My office, like I’m sure many offices across the province, has received calls from families saying, “My parent is being pushed out of hospital. I don’t have the ability to care for them”—

Interjection.

Interjection.

Anyway, what’s happening is—and we all hear this—patients are being pushed out of hospitals. Family members are concerned. They’re threatened that if they don’t take their family member home because there is no care for them, they’re going to be charged with a bill. This is a great concern.

As we’re changing the system, I’m asking the minister specifically: What will the consequences be for families who choose not to be pushed out of the ALC into a long-term-care home that they choose not to be in?

It is my pleasure to start my hour lead on Bill 7, the More Beds, Better Care Act.

Because I have a little bit of time, I want to place this in context. Our hospital system has been overcrowded for a long time. You have heard me and many others talk about hallway medicine for a long time. What does hallway medicine mean? It means that if a hospital has 300 beds, they have 350 patients admitted. The other 50 who don’t have a bed will end up in a hallway, in a TV room, in a bathroom, at the end of a unit, wherever they can place them. This has been an ongoing problem.

This government is making the link that, in general, most large community hospitals have about 20% of their beds which are occupied by what is called alternate-level-of-care—they’re referred to as ALC. Most people who get that designation are frail, elderly people. They want, like 90% of all elderly people, to live at home. They want to be supported at home. But the home care system fails them. The home care system does not allow them to stay home safely. They end up in trouble. They fall. They don’t take their medications when they are supposed to. They end up in the hospital. Once they’re in the hospital, the attending physician says, “I cannot send you back home because I know that the home care system will fail you again and you will end up in more trouble,” so they put them towards a long-term-care home. They become ALC simply because they cannot do the transfer to a long-term-care home as fast as their care needs are no longer requiring hospitalization.

I want to go a little bit into what could be done to prevent 20% of most community hospital beds being presently occupied by patients labelled as alternate-level-of-care: Fix our home care system. Give people the care they need where they need it, which is at home.

I have many examples of people from my own riding whom the home care system has failed.

I want to share the story of Lucie Laplante. Lucie Laplante’s husband is Gabriel. Gabriel is in—oh, no, not this story yet. I will start with another, shorter story, because I see that I only have a few minutes on the clock.

I will start with Mrs. D. Mrs. D lives in Hanmer, in my riding. Her husband broke his neck several years ago. He has been on the mend, but he suffered another fall a year later and has deteriorated. She sold their home and moved to something that would be more accessible for him, but she cannot bring him home from the hospital, because there is no home care. He needs a lift to get out of bed and into a wheelchair to get around. He is unable to stand on his own. He went for rehab for three months at the Clarion, which is a hotel that is presently being rented by our hospital to care for people in overflow—because our hospital is overflowing. He has been in the hospital since December 2021. While at the hospital, he got out of bed, fell and banged his head. She is making an inquiry on her own to find private home care, and she is buying all of the equipment that he needs to stay home, like a hospital bed to have at home. But everybody is telling her that he needs to stay at the hospital because home care is not available. The hospital is telling her that they could provide home care for one hour a day, five days a week, as long as she got a lift and a wheelchair. She wants her husband to be cared for at home, not at the hospital, but she’s having difficulties working out a discharge plan, although she is willing to pay for all of the equipment needed. She wants her husband at home. This story repeats itself over and over. This person is now being placed for a long-term-care bed when all they want is to go back home.

I see you’re looking at your watch, Speaker, so I will sit down.

This government’s grand plan to fix our health care crisis is to throw open the door to privatized health care. But funnelling patients to private health care will only bleed resources out of our public hospitals and will make the health care crisis even worse.

We know that health care privatization always ends up with patients getting the bill. If Ontarians won’t need to use their credit cards for health care, please explain why there is currently no provincial oversight to protect patients against inappropriate charges for publicly funded surgeries.

My question is to the Minister of Long-Term Care. The government is now going to move people from hospitals to nursing homes that they do not want to go to. If they refuse to go, will they be billed for their hospital bed?

Can the minister guarantee right now that if a senior refuses to go to a care home they don’t want, they will never be billed for their hospital bed?

Why does this government believe it’s okay for health care to come with a bill?

