This past Friday was the 37th anniversary of the death of Tommy Douglas. In 2004, the CBC did a Canada-wide vote to find the greatest Canadian of all time; 1.2 million people across Canada voted. The winner wasn’t Wayne Gretzky, Shania Twain or even Terry Fox. It was Tommy Douglas.

Tommy was the father of our universal public health care system. As Premier of Saskatchewan, Tommy introduced the first single-payer, publicly funded and publicly delivered health care system in all of North America. Tommy did this as Premier while also running 17—that’s right, 17—balanced budgets in a row, and even achieving surpluses. Keep that in mind when you hear politicians saying we need to cut public services to be fiscally responsible.

Before that, government didn’t help families with health care costs. Health care was expensive and not accessible to most people. Tommy knew it wasn’t right that some people could afford health care and some couldn’t. He spent his life trying to make change for the better.

We need to remember and honour Tommy Douglas and his legacy. People across Ontario and across Canada know that universal, public, not-for-profit health care is part of what it means to be a Canadian. We take care of one another. Ontarians, Canadians don’t want American-style private, for-profit health care where the wealthy get faster and better care and lower-income families go bankrupt trying to get the health care they need, or go without care at all. The Conservatives call this profit-driven, call it innovation. But it’s really the oldest game in the book. Frankly, it’s a cop-out that will hurt Ontarians.

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.

We’ve heard a lot about Tommy Douglas today and the great work he did in getting the Medical Care Act passed in 1966. I’m sure my friends opposite know that there are four core principles to that policy—before the federal government will entertain any health care transfer. Those four principles are public administration, comprehensiveness, universality and portability.

We know that this government spent $78 billion last year on health care, which was a $14-billion increase from the year before. We also know that in recent discussions with the federal government, they’ve increased that funding over the next 10 years by $8.4 billion.

Will the member opposite agree that the federal government would have ceased the transfers if we were privatizing health care in Canada? Will you admit that this privatization is just a smokescreen that you are proposing to try to somehow discredit the much-needed changes this government is making?