I received a letter in the mail from Judy P. in Oshawa. She says, “I’m not normally what I’d describe as an activist or prone to protesting against my government, but never in my life have I felt more compelled to very strongly voice my objection, disbelief, and frankly horror over the policies of Premier Doug Ford....

“I feel the need to fight for our health care for my children, grandchildren, family, friends, and all fellow Ontarians. Premier Ford appears to be intentionally trying to cripple our previously world-class health care system in order to make private health care look like it’s our best option. His promise to end hallway medicine has failed and turned into parking lot medicine. Never in my life have I had to worry about an ambulance not being available or a hospital not having an empty bed. Never have I had to worry about delays in surgeries or treatments and yet, this is now Ontario. People are dying. Premier Ford has said that he would never do away with public health care for Ontarians. But he’s whittling it away and heading for a two-tiered system. And we know private facilities would get the cream of the crop in resources and personnel, making it one gold-level system for the haves, and a much poorer system for the have-nots. This will mean more Ontarians living on the edge will suffer and even die. What a legacy!”

She goes on to say, “Our health care is something I remember my parents being so proud of. Universal health care came about when I was a young child. It sets Canada apart from many nations. We used to be a shining example that other nations looked to with envy....

“We can’t afford to lose our universal health care. It’s part of what makes Canada a great place to live.”

Well, Judy, we have a hell of a fight on our hands to save medicare. Thank you for your strong letter. I’m in the fight with you.

Speaker, I’m very glad to have an opportunity to stand on behalf of the people from Oshawa and Durham region broadly to talk about health care today. We’re debating Bill 60, which is An Act to amend and enact various Acts with respect to the health system. The short version of it is that this is an attack on medicare. I am a medicare defender and I am Canadian, and I recognize the value of health care access for everyone, and publicly funded health care, but importantly—what we don’t hear from this government, we don’t hear from the Liberals—publicly delivered health care.

I’m going to explain a fair bit for the folks at home, but also for this government, because the government has its talking points and they seem to be confused when the members of the opposition are raising important concerns. I’m going to continue to do that and I hope we’re going to have a spirited discussion this afternoon.

Tommy Douglas is known as the father of medicare, among other things, frankly. One of his quotes—and we’ve heard a lot of them lately, but one of them is, “We are all in this world together, and the only test of our character that matters is how we look after the least fortunate among us. How we look after each other, not how we look after ourselves. That’s all that really matters, I think.” That’s from Tommy Douglas.

We hear a lot in this space, especially from the government, that there’s a lot being done for folks that they know—maybe folks they play golf with; I’m not sure—folks who stand to make a lot of money. This government makes a lot of decisions that benefit them. I can’t speak to the why. I can’t speak to the relationships. It doesn’t look good, doesn’t smell good, but that’s where it stands. A lot of the decisions that are made are not benefiting the vast majority of Ontarians, the average folk, our friends and neighbours, people we haven’t met yet. Imagine putting forward legislation that actually benefited people that they didn’t know. That’s how Ontario used to operate, but here we are.

Another quote from Tommy Douglas about medicare: He said, “I came to believe that health services ought not to have a price tag on them, and that people should be able to get whatever health services they required irrespective of their individual capacity to pay”—again, having access to health care based on need, not the ability to pay.

That’s something we’ve heard from folks across the community writing in to us. The government hasn’t admitted it, but I’m willing to bet that they’ve also been hearing from folks saying, “Medicare is what makes us Canadian. That’s part of who we are. That’s part of our identity. It’s part of how the world sees us.”

A bill like this, which is just chipping away at the system, which is undermining the integrity of medicare, will lead to more degradation and, ultimately, potentially, to a lot of people being sick, harmed or worse.

The government is going to stand—I can feel it coming—and they’re going to call me a fearmonger. But what I am is a medicare defender. What I am is a champion for the folks who write to my office that say, “I already can’t afford these random fees that I’ve got from my private clinic,” or that there’s a blood test that they weren’t told now requires a fee—that’s not legal; we’re working with them. But this is already happening. Now, imagine, with this bill, the private surgical clinics that are not going to have the oversight that they need—more on that later.

Speaker, we have a lot of folks writing in. I’ve got one here from someone named Krystle: “My name is Krystle and I am writing you because of fearing for our city, our province and our country.

“This week I waited eight-plus hours in Oshawa emergency department for my seven-year-old son to see a doctor.

“There is currently an 18-month wait to see a therapist/psychiatrist covered by OHIP in Ontario.

“Real people will die. That is unacceptable and too long in either regard.

