Thank you to the member for the question.

We have record numbers of students who are entering the nursing profession, and we are ensuring that we have more nurses as we move forward with our plans, and this is in no part due to the NDP and Liberals, who do not support us every step of the way. We continue to make investments in registered nurses, registered practical nurses, PSWs. Every time, the opposition votes against those measures.

We are allowing our colleges and universities to now offer stand-alone nursing programs across the province, and this will ensure that nursing students can practise in their areas and continue to be professionals in those areas. As part of Bill 60, we’re hiring more health human resources, but we’ve also expanded the Learn and Stay program that is now not only there for nursing students but also for lab techs and paramedics, and this is in exchange—free tuition—to continue practising in those areas after graduation.

We will ensure that more students are entering the profession as we continue to build Ontario’s world-class health care system.

Last week, our government introduced the Your Health Act, 2023, which outlines our plan to provide Ontarians with a better, more convenient health care experience closer to home. If passed, our plan will reduce wait times, recognize credentials of out-of-province health care workers and respond directly to the changing needs of our health care system.

As part of this plan, we are working to hire more health care workers. That starts with ensuring that the next generation of those workers have access to high-quality, high-calibre education right here in Ontario. This includes moving forward with the largest medical school expansion in more than a decade and adding thousands more nursing spots and schools across the province. Unlike previous governments, we are getting it done for the people of Ontario.

This government seemed to take its eye off the ball when it came to the impact of Bill 124 on the health care system. They seem to neither know and certainly don’t report the growing number of unfilled nursing positions in hospitals and nurses leaving the profession. Bill 124 led to surgical backlogs, closed ERs, and unnecessary suffering for the people of Ontario, including our nurses. Public servants of this government’s Ministry of Health stated this in a leaked memo.

One impact of Bill 124 is quite clear: This government is underspending on health care by underpaying the remaining nurses we do have, contributing to underspending to the tune of $4.9 billion in the next three years, according to the FAO.

My question to the Minister of Health: Will the government take accountability for their Bill 124 mistake and invest some of the billions they’ve parked in contingency funds to fix the staffing mess they created with Bill 124?

Thank you very much to the leader of the official opposition for putting forward this important motion.

This government is responsible for breaking our health care system, pushing it to the brink, and driving out nurses and health care workers with their incredible disrespect. As a result, people in Ottawa West–Nepean and around the province are suffering, waiting in pain or poor health for desperately needed surgeries. But instead of fixing the crisis, the government is now trying to sell people an illusion of access to care while they break the public system even further and allow private, for-profit providers to step in and reap profits off of people’s pain. But the government’s so-called solution is a shaky house of cards that falls to pieces if you even look at it too hard.

The government claims that we have to let private, for-profit providers into our health care system because the public system just can’t do it anymore. But in Ottawa, we have operating rooms sitting unused and underused because we don’t have the staff for them. There are over 500 vacancies for nurses currently at the Ottawa Hospital, and without nurses, surgeries just can’t happen. Among the operating rooms that are underused are the ORs at the Ottawa Hospital Riverside campus, which are not used on weekends. But in a deal that was just announced and that just started this past weekend, these publicly funded operating rooms, located in a public hospital, are now being used by private, for-profit surgeons on weekends. It’s bad enough that people are being allowed to make a profit out of space in our public hospitals rather than those spaces being used to expand the number of publicly funded, publicly provided surgeries in Ottawa, but here’s the kicker: When this deal was made, it was claimed that the surgeons would bring in all their own staff. They weren’t supposed to be using the hospital’s nurses or health care workers; only the space was to be used. So this was adding capacity that the public system didn’t have. But what happened instead? Nurses at the Ottawa Hospital are being approached in and around the operating room while they are on shift to ask if they will staff these private surgeries on the weekends. So much for bringing in their own people. So much for the Minister of Health’s assurances that her privatization plan would have no impact on staffing of the public system. What happens now, when the Ottawa Hospital already has more than 500 vacancies and nurses are being asked to take weekend shifts for private providers too?

The minister’s plan has never been about adding capacity; it is only about multiplying profits. The government should rip up this terrible plan, invest in our public hospitals, and recruit, retain and fairly compensate nurses and health care workers so that people in Ottawa can actually get the health care they deserve.

Speaker, I rise today to support this motion. My colleagues have explained some of the many reasons why this is necessary.

We have operating rooms that are sitting empty because we don’t have the workers needed to staff them. At best, this is incredibly problematic, fiscal mismanagement on the part of this government.

