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.

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?

Thank you, Madam Speaker. It’s an honour to see you in that chair today.

It is an honour for me to rise today to speak in support of Bill 7, the More Beds, Better Care Act, introduced by my friend the Minister of Long-Term Care. I’ll be sharing my time today with the member from Mississauga Centre.

I’d like to begin by thanking the minister and his parliamentary assistant from Lanark–Frontenac–Kingston, as well as the Minister of Health, for their work on this bill, and the five-point plan they released last week to provide the best hospital care to patients while also ensuring resources are in place to keep our province and our economy open. Bill 7 is an important part of this plan because it will help to fix Ontario’s ALC problem. Over 15% of hospital beds in Ontario are now occupied by patients who are ready to be discharged but need an alternative level of care, often in a long-term-care home.

In northern Ontario, up to one in three hospital beds is occupied by ALC patients. In Mississauga, Trillium Health Partners uses well over 100 hospital beds to care for ALC patients, beds which are not available for new patients. ALC patients are often stuck waiting in hospitals for months, or even years, when the long-term-care home they prefer has no available beds.

Speaker, it is important to note that this problem has grown worse over the last two decades because the previous Liberal government, with the support of the NDP, built only 611 new long-term-care beds. Between 2011 and 2018, as the number of Ontarians over 75 increased by 75%, the number of long-term-care beds increased by less than 1%.

When this government was first elected four years ago, there were over 37,000 seniors on a wait-list for long-term care, including over 4,500 in Mississauga alone. We had 20% fewer long-term-care beds per capita in Mississauga than the provincial average. Now, four years later, our government is investing $6.4 billion to build 30,000 new long-term-care beds and to upgrade 28,000 beds to modern design standards by 2028, and we’re on track to deliver on these commitments. That includes 1,152 new and upgraded beds in Mississauga–Lakeshore alone—more than any other riding in Ontario. This is the largest long-term-care building program in Canadian history.

Two years ago, on July 21, 2020, I joined the Premier and the former Minister of Long-Term Care, with Michelle DiEmanuele, who was then the president of Trillium Health Partners, to announce an accelerated build pilot project in Mississauga–Lakeshore. With rapid procurement, modular construction, and the use of hospital lands, this government is building new long-term-care homes many years faster than the traditional timeline. That includes 632 new beds at two new long-term-care locations on Speakman Drive in Mississauga–Lakeshore. The project will include a new health service building and the first residential hospice in Mississauga, operated by Heart House Hospice.

Trillium Health Partners is building another 320 beds through the Mississauga seniors’ care partnership with Indus Community Services and the Yee Hong Centre. There are projects like this planned or under way in communities right across Ontario. Many seniors and their families have already reached out to my office to help find a place in these new homes.

On November 2, 2020, I joined the Premier and the former Minister of Finance and Minister of Long-Term Care at Trillium Health Partners in Mississauga–Lakeshore to announce an increase in the hours of direct care for long-term-care residents, to an average of four hours a day, to help ensure they receive the best quality care in Canada.

Our government is investing $5 billion over four years to hire over 27,000 new long-term-care staff, including nurses and PSWs. That includes over $5.5 million this year for long-term-care homes in Mississauga–Lakeshore, and that will increase to $14 million in 2024.

By 2024, the Camilla Care community will receive $4.5 million more for staff each year; Chartwell Wenleigh will receive $3.5 million more; Sheridan Villa will receive $3 million more—and I could go on.

But these changes cannot happen overnight. Training tens of thousands of new staff and building new, modern facilities, even on accelerated schedules, takes time. And in order to prepare for what may be a challenging flu season, we know we need to do more now.

As the minister said—and I want to reiterate: Bill 7 would, if passed, help to encourage the transfer of ALC patients into temporary settings while they wait for their preferred long-term-care bed. It would not move ALC patients out by force, and it would not force people into homes far away from their families. There will be mandatory guidelines to ensure that all patients continue to stay close to their partners, loved ones and friends, and to ensure they won’t be out of pocket for any cost difference between their temporary home and their preferred home.

The intent of Bill 7 is similar to policies in many other provinces, like British Columbia, Alberta and Nova Scotia, which all encourage transfers of ALC patients into temporary care settings while they wait for their preferred bed.

Dr. Stephen Archer, the head of the department of medicine at Queen’s University, wrote about a local ALC patient who was stuck in a hospital bed for two years. The average hospital in-patient stay was about six days. So in the two years that this ALC patient stayed in the hospital bed, the bed could have supported the care of 120 other patients. He said, and I agree, that this debate is not about ALC patients’ rights to make their own health care choices; it is about balancing ALC patients’ rights against the equal rights of those 120 other patients, who may need treatment for heart attacks, strokes or ICU care, that can only be provided in our hospitals. And this is what Bill 7 does.

Dr. Kerry Kuluski, a research chair at Trillium Health Partners, makes another important point: While caring for ALC patients is obviously costly to their hospitals, it is also costly to ALC patients themselves, since more appropriate care settings, including long-term care, can better support their quality of life. In hospitals, patients who need acute care are rightly given priority over ALC patients. In temporary placements in a long-term-care home, ALC patients will soon receive an average of four hours of direct care per day, even if they’re not the patient’s first choice for cultural reasons or because the home is not close to their family and friends.

If passed, Bill 7 will help provide ALC patients with the right care in the right place and a better quality of life in more appropriate settings. It will also help free up at least 250 much-needed hospital beds in the first six months alone for patients who need them, and help to support a better flow of patients now and in the future.

Together with the construction of more modern long-term-care homes and the expansion of our health care workforce, this policy will help to lower wait times in our emergency departments and for surgical procedures. Ontarians will have faster access to health care and more health care options in their own communities.

Again, to conclude, I’d like to thank the minister and his team for their work on Bill 7. I encourage all members to support this important bill, moving forward..

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 recognize the member from Mississauga Centre.

This question is for the member for Mississauga–Lakeshore. He talked about ALC patients earlier. Could the member explain what measures will be taken into consideration when proposing appropriate long-term-care homes for ALC patients?

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?

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?

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?