“I urge you to please do whatever is in your power to request more funding for our health care. I fear our health care system is beyond repair. However, I can’t stand idle while it crumbles.” That’s from Krystle.

Folks are worried and they don’t know where to turn, so they reach out to us and say, “Please stop this. Please help us.”

We’ve heard the term “manufactured crisis,” and I’m going to use it again. This is from an article. The Financial Accountability Office of Ontario has found that Ontario’s per capita funding is the lowest in the country: “The report found that on the whole, Ontario’s total program spending in 2020 was the lowest in Canada.” And then, “Since 2008 when the data is first available, Ontario has consistently had among the lowest levels of per person health spending in the country.”

There are reasons for that—there’s all sorts of stuff—but this government has not changed that course. If you’re starving a system, chances are it’s going to be hungry. If you’re starving a system, chances are a lot of people aren’t going to be able to get what they need. And if you starve a system, you’re manufacturing a crisis.

We had an opposition day motion how many hours ago today, and the short version of that—I know that folks already heard that debate. They were saying, “Let’s utilize the resources that the taxpayers have already invested. Let’s utilize these surgical suites that already exist, the operating rooms that are already ready to go, with state-of-the-art technologies and whatever they need, that provide surgeries, that do the work, that do the surgeries”—the staff do them, excuse me, in these operating rooms. But then, as we heard our health critic say, around February or March, when the money runs out, when the government cap on “You’re only allowed to do this many surgeries. You’re only allowed to do this many cataracts or hip replacements”—once they have done that, there’s no more funding, so those operating rooms sit vacant.

Some of the members on the other side are kind of furrowing their brow, like, “That can’t be right.” Well, ask your government, because it is. The member from Nickel Belt and the member from Timiskaming–Cochrane talked eloquently about exactly how many operating rooms there are and how many basically have to go offline, not because people don’t need surgeries. So we said, “Let’s use those resources before you guys are making all these deals for the private clinics.” It’s like you don’t make eye contact over there. Like, “Oh, we’ve got resources and we’re not investing, and we can’t use what we’ve got? But I promised Frank at golf on Saturday that we’d help him build his clinic.”

Interjections.

Speaker, I withdraw. I don’t know that that happened, but—

Interjection: You can’t say that.

I’m going to continue along the lines here of the manufactured crisis. Bill 124—folks who are maybe just tuning in now and are like, “What is this Bill 124 I’ve heard of?” Well, specific to health care—and we could talk about all sorts of other sectors in Bill 124; ferry workers, for example. But the nurses are not able to be paid what they’re worth where they work, at the hospital. This is just a piece of it. When I had met with folks at the Lakeridge hospital, they’re basically being held hostage. Without Bill 124—with this foot on their head that they aren’t allowed to bargain fair wages—they would normally bargain a wage for their staff, whatever that is that is fair. But they’re not allowed; there’s a cap on that. Instead, they’re forced to pay less than 1% increases.

Then there’s the private agency world over here. The private agency world over here doesn’t have that foot on their head, doesn’t have that cap on wages, so they can pay more. A nurse might have to make that tough decision to walk away from benefits and union protections, because there’s so much money to be made over here that they leave. They’ve been leaving in droves, and the hospitals don’t have anyone to reach for. There’s no staffing because now they’re working at agencies. But they still require staff, because you, me and your neighbours, everybody sitting in emergency, sitting in waiting rooms needing help—they’re forced to go to the agencies, who can charge them whatever. The nurses are making more, and I don’t begrudge them making more. But I do begrudge the agencies and their profit margins. They’re fleecing our hospitals. The hospitals—that, weirdly, have to answer to the government—are allowed to pay those staffing costs, but they’re not allowed to pay their own nurses. And the government is like, “Shh, stop talking. We don’t want to hear this.” Because that’s business. That’s options. That’s—I don’t know—innovation.

I’m going to read something here, a letter from nurses who are quite concerned. They had said, “Expanding private health care and forcing seniors into long-term-care homes are false solutions. They won’t address the real problem, Ontario’s nurse and health care staffing crisis....

“Thousands of job vacancies remain unfilled because there aren’t enough skilled nurses available and willing to do the work under unfair working conditions. Unprecedented backlogs of surgeries and other procedures can’t be cleared without proper investment and publicly delivered health care.

“People with urgent care needs are waiting longer than ever, with some overstretched emergency rooms having to close their doors and send patients elsewhere.

“These challenges are the result of underfunding and unfair legislation like Bill 124 making it harder than ever for our public health care system to retain and recruit nurses and health care professionals.