It does concern me that the member opposite and the party opposite do not believe that there can be innovative solutions to what are very long-standing problems. We cannot keep doing the same thing and expect different results. Status quo is not an option. That is why our five-point plan includes additional capacity, like expanding surgical units and the access to it, like expanding how we are using—in 40 communities across Ontario—the community paramedic program. These are the innovations that Ontarians need and deserve.

I don’t know if you’ve heard from your constituents waiting for those surgeries, but I have. I want to make sure that where we have capacity within our health care system, whether it is in hospitals or, in fact, in independent health facilities, we use that to make sure that people get the surgeries when they need them, as quickly as we can get them.

I point to a quote from Dr. Rose Zacharias, the president of the Ontario Medical Association: “Physicians are resilient, compassionate, high-capacity people. We need to spend our health care dollars strategically and fill these existing gaps.” We will do that working with our partners. I implore the members opposite to work with us on it.

Specifically on the surgical wait-lists: As part of our province’s Surgical Recovery Strategy, we’ve invested over $880 million over the last three fiscal years—and Speaker, I might remind the member that that’s over the last three years because we understood that there were going to be backlogs and we needed to take these steps proactively to make sure that individuals like Doug got their surgery as quickly as they could. We have funded Ontario hospitals to expand their surgical unit hours for exactly the reason the member opposite raises.

The 400 additional physician residents who are now practising in northern and rural Ontario are to expand and allow more opportunities for people to be able to access care closer to home as quickly as possible. We are making these investments. We are doing this because we understand. We want people like Doug to make sure that the high-quality, amazing health care that we have in the province of Ontario—they are accessing closer to home.

My question is to the Premier. Rick Brown lives in London West and is exhausted from more than five years of caring for his wife, Marian, who has an incurable brain disorder. His only break is during her weekly nine hours of home and community care. Before the pandemic, Marian could stay up to a week at a long-term-care home through the short stay respite program. That program was suspended in March 2020.

Will this government restore the short stay respite program to give caregivers like Rick the break they so desperately need?

The ministry told us that the short stay respite program was suspended to free up long-term-care beds. Why is this government more interested in forcing seniors from hospitals into long-term care than in providing caregivers like Rick with the respite they deserve?

My question is to the Premier. The University Health Network in my riding has seen an increase in the use of temporary nurses. Their spending has gone up from $1.1 million to $1.7 million over the past three years. Other hospitals are seeing similar increases.

Nurses are burning out. They’re leaving the profession in droves. Why is it okay for the Ford government to pay private companies more than the nurses who are essential to delivering health care for our communities? When will this government repeal Bill 124?

Anything short of repealing Bill 124 will not fix the nursing crisis. This is really the question at the heart of what we are discussing. We have nurses all over Ontario who are crying out for help. I will share just one story. One nurse tells me that their profession is seen as a dead-end job in Ontario, because what they are now seeing is that health care in Ontario is going absolutely nowhere. I wish that that was not the case, certainly not within my lifetime.

Bill 124 is actually driving this low-wage economy for nursing. What is the government going to do? You called them heroes during the pandemic. Are they not heroes anymore to you?

My question is for the Premier.

Speaker, you may remember the case of Mr. Vibert Britton, who I spoke about in December. At the time, Vibert was suffering from large bed sores, and his sister, Pamela, fought to have him taken to the hospital for life-saving treatment. Now, several months later, matters have gone from bad to worse, and he has been in and out of the hospital. His sister tells me she believes this is a result of his private long-term-care home not following hospital orders.

Sadly, this situation is all too common. Seniors are spending their hard-earned savings on inadequate care in private LTC homes which lands them in and out of hospitals. This burdens our emergency rooms and is adding to the health care crisis. This has to stop.

When will this government ensure adequate standards of staffing and care in private long-term-care homes? Vibert and so many others don’t have the time to wait.

I would like to start by correcting my record. This morning, I gave the story of one of my constituents. I simply called him Mr. D. I said that he was waiting for a long-term-care placement. Mr. D has passed. He is no longer. I was giving the story about him not getting the home care he needed, but he is not on the long-term-care list; he has passed—just to correct my record.

The bill that we have in front of us has a very telling title. It tells us that we want more beds—that is, to free up hospital beds; and better care—that is, people who need long-term care should be in a good long-term-care home to receive the level of care that they need.

