I would like to introduce nurse Dave Verch as well as Angela Glanzman from the Ontario Council of Hospital Unions who are here with us today. Welcome to Queen’s Park.

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?

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’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.