Like most of us, we have three kids. I have seven grandkids, six of them old enough to be in school, and I would say that they are—they’re wonderful; they’re mine, but they are just like everybody else. Kids in school, 20% of them will excel no matter what, if they’re online; 20% of them will struggle no matter what. They need that extra support. And the 60% in the middle, well, they do good in math but not in history etc.

When you look at this and you look at the government’s plan to give every parent $50, how will the 20% of kids who need this extra support, who need the tutoring to be able to achieve their full potential—we know how to support them. We know how to make them thrive and succeed, but they need that extra help. How is the 50 bucks going to help the 20% of kids who need support in order to be able to achieve their full potential?

It’s rather interesting, because I was also going to ask you about the South East Grey Community Health Centre, a community health centre—like all of them—where care is based on needs, not on ability to pay; where people who have complex needs can be taken care of by an interdisciplinary team. Not only do they have nurse practitioners, they also have social workers and they have nutritionists, and they all work together so that they can make people as healthy as they can and support them if they have complex needs.

I was happy to just hear you say that you support the model. There are about 20 communities in Ontario that have been waiting for a long time for a community health centre or a satellite of a community health centre. Would you help advocate so that your government funds those communities who have been waiting such a long time for a community health centre?

I have no problem building better care for patients, but we have to look at the link that was made right at the beginning of the throne speech, that our health care system should be there to support people based on their needs, not on their ability to pay. It does not exist to keep our province open.

So why does this link bother me? Do I want our province to be open? Absolutely. Some 20% of the small businesses in Nickel Belt closed or went bankrupt during the pandemic. Those businesses did nothing wrong. Those businesses did what the government told them to do. They closed down when the government told them do so, but yet there was no support for them to stay open. There was no support for them to make it to the other side of the pandemic. And 20% of the small businesses in Nickel Belt do not exist anymore through no fault of their own—that is, people that don’t have jobs anymore; that is, families that need to find other ways to support themselves; that is, businesses that have been there for three generations that are not there anymore. That means, whether you go to Place Bonaventure Mall in Chelmsford, or to the Hanmer mall, there are more empty places in the malls than there are businesses still open. Do I want our province to stay open? Yes, absolutely. I don’t want to lose any more businesses in Nickel Belt.

But I also want our health care system to be true to Canadian values. When Tommy Douglas brought us medicare, he made it clear that care will be based on need, not on ability to pay. This is a value that defines us as Canadians. This is a value that really distinguishes us from our friends to the south. In Canada, you get the care you need based on your health needs, not on your ability to pay. Whether you are a two-year-old, newborn or a 102-year-old person, you will get the care you need. But all of this is under threat right now, Speaker.

When we look at Bill 7 that the government introduced, where you will take away the right to consent from frail, elderly people needing long-term care, so that you could free up beds so that our hospitals allow our businesses to stay open? This is to put the burden of all of this on the shoulders of frail, elderly people. How, as a society, could we even contemplate doing things like this?

Do I want our hospitals to be there? Yes, absolutely. Do I want them to have enough beds for the care that we need? Yes, absolutely. Have I had it up to here with hallway health care? Yes. My hospital, Health Sciences North, has been full at over 120% every single month for the last three years, except for that little wee part there during COVID where they were allowed to stop everything. They’re still full. I didn’t look at the stats this morning, but yesterday they were at 124%. What does that mean? That means that every single bed is full. That means that the hallways on four north and four east have at least four beds in all of them. That mean that there is no more shower room—we have patients in there. That means that this big, ugly room beside the morgue in the basement of the hospital has at least eight patients in there, in beds with no bathroom, no call bell. This is what hallway health care looks like in northern Ontario, and I don’t want any of this.

But there is so much that we could do. First, invest in home care. Our home care system was privatized by the last Conservative government that was there. Remember, it was called the Common Sense Revolution. The private sector was going to deliver home care faster, better, cheaper than the public system. Fast-forward to 2022: Would anybody say that our home care system does a good job? Absolutely not. It fails more people than it helps, every single day.

I will give you some examples. I don’t have the right to share her name, but we’ll call her by her initials. D.R. has concerns regarding home care services for her husband, Mr. R. She has been trying to reach her care coordinator for two weeks. She leaves voicemails, but does not receive a call back. She had heard from a PSW from Bayshore that the hours of care for her husband will be cut from four hours a day to two and a half hours a day, because there is a lack of staffing.

Mr. R. just returned home from the hospital two weeks ago. He is quadriplegic and spends most of his days in bed. She wants her husband to have proper care at home; so does he. But with two and a half hours—when you’re quadriplegic, it requires quite a bit of care and requires the skill to be able to provide that care. There are very good PSWs that have been working with that family for a long time, but now her hours of care are being cut, because there are not enough PSWs to do the job.

We all know how to fix this. We have been told over and over again. How do you fix the shortage of PSWs in our home care system? Let me repeat it, Speaker: The government can, today, pass the law that we would all agree to this morning, to make 70% of jobs in the home care system permanent, full-time, well-paid, with benefits, sick days, a pension plan and a workload that people can handle—problem solved.