I started my remarks by saying the first part of the title of the bill, “More Beds,” is really because our hospitals are in crisis. You have heard me talk about hallway health care for a long time. Our hospitals are full—at more than 100% capacity most of the time. Even in the summer, which is usually the slow season for hospitals, you can look at 152 hospital corporations in Ontario, and the vast majority of them are full-to-overcapacity already, and this is before fall has even come. So the aim of the bill is to free up some of those beds.

The crisis in our health care system, in our hospital system, is not new. You will remember, many times, bringing examples of—I remember my good friend Leo Seguin, who spent 10 days in a bathroom at Health Sciences North because there were no beds left for him to be cared for. And this happens in every hospital when all their beds are full but the people that they see are too sick to be sent back home. They need hospital-level care. They get admitted into a TV room, a hallway, a bathroom, a shower room, whatever they can to keep the patient there so that they can be looked after.

If you look at a large community hospital, most of them have about 20% of their beds that are occupied by what we call alternate-level-of-care patients. Alternate-level-of-care patients are patients who were admitted into the hospital, they received the care they needed to get better, and now they cannot be sent back home.

The example that I was giving this morning, and I have a pile of examples—90% of frail, elderly seniors want to be home. Their loved ones, their families, their neighbours do everything they can to try to support them at home, but they need the home care system to be there, and the home care system fails them day after day, week after week, to the point where they end up in trouble. They end up in the hospital, and their physician looks at this and says, “It is not safe for me to send you back home. The home care system will not support you. The home care system will fail you again. We will send you to a long-term-care home.”

Once they don’t need the level of care in a hospital anymore, they are labelled “alternate level of care,” ALC, and it simply means we are not able to send you home. The home care system will not be there for you. You will be going to long-term care. Once this happens, they get assessed, and they get to pick a long-term-care home of their choice. They can put up to five homes, but they don’t have to. They can put only one long-term-care home.

The aim of the bill is really to take some of the frail, elderly people who are patients in our hospitals, who have been labelled alternate-level-of-care, and get them into a long-term-care home. In theory, they will be getting better care in a long-term-care home. This is addressed not only to their physical and medical needs but to the need to socialize and the need to eat with other people and the need to take part in activities that they’re able to enjoy. That’s the theory behind what we have.

But we all have to realize that, when you move to a long-term-care home, there’s a good chance that you are moving to your final residence. The great, great majority of people get discharged from a long-term-care home after their passing. So families take that decision seriously—“Where do we want our loved one to go? Which long-term-care home will best meet the family’s needs so they continue to have frequent visitors and continue to be part of the family and we’re able to take them home for a special birthday, and is not too far?” If they speak French, they may want to go to a home that’s able to provide services in French.

In Sudbury, we have Finlandiakoti, which offers services in Finnish. They are supported by the Finnish community in our area etc.

There are many that either are able to offer different languages or are anchored in different cultures so that the food that is served to you is food you’re used to eating and the activities are activities that are in line with your culture and things you like to do.

All of this happens at a very, very slow pace because most of our long-term-care homes are full. I can give you the statistics. They are available online, if anybody wants to know. You can go right now—information on long-term care. I looked at the one in my riding called Sudbury-Manitoulin. You can see that we have 1,555 long-term-care beds—we are higher than many other areas of the province because we have very few other services to support people in the community to keep them there, as opposed to other parts of the province that are able to keep frail, elderly people in the community longer—and right now, on the wait-list there are 1,107. I will let that sink in: 1,555 beds for the Sudbury-Manitoulin area, which is a huge area, and we have 1,107 people on the wait-list.

I want to talk a little bit about the different homes.

We have two private, for-profit—we have more than this, but we have two Extendicare long-term-care homes in Sudbury: Extendicare Falconbridge and Extendicare York. Both of them are big homes—Extendicare Falconbridge has 232 beds, and Extendicare York has 272 beds—but they have very small wait-lists compared to others. Extendicare Falconbridge has 53 people on their wait-list. Extendicare York has 37 people on their wait-list. I was mentioning Finlandiakoti. Finlandia has only 108 beds, but they have 445 people waiting for those beds. I’m strong in math. If you look at the difference between the two—if you put your name at Finlandia, you will wait 32 times longer than if you put your name to go to Extendicare York. Extendicare York is an older home that still has four beds to a room. It hasn’t been renovated for as long as I can remember; I would say at least 50 years. It is not the long-term-care home of choice.

