My question to our member here is specifically with respect to the comments she raised. Clearly, this plan was being developed even prior to the election, but unfortunately I don’t think we actually heard much about this plan during the election. So I’m just very curious, considering this government’s record, especially when it comes to private long-term-care facilities, contracting out and deregulation, what does this member foresee happening in the future, should the bill go ahead without any substantial amendments or improvements?

I recognize the member from Mississauga Centre.

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 want to thank the member for that question, on the consent issue as well.

Yes, we have to free up these hospital spots right now because we are looking at a flu season that is happening further ahead. But we wouldn’t have to be doing this if, from 2011 to 2018, they had built more long-term-care beds. The previous government only built 611 beds throughout this whole province of Ontario. We’re building 632 just in my riding in one location alone, on an accelerated build.

We have to continue doing this throughout the province of Ontario to help our seniors get into homes where they can get four hours of care and so they can be treated with dignity. That’s what we’re doing as a government here in Ontario.

We have to free up hospital spots as well because we have to do surgeries that have been backlogged for the last couple of years during the pandemic, people who need heart surgeries and stroke treatment as well as ICU treatment. We have to work together with our long-term care and our hospitals to move forward in the province of Ontario.

Thank you to the members across the floor for your comments on this bill. Recently, I had the opportunity to meet with nurses from ONA Local 83 of the Ottawa Hospital and ONA Local 84 of the Queensway Carleton Hospital about the health care crisis in Ottawa. We discussed the fact that there are beds available in Ottawa hospitals even though there are patients waiting in the emergency room.

The Queensway Carleton Hospital is only operating at 60% of its surgical capacity. The issue is not beds; the issue is a lack of nurses available to staff the beds. So I am deeply disappointed to see that the government’s response to the health care crisis is a bill that will not recruit or retain one single additional nurse to our health care system but does show incredible disrespect to seniors and persons living with disability and their right to provide consent regarding their care.

I’m wondering why the government feels that the most appropriate response to our health care crisis is to continue to show disrespect to our hard-working health care workers, while also adding a new level of disrespect—

I want to thank the members from Mississauga–Lakeshore as well as Mississauga Centre for both of your remarks, and also thank the member from Mississauga Centre for her work in the health care sector and the dedication that she has shown, especially during the pandemic, going back to it. It’s incredible.

I do have a few questions. I know that the things you’ve highlighted are what we’re facing in our province right now in our health care sector. My question to the members opposite—and mainly, I guess, this goes to the member for Mississauga–Lakeshore because I want to quote one of the words that he’s pointed out, which was that they will “ensure” that people will, for example, be placed near their homes, and if there is a payment that someone’s asked for, this bill will “ensure” that that’s not the case. But we know that there are a lot of things that are up to the regulations, for example. How will you ensure that they are within the region of their homes or that they are liking the home that they’re placed in? And how will you ensure that there is no extra payment made?

Questions and answers?

That’s a great question. You’re speaking about British Columbia, Alberta and Nova Scotia. We’re following what they’re doing. As well, British Columbia is under an NDP government, so I don’t really understand why the opposition is against their own friends in British Columbia that are NDP members and they don’t believe in what the NDP are doing in British Columbia. So I think that what we’re doing—we’re taking ideas from the NDP from British Columbia and putting it in to our bill to help our health care system.

Thank you, Speaker. I am remiss in not congratulating you on your appointment, so congratulations.

We know that under the previous Liberal government, the long-term-care sector was badly underdeveloped and neglected. In the third of its terms in office, the NDP propped up that government in that underdeveloped and neglected way—

Thanks to my colleagues from Mississauga–Lakeshore and Mississauga Centre for their presentations.

Speaker, a recent Globe and Mail editorial discussed our government’s five-point plan for staying open. They talked about emergency beds for the critically ill, and not for those waiting for long-term care. Speaker, patients requiring long-term care should be treated in an appropriate setting. As the member for Mississauga–Lakeshore mentioned in his remarks, many provinces across the country, such as British Columbia, Alberta and Nova Scotia, have in force available-bed policies similar to the one we are debating now.

