Good morning, Speaker. I’d like to welcome three Western University students, Veronika, Maria and Sarah, from the Women In House program.

I would also like to welcome Josiane, who is my new executive assistant at the Ministry of Francophone Affairs. I look forward to working with her.

I would also like to welcome, from the Ontario model Parliament, from the beautiful riding of Mississauga Centre, Rishi Jarajapu.

The member opposite and I can probably agree on one point, and that point is that the status quo is simply not working.

It is an honour to rise today to speak to the bill introduced by our Deputy Premier and Minister of Health entitled Your Health Act, 2023. I will be sharing my time today with the member from Thunder Bay–Atikokan.

I would like to congratulate the minister and parliamentary assistants for their hard work, resolve and courage in bringing bold and innovative solutions to challenge the status quo in our health care system.

The bold and innovative plan is based on three pillars: the right care in the right place; faster access to care; and hiring more health care workers.

Before I get into the three pillars and their importance, I would like to highlight some of the foundational work this government has done in the last Parliament to lay the foundation for today’s legislation.

Speaker, under our government, we have increased health care funding by $14 billion since 2018. To put things into perspective, in 2015, the health care budget was $50 billion; today, the health care budget is $75 billion—a 50% increase in eight years. These are historical investments into our health care system.

Madame la Présidente, le plan audacieux et innovant repose sur trois piliers : les bons soins au bon endroit, l’accès plus rapide aux soins, et l’embauche de plus de travailleurs de la santé.

Avant d’aborder les trois piliers et leur importance, j’aimerais souligner certains des travaux fondamentaux que ce gouvernement a accomplis au cours de la dernière législature jusqu’aux fondements de la législation d’aujourd’hui.

Sous notre gouvernement, nous avons augmenté les dépenses en santé de 14 milliards de dollars depuis 2018. Pour mettre les choses en perspective, en 2015 le budget de la santé était de 50 milliards de dollars. Aujourd’hui le budget de la santé est de 75 milliards de dollars, une augmentation de 50 % en huit ans. Ce sont des investissements historiques dans notre système de soins de santé public.

And Speaker, I call these “investments” and not simply “spending,” because our government believes in fiscal responsibility, respecting taxpayer dollars and not simply throwing money at a problem.

Let me outline some of these investments and some of the monumental foundations we have laid to enable this ambitious work.

Over the last four and a half years, we have built 3,500 acute hospital beds, including pediatric critical care beds—the equivalent of about six to seven community hospitals in four years.

We currently have shovels in the ground on 50 new major hospital projects, including the expansion of Mississauga’s Trillium Health Partners. In total, it’s a historical infrastructure investment of $40 billion over 10 years.

We have also provided operational funding for 49 new MRI machines in hospitals since 2021 to help us address some of the diagnostic imaging backlogs.

We are on track to building 30,000 new long-term-care beds by 2029, including culturally and linguistically appropriate beds for francophone, Muslim, Coptic, Arabic, Punjabi and many other diverse communities living and thriving in Ontario.

We have grown our health care workforce by 60,000 new nurses and 8,000 new physicians since 2018.

We currently have 30,000 nursing students enrolled in our colleges and universities, and I am excited to say that one of them, Maria, is here today as part of Western University’s Women in House program. I’m so happy—

Interjections.

Welcome, Maria—that we had an opportunity to connect and chat about our health care system.

Speaker, I want to share Maria’s story, as I think it is important that all of us legislators listen to the voices of the future generation of nurse leaders. Maria is currently in her fourth year of nursing, doing her consolidation and working full-time at Victoria Hospital in London at the pediatric in-patient unit. Here is her story:

“I decided to apply to nursing very late in my high school career; but what inspired me to go into nursing are the rewarding interactions with people from diverse backgrounds. I think nursing is unique because it connects science and theory and views the patient through a more holistic perspective. During placement I was able to put into action what I learned in school and learn a lot more ‘on the job’ rather than through textbooks. Nursing goes beyond textbooks and it’s the hands-on skills that make me feel confident within my abilities as a student. You also learn things that aren’t mentioned in the hospital such as the conversations I would hear as a student about nurses debating on which patient takes priority over a bed regardless of both of them being equally sick or in need of care. While some days as a student I feel relaxed as a lot of the respiratory cases have gone down and the shifts are less chaotic,” sometimes “I myself have felt and heard from nursing student colleagues that it would be nice if nursing students were also compensated for working full-time jobs while also being full-time students. Regardless I would not have chosen any other field; the feeling of excitement or sense of reward I have felt after helping a patient with relieving their symptoms or even being with them throughout their journey as a patient cannot be replaced or be provided in any other field.”

Maria, I want to thank you for your commitment to Ontario’s patients. Thank you for choosing nursing and for sharing your story with us. I wish you very well as you enter the exciting and rewarding career of nursing.