In Ontario, when you look at our operating rooms—it’s like a person who has a beautiful, high-end car and decides to go and park it out in a field so they can get into somebody else’s tired old limousine that won’t take them where they want to go and will charge them extra once they get there.

Bernie Robinson, ONA’s interim president, said it best: “There is no health care without the dedicated care from nurses and health care professionals. A bed is just a bed without the staffing and support to ensure the patient is receiving quality care.”

It’s clear that this government has no plan to actually address the health care crisis. Look at what happened in Walkerton. Look at what happened in Chesley. Look at what happened in Listowel. They are shortchanging rural and small hospitals, and they’re shortchanging health care. Look at the 80 ER closures over the summer.

Across the province, we heard during the pre-budget consultation that Ontarians want this government to invest in a health care human resources strategy. We have the lowest nurse-to-patient ratio per capita in the entire country.

Shortly after I was elected, I was approached by seniors who had been waiting years—years—in pain for joint replacement surgeries. They were left languishing on that wait-list as a result of the Liberal government, who put those arbitrary caps on the amount of time that they could spend in those ORs. And this government is going down the same path. It’s not the answer.

This government could say yes today—they could say yes to a plan that can be implemented immediately—but they keep saying no. They want people to settle for a system that’s less effective and that will cost them more. They want to waste money. It’s wasteful to underuse our public health care infrastructure. We on the official opposition side want people to expect more. Let’s not go backwards.

I urge my friends across the aisle to protect our values, protect Ontario’s integrity, protect our health. Let’s build a province where companies want to invest. What is required is a publicly funded, publicly delivered health care system so companies know they have a healthy workforce, so they don’t have to pay for that extra—an educated workforce, so they don’t have to always retrain.

Support this motion today. Say yes.

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.

I want to start by thanking all the members of the official opposition here, in the NDP, for their very strong and effective arguments for why this government, the members opposite, should support this important motion. I’m very proud to sit here with all of you and to have your support.

Speaker, we heard this afternoon that the option is there—the option is, fully fund and fully utilize our public operating rooms, fully fund and support our staff to expand the number of shifts in the public system, keeping our nurses here in Ontario rather than having them become, as I’ve mentioned before here, Ontario’s greatest export right now. All of that is there. The option is there. But what is missing is the political will to get it done. This is about choice. This government has chosen not to spend money on public health care. They’ve chosen to create a crisis, and as the member from Waterloo said, they have, in fact, squirrelled away billions and billions of health care dollars rather than spend them to fix the crisis. This crisis could be fixed today. This problem could be solved today if this government chose to put patients ahead of profits, if they chose to put patients and public health care ahead of their political ideology. We could do better. We could serve the people of this province well. And we wouldn’t have people waiting for surgeries, looking to the private health care system now for solutions.

I hope I can count on the government to support this motion.

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.

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?

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.

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—

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?

We stand categorically against Bill 60 and the way in which it gives way to corporatize profiteering in our health care system. There is absolutely no room for that. We have been clear. I campaigned as a Liberal in the last election saying that there is room to move some surgeries out of hospitals in a not-for-profit model with adequate guardrails. That remains our position. To be clear, we are entirely against the profiteering and corporatization being proposed under this legislation.

We’ve seen the corrupting effects of profiteering in our health care system. We’ve seen how Bill 124, for example, has pushed nurses out of public health care. Things like temporary, for-profit nursing agencies, which have proliferated under this government, have subsequently pulled nurses out of public health care.

It’s why, in my unwavering commitment to protect our public health care system, I introduced legislation that will hold these nursing agencies to account, that will commit to and strengthen our publicly funded health care system. It’s what I have done as a physician, it is what I am doing as an opposition critic, and it is what I and the rest of the Liberal caucus will always do.

The member across also made the allegation that nothing happened under the previous 15 years of Liberal government. I would point out that the most immediate five years of performance under this Conservative government have been the worst years in this province’s entire history. I would caution the member about any sort of chest-thumping, given the current state of our health care system.

On repeated occasions, the Minister of Health has been very clear that she didn’t believe that there was a problem in the first place. I recall quite vividly that she cited a 1-800 number, I believe, to anyone who believes that they have been upsold and upcharged, in frank contradiction to what the Auditor General has been telling us.

And so, amidst that backdrop, amidst this problem that we know is objectively a problem, this government now expects us to believe that, coming out of that fantasy land, they can be trusted to protect against upcharging and upselling with this new fallacy of a plan? It simply is not credible.

Thank you for your question.

Report continues in volume B.

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—