There are tens of thousands of PSWs that are good at what they do, that care for the people, that have the knowledge and the skill to care for a quadriplegic patient in his home who wants to stay with his family in his community. But if they work for home care, if they work for Bayshore, none of them have a permanent job, none of them have a full-time job, none of them get paid enough to be able to pay the rent and feed their kids. So rather than taking a shift with Bayshore, they will take a shift with Home Depot, with Giant Tiger, because Giant Tiger will pay them more than what they get when they work hard as a PSW.

In my riding, I serve 33 small, local communities in northeastern Ontario. The communities are far apart. They come to me and they show me—every two weeks they submit their mileage. They could have 800 kilometres of mileage. They could have 600 kilometres of mileage for what they do in a two-week period of time. Do they get paid? How long do you figure it takes to travel 800 kilometres on the not-so-good roads we have in northern Ontario? It takes hours and hours. They don’t get paid for that travel time. They get 34 cents per kilometre. You can go to Foleyet. There is one gas station, and gas is at $2.29. How far do you figure that 34 cents brings you? Not very far.

It is better to go do a shift at Giant Tiger at minimum wage than it is to care for Mr. R., who is quadriplegic and who needs home care. This is wrong. Why can we not respect PSWs? Why can we not respect the fact that 90% of people want to stay home, that we have tens of thousands of PSWs who are good at what they do, who want to care for people, who went to school to do this, but who cannot pay their rent and feed their kids if they work as a PSW in home care? Why can we not change this today? It would make such a huge difference.

Mr. R. will end up in the hospital, he will end up being labelled ALC, and he will end up in a long-term-care home an hour’s drive away from his family.

I can give you the example of—again, I don’t have permission to share her name, but we’ll call her G.B. Mr. B.’s wife is the primary caregiver at home. She called for assistance. Her husband receives home care, and she receives respite. Her husband has dementia. He’s diagnosed with Alzheimer’s and is on dialysis three days a week for his kidneys. She takes care of him most of the time, but she was receiving respite hours on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays—three hours three days a week. She decided to take her husband on a little holiday. It was summer, COVID was finally lifted; let’s go for a little holiday. When she returned, she realized that her home care had been cancelled. She has not received any respite care since then. She spoke to her care coordinator at the Home and Community Care Support Services and she is saying that there are not enough PSWs to reinstate her respite care.

She spoke to a PSW at Canadian Shield and she told her that there are a lot of PSWs available, but, again, they need to pay the rent and feed their kids and they will make more money working at Giant Tiger, Home Depot or Tim Hortons than they will—she is very disappointed. Nobody told her that if she was to take her husband on a little holiday, they were going to lose their respite care.

I have Mrs. C.K.: Mrs. K. reached out to our office with her concerns. She says that her care coordinator from Home and Community Care Support Services North East told her that she had too many home care hours and they were going to make some cuts because the guidelines had been changed. Mr. K. had been receiving home care since 2019.

She says that she received one hour in the morning and half an hour at night, which equalled 10 and a half hours per week. It’s for her, not for her husband. They help her dress, make her bed, bathe her, change her commode, wash her hair in the sink during the hours that they are there in the morning, and the half an hour at night is to change her commode and get her ready for bed. Now, she has one hour per day. The half hour has been cut off at night. All of this, she is told, is because of budget cuts and her care will be down to a minimum.

We all know what will happen, Speaker. This woman won’t be able to stay at home. Everybody needs to be washed. Everybody needs to sleep in their bed. You cannot sleep in a wheelchair; you will end up with a pressure ulcer on your butt, or anywhere else, and then you end up in the hospital. And then the doctor will say it’s not safe for you to go back home, and then you are labelled ALC. Then, apparently, you take up a bed in our hospital and you are not keeping our province open, because this is how this government looks at that.

I have another failure of home care here: Mrs. D. lives in Hanmer. Her husband broke his neck several years ago and he has slowly deteriorated. She sold their home and moved to something that would be more accessible to him, but he has been in the hospital following a fall. She wants to bring him back home. She moved to a place that will be easier for him. But there is no home care. He needs a lift to get out of bed and into his wheelchair to get around. He was sent to rehab for three months. Everybody feels that he would be ready to go back home, and there is no home care.

She has made an inquiry of her own. She found home care. She went and bought the equipment. She moved their home into a place that will be wheelchair-accessible so that her husband could come back home. But there is no PSW to provide the home care that her husband needs.

The hospital and the rehab says that with one hour a day, she would probably be able to manage having him at home. Think about this. For the sake of one hour with a PSW—most of them are paid $18 an hour—for the sake of the government investing $18 a day into this family—he is in the hospital. He has been labeled ALC in the hospital. It costs the taxpayers $500, $600 a day to keep him there. He will be transferred to a long-term-care home where the government will be investing about $187 a day—for the sake of $18 for one hour with a PSW to bring this man back home.