“This situation isn’t sustainable.” And it goes on.

The court said Bill 124 was unconstitutional, and this government is fighting them. But we’ve heard today we’re not allowed to discuss it because it’s before the courts. This speaks to the government’s priorities: Don’t do right by the nurses; don’t do right by the health care workers; don’t fix the staffing problem; don’t address the backlogs when we have empty operating rooms because the hospitals aren’t allowed to ask for more money for certain types of surgeries because there’s a cap. All of this is manufactured.

The Ontario Health Coalition has been doing fantastic work, and they’ve been doing town halls across our community. I was proud to join in on one of the Zoom town halls to hear from people about what their concerns are, what their fears are, but also what their plans are. I’m proud to be a medicare defender; I’ll say it. There were also Liberals on some of those calls, which I thought was fun. I say “fun” because everybody is talking about publicly funded health care. Even this government talks about publicly funded health care. I’m not challenging publicly funded health care. Your tax dollars, my tax dollars—folks pay into the system, right? Health care is supposed to be one of the things that comes out of it.

So for publicly funded health care, the money goes into the health care bucket. Picture a big bucket; that’s where our health care dollars go. My concern is about “publicly delivered,” because if you’ve got this big bucket of money that’s meant to go to health care and then you’ve got all these for-profit companies that come along and say, “Oh, I can do it better, faster, cheaper”—no, they can’t. In fact, the evidence is that they can’t. But right now they say they can. These private companies come along and they drill holes in that bucket and that money goes to profit margins, goes to shareholders, so the money doesn’t go as far because that level goes down and down when it goes to profit instead of being reinvested in the system. So with publicly delivered, those holes don’t exist because we don’t have to pay profit margins. It’s patient care instead of profit margins. That’s the difference between publicly funded and publicly delivered.

The official opposition, New Democrats, understand that. The Ontario Health Coalition and medicare champions across this province understand that. And for the government that jumps up and down and says, “You will never have to pay with your credit card, and how dare you suggest such a thing”—you’re going to have to pay fees with your credit card, and you’re not actually arguing that. But you’re talking about health care services that will never have to be paid for with a credit card and always paid for with the OHIP card. Okay, fine, but your OHIP card ain’t going to go as far with all that money leaking out of your profit bucket, so how you pay for it is part of the conversation. How far that money goes in making decisions in the best interests of public health and care—that’s the conversation I wish this government was capable of having.

Speaker, I have a stack of letters, and I am running out of time. I would actually invite folks to go online—and I know a lot of the government members are Googling the facts of the world the last couple of days. The Ontario Health Coalition has a whole bunch of fact sheets about the Canada Health Act, facts about two-tiered medicare, a lot of the myths that are out there, so take a look. Do some homework; learn a couple of things.

But I have a letter here that was sent in the mail from Judy in Oshawa, and I want to read this. She says, “It’s easy to make privatization look appealing. There would be promises of low premiums from insurance companies from the beginning. But eventually rates would explode like they have in the USA. There are people there paying thousands of dollars per month for health care. How many of us make thousands of dollars a month that they could pay towards health care? And let’s be honest ... private health care doesn’t really want to pay out, especially on anything major. Their goal is to not pay out, like all insurance companies.”

She goes on and on. She says, “Health care is expensive, but privatizing it would make it more expensive for individuals because of uncontrollable corporate greed. A proper government should be acting on behalf of the public, the individuals who live and work in this province. Not the rich (and often multi-national) corporations that Premier Ford appears to work for.”

Judy also remembers. She says, “Our health care is something I remember my parents being so proud of. Universal health care came about when I was a young child. It sets Canada apart from many nations. We used to be a shining example that other nations looked to with envy.” She talks about what they see in the States: “People can lose their homes and more if they have a very serious medical issue; many die. It’s a system that discriminates against anyone who is not rich. We should never allow this to happen here.” Thank you, Judy.

Speaker, the government is going to get up and say, “Well, that’s not happening,” and I will say, “Yet.” Because Bill 60—this is a dark day in Ontario. No matter what they tell you at the caucus table, government, this is a dark day, because you’re not going to be able to come back from this easily. Once you’ve got the sharks in there, once you’ve got the profit margins, once you’ve got all that profitization of health care, they ain’t giving that back.

Let’s look at long-term care. At Orchard Villa in my neck of the woods, in Durham region, instead of holding them to account, instead of at the time shutting them down, instead of saying that that was not okay that those people died, this government rallied so fast to protect them from being sued. And now we wait with bated breath: Will they or won’t they get their 30-year licence extension and additional beds? That’s what you do. That’s what this government has done when it comes to profit and for-profit companies, with their death grip on our health care system—in that case, long-term care.