That brings me to the content of the bill. Bill 7 is quite modest, really. It’s a page and a half. That’s it. That’s all. That’s the entire bill. So what the bill does is that it changes—section 1 of the bill amends the Fixing Long-Term Care Home Act by changing the definition of “personal health information” under the Personal Health Information Protection Act. This is significant, because what the bill will do is it will give a bigger amount of people the right to assess you, to see if you could be transferred into a long-term-care home, whether you give your consent or not. In a hospital, nobody can do anything to you without your consent. If you don’t consent to a test, it will not be done. It is the bedrock of our health care system. Everybody has to give consent before anything is done to them. You don’t want a vaccine? If you don’t consent to a vaccine, you’re not going to get a vaccine. In our health care system, you have to consent.

But this bill takes away consent. First, it used to be that once you are finished your active treatment in a hospital, a physician had to assess you to see if you meet the criteria to be transferred into a long-term-care home. The bill changes this—that, now, it’s not only physicians who can do this, but other health care professionals can do this. And then it takes away your right to consent. That professional—be it a nurse, be it a care coordinator, be it a social worker, be it a physician—is allowed to go and assess you to see if you meet the criteria to go into a long-term-care home. Not only are they allowed to assess you without your consent, they’re allowed to access your personal health information and they’re allowed to share that personal health information with the long-term-care home of their choosing.

This is not how health care is supposed to work. In health care, the dignity of the person, the quality of care is always linked to you. You only get done to you what you consent to. But this bill changes this and gives physicians, nurses, social workers, care coordinators, the right to assess you to see if you meet the criteria, whether you give your consent or not. The bill gives physicians, nurses, social workers, care coordinators the right to share personal information about you to a long-term-care home that you don’t want to go to. They have the right to do that. They are giving themselves in this bill the right to do that.

The second part, section 2 of the act, also amends the Fixing Long-Term Care Home Act by adding section 6.1, which provides for a modified long-term-care-home admission process for alternate-level-of-care patients. I have described what the admissions process looked like before. Section 2 of the bill will change this.

Usually, you need to have consent from the patient or from their substitute decision-maker to be allowed to go and assess. This is being taken away. It goes on to say, if an attending physician reasonably believes that an ALC patient was eligible for admission to a long-term-care home, paragraph 1 would authorize the clinicians to “request that a placement co-ordinator carry out” an action described under paragraph 2.

Placement coordinators are people who exist right now in our hospitals. They are usually linked to the home and community care sector, HCCS. They are the ones who manages all of the long-term-care-home wait-lists. For every home, there will be a wait-list for a private bed, for a semi-private bed, for a basic bed—for all of the homes, they will keep the wait-lists. Those wait-lists are available online if you want. You won’t see names on it, but you will see numbers. Every patient is assigned a number so that you can see where you are on the different lists that you have chosen.

The bill will change all of this. It brings forward a new admissions process for alternate-level-of-care patients. So the attending physician requests a placement coordinator to carry out the assessment. The placement coordinator would have the authority to:

“i. Determine the ALC patient’s eligibility for admission to a long-term-care home.” Usually, this is only done with consent. With this bill, they can do this whether you consent to it or not.

“ii. Select a long-term-care home ... for the ALC patient in accordance with the geographic restrictions that are prescribed by the regulations.” I have to tell you that the geographic restrictions prescribed by regulations—we don’t get to see the regulations. I know that they are being worked on right now. I know that the Minister of Long-Term Care has the full intention of making those regulations available within a week of the bill passing. But there’s this element of trust. We have to trust that the regulation as to how big of a geographical area will be in the regulations will make sense—that it will make sense to us in northern Ontario.

I have to admit to you, Speaker, the level of trust in this government regarding the safety of our long-term-care homes is very, very low in parts of the province where we have seen people dying by the hundreds in our long-term-care homes through COVID, with a government that was not prepared, that didn’t do anything to protect them. To trust that whatever those geographical limits will be will make sense is a big pill to swallow. I can talk to you about when our hospital was designated crisis 1A.

People will say, “Oh, but they were placed within the city of Greater Sudbury.” The city of Greater Sudbury is huge. You can fit Toronto, Mississauga, Hamilton—you can fit many, many cities in southern Ontario into the geographical area of the city of Greater Sudbury.

