Hey, we’re understaffed too.” So there could be some major unintended consequences to the provisions of Bill 7, especially if elders are moved far from family, friends and caregivers. I can’t tell you how many caregivers I’ve met in my own riding who spend hours caring for their loved ones. If they live hundreds of kilometres away from those loved ones, it will be incredibly difficult for them to be able to provide that additional care, which will actually put more pressure on our long-term-care system.

Speaker, as we speak, the Premier and the Prime Minister are meeting. We need the federal government to step up with more funding for health care, long-term care, mental health care and the social determinants of health, such as poverty and homelessness, but we also need a provincial government that’s actually going to spend those funds and flow them through to the systems that we need to support in this province, not underspend their health care budget by $1.8 billion, like what happened last year.

I believe there was an opportunity for us, if we could have had an opportunity at committee, to work together across party lines to deliver some solutions that will put seniors first and, unfortunately, Bill 7 as it’s written right now does not accomplish that. I encourage all members from all parties to stand up for the dignity of our elders and vote no on Bill 7.

That’s right. Almost every hospital that you see in this province was conceived of, thought of and built by a Conservative government.

And I forgot to mention how medium-sized hospitals—I thank some of the members in some of the smaller jurisdictions, who kept saying, “You know, the Liberals kept starving small and medium-sized hospitals. They kept starving them. They could hardly do anything.” Well, of course, we fixed that funding model too. I forgot to mention that. I almost forgot what I was talking about, because there are just so many good things that are happening.

But what is the bill ostensibly about? It is about looking at somebody who’s in a hospital—Madam Speaker, I’ve actually been there. I’ve been there. I’m not lucky enough to have had a parent, my own parent, that lived long enough to come even close to a long-term-care bed, but I have a father-in-law who did. He was discharged from the Markham-Stouffville alternate-level-of-care centre at the old Humber Valley site—at 400 and Steeles, I think, or something like that.

He didn’t want to go at first. He didn’t want to go. Do you know why he didn’t want to go? It wasn’t because of the distance, but he just thought that that meant too much of a difference, a change for him. You know, “I can’t be on my own anymore and I worry about it.” Once he got there and saw how good the care was in comparison to a hospital, he was grateful for the opportunity that he had to go there. He wasn’t so excited about transitioning out, but we saw what happened. As a family, we saw what happened: He started to do better. He started to thrive. He came back. He came back to the point where he could live on his own again. And I’m glad the member from Niagara Falls is almost finished reading the bill, because he seems to be agreeing with some of this now. He came back. But that’s what we are offering.

The member for Toronto Centre talked about—and I was at the Rekai Centre just a couple of days ago. It is a wonderful place. Not-for-profits are wonderful. Our municipal homes are wonderful. Our for-profit homes are wonderful. What has not always been wonderful is the regulations that they, the Liberals and the NDP, failed to put in place to ensure that the quality of care was equalized among all sectors. We did that. But I was at the Rekai Centre, and she is correct: It’s a great facility. Many members of the LGBT community are now transitioning into that home. It is a home of preferred choice.

But the member talks about how if somebody is in ALC—and if I’m wrong, the member can correct me, if I get it wrong—we won’t be able to address their specific needs. But again, that is incorrect. It’s incorrect. It’s not—I’ll choose my words carefully. It’s incorrect. Why? Because of a couple of things. First of all, nobody can be discharged to a home that doesn’t have the staffing. It’s part of the Fixing Long-Term Care Act. So when they talk about how there are not going to be enough staff, that’s actually incorrect; the law doesn’t allow that to happen.

But part of why we are doing this, part of the rationale for consent, part of the rationale to look at a patient’s needs is so that we know that before we offer a facility that is not a preferred choice, we can ask: “This is what this patient, who is discharged from a hospital, needs. Can you cover this person’s needs?” Whether it is cultural, whether it is, as I’ve said, dialysis, or many of the patients in hospital have dementia, they need specialized care. We can ask, “Can you handle that?” And they will say to us, yes or no. If it’s a no, then we’ll say, “What do you need in order to handle the person we want to send to you for better care?” They may say, in the case of somebody with dementia, “We need additional resources from behavioural services Ontario to ensure that there’s an attendant who can work with the patient.” They may say, “We need a special diet for the patient.” They may say, “We need larger beds for bariatric patients.” They may say, “We need kidney dialysis.” And there’s funding in place to ensure that that happens—funding that doesn’t exist now but that will exist because of this bill. It is matching up the needs of the patient with the resident—the person who will become a resident. So we don’t have to ship people off to get dialysis.

Who would get up in this place and advocate for a system that they know is not in the best interests of the patient?

What we’ve heard from the opposition today is ludicrous—that, somehow, offering a better quality of care to somebody is going to make them give up. My father-in-law didn’t give up because he was asked to go somewhere else. He ended up thriving. And that is what we are trying to accomplish with this bill.

At the same time, it is unacceptable—the member from Niagara Falls talked about how Ontario is a rich province—that if I have to bring my child to an emergency room, or if you have to bring your grandchild, your child, a parent, a loved one, that they have to wait, and that if they need to be put into a hospital, there’s not a bed available. Why? Because we have people there who aren’t being treated in the best possible way. It doesn’t serve the needs of the person who’s waiting. It doesn’t serve the needs of the person who wants or needs a room. And we can do it better.

The worst part is, the NDP are arguing for a reduced level of care. They are arguing to treat our seniors—because that’s what this bill is talking about—like less, that they don’t deserve the same quality of care that somebody else gets. I think that’s wrong. That’s why we’ve made the investments that we’re making. That’s why the bill does what it does. That’s why it makes the extra investments. Their lies, their argument, everything that they say runs counter to what is best for the patient, but what it is best for is the status quo and the people they’re more interested in—because, I would submit to you, Madam Speaker, it’s not the patient who, as my parliamentary assistant said, wants to become a resident, wants to have a home; a patient who will get treatment, who will get care in a long-term-care home while waiting, if they’re asked to move, at the top of the waiting list for their home or preferred choice.

Better care in your community—close to your family, close to your spouse, close to your caregivers, while waiting at the top of the list for your preferred choice. I think it’s a choice that Ontarians understand is in the best interests of the people of the province of Ontario.