Speaker, I have so many letters. Here’s one. Kelly said, “I am writing with a truly burdened heart over the status” of “the health care system in both Ontario and Canada. The provincial and federal governments must do more to address the crisis in our hospitals. I wish that I could come up with the words to articulate how difficult the last week has been.”

She wrote about her father, who was sent by ambulance to the hospital with a suspected stroke—and of course time is of the essence in that case. She said, “My father spent seven hours in a hard chair in the emergency ward and was sent home with the message that he had not had a stroke, and there was no treatment.” However, it was later confirmed by his eye doctor that he had indeed had a TIA.

She says, “It is truly incredibly scary that in an emergency, our health care system is not equipped to respond in a timely or thorough manner. I know that there is a crisis in the system.... There is no excuse for not being able to provide proper emergency care where lives depend on it....

“Please do your part to advocate to the provincial government that there must be more done. This is Ontario, and this is Canada.”

There’s a lot at stake right now. Bill 60 is a terrible mistake. It is unnecessary. Our opposition day motion earlier made the case—and it is a legit case, and you know it—that there are resources that we are not using, that we have operating rooms that could be utilized to clear the backlog, but you won’t fund the staffing. We have a staffing crisis and shortage, and you won’t allow hospitals to pay their staff what they’re worth—won’t allow.

We’re talking about medicare, and people who are writing in about the fee that they’re having to pay—we’re just going to see more of that. In this bill there isn’t sufficient oversight, and anyone who says there is cannot point to it in this bill. When it comes to oversight, it should be rigorous. Anything you do with health care should be about patient protection. There is not anything in this bill about oversight. If you’re going to move it into a for-profit, investor-driven corporate clinic, you’re taking it out from under the CPSO, because it’s no longer under physicians that these surgeries will be done; it will be done under a company. And if CPSO no longer has oversight, well, then what? Because patient complaints—do you want to spend some time talking about that? Your patient complaint system is insufficient today, before we do this. You are doing the wrong thing, and Ontarians deserve better.

I am very proud to stand in this House as a New Democrat and as a provincial member who is excited about having the opportunity to stand on behalf of people when it comes to public education, public health care. I want to strengthen the system we have before us.

Tommy Douglas—his vision was also about pharmacare and dental care. That’s the whole thing—it’s supposed to be about wellness and the idea of prevention and trying to keep people well before they get sick. Economically speaking, that should make sense to Conservatives.

From a human perspective, health and wellness should be based on need, not people’s ability to pay, which is why we’re standing here talking about the importance of protecting medicare from this piece of legislation—and I’m proud to do that work every day.

Anyway, what I will say is that our communities have complex needs, so the fact that folks can go to the pharmacists, who are professionals and are able to deliver important pieces of that care—everyone across communities is glad for that. Who benefits from that beyond the patients and actual folks in the community? I get pretty sticky when it starts to be Mr. Galen Weston, over and over and over. I want health care to be about health care, about caring about health, not just about making folks stupid rich.

I think that when we are focused on patient care, we’re going to be doing the right thing—or, I guess, the left thing. When we’re focused on profit care, I’ve got a problem with that.

I’m going to do the opposite of that: I’m going to talk about why we should not privatize public hospital services, whatever that looks like, whatever they call it, them or the next—well, they won’t be the next. The next government will make the best decisions for Ontarians and their health.

Why we shouldn’t privatize public hospital services, from the Ontario Health Coalition—for-profit clinics and hospitals provide poorer-quality care; they hire less-qualified staff and direct public funds into profits rather than care, as we’ve talked about. It worsens staffing shortages. Private clinics take easier and less complex patients, leaving the more complex folks languishing, and they also charge user fees and extra-bill patients on top of OHIP for medically necessary services.

This is not the direction Ontario should be going. Reverse course, please.

Privatization or profitization, or whatever word this government is going to be comfortable with, is the wrong direction.

When it comes to the lowest per capita funding that we’ve got in Ontario—to the member’s question—there are multiple layers to why, but this government is not making it better. This government has not been investing what it needs to in health care.

The manufactured crisis is your smokescreen. That is this government’s “Hey, look over here. Look how bad things are. We’re going to have to rescue it with this absurd scheme that has been tried, time and time again, and does not bear fruit.” In fact, it will make sure that Ontarians don’t have what they need when they need it. That is the wrong way ahead.

This should not be a plan for just the wealthy. This should be a plan to—