Some of the people I represent, my constituents—if some of you come from northern Ontario, you will know where Onaping and Levack are. The long-term-care home that is closest to Onaping and Levack is in Chelmsford, which is about half an hour’s drive away from their community. So if you come from Onaping or Levack or Dowling or Chelmsford or Azilda, you want to go to the long-term-care home in Chelmsford. Unfortunately, the long-term-care home in Chelmsford, called St. Gabriel Villa, has 128 beds and 367 people waiting to go to that home. Usually, the average beds available per month is three. I will let you do the math. There are 367 people waiting for a long-term-care bed and they take, on average, three new residents. That means most people will wait over 120 weeks before they are admitted into that long-term-care home. But if you want to go to Extendicare York, you can get there within a week.

For the people I represent, if your loved one is 90 years old, going into a long-term-care home, there’s a good chance that the spouse is also close to 90 years old. He may very well be able to still have a driver’s licence, because I have many elderly people in my riding who are still very good, but they are very careful about where they drive. They would drive from Onaping-Levack down Highway 144 to Chelmsford, because this is where the Canadian Tire is. This is where the grocery store is. This is where the bank is. That’s okay. But to make it all the way to Extendicare Falconbridge, that’s, at a minimum, an hour’s drive to get there.

Think about it. You want to go see your wife every day. You are worried about her because she is in a long-term-care home. We’re telling you that we will place her in a long-term-care home that is within the city of Greater Sudbury, but that is an hour’s drive away. That means an hour there, an hour back. Two hours of your day on the road when you’re 90 years old to go see your wife means that your wife is not going to be supported.

That means that your wife will be wondering, “Why am I being abandoned? Why have I been moved to this part of the city that I have nothing to do with? I come from Onaping-Levack. This is where I want to be. This is where my children are. This is where my grandchildren are. This is where my friends, my family, my husband, my home are.” We will place you within the city of Greater Sudbury, but an hour’s drive away from where you live, where your husband of 60 years won’t be able to go see you, because it is just too dangerous for him to drive all the way down there. He could go see you if you were in Chelmsford, because there’s one highway; you go in and that’s it, that’s all. But to make your way and zigzag through the city to make it to Extendicare, where there are beds available, means that he won’t be able to go see you.

So when we see in the bill, “Select a long-term-care home ... for the ALC patient in accordance with the geographic restrictions that are prescribed by the regulations,” can you see how people are nervous when they see this? First of all, we don’t know what the geographical area is going to be, but if the geographical area is the city of Greater Sudbury, then that means that if you live in Alban, Estaire, Onaping, Dowling or Whitefish—everybody that I represent—you could very well find yourself in a long-term-care home that is an hour away from your loved ones, from your circle of care.

I can tell you exactly what happens to those good people who get transferred to a home where they have no support. You feel, first of all, “Why am I here? Why am I so far away? Why is it that I don’t see my family anymore? Nobody loves me. Nobody cares about me.” It’s easy to get depressed. It’s easy to give up. And when you’re 90 years old and you meet the criteria to go into a long-term-care home, it’s a good chance that you have a number of health issues that qualified you to go into a long-term-care home, and those health issues will take over.

There are statistics that exist for people who get transferred into a long-term-care home not of their choosing, into a long-term-care home that is away from your circle of care, from your family, from the people who support you. You will see the huge difference in life expectancy. The average life expectancy in a long-term-care home is around three years; if you don’t go into the long-term-care home of your choosing, if you don’t have a circle of care about you, if you miss your friends, if you miss your spouse, it will be in months, not in years. Is this really how we want to treat frail, elderly people? I am worried. I am very worried.

That was paragraph 2, subsection 3: A placement coordinator would have the authority to:

“i. Determine the ALC patient’s eligibility for admission”—that is, without their consent;

“ii. Select a ... home ... for the ALC patient in accordance with the geographic restrictions that are prescribed by the regulations”—regulations that nobody has seen;

“iii. Provide to the” long-term-care home “licensee ... the assessments and information set out in the regulations,” including “personal health information.”

Remember, your personal health information is something that is just that: It is personal. You get to decide who sees that information and who doesn’t, and you do that through consent. This bill takes that consent away from you. The coordinator will do the assessment, will access your personal health information and will share that personal health information with the long-term-care home of their choosing, not of your choosing.

