Thank you to the member opposite for the question. In fact, we are doing a lot of the things that you mentioned, including investing in centralized wait-lists. The Your Health plan, which was announced earlier this year, has some of those very things in it, including the centralized wait-lists.

Ontario leads the country in how many people actually benefit from a long-term, stable relationship with a family doctor or primary care provider—over 90% of Ontarians. But we can do more and we will do more.

That’s why we’re increasing training opportunities at the same time by expanding team models of primary care across the province, which we announced, again, in the Your Health plan. Work is under way to train the next generation. We’re adding physician spots, including 450 new spots for physician training, 52 new spots for physician assistants, 150 new nurse practitioner spots, 1,500 additional nursing spots and 24,000 PSW spots. By adding these new health human resources to Ontario’s workforce, more team-based care will be made available to Ontarians.

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 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.

Investing in the future of Ontario’s health care system starts with providing a high-calibre education for those who want to work on the front lines. Earlier this year we announced our expansion of the Learn and Stay grant, a key component of Ontario’s plan to stay open. I’m happy to say that the Georgian College, Owen Sound Campus is part of this program.

The grant, which we announced in March 2022 for students who enrol in nursing programs, has now expanded to include paramedic and medical laboratory technologist programs in priority communities. Eligible students will receive full, upfront funding for tuition, books and other direct educational costs in return for working and caring for people in the region where they studied for a term of service after they graduate.

Grant applications for the 2023-24 academic year opened this spring, targeting 2,500 eligible students at over 20 institutions. Right now, students can go online and see a full list of eligible schools and programs on the Ontario Learn and Stay Grant website and learn more about how they can apply.

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.

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—

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.