Thank you to the member for Barrie–Innisfil for your question. What I am very much in support of, when we’re talking about expanding public health care, is making sure that hospitals in Toronto, University–Rosedale, across Ontario—ensuring that their operating room capacity is at their maximum.

In University–Rosedale, we have the UHN network; we have SickKids. I have reached out to them and asked them what their operating room capacity is and they were all very clear with me: They said that they are not able to have all their operating rooms full—especially in the evenings, certainly on weekends—because they have a human resources shortage. And this human resources shortage doesn’t just exist when it comes to nurses; it exists in every single department that they’re experiencing, from human resources to finance to cleaners to personal support workers.

It’s a reason why our party has introduced this motion earlier today, calling on the Ontario government to increase capacity in operating rooms that are run by public hospitals in order to meet the need and address the surgery backlog.

I’m pleased to have the opportunity to be able to speak to this motion brought forward by our leader today to stop the government from privatizing our health care system—to fund and fully utilize our public operating rooms, instead of further privatization.

We know that we have a severe crisis happening in our health care system, but the government’s plan is not the way forward. Creating a private system that is going to take the people and the human resource factor out of our public system is just going to further break our public system. And that is completely their goal. We have watched this happening for years.

Bill 124 was definitely something that we have seen deplete our nursing and health care staff out of our public system. We’re watching nursing temp agencies with double the wages being the golden apple for many of our nurses to chase after. And why wouldn’t they, quite frankly? They’re getting respected hours, they’re getting better pay and still doing the same job.

The regulations are definitely not in the system that the government is currently building—we’re watching the inspections and the regulations going to dwindle. Who will be able to serve in these private facilities, who will be able to do the work without the proper regulating health care bodies? My constituents know it. One said to me—this was at 10 to 1 today: “I called our family doctor today and waited 45 minutes to get a hold of a staff member. She said, ‘Sorry, we were short-staffed.’

“Sitting at McMaster, the halls are filled with children who are admitted, waiting for surgeries or procedures. Wheelchair scales are broken and most likely are not being fixed or replaced.

“We live in a health care system where I can tell you horror stories of sitting in the ER waiting to get triaged with a broken arm that was visible to hallway medicine. To tell my daughter, age four—needed surgery, in trauma bay—’Advil shortage crisis.’” This parent is just going on and on and on, as you can hear, because she faces our health care system and is desperate. She’s desperate for a public system that Canadians have known that we could count on since the time Tommy Douglas brought us universal health care.

This program that the Conservatives are bringing forward is the wrong direction. It will only further deplete our public system and put the haves and the have-nots into a totally two-tiered health care systems.

I hope that the government members see the difference and vote for our motion today.

Quick question?

I was here while the member did her debate last week and I think it’s important, since we don’t have a lot of time, that maybe she just wants to recap the impact that this will have on her constituents.

It’s an honour to rise and participate in the debate on Bill 60. Let’s be clear: Ontario’s health care system is in crisis and it’s only gotten worse under the current government, starving our public health care system of the resources it needs, bringing it to the point of collapse.

An FAO report just last year confirmed that since 2008, Ontario has had the lowest per capita funding for health care of any province in the country. Health spending in Ontario is 10% lower than the Canadian average, and this has had disastrous consequences. Patients are waiting far too long for critical surgeries. Emergency rooms are understaffed and sometimes being closed. Existing surgical clinics are being underutilized due to staff shortages. Nurses are overworked, underpaid and experiencing tough working conditions. The government’s Bill 124, which restrains their wages, has only made the situation worse.

That’s exactly why health advocates, experts and front-line workers have been emphatic in their appeal to this government to not appeal the ruling on Bill 124 and to make strategic investments in primary health care, home and community care, mental health services and in addressing the health human resource crisis that we’re facing.

Instead, this government has continued to ignore the experts and is instead scheming up a plan to expand private, for-profit health care clinics, draining staff and financial resources from our public health care system. Bill 60 will force Ontarians to pay more for less care. Every precious public health dollar should go to patient care, not shareholder-driven profits.

To make matters worse, there are no clear protections for patients being pressured for upselling of services in Bill 60. The Auditor General’s report has already showed the problems that exist in this regard. This bill has no clear oversight provisions in place to protect people and the public.

There are better and more effective ways to address Ontario’s health care crisis. It’s time for this government to start listening to what the nurses and the experts are saying. Make the investments needed to bring Ontario’s per capita funding of health care at least up to the Canadian average and ensure that every dollar spent in this province is focused on patient care, not shareholder profits.