My question to my colleague is, how would Bill 7 play a role in supporting Ontario’s broader health care system?

Question?

Thank you to the members for Mississauga–Lakeshore and Mississauga Centre for their comments.

Speaker, I’m curious to understand the rationale of the government to proceed with this legislation. We just came through a pandemic in which more than 4,000 seniors died. Many of these seniors were forcibly transferred from hospitals into long-term care through the emergency powers legislation that this government passed. Proper supports were not put in place in long-term-care homes. The proper infection prevention and control measures were not put in place. So why does this government feel that forcing seniors to move from hospital alternative-level-of-care beds into long-term-care homes is any kind of solution to the health care crisis that we have before us?

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.

I would like to say to my colleague before I start off what a great job that she did on her hour lead. It’s never easy, to all the new people that are here, to stand up and do an hour lead. On behalf of myself and, I’m sure, my colleagues, you did a great job. Hopefully, the Conservatives were listening.

Bill 7, long-term care—Madam Speaker, thank you for allowing me to rise and speak today to Bill 7. Let’s get right into the proposal of this bill: It’s to move patients into long-term-care homes, away from their communities, without their consent. And I want to be clear on that because my colleague was right on the money. Because you can say, “Well, we’re going to put them in your riding.” Well, my riding is an hour’s drive from Fort Erie to Niagara-on-the-Lake to Niagara Falls.

I’m dealing with a case today with a senior who wants to get her husband into Millennium Trail Manor in Niagara Falls, and do you know why she wants him there—it’s her choice, right? You get choices—because she doesn’t drive. This way she can walk and take care of her husband all day. So when you say, “Well, we’re going to keep them close,” you can say you’re going to keep them in my riding but it’s going to take an hour, in some cases, to get to those long-term-care facilities.

We’ve seen this government stretch the meaning of some of the bills, but anyone who just reads Bill 7 can understand entirely what’s going on here. In fact, there’s an entire section labelled, “Certain actions may be performed without consent.” And what are those actions? They empower hospital administrators to now share your medical information without consent. They’re allowed to discuss your personal situation with private for-care providers without your consent. They’re allowed to reassess you without your consent. And I believe, as it is written in this bill, they are allowed to move you without your consent. Speaker, with this clearly spelled out in black and white, why on earth is the part-time—I can’t say that. Why on earth is the Minister of Long-Term Care trying to convince people that’s not the case? The minister seems to indicate it’s not the case because there is a clause that says, “The actions listed in subsection (3) may only be performed without consent if reasonable efforts have been made to obtain the consent of the ALC patient or their substitute decision-maker.”

I know you guys have some lawyers on the other side of the House, and they understand what “reasonable” is. Here’s the issue: These discussions already happen. If someone is waiting in a hospital bed today, this discussion already occurred with them. Administrators have had this power now; there’s nothing new. In fact, for years advocates have been saying the power to have these discussions already leaves seniors without proper representation. So they have these discussions, sometimes without their family members. They do it all the time.

So what is new here? Well, now they have the power to move your loved one without consent. As I get further into this, I’m going to discuss something around my family.

A serious question arises: What does this government feel is a “reasonable attempt” to obtain consent? Where’s the line? Why is the government giving hospital administrators the power to override the wishes of a patient or their substitute decision-maker? This is the roundabout way that they’re going to do this.

Speaker, don’t just take it from me; you can read it in their own bill. It’s right before all of us and available online. I encourage people to read it—or they can take it from the Ontario Health Coalition. In their release on this issue, they said, “Advocates and experts spoke with one voice today decrying the new law that the Ford government introduced yesterday and intends to pass within just two weeks. The new law ... titled ‘More Beds, Better Care Act’ gives new powers to force the elderly and persons with disabilities who are waiting in hospitals into long-term-care homes against their choice, in what legal experts and patient advocates warn is a fundamental violation of their rights.” It is there in black and white, and the government should be honest about the language they put in this bill.

