Thank you. Questions?

Further debate?

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.

Questions?

My thanks to the member for Oshawa for participating in debate this afternoon and for contributing her comments and remarks about the legislation. I think we have deep differences of perspective on how this bill will impact the people of Ontario.

I believe very firmly that the legislation before this House is going to have an immense impact, in a positive way, by reducing the wait times and ensuring that people in my riding are able to access the care that they expect and deserve when and where they need it.

My question to the member opposite is—I know she obviously supports the work that her former colleague Mr. Jagmeet Singh is doing in Ottawa. I’m just wondering if she would support, if she were a federal MP, the federal expansion of dental health benefits. And if she supports the federal expansion of dental health benefits, does she support the fact that that will be provided through private dentists?

Just last week, I had a town hall in Niagara Falls, and we had over 200 people there. It was a full house. They were very passionate about protecting our publicly funded, publicly delivered health care. The health coalition was there, who we all know and have talked about in this House. We had an ER doctor. We had mental health organizations, paramedics who are saying that they’re stuck at hospitals. So I believe that Ontarians are going to fight tooth and nail to protect their publicly funded health care system.

It’s interesting today, because it’s the first time I’ve heard it—for the last three years, we’ve been raising Bill 124 in this House, and today they’re now saying, “It’s before the courts. We can’t comment.” I want to ask my colleague, why do you think they’re saying that?

Questions?

I’d like to thank my colleague from Oshawa for her wonderful presentation.

I want to take you back to March 2022, when Ontario’s former Patient Ombudsman and, at that time, the Conservative health minister, Christine Elliott, almost issued a warning—or, at the very least, let it slip. She stated: “We are ... making sure that we can let independent health facilities operate private hospitals.” Possibly, when they realized how foolish and wrong this was, the minister’s spokespeople said, of privatization, “The use or function of private hospitals and independent health facilities in Ontario is not being expanded or changed.”

Clearly, funding is being cut for publicly delivered health care, as we’ve seen in the FAO’s report—cutting $5 billion—and it’s being put into for-profit health care profiteers’ pockets.

My question to the member is, why did they flip-flop?

As I mentioned earlier, one key component to ensuring the right care in the right place is expanding care at local pharmacies. As of last week, 70,000 assessments were conducted by pharmacists—highly trained, trusted, regulated health professionals across the province.

Will the member opposite support expanding the scope of pharmacists so that constituents in Oshawa and ridings across Ontario can get better access to care closer to home?

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—

I’m pleased to rise in the chamber today to speak to Bill 60. I’d like to point out, at the outset, that I’ll be sharing my time with the member for Kingston and the Islands—

I’d like to begin this debate by pointing out something that the member from Simcoe–Grey just remarked on, which is that medicare has four principles. That’s not true. Medicare has five principles, and the one that he missed was accessibility. For as long as there are fundamental differences on objective facts like the number of principles that we hold dear in the Canada Health Act, then it is just not credible that this government can be trusted to manage public health care in the first place.

Bill 60 remains the latest in a series of poorly conceived, superficial policies lacking thought, detail or any semblance of understanding about the challenges in our health care system. It continues with a series of failed policies, like the failed effort to increase credentialing of foreign-trained health care workers; the failed effort to regulate temporary for-profit nursing agencies; and the failed effort to reassure us that Ontarians will always pay with their OHIP cards, not their credit cards. We don’t need to look further than virtual primary care to discover that OHIP services are locked up in this province behind paywalls and credit cards already.

As a brief overview—what’s wrong with Bill 60?

(1) It completely misses the point of our health care crisis. Notably, it doesn’t address any of the challenges with our health human resources. It doesn’t address the massive underinvestment in our health care system under the current government.

(2) It only pays lip service to the things that actually matter in our health care system—oversight, protection against upselling and upcharging—but it delivers none of the details and leaves far too much to the regulations.

(3) Finally, I will say that it has failed even before it has passed, because we are seeing for-profit corporatization across our health care system, to the detriment of our patients and having surgeries and procedures addressed in a timely manner.