This is a dangerous door to open, Speaker. I fully understand that our hospitals are full, that we are expecting a surge in demand for our hospital beds coming this fall, that 20% of our hospital beds are being occupied by people who could be cared for someplace else. But I can’t help but think there is a cost to those decisions, and the cost to those decisions is that frail, elderly people lose their right to consent. I’m not willing to do that, Speaker. I’m not.

So your personal health information will be shared with a long-term-care home. There could be many reasons why a patient, a hospital patient, would not want their personal health information shared with a specific long-term-care home. They could have an ex-wife or ex-husband who works in that long-term-care home, and the relationship is not good. So you would have never chosen that long-term-care home because you-know-who works there, but you have no choice, you have no say. The bill takes away your right to consent to sharing of your personal health information, and the health information is shared with the long-term-care home that the care coordinator has chosen, not you.

And “iv. Authorize the ALC patient’s admission to” the long-term-care home. So the admission has been authorized by the placement coordinator. The placement coordinator will also have the authority to “transfer responsibility of the placement of the ALC patient to another placement coordinator....” This always brings confusion. I can tell you that a transfer of a loved one into a long-term-care home after a hospital admission is always something stressful. Most of the care coordinators are nurses or social workers. They do a fantastic job trying to calm the residents, calm the family, explain the process. But now we are giving them a job to do, that is to move that patient out of that bed, out of that hospital bed, and into the long-term-care home that has beds available.

Paragraph 3: “A physician, registered nurse or person described in paragraph 3 of subsection 50(5)” would be authorized to “conduct an assessment of the ALC patient for the purpose of determining the ALC patient’s eligibility for admission to a long-term-care home.” Some long-term-care homes have specific services that are not available. Some will have lockdown units for people who have dementia, who are hard to control. So with a lockdown, if your level of care is such that you need a lockdown unit, then you could only be transferred to a home that has that level of care, so that is in the bill.

Then it becomes even more interesting. “A long-term-care-home licensee” would be required to—so the long-term-care home now has a requirement added to them to:

“i. Review the assessments and information provided by the placement co-ordinator....” So whether the patient has consented to it or not, the long-term-care home has no choice; it has to review the assessment.

“ii. Approve the ALC patient for admission” unless one of the conditions specified in the Fixing Long-Term Care Act for not approving the admission was met. And usually, as I said, it’s a patient that has a level of care—some are on dialysis, some need a lockdown unit, some need special care that may not be available in that home. But I would tell you that the placement coordinators know the long-term-care homes inside and out. They will know where to refer the different patients.

And then, “iii. Admit the ... ALC patient” as a resident “when they present themselves” at the long-term-care home. This is where we have this gap. So once the patients present themselves at the long-term-care home, the long-term-care home has to admit the ALC patient as a resident once they present themselves to a long-term-care home. So the Minister of Health goes to great length to say, “You will not be forced out of the hospital into a home that is not of your choosing,” but we will have taken away your opportunity to consent. We will have assessed you. We will have shared your personal information with the long-term-care home, and the long-term-care home will have to admit you if you present yourself.

Then paragraph 5, subsection (3): “A person with authority to carry out an action listed in paragraph 1, 2, 3 or 4,” that I just went through, “a hospital ... or any other person prescribed by the regulations” would have the authority to “collect, use or disclose personal health information if it is necessary to carry out an action listed in paragraph”—the actions are to do the assessment.

So that would be a person listed: a physician, a nurse or a social worker—I still have a lot of problems with giving them the authority to do an assessment without consent, to access your health information without consent and to share your health information without consent. But this bill now says that there could be “any other person prescribed by the regulations.” I’m a little bit afraid to read that part of the regulations.

The bill already talked about physicians. They already talked about nurses. They already talked about care coordinators. “Any other person prescribed by the regulations”—I don’t think you and I, Speaker, should be the one deciding if somebody is ready to go into long-term care and which long-term care they should go to—

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..

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 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 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?

As the member mentioned, in the explanatory note, it says, “This new provision authorizes certain actions.... The actions include having a placement co-ordinator determine the patient’s eligibility for a long-term care home, select a home and authorize their admission to the home.”

What do you think will happen to ALC patients in our hospitals after this bill is passed?