What I don’t understand is, there’s nothing in this bill that talks about sending anybody to a publicly funded long-term-care facility, or a not-for-profit long-term-care facility where we know the outcomes are a lot better. Nothing in the bill—nothing. You can read it, if you like, when you’re home tonight.

The real problem with this bill goes much deeper. This is the second term of this government. Long-term care has been fully under their watch for four years now.

It’s not in my notes, but I will add here, I just came through a campaign. Actually, I’ve been campaigning for a year and knocking on doors. Not once did the individual I ran against, the PC—or not once that I’m aware of in the province of Ontario—speak with residents in the province of Ontario and told them what you wanted to do—not once. They can correct me, when they do their 10-minute question period, if I’m not accurate. But I know that in my riding it never happened.

Think about this, as you’re all on your computers and doing whatever: This bill doesn’t hire one nurse. It doesn’t recruit one new doctor. It doesn’t send more money to create not-for-profit long-term-care beds in communities where people want to live. No, instead of properly funding our long-term-care homes—or home care, by the way; there’s nothing mentioned in the bill about home care, where 90%—90%—of our loved ones want to stay home. We want them to stay home as well. We just need more support. No, instead of properly funding our long-term-care homes, this just ships people across the areas, without their consent, to try and hide the problem. One is left to ask, what did seniors do to this government that they’re such a target? How can a government of the people so cruelly abuse our elders? Not everybody agrees with me on that statement. That’s how I feel.

Speaker, it should be absolutely clear to this government why this law is wrong. If loved ones need long-term care, part of that plan is to be around family and friends that they love. That means they need to be close to that family that can visit them. Oftentimes with seniors stuck waiting in long-term care, the facility is so understaffed that the family plays a critical role in delivering care.

I’d like the PCs to listen to this. I’m going to talk about my mother-in-law and my father-in-law, and my wife, Rita.

My wife, Rita, decided to retire a year early so she could take care of her dad, who was in a retirement home. My wife did an incredible job, quite frankly, because they were short-staffed. She’d get up every day, after she retired, to go help her father, to make sure he got his pills, to help him get his breakfast, sometimes to help him get clothed. She did that for a number of years with her dad until my father-in-law got too sick, went to the hospital and he passed. But if it wasn’t for my wife and the rest of her family going to that home, Mr. DeLuca probably would have passed sooner. It’s why it’s important to have family members involved in any of these decisions, including consent.

I’m going to talk about her again, because not that long after, her mother, my mother-in-law, got sick and we had to put her into a long-term-care facility. Again, the family took care of her. They went there every day. They visited her. I visited her as well. What happened while she was there was, she got sores. If anybody who has had grandparents or parents—she had sores on her leg. It was getting close to the point where they were going to just take the leg. In Niagara, quite frankly, I think we have more people who get their legs chopped off than anywhere in the province of Ontario. But through the family saying, “We’ve got to find a solution to this. We’ve got to get this fixed before she loses her leg,” the family got a doctor in Hamilton—I don’t have his name, and I apologize—who worked with her, got the sores better, and she didn’t have to have her leg chopped off, which happens right across the province far too much, especially to those who have diabetes.

Her mom has passed. But again, without the family’s support, Grandma and Grandpa would have been gone a long time before they did pass. I talked to my wife about this because, like I said, she retired a year early, and she doesn’t regret taking care of her dad or her mom one bit, because she’s Italian. Mom and Dad took care of her growing up, put her through school, supported her, and she was there for them.

That’s why I believe, from the bottom of my heart, it’s so important to involve the family, make sure we have consent, make sure we’re talking to them all the way through this process.

Under this bill, if my wife and her family, who are Italian, were not told that they were giving away their medical information—I would like to see it, but it would not be pretty, trying to find out what happened here, without a doubt.

