Earlier this year I was proud to welcome the minister to my riding of Mississauga Centre for a wonderful announcement at the Saint Mary and Saint Athanasius Coptic church. Yes, indeed, we announced a brand new long-term-care home, which will service the Coptic community, including for the first time in the Arabic language. Further to that, we have also announced a Muslim long-term-care home through the Muslim Welfare Centre in Mississauga, in addition to our francophone strategy, which we were so proud to announce last year.

Can the minister please tell us why linguistically and culturally appropriate care is so important in the province of Ontario?

Tomorrow, the people of Ukraine will be commemorating the 31st anniversary of independence. Speaker, this independence day is like no other. For me, as a Polish Canadian, it is a stark reminder that freedom and independence are fought through the sacrifices of brave men and women.

Speaker, my riding of Mississauga Centre is home to many Ukrainian Canadians who, through their hard work, strong work ethic, dedication and commitment, have contributed to the cultural, social and economic fabric of Ontario. Ontario would not be the same without the entrepreneurs like the Horodynsky family, athletes like Wayne Gretzky or Tyler Bozak, or politicians like Ernie Eves.

Mississauga is home to over 30,000 Ukrainian Canadians, and we are proud to welcome several dozens of new families every week. Whether it is St. Mary’s Catholic church, the Mississauga Ukrainian Festival, the Barvinok dance ensemble, St. Sofia school, the UCC, or Business Woman PRO Canada, Mississauga has many flagship organizations ensuring the celebration and preservation of Ukrainian heritage and culture.

I was happy to recently welcome Minister McNaughton to Mississauga for a fruitful round-table discussion with newcomer families. We discussed our firm commitment to support newcomers from Ukraine with access to education, health care and other vital services.

I would also like to take a moment to thank my campaign volunteers of Ukrainian heritage: Natalya Halich, Svitlana Yanchynska, Nadiya Yashan, Liliya, Maryszka, Vira and Viktoria. And I would like to wish them a meaningful and commemorative Ukrainian Independence Day. Slava Ukraini.

I’d like to welcome some very special guests this morning: all the way from Poland, my godmother Kasia, her daughters Ola and Gabi; from British Columbia, my brother Jakub with his girlfriend Carlie; and, of course, endearingly known by our caucus as the perogy queen, my mom Anna Kusendova. Welcome to Queen’s Park.

With more than 370,000 jobs going unfilled across the province, we need to expand our workforce to meet the vital market needs to get workers building our roads, highways, schools and hospitals. Newcomers are crucial to growing our economy and building a strong future for us all. As my good friend from Mississauga–Malton had said, jobs need people and people need jobs.

We know that Ontario is a destination that has always been attractive for people looking for a bright economic future, including my very own family when we immigrated 22 years ago. But we also know that we are facing a global race for talent as people all around the world are searching for a better place to build a life and raise a family.

Can the Minister of Labour, Immigration, Training and Skills Development share what our government is doing to make Ontario a more competitive jurisdiction to help bring people to our province and address the ongoing skilled job shortages?

Ontario deserves to be a part of a fair system, to have a bigger say in how we address the jobs and skills gap in our province. It is not right that Ontario only has a say in less than 5% of immigration applications, while other provinces have nearly 50% oversight in application approvals. It is vital that we address this now and fix the growing backlog.

Skilled individuals are in demand all over the world. Right now, when Canada is short countless people for jobs in the skilled trades, the Federal Skilled Trades Program has a processing time of 47 months, which is nearly four years. Can you imagine?

Can the minister please explain more about the advocacy from Ontario and the other provinces regarding fixing the immigration approval system and ensuring that we can bring more skilled workers to meet our growing needs?

I thank the member for Mississauga–Lakeshore for sharing his time today. I am very glad that he mentioned the accelerated build on Speakman Drive. This is a project that all six Mississauga MPPs are very proud to support. The member and I are working very hard to ensure that, for the very first time in the region of Peel, there will be some long-term-care beds available to also service our francophone population.

It is indeed an honour to rise today and speak to Bill 7, More Beds, Better Care Act. I would like to take this opportunity to congratulate the Minister of Long-Term Care on the work that he has been doing since taking over this portfolio.