I would suggest to the member: Listen to what nurses are saying. Listen to what front-line health care workers are saying, who are overworked, underpaid and dealing with tough working conditions. End the government’s appeal of Bill 124, so we can actually negotiate fair compensation, fair benefits and better working conditions for nurses. That’s how we can stop draining staff from our public health care system.

And if you’re going to set up community surgery facilities, make them non-profit and connected to a hospital, where you don’t see staff being drained away from our publicly funded, publicly delivered health care system.

Let’s spend our money, the precious health dollars we have, on actually utilizing the infrastructure we already have in place.

Thank you to the member from Guelph. Thank you for your short few minutes. You seemed to boil it down to the manufactured crisis this government has created in our health care, and really what we’re looking at, which is the profit-ization of our health care.

Can you just comment on what we really need the people of Ontario to understand, that our hospitals now have capacity? Operating rooms are sitting vacant and unused. We have emergency rooms that are closing, and we have urgent care rooms that are closing. There is capacity. This can be fixed. So why is this government hoarding billions of dollars that should be going into our public health care to address the crisis that they’ve created?

To the member opposite: As you’ve heard us say in the House before, we added 12,000 new nurses registered to work in the province last year. That’s a record.

We’ve also increased the range of initiatives to attract and retain nurses, including $342 million to add over 5,000 new and upskilled registered nurses and registered practical nurses, as well as 8,000 personal support workers. In addition, there are over 5,000 internationally educated nurses residing in Ontario with applications being reviewed, and already the CNO and Ontario Health have resulted in 6,727 internationally trained nurses getting licences in 2022. Will the member support this bill?

Thank you to the member for Hamilton Mountain for that question. My riding is very diverse. We have people with complex care needs and opioid addictions. There’s a homelessness crisis in our riding. These are typically not people that private clinics will accept and operate on, which makes it even harder for our public health care system to deal with people who are suffering from complex needs.

We also have an aging population in University–Rosedale and they often need more care as well. Understandably, many of them are concerned about what the private delivery of surgeries will mean for them.

I’d like to ask the member here about some of the tone that we’re hearing around this debate. When we first brought out the plan to expand more publicly funded, OHIP-paid procedures, we heard from the opposition—you can hear them now, saying that the sky was falling and that this was us leading to American-style privatization.

What I actually think is American-style was the deliberate fearmongering by the opposition, telling residents that they would have to pay with their credit cards, not their OHIP cards. We know that not to be the case; Ontarians will always use their OHIP cards.

Will the member condemn this type of rhetoric that we hear from the opposition?

Yes, Speaker, that’s true. Prior to that, I was a civil servant at Queen’s Park where I worked for the Ministry of Health, I worked for the Ministry of Long-Term Care and I worked for the Ontario Seniors’ Secretariat. Following that, I started my municipal career in 2003, and was 13 years as a regional councillor for the region of Durham. At that council, I was the chair of the health and social services committee for seven and the president of the local public health agency of Ontario for two.

I offer that particular background because it provides some context for what I’m going to say and relate it not only to that experience but also, at the same time, Speaker, to the riding that I’ve had the privilege of representing now with that combined experience for 20 years.

Under our government, we’ve increased health care funding by $14 billion since 2018. To put things into perspective, in 2015, the health care budget was $50 billion. Today the health care budget is $75 billion, a 50% increase in eight years. I call these investments and not simply spending. That’s an important distinction, I believe, because our government believes in fiscal responsibility, respecting taxpayers’ dollars and not simply throwing money like previous governments did, without a plan. We have a plan, and that plan is being implemented.

Let me highlight some of the bricks we’ve put in place to enable this ambitious and innovative work. Over the last four and a half years, we have built 3,500 acute hospital beds, including pediatric critical care beds. We currently have shovels in the ground on 50 new major hospital projects in total, including one in Brampton. It’s a historical infrastructure investment of $40 billion over 10 years. We’ve also provided operational funding for 49 new MRI machines in hospital since 2021 to help us address some of the diagnostic imaging backlog. We’re on track to building 30,000 new long-term-care beds by 2029, including culturally and linguistically appropriate beds for Francophonie, Muslim, Coptic, Punjabi and many other diverse communities living and thriving in the region of Durham and other parts of our province. There has been a long-standing demand in providing these types of beds and we’re responding directly to those demands, not only in my region but in other regions of the province.