We know our nurses are under stress. We know they’re overworked. We know they’ve done an incredible job for the last three years. We also know that some nurses, some doctors, are being abused more than at any time, I think, in recent memory that we’re aware of, and this bill will cause that, if families find out that they’ve given consent to long-term-care facilities to give them their private information. It’s a mistake. It just doesn’t even make sense to me, quite frankly, and we lived it for the last number of years.

Rita’s mom and dad have been gone for a few years, but I know my wife thinks of them all the time—because everybody grieves differently; every nationality grieves differently.

What happens when an elderly patient’s spouse doesn’t drive? You can imagine that the partners of these ALC patients are so elderly themselves, and many depend on their families to drive them to see their loved ones. The story I talked about that I’m dealing with in my own riding doesn’t drive and can’t get there through a bus route. Can you imagine saying, “Well, I’m sorry, your husband is going to Niagara-on-the-Lake” and they live in Fort Erie? It’s an hour. There’s no transit between the two. In a lot of cases, they wouldn’t be able to afford it. They certainly couldn’t afford a cab. It makes no sense.

When you separate families like this, we see the health outcomes of these seniors absolutely drop. This plan will take years off seniors’ lives. It will separate families. It will absolutely crush the elderly patients who are being moved. How is it possible that that outcome is better than just properly funding seniors’ care in our communities?

I talked a little bit about home care. Seniors want to stay at home. As we get older, I think we all want to stay at home, be with our family, be with our friends, be with our neighbours. Why aren’t we investing in home care? Why are we not investing in more PSWs? Why are we not paying PSWs the way they should be paid so that they can work full-time as PSWs in home care, so they’d have some benefits? Some may have a pension—and God forbid, from your side, maybe we’ll make it easier for them to join a union so they’ll get respect on the job. We saw what happened with a company called CarePartners. We had that discussion here a few years ago. Why wouldn’t we do that?

I know I’m supposed to go through you and I really am trying to, but I see the minister is here and I’d like to ask him—we know that minister has a lot of weight in his party. We all know that. Let him tell us why he won’t repeal Bill 124. Everyone is begging you guys, all of you guys. That is the single one that can send a clear message to every nurse, every PSW, every corrections officer, every health care worker, that we care about the job they’re doing, because they’re all covered under Bill 124. Why don’t we do that? If you care about our seniors and you care about the crisis in health care, repeal Bill 124. There’s more to this new plan that actually makes it worse than it looks and, honestly, in my humble opinion, it looks pretty bad.

Let me read you another quote from the head of the Ontario Health Coalition—and I want to be clear to my colleagues on the other side. I see my good friend from the Liberals is here as well. I want to be clear with you guys: I’m not saying this. This isn’t Wayne Gates just standing up and saying it. This is coming from the Ontario Health Coalition, which is one of the most respected organizations in the province—non-partisan, and their facts and their research are second to none in this province. I admire the work they do with the limited resources they have.

“What we think it is about is filling up the beds of the worst long-term-care homes that people do not want to go to, for good reason.... The government cannot override the rights of seniors to shore up the profits of long-term-care operators with terrible records and reputations. The Ford government has come under fire for its connection with the for-profit long-term-care companies before.” Now, I didn’t say that. It didn’t come from Gatesy. It could have, but it didn’t. It came from the Ontario Health Coalition.

This is where I’m going to say again that over the last couple years, two and a half years, close to 5,000 of our moms, our dads, our grandparents, our parents, mothers-in-law, fathers-in-law, aunts and uncles have died in these facilities. Most of those deaths—where were they from? They were in for-profit long-term-care facilities. Now, I don’t have the stat right in front of me so I’m not going to—I guess I will guess. I would say it’s over 70% who died in these for-profit long-term-care homes. We had better outcomes in publicly funded, publicly delivered homes.

It’s not mentioned in the bill. I read the bill because I was asked to read the bill by the minister. I read the bill and I can’t find anything where it mentions not-for-profit homes and regional homes. By the way, the regional homes do a great job as well.