Speaker, with my remaining time, I’d like to outline the three pillars and what they mean to Ontarians.

Pillar 1: the right care in the right place. We have expanded the role of pharmacists to allow them to prescribe for 13 common ailments, such as hay fever, oral thrush, pink eye, dermatitis, acid reflux, cold sores, urinary tract infections and insect bites, to name a few. This will allow patients convenient access to care while off-loading some of our primary care clinics. We are also supporting end-of-life care by adding new hospice beds to the 500 beds already available. The ER is no place for a patient to spend the last days of life, and it certainly is not a place for ER nurses to palliate patients. Building a robust hospice palliative care network is more important today than ever.

The second pillar, faster access to care, under which the government is investing $18 million into existing surgical and diagnostic centres, will allow thousands of patients access to these much-needed procedures. As a nurse working in the ER, it is devastating to see patients coming in after a few years of not being able to see their family physician due to the pandemic. They are coming in with aches or pains in a certain area, and upon investigation, we are finding aggressive, late-stage tumours and cancers. These cancers could have been caught much sooner had the patients had access to one of these 800 existing centres, and their prognoses could have been much better. These patients cannot wait any longer. We need to clear the backlogs, and we need to clear them now. This investment into 49,000 hours of MRI and CT scans—these are not just talking points. These represent cancers caught earlier and lives of Ontarians prolonged.

Interjections.

Finally, the third pillar, hiring more health care workers: I’m so proud that the last year, 2022, has seen a record high number of registrations under the College of Nurses of Ontario—12,000 nurses, a record high number, have entered the profession. Despite the rhetoric coming from the opposite side about how nursing is not a great profession and there’s such a crisis discouraging our young people from entering into the profession, we have seen 12,000 nurses register under the College of Nurses of Ontario. We’re also fast-tracking internationally trained nurses. We are leading the charge. We’re the only jurisdiction that is currently doing that in Canada, and 5,000 internationally educated nurses are on track to work in our health care system.

Finally, very excitingly, we are building two brand new medical schools. In decades, we have not built medical schools in Ontario. One of them is coming in my region of Peel, in Brampton—the Toronto Metropolitan University medical school—and I can’t wait to see the first cohort of medical students enrolled there.

In closing, Speaker, nothing is more important to people than their health. Time and health are the two precious assets that we don’t recognize and appreciate until they have been depleted. Let us use the time we have been given here, the privilege to serve in this House—let us use this time wisely. Let’s not allow it to be depleted, and let’s continue protecting our precious asset, which is our health and our health care system.

I’ll take this opportunity to educate the member opposite about our learn and stay program. This is an innovative program. For the first time in the history of this province, the government is actually paying the full cost of tuition and textbook expenses for nurses who choose to go to school in those far and remote areas. I wish that program was available to me when I was a nursing student, but unfortunately the previous government did not have such foresight. Perhaps if they had, we wouldn’t be in the position we are in today.

However, once the student graduates—we have also expanded this program to allow paramedics and lab technicians in addition to nurses to access the learn and stay program—they actually have to commit to working in that community for at least two years of service. And we’re hoping that this will encourage these practitioners to fall in love with those communities and actually stay.

This is a concrete action that this government has done that no other governments have done in the past.

So while the members opposite continue fearmongering, this government is actually putting shovels in the ground on many hospital expansions, including 50 brand new hospital expansions in the province of Ontario.

This is a historic $40-billion infrastructure fund over the next 10 years, including, in my city of Mississauga, Trillium Health Partners: We’re expanding and adding 350 more in-patient beds. And just to educate the member opposite, these 350 beds will come fully staffed and operational funding will be attached to the infrastructure funding, so it will be fully staffed and operational once it gets built.

Please stop fearmongering, because we’re actually building the health care system, unlike the party opposite.

Oui, bien sûr, je vais voter pour cette législation. Je pense que c’est très important que les patients aient accès à la chirurgie de la cataracte, que ça ne prenne pas deux ou trois années pour avoir accès à cette chirurgie.

Avec l’investissement et avec ce projet de loi qu’on a déposé hier, c’est exactement ce qu’on va faire. Les patients vont avoir accès à ces chirurgies, et ça va vraiment changer leur vie.

Moi aussi, j’ai des lunettes. Si je ne les porte pas, je ne peux pas voir. Alors, c’est très important pour les patients de pouvoir voir et améliorer leur santé.

As a nurse, I would just like to set the record straight. When the member opposite said that nurses didn’t get a raise in the last 10 years, well, last year, nurses got a $5,000 retention incentive, which represented a $786-million investment by this government, and they deserved every single penny of that. Prior to that, nurses got two rounds of pandemic pay and they deserved every single penny of that.

I agree with the member opposite that we have a limited pool of talented health care workers, but the rhetoric coming from the opposition is actually scaring them. My question—