I agree with you that action is needed, and I agree with you that our health care system is under immense pressure. What 90% of the frail, elderly people in Ontario want is that they want to stay home. Support them at home so they don’t end up in our hospitals, they don’t end up ALC and they don’t end up needing a long-term-care home.

How do you do this? You fix our home care system. How do you fix our home care system? You give PSWs permanent, full-time jobs with decent pay, with benefits, with sick days, maybe with a pension plan and a workload that a human being can handle.

There are many, many PSWs who would love to go back and provide home care if they could make a living out of this, but they can’t. There are solutions that exist right here in Ontario with the resources we have, but taking away a person’s ability to consent is not something I can support.

What will happen is clear. A whole bunch of frail, elderly people will be taken from our hospitals and put into a long-term-care home that is not of their choosing. Once they are there, they will not have their circle of care to be there because it will be too far, because it’s not the right language, it’s not the right culture. They will feel abandoned; they will feel disrespected. When you’re frail and elderly enough to qualify for long-term care and you get depressed, things go bad really quickly.

They were about 2,000 beds that were set aside for isolation, so when you get admitted into a long-term-care home, they did not want to take any risks; they put you in isolation for 14 days, so that if you had COVID, you didn’t spread it. Some of those beds will be put back into circulation—300 of them by the end of the summer; that’s what I hear; 1,000 of them this year, depending on how the pandemic goes.

Absolutely, I have no problem with people going to the long-term-care home of their choosing. I have a problem with taking away the right to consent to be assessed and the right to consent to share information. I cannot support anything like that.