I’ve been listening to this debate in the House for the last few days. The thing that seniors are most concerned about is that they will be forcibly transferred to long-term-care homes against their will. And the government keeps responding with diversions, with insults to the NDP—“Oh, you haven’t read the bill. There’s nothing in there about consent.”

I’ve read the bill. The bill is right here, and I can see in this bill that it says “certain actions” are “to be carried out without the consent of these patients.... The actions cannot be performed without first making reasonable efforts to obtain the patient’s consent.” There’s a list of 13 actions that can be taken without the patient’s consent. That’s what this bill is about. It also says—and I think this is the most terrifying statement for seniors in the province of Ontario—“The section does not authorize the use of restraints in order to carry out the actions or the physical transfer of an ALC patient to a long-term-care home without their consent.” In other words, they set the bar at they will not handcuff seniors who are in hospital beds and refuse to be transferred, but they will do everything up to that.

So my question to this speaker is—

Thank you to the member from Thunder Bay–Superior North for your comments. You made a very clear and fact-based argument that this government has been deliberately underfunding our public health care system in order to create a crisis in order to privatize it, just like they privatized our long-term-care system—

Interjections.

Point of order.

They don’t like being faced with the truth.

I appreciate the comments from the member for Kitchener–Conestoga. But his history is selective, because the NDP government—the last time we were in power, we actually brought in a seniors’ bill of rights, we brought in mandated residents’ councils in all long-term-care homes to represent the rights of residents, and we also mandated hours of care and also inspections. The Conservative government that came in in 1995 stripped all of that away, including the seniors’ bill of rights.

This bill goes even further. This bill is about “without consent.” It uses the term “without consent” six times, and it has a list. Some 20% of the text of this bill is a list of 13 items or things that this government is empowering people to do without the consent of the resident seniors. So will this member admit that his government is not at all interested in protecting the rights of seniors in long-term-care homes?