Speaker, imagine that. We know for a fact that properly funded, properly staffed, safe long-term-care beds aren’t available right now. We know that. The safe ones aren’t available. In fact, most of them have long waiting lists.

There’s a reason the homes this government plans to send people to have openings. Oftentimes they are the worst-run homes with records of abuse, with several seniors to a room and without air conditioning. These are homes that are closely related to PC insiders, and we all know about that. We know who’s on boards. We know that.

I’ve only got a minute and 30 seconds left. I want to talk about the air conditioning in the rooms. The minister did speak about that there’s 100% air conditioning in long-term-care homes. What he didn’t talk about is the air conditioning in the residents’ rooms where, because of COVID and because of the outbreaks, they then have to stay in their rooms. They’re staying in their rooms for days because of the COVID outbreaks, and it’s 40 degrees Celsius. I challenge anybody, any of my colleagues—I’ll go with you—to go sit in one of those rooms with no air conditioning for 24 hours. That’s our seniors. We know that they are fainting because of the heat. As a matter of fact, it’s going to get hot again today, tomorrow and the day after. They’re going to go through the same thing in a lot of these long-term-care homes. We know they are fainting. We know they’re getting sick. We know they’re having heat stroke. Everybody knows it. We have to do better, as a government—and I’ll take some of the blame. Maybe I wasn’t loud enough. Maybe I didn’t talk enough. But we need to have the air conditioners put in the residents’ rooms. No senior—not your mom, not my mom—should have to live under those conditions in the summer.

How many of you have gone out to a ball game or anything, and you’re sitting there sweating? Can you imagine sitting in a room with no air conditioning in our long-term-care facilities? It’s absolutely wrong in the province of Ontario. Many of the homes with wait-lists are even missing basic things—I just said that.

We see numerous record-breaking heat waves—

I’ve always been one, when I look at legislation—there’s winners and there’s losers. There’s positives, and there’s negatives. I always try to get to the point of, why is this coming? Why is this the top priority for the government of the day to bring this forward? It leads me down to a path as far as, who’s going to be benefiting from this? I don’t see seniors or individuals that are in long-term-care homes that are going to be benefiting greatly with the language.

Words are also powerful. When you grab this at face value and you read the legislation where one title is, “Certain actions may be performed without consent,” and there’s a variety of things that can be done here without consent, it leads me down to the path that, yes, words are powerful and you are doing things without consent.

My question to the member is, who is going to benefit from this legislation?

We now have time for questions and answers.

Next question.

What I do know, sir, is that if I’m a senior and I’m in a hospital, I should be able to give consent. You should have to come to me to give you consent. Just because I’m old doesn’t mean that I don’t matter in this province. Just because you’re a little younger, maybe you’re in your fifties, they can go to you and get consent. But with a senior, you don’t need consent.

You can give away their medical history. Do you think that’s right? You’re the minister. Do you think it’s right? I don’t mind having that debate with you, or that talk. I don’t think it’s right that we don’t say to that senior, “We’d like to do this for you. We need your consent,” and have those discussions. They’re having them now. The difference is that they’re giving them to other people. They’re not keeping it in the hospital; they’re giving—

But I’m pretty sure we know who’s going to benefit from it because they didn’t mention in the bill that they can go to a publicly funded long-term-care facility or a not-for-profit. All they talk about is for-profit. So who’s going to benefit from this? In my humble opinion, the owners of the for-profit care; I think that goes without saying.

And we know, just to add a little bit to it because I’ve got a few seconds left, they’ve already, over the course of the last 10 years, made $1.2 billion in profit. What we need to do is to take that profit out of long-term care and put it into publicly funded care, so we can take care of our seniors properly, so they can live longer, so our parents live longer.

That’s a great question. Thank you.

You know, I hesitated on whether I should get up and ask a question at all, given how incorrect many of the statements were in the member’s—and, obviously, there’s no intention, actually, to accurately reflect what’s in the bill. But I would just ask the gentleman this: Does he know the difference between “consent to move” and “consent to review”?

Question?