We’ve also grown our health care workforce by 60,000 new nurses and 8,000 new physicians since 2018. We currently have 30,000 nursing students enrolled in colleges like Durham College in my riding and other universities outside of my riding in Oshawa: Ontario Tech and Trent Durham. Those programs are oversubscribed. The need is there, and we’re filling that need with this plan.

Speaker, with my remaining time, I’d like to outline the three health care pillars and what they mean to hard-working families in Whitby and other parts of the region of Durham, where there’s close to a million people.

Pillar one is the right care and the right place, and we’ve expanded the role of pharmacists to allow them to prescribe for 13 common ailments such as hay fever, oral thrush, pink eye, acid reflux, cold sores and insect bites, to name a few. This will allow patients convenient access to care, while off-loading some of our primary care clinics. We’re also supporting end-of-life care by adding new hospice beds; for example, Oak Ridges in Port Perry, which is in my deputy whip’s riding in Durham—a long-standing need there. Again, we’re filling a need. We’ve listened carefully, we’ve included it in our plan and we’re responding.

The second pillar, faster access to care, under which the government is investing $18 million into existing surgical and diagnostic centres, will allow thousands of patients access to those much-needed procedures; for example, Lakeridge Health. That’s situated in Oshawa, but it’s also situated in Ajax and Pickering. This investment into 49,000 hours of MRI and CT scans represents cancers caught earlier and lives of region-of-Durham residents prolonged. Once these patients are diagnosed, they often need surgery. That’s why our government is investing $300 million into the Surgical Recovery Strategy.

Finally, the third pillar: hiring more health care workers. I’m so proud of 2022 seeing a record-high number of registrations under the College of Nurses of Ontario. Some 12,000 nurses, a record-high number, have entered the profession—absolutely outstanding. As I mentioned earlier, the programs at Durham College and Trent Durham and Ontario Tech are all oversubscribed, so we’re adding to that as well. We’re the only jurisdiction that is currently doing that in Canada, and 5,000 internationally educated nurses are on track to work in our health care system.

What’s clear is that for too many people, whether it’s the region of Durham or other parts of our great province, health care is too hard to access. I think you would agree with that. The status quo is not working. Whitby residents and those in other parts of the region of Durham deserve to be able to get care where and when they need it. Our plan does exactly that.

This means more hospital and long-term-care beds in the communities. It means more diagnostic testing, like MRIs and CT scans, closer to home. And it means more skilled health care workers—some of whom I just referenced—available to provide care. Clearly, we need to be bold, innovative and creative, and we absolutely are.

Over time, Ontarians will see and feel real improvements in the care they receive as we build a better health care system for the future, for my children and my granddaughters, Annette and Sophia. People have more information and better tools to make the right decisions about their health, and it will become faster and easier for Ontarians to connect to the health services they need in their community or at home, no matter where they live, using their OHIP card—not a credit card. This plan has been well-conceived and it’s been based on wide consultation with different sectors across the province.

I’m happy now to turn over the next 10 minutes to my colleague MPP Trevor Jones.

Interjections.

Please be seated. I’m going to ask all members to keep in mind that you have to refer to other members by their riding names and not their actual names.

The member for Chatham-Kent–Leamington.

I always find it interesting listening to my Conservative friends. You talked about listening; I think both presenters did. There was no consultation with the nurses. There was no consultation with paramedics. You brought in Bill 124; you never talked to the union leadership. I’d just like to know who you consulted with—certainly none of those who really are front-line.

So my question is pretty easy—well, it’s not easy for you guys. Why are you funding for-profit clinics instead of adequately paying doctors and nurses who would help increase surgical capacity in public hospitals? And this is the one that’s really creating a crisis which they won’t address—why is this government still challenging the ruling on Bill 124?

Questions?

Good afternoon. It’s a privilege to speak today to Bill 60, Your Health Act, 2023. I’d like to thank the Minister of Health and her amazing parliamentary assistants for their tireless work and their collaboration with health care providers and Ontarians from every corner of the province. The objective? Bring innovation, best practices and real solutions to support efficiencies that benefit all of Ontario.

This investment has already begun. Since 2018, we have built 3,500 acute-care beds around the province, and even more importantly, staffed each bed with exceptional, trained professionals to provide the highest standard of care to anyone requiring it—world-class care, close to home, paid for with our health cards.