I can talk about Mrs. M.R. Mrs. M.R. lives in Whitefish in my riding. She is on home and community care support services and has a plan of care for a PSW to go to her house every day for an hour to help her dress, put her braces on etc. When she was discharged from the hospital, the care went pretty good for many years. Now, the PSWs, day after day, don’t show up. If there’s nobody to help her, then she is at very high risk of a fall because she needs help to put her leg braces on. When she talked to the scheduler at Bayshore, the scheduler at Bayshore told her that it will get worse before it gets better. This patient is getting worse. She has cancer. She is partially blind. She needs home care. Again, for the sake of one hour a day of a PSW coming to help, Mrs. M.R., who lives in Whitefish in my riding, is going to end up in the hospital, and she’s going to end up being labelled an ALC patient. She’s going to end up in a nursing home for the sake of one hour of a PSW a day.

I could keep going on and on, but I see that I have very little time left.

To keep our hospitals open, certainly, fix our home care system. It is very economical to keep people in their own home. This is what people want. The best quality of life is to be in your own home, with the people you love, in the neighbourhood you know, with the people who support you, with your circle of care. And yet, we have a privatized home care system that does not respect their PSWs, that cannot recruit and retain a stable workforce, which means that for the one hour a day of a PSW—I’ve given you three or four examples. I have pages and pages of examples all from my riding, but in every single one of our ridings it is the same story. We could keep all of those people safely at home if we fix our home care system rather than taking away their right to consent.

We could also do a whole lot to help our hospitals if we were to invest in community mental health. When we see where the investments are being made, in more in-patient mental health rehab—unfortunately, 90% of them who go to those beds will relapse because they don’t have the support in their community. We have billions of dollars coming from the federal government. Invest them into supporting people with mental health issues and addictions in their own homes so that they will not end up in the ER, in our hospitals.

There is lots that could be done to help make sure that our hospital system, our safety net in our health care system, is there when we need it. But taking away the right of elderly people to consent to their assessment for long-term care and taking away the right of frail, elderly people to consent to sharing their personal information and having people access their personal health information is not something in line with the values of Ontarians. We should run away from this and fix the part of our health care system that would keep our hospitals free.

Thank you for asking a question about home care. The solutions in home care are clear. To continue to invest into the for-profit companies that dominate our home care system, when there are no checks and balances, does not give us better home care.

To give us better home care, mandate permanent full-time—mandate 70% of jobs in home care to be permanent, full-time, well-paid, with benefits, sick days and pension plans, and the problem will be solved. You will make a huge difference. Tens of thousands of PSWs who presently work elsewhere will come back to the job that they love, to the job that they are good at doing.

By keeping all of those people in their homes, you free up beds in the hospitals. There are solutions that are within the government’s control to help free up beds in the hospitals. I hope you will do it.

If you share information with a physician, with a nurse, with a lab tech, with a physio or whatever, they are bound to keep that information secret. Nobody will know. The bill, Bill 7, takes away that right, takes away that bond. Now health care professionals will be able to access information without your consent—

We just came out of a pandemic. We have seen the difference between private, for-profit long-term-care homes, where two times or three times more people died than in not-for-profit. When you see the difference is so clear in the quality of care—it costs the exact same to the taxpayer to invest in a not-for-profit home as it does to invest in a for-profit home. Why not make sure that we get the best value for taxpayers’ money and invest in a not-for-profit long-term-care home, as opposed to what you’re doing?

My constituents in Nickel Belt continue to wait for this government to follow through on their commitment to provide affordable child care spaces—parents like Janelle, from Chelmsford in my riding. Janelle has had her child on the registry since April of last year—that’s 16 months ago—but she has yet to find a child care spot. This young woman travels and has applied to 10 different child care centres, yet she is still empty handed, her maternity leave ends in September, and she wants to go back to work, but cannot do that without child care for her baby.

K.G. lives in Hanmer and is a registered nurse. She has two young children on multiple wait-lists. She would accept driving to two different daycares, twice a day, every day so that she can get back to caring for patients as a nurse. Her maternity leave is done. She wants to get back to work, she is very much needed as a nurse, but she cannot go back to work until she finds child care for both of her children.

Yesterday the government stated, “Every job that sits unfilled hurts Ontario’s economy.” I agree, Speaker. But those are just two of the thousands of professional jobs across our province that are unfilled because this government won’t follow through on the commitment to deliver child care to the working parents of Ontario—talk about an easy solution that would help our health care system tremendously.

I seek unanimous consent to move a motion to allow an emergency debate on the health care crisis this afternoon during orders of the day.

Ma question est pour le premier ministre.

Every day over the last week has raised new concerns about the government’s plan for private health care. Today, we have a leaked copy of a poll from the government’s pollster of record, asking Ontarians whether they agree with the following statement: “I should be able to pay for my own health care to get better service in Ontario.”

I would like to put the same question to our Premier: Does the Premier think people should be able to pay their way to better health care in Ontario?