Before I dive into this bill as well as speak to our five-pillar plan to stay open, I would like to lay down some context and highlight some of the tremendous and unprecedented work and investments we have made in long-term care during our first mandate.

The Fixing Long-Term Care Act instilled four hours of direct patient care per resident per day, leading the country in legislating such high standards of care. This is an increase from 2.75 hours, on average, to four hours—an increase of 42%. Conversely, the previous Liberal government increased the direct care to residents by only 21 minutes from 2009 to 2018—an increase of only 12% over nine years, or about two minutes per year. Speaker, two minutes per year. I think you and I can both agree that our residents deserve much better.

We are also hiring 27,000 more health care workers into the system to live up to this four hours of care standard. We will do this over time, of course, in tranches, by investing $270 million last fiscal year, $673 million this fiscal year, $1.25 billion in 2023-24 and $1.82 billion in 2024-25.

We are also offering free education to 16,000 PSWs, who have taken these courses and are starting to enter the workforce currently. We have made the PSW wage increase permanent, from $15 to $18.

We have also committed to building 30,000 long-term-care beds over 10 years through accelerated build projects such as the one on Speakman Drive in Mississauga.

And we have committed ourselves to linguistically and culturally appropriate care, some examples of which include the Muslim Welfare Centre we recently announced with our members in Mississauga, as well as the Coptic home in Mississauga, through Virgin Mary and St. Athanasius church, which will provide for the first time in the history of Ontario long-term-care services available in the Arabic language.

I’m also, of course, very, very proud of our francophone strategy, which we announced last year, which saw 777 new and renovated beds for our Franco-Ontarian population. For the very first time in Ontario, we are building a francophone long-term-care home right here in Toronto, with 256 projected beds. These underserviced and equity-seeking populations will now, for the first time, have access to care, here in Toronto—par et pour les francophones.

An example of this incredible work is the Foyer Richelieu. I had the opportunity, recently, to meet with the mayor of Welland, Frank Campion, to discuss the incredible projects that are happening there under the leadership of Foyer Richelieu and Mr. Sean Keays.

All of these actions taken by our government are not just lip service. Let me speak a little bit about what these actions mean on a practical, human level.

I never had the opportunity to work in long-term care; however, I did work at the Bickle site of the Toronto rehabilitation centre as a nursing student, where the staffing and care models resemble long-term care. Residents were staying there for a prolonged period of time to seek complex continuing care and geriatric rehabilitation and dialysis. A team of nurses, nurse practitioners and PSWs were taking care of residents to overcome challenges of disability, injury, illness or age-related conditions, to live active, healthier and more independent lives. I was happy to be an addition to this team as a nursing student, to help these patients get better, to be able to hopefully transition safely back home from patients to residents.

Due to limited time, I remember rushing with my preceptor through the morning routine, which began at 7:30 a.m. with a report from the night shift, ensuring that all of our patients are bathed, changed, have gone to the bathroom and set up in their chair for breakfast. Next was the race through breakfast. Mrs. Jones needed her toast to be buttered and cut into small pieces, and orange juice to be opened within arm’s reach. Mr. Smith was getting total parenteral nutrition and needed his pump primed and bag hung and run properly. Mrs. Brown needed to be fed under supervision from start to finish to avoid any choking hazards, and so on until all of our patients were fed.

Next came medication time—the dreaded 10 a.m. rush. Racing against the clock, first pulling all of our medications from the med stations for all of our patients at the same time, ensuring no med errors were made, then crushing the pills that needed to be crushed, again for swallowing ease, then pulling our injections like insulin and doing point-of-care sugar tests, and finally making the rounds with all of these medications prepped in our cart, ensuring we administered the right medication to the right patient, at the right time, at the right dose, through the right route. Then came our mobilization activities, which included fitness, rehabilitation, occupational therapy or cognitive activities, getting each patient ready and transferred to the right room. We are now at about 11:30 a.m., and my preceptor and I are sweating from all the running around, without having had the chance to take a coffee break or go to the bathroom or simply to pause and take a breath.