This government loves to rail against the status quo, without acknowledging that they are the status quo. The moment they took power five years ago, our health care system embarked upon a significant nosedive. They cut hundreds of millions in public health funding. They cut staffing solutions like the practice-ready assessment program for foreign-trained family doctors. And they enacted the unconstitutional and wage-constraining Bill 124, which they continue to support and now appeal in the courts, to the cost of millions of dollars to the citizens of Ontario.

Bill 124 is the rate-limiting step that is preventing us from enhanced performance of our health care system. For those who don’t believe me, I invite you to consider this quote from the Ontario Hospital Association, that very same organization that this government loves to go to when they need quotes to support their policies: “The OHA has consistently advocated that Bill 124 should not be extended nor should additional restrictions be imposed due to its impact on availability of HHR and other impacts on hospital operations.” That’s from their buddy.

It will come as no surprise, then, because they have persisted in defending Bill 124, that Ontario Health data reveals that under the Ford government, our health care system performance has been the worst in this province’s history, ever. To be clear, every year of this government’s so-called leadership has resulted in worse performance than the last.

What I’m here to argue today is that rather than throwing the baby out with the bathwater, what we need to be doing is moving our health care system from neglected under you guys—sorry; neglected by the current government—to protected.

Let’s also not forget that by 2028, this government will have underinvested by over $23 billion, according to the Financial Accountability Officer. I have heard that the government contends they disagree with the FAO, but I will also add that this opinion simply can’t be trusted, considering their own estimates of this province’s deficit swing by billions of dollars every few weeks.

Amidst this comedy of incompetence, we have a murky new bill whose impact really won’t come into focus until it has passed, because so much of the stuff that matters isn’t actually in the bill and is instead left to regulation. Who, for example, will perform the oversight? Is that body external or internal? And without such details, how could we possibly believe that there are credible protections against upselling or overcharging? After all, this government has insisted throughout the entire year that upcharging isn’t actually even a problem, although the Auditor General has said that it is, and instead ignored her recommendations while reassuring us that everything is okay.

Madam Speaker, this bill really could have spent some more time cooking in the oven. For example, in schedule 2, the definition of “nurse” is thrown out the window and is instead replaced with the following: “‘registered nurse’ means a member of the College of Nurses of Ontario who holds a certificate of registration as a registered nurse under the Nursing Act, 1991 or another person prescribed by the regulations....” So the definition is changing, but we have no clue what that definition will be. It is simply left to the regulations. How can we have a discussion about redefining an entire profession without any details about what that will be? The reality is that this is likely an approach to introduce as-of-right legislation, without affording anyone an opportunity in this Legislature to have an actual debate about it.

I’m going to talk very briefly about moving surgeries out of hospitals. There is some precedent that in Canada and around the world, surgeries can be moved out of hospitals, but in order for that to be successful, it has to be done with adequate guardrails. Most importantly, time and time again we have learned that not-for-profit initiatives consistently outperform for-profit ones. This is not an ideological position. Apart from the fact that it has been demonstrated in journal after journal after journal, it is also the position of the Ontario Medical Association. In their report on integrated ambulatory centres in 2022, they made it clear that their position is that such centres should operate on a not-for-profit basis. So they should be not-for-profit, and they must have credible protections against profiteering, upselling and siphoning of health care workers out of the publicly funded system. Bill 60 doesn’t do any of these things, and instead, it leaves massive gaps. Until such gaps are credibly filled, this bill is nothing more than window dressing and does nothing but threaten the quality of health care in this province.

With that, I yield the remainder of my time to the member from Kingston and the Islands.

I want to thank my colleague the member for Don Valley East for serving almost like a one-person opposition on health care. He’s done such a great job to hold this government to account. I’m going to try my best to add a few things to what he said.

What we’re talking about today is establishing something called integrated community health services centres, and what we’re repealing is something called the Independent Health Facilities Act. Now, already this sets off some flags in my head: Why are we changing the name so much? So I decided to compare the two acts a little bit just to see very quickly what the differences might be.

One thing that I found is that both acts rely on a director to grant licences, to look at licence applications, to conduct inspections, to potentially revoke licences if something goes wrong. But I noticed that in the previous act, the director had to be an employee of the health ministry, and in the current act, the director could be anybody. The legislation doesn’t say.