Our government has demonstrated a commitment to building a modern, sophisticated and agile health care system with resilience. We have grown our health care workforce by 60,000 new nurses and 8,000 new physicians since 2018. But even more promising—like my colleague alluded to—we have 30,000 nursing students enrolled in colleges and universities right now, including my son Samuel’s friend Jackson, who chose to follow his father’s footsteps by choosing nursing as a career, bolstered, confident and inspired because of the actions of this government.

As a long-standing member of the Ontario Provincial Police, I had the privilege of serving in communities throughout Ontario, as far north as Kitchenuhmaykoosib Inninuwug and Pikangikum to our National Capital Region to right here in downtown Toronto, and as far south as Pelee Island, in the middle of Lake Erie, in my riding of Chatham-Kent–Leamington. In every community I worked in as a first responder, I came to closely rely on the brilliant, skilled and dedicated professionals, from paramedics to nurses, pharmacists, medical technicians, doctors and all the staff who support them. Probably more than any other profession outside of health care, police officers spend a considerable amount of time in hospitals and other health care centres by the very nature of our work. In some communities and at certain times, they were all I had. I deeply respect and value their insights, experience and the unique perspectives they candidly offered me. Those years working alongside so many diverse health professionals taught me a number of valuable lessons, the most important of which was to listen. These amazing people work with one common goal and one agenda: apply their training and experience to serve, care for, and support and improve the health of others to the best of their abilities. In my humble opinion, that is truly the most honourable pursuit. I have sought the advice and earned the trust and friendship of world-class orthopaedic surgeons, ER doctors, front-line nurses and paramedics.

At home, I’ve been blessed to live beside the same amazing family for nearly two decades, and I have watched their two brilliant, caring daughters, who babysat my own kids, graduate with distinction from the University of Windsor nursing school and begin their professional careers in our local hospitals.

Just around the corner from my home, our friends have three daughters very close in age to my sons, one of whom has just graduated from medical school and is currently completing her residency with the hope of gaining the skills necessary to set up her own care practice in our community. Interestingly, her two sisters are completing their undergraduate degrees with the hopes of aspiring to careers in health care.

As one of my first orders of business after being elected to this House, I sought out and met personally with health care leaders from Chatham-Kent–Leamington. The Chatham-Kent Health Alliance and Erie Shores HealthCare are both led by brilliant, credible, experienced women—leaders who started their careers, one as a pharmacist and the latter as a front-line nurse. Both women excelled in their fields and continued to advance their studies while getting the precious experience to take on greater leadership roles that culminated in each earning their titles as president and CEO. Cheers to that, and my congratulations.

The people I’ve spoken to across this province, including young recent graduates, established practitioners and formal leaders, all agree that the status quo is not working. Many of these same caring professionals were directly impacted and suffered, witnessing first-hand the lack of investment from previous governments. I have listened and seen from personal experience that it’s taking far too long to get an appointment or a surgery.

We now have a government committed to health care workers and everyone across this province who must rely, at many times in their life, on our health care system. This government agrees the status quo is not sufficient, and we were elected with a strong mandate to take decisive action and make the necessary historic investments to infrastructure projects like the one in Windsor and Essex county—the Windsor-Essex single-site acute-care hospital—and our Toronto Metropolitan University school of medicine.

There is genuine excitement building in our community as projects begin to materialize. Don’t let the naysayers dissuade you. To accompany this important work and to propel our health care system forward, we need the critical legislation that is equally bold, creative and innovative. We need true collaboration across the health care system and the courage to install the proven best practices from our neighbouring jurisdictions, while protecting the fundamental way we pay for health care: with our OHIP cards.

Bill 60, if passed, will allow all Ontarians to be better connected to the care we all need at a time and a place where it’s most convenient. We’ll be able to get the care we need more quickly, when it have the greatest impact on our health. Further, all parts of the health care system will be more flexible and responsive to our needs, making it easier for everyone to navigate the system that our lives depend on.

This strategy, as my colleague alluded to, is based on three critical pillars:

The right care in the right place supports more care in the community, leveraging the very best virtual care, supporting targeted critical care needs and specialized supports, including mental health and addictions services.

Faster access to care—maximizing surgical capacity, expanding hospital and community bed capacity to provide needed services, and building new and improving existing hospitals. By maximizing the scope of practice, we increase access to care universally.

And, most importantly, hiring more health care workers—recruiting, retaining and optimizing to ensure we have the right number, types and distribution of health care professionals in every community in Ontario.

I have listened to our professionals. Our government has listened to our people and our professionals.