Speaker, why am I painting this picture? Because I strongly believe that had we had, back then, four hours of direct, hands-on care per resident, which would mean more staff—on average 25 more PSWs, 12 more RPNs, or six more RNs per home of 160 residents—we would have had the ability to spend more time with each resident, giving them the dignity and, at the most simple humanistic level, more time to chat about their grandchildren, to bring them their favourite flavour of pudding or take five minutes to play cards or board games. To these seniors, it is the smallest things that make the most difference, like asking them what flavour of pudding they like, and giving them that small level of autonomy to decide for themselves. And I truly and wholeheartedly believe that the Fixing Long-Term Care Act will allow that extra time for health care providers to turn patients to residents and facilities into homes.

Speaker, with my remaining time I would like to address some of the pillars of Bill 7, More Beds, Better Care Act, 2022. The bill, if passed, will enable the transition of patients who no longer require treatment in hospital into long-term care. Currently there are almost 5,000 alternate-level-of-care patients, with about 39% of them waiting for long-term care—5,000 patients, Speaker. That is the equivalent of 11 large community hospitals. This is a staggering number. To ease off the pressures of our emergency rooms and acute care and patient units, and to allow for surgeries to go back to pre-pandemic levels, we simply must make the room. The status quo will simply no longer be acceptable.

You know, Speaker, I’m having trouble understanding the members opposite. On one hand, they are sounding the alarm on the health care crisis with long wait times in the ERs, long wait-lists to access surgeries and diagnostic imaging. But on the other hand, when we bring outside-of-the-box, innovative and very practical solutions to make room for around 2,400 acute care beds, all we hear from the opposition is “no, no and no.”

Speaker, the member from Nickle Belt said that people do not like to be institutionalized, and I could not agree more. Patients do not like to be staying in sterile hospital environments with bells and alarms sounding at all times of day and night. Hospitals have simply not been set up for patients to stay for months at a time—up to two years. Our long-term-care homes provide more home-like environments with the proper social and recreational programming, in addition to the new services like bariatric, behavioural and diagnostic services in long-term care, which our government is funding with an investment of $37 million.

In conclusion, Speaker, these are just some of the actions our government is taking to fix long-term care and build more beds and better care.

I’m glad the member asked the question, because she wasn’t here during the last session of Parliament, and so I’ll take this opportunity to educate the member on how much we as a government have done to bolster the nursing profession.

For one, we have granted colleges stand-alone programs where students can now decide to obtain their bachelor of nursing at our regional colleges, like Humber College, or La Cité for our francophone nurses.

We have introduced the Learn and Stay program, where, for the first time in the history of Ontario, the government will be paying for the entire tuition costs, textbooks and other fees for our nurses who actually commit to staying in rural and underserviced areas for two years.

We have increased the nursing student enrolment by about 19%, and we are getting more internationally trained nurses into the workforce, with CNO recently sending a press release about a historic ground-breaking amount of I believe about 4,000 new IENs entering into our workforce right now.

So we are doing a lot to bolster our nursing workforce, and I’m glad that member asked the question.

You know, Speaker, when I as a nurse go in and give out my medications to the right patients at the right time at the right dose, I think as well of our current health care ecosystem. We need to be providing the right care in the right place. Simply, alternate-level-of-care patients who are stabilized and well enough to be transferred into long-term-care facilities are taking away valuable resources from other acute care patients: those heart attack patients, those stroke patients who need those beds. The status quo is not working, and that is why we are providing tangible and practical solutions.

Madame la Présidente, imaginez une autre conversation, où M^me Smith arrive avec une douleur thoracique : « Madame Smith, vous avez besoin d’une chirurgie cardiaque. Madame Smith, vous avez besoin d’un lit de réadaptation cardiaque. Mais, madame Smith, on n’a pas de lit dans cette unité—on a juste un lit dans le couloir—car on doit attendre une décharge de l’hôpital des autres patients. »

Aujourd’hui en Ontario actuellement, il y a 5 000 patients—c’est l’équivalent de 11 hôpitaux communautaires—qui devraient être soignés pas dans les hôpitaux.

So my question to the member, if he opposes this policy: Are you suggesting that seniors are better off in institutionalized hospital-like settings—in the hallways, perhaps—rather in the home-like environment that long-term care offers?