Why is it, Madam Speaker, that the government made this subtle change in the legislation so that they did not have to appoint a director who is an employee of the ministry? They don’t have to appoint a director who’s used to giving fearless advice and loyal implementation. Why is it that they don’t have to appoint a director who is an employee of the ministry and therefore, generally, is non-partisan, is not a big donor or is expecting favours or anything like that? That, to me, is a red flag, and I’d like to understand at the committee stage why the government made this change.

The act is quite long—it’s a lot of pages and it takes a long time to read through. And sometimes little, subtle changes like that, especially when there’s two different acts—one that’s getting repealed and another one that you’re trying to read through as the legislation is being debated—you don’t always see these comparisons. But I would hope that in committee, these little differences are examined. I would very much like to know why this government chose to change the act slightly so that they don’t have to appoint the director—in fact, the most important person, the lynchpin in this whole system, the person who grants licences, reviews licence applications, oversees inspections and potentially revokes licences. Why is the government not committing itself to hiring an employee of the Ministry of Health?

As my colleague said, a lot of the actual plan is going to be in the regulations. This is kind of like asking the people of Ontario to put down a deposit on a house by looking at the sales brochure instead of being able to walk through an open house. That’s what it feels like. If you look at what the considerations are when licence applications are looked at, it doesn’t include what the licensee is going to do in terms of protections from upselling. It doesn’t include what the licensee is going to do to prevent poaching staff from hospitals.

If there are any complaints, what the act says is that the licensee—the operator of the integrated community health service centre—is required to establish a process for complaints, not the system. That strikes me as a little strange, because if we’re going to change the system, it would seem to me that in the first few years, we would want to have a more robust system of hearing complaints from users to make sure things are working, to make sure that there aren’t little adjustments we can make to make sure that the system is serving the people of Ontario properly.

There is no commitment from the government to increase funds to the Patient Ombudsman, but I feel like there needs to be a specialized response to Ontario consumers who are using these new services in integrated community health service centres at least for a few years, to make sure that things are working well.

Thank you. The member from Kingston and the Islands.

Great member.

Either member could answer this question. I just want to go back a little bit. When the Liberal party was in charge of the government, back in the majority days, Premier Kathleen Wynne’s government was trying to extricate itself from one privatization disaster, even as it sets itself up for another. That’s the Ornge one that they’re referring to. The current disaster of its handling of surgical clinics—Ontarians may recall the government’s decision to expand the scope of private clinics, announced with much fanfare by then health minister Deb Matthews in 2012.

I just need to ask the members a question: Do they support privatization of health care expansion or not?

I appreciate the revised history lesson from our new Liberal colleagues. I can appreciate that they weren’t elected during the 15 years when Liberal governments fired nurses and closed down hospitals, including the Peel Memorial Hospital, which is actually the hospital I was born in, in Brampton—and, actually, I guess the other previous Liberal members in the previous government also voted against rebuilding that hospital in Brampton, to get a second hospital at the site of Peel Memorial. So I can appreciate that these members might—

When we talk about corporate profiteering and privatization—

Questions?

A quick response.

To the member from Don Valley East—interesting presentation, isn’t it? Fifteen years to get absolutely nothing—absolutely nothing.

One of the aspects of our plan supports expanding the number of physicians that can join a family health team. I’m from a region that has a million people. The people that I represent, 149,000 people—this is something they want, this is something I hear at the doors that I knock on, every other weekend.

Can the member for Don Valley East tell me whether he supports increasing access to family health teams?

My question is to the doctor. He said the Ontario Hospital Association has said very clearly to this government that Bill 124 shouldn’t be extended. I think that’s pretty clear.

What I’ve never understood is why a labour minister on that side of the House, who is supposed to be non-partisan, is supporting and continues to support Bill 124. I hope he hears me; I don’t know if he can hear me or not, but I hope he does.

You also said that performance is better in not-for-profit compared to profit. When I look at long-term care, because I’m the critic, 5,400 people died in long-term care; approximately 3,800 of them died in private long-term care.

My question to you is, do you agree that everything should stay not-for-profit?