Bill 60, if passed, will support innovation and efficiency, like using community-based surgical and diagnostic centres with state-of-the-art modern facilities to diagnose and treat patients more quickly, while safeguarding and ensuring patients pay for such procedures with their health card. These investments, this collaborative effort, this support, and this bold, whole-health approach are what will draw our young people—just like my neighbours—into the critical broad spectrum of rewarding health care careers, where every day you get the opportunity to care for and improve the lives of those in your communities. I encourage all members in this House to support a bill that will help safeguard and modernize this most precious resource for generations to come.

Thank you to my friend.

We’ve expanded the Ontario Learn and Stay Grant for health care graduates to receive a full tuition reimbursement in exchange for committing to practise in an underserved community. There’s no place more underserved than northwestern Ontario, where I spent a good deal of my career working in communities like Pikangikum, Big Trout Lake, or Kitchenuhmaykoosib Inninuwug. These are places where, if we can invest in those young people to learn and stay in those communities, they’ll build the bonds, they’ll build their families, and they’ll build the commitment to stay and practise and have a long, rewarding career in those communities.

Building on 12,000 new nurses registered to work in the province only last year, our government is investing in a range of initiatives to attract, train and retain nurses to get them in the system sooner—including $342 million to add 5,000 new and upskilled registered nurses and RPNs and 8,000 personal support workers.

This government listened for 15 years while the Liberal government, backed by the NDP, wasted away and directed money away and closed beds and really mistreated our health care workers. That’s the truth.

There’s no small question and no curiosity that young people are more and more attracted to nursing and health care professions, as evident in a small sample size of people in my little community of Leamington. Why are these young people now attracted? Because they believe in this government of yes. They believe in the investments. Momentum is building. The party of no can say no, but young people are recognizing that these opportunities—

I want to thank my colleagues for their speeches today.

I’m so proud of this government. You look at looking outside the box—we know that health care cannot be done the same way over and over and over again. We see that with our parents, our grandparents and our kids. We need to do better, and that’s exactly what we’re doing.

Even the announcement last week about 13 common ailments that can be fixed by our pharmacists—that’s great news for anybody, all of our constituents. Regardless of your political stripes, you can’t tell me that that senior is not saying thank you because they can go right down the street and get ear infection or pink eye infection medicine versus having to wait for their doctor.

When it comes to the status quo, we all know—

My question is for the member for Chatham-Kent–Leamington.

He talked about supporting front-line workers. If he really supported front-line workers, he would pass anti-scab legislation so that Highbury Canco couldn’t be using scabs and keeping people in his riding out on the picket line.

Speaker, it’s interesting; the member for Chatham-Kent–Leamington—I didn’t know that he was a police officer.

Thank you for your previous service.

My question is around salaries. When we’re talking about compensation, specifically with nurses and Bill 124—I think it’s interesting that 78% men make up the OPP. They had a salary increase of 2.22%. Some 97% of firefighters are men. They had a wage increase of 2.5%. Yet nursing is made up of 93% women, and this government capped their wage increase at less than 1%. I’m asking the member for Chatham-Kent–Leamington, can you explain why you and your government value the important work of women-led professions far lower than those with men?

My question is to the MPP for Whitby.

We’ve heard a lot in the discussion about this bill, as well as the previous discussion about the opposition bill, about privatizing health care.

I’d like the MPP, please, to tell us what this government is doing to protect Ontarians from extra billing.

Thank you to my colleague from the riding of Niagara Falls for his question and the passion that he provides in the Legislative Assembly on a variety of topics.

To the question: We talk to front-line providers all the time. Every other weekend, I’m out knocking on doors in my riding, and it’s inevitable that I’m going to knock on a door that is inclusive of front-line providers—but more directly, we talked to front-line providers all along.

In terms of Bill 124, I can’t speak to that directly because it’s still before the courts, and my colleague knows that. In terms of—

Interjections.

In terms of the Ontario Health Coalition, Ontario will continue to have one of the largest publicly funded—

Another aspect I think that’s important for people who are watching this afternoon, or listening in, is that integrated community health services centres will now have to post any uninsured charges both online and in person. That’s an important step. Whether it’s the Oshawa community clinic on Taunton Road in the north part of my riding or any other six clinics that extend within the region of Durham, that is going to be the practice.

Last but certainly not least, patients cannot be denied access to treatment if they don’t purchase uninsured services. That’s a very important distinction that I want to leave—

Speaker, what we’ve done with the pharmacists is just another example of the innovative thinking that has taken place in the development of our plan. The plan that’s in place wasn’t in place for 15 years with the Liberal government—