Do you know what? Usually, I would stand up and say, “Listen, I appreciate the member from Nickel Belt’s remarks,” but today it’s a bit of a different story. I can’t believe she would stand up for an hour and tell, quite frankly—if she wants to use the term “myths”—myths to the people of Ontario—

I’m a proud Canadian myself, Madam Speaker. And you know what? When we talk about places—when we talk about being Canadian, when we talk about making sure we have a strong, publicly funded health care system here in Ontario—Alberta, BC, Quebec already use this model.

I don’t understand how it can be so confusing to members of the opposition. They want to stand up here and they want to fearmonger and they want to say, “Oh, my God, the sky is falling.” But there are multiple other provinces here in Canada that are already doing this—including in the UK, including in Germany, including in other parts of Scandinavia—including in Waterloo region, where TLC laser centres is already performing cataract surgeries in partnership with St. Mary’s hospital—

I want to talk about something a little different, because it’s always a good idea to go back over history. Let’s go back into the Mike Harris history. When we had this same debate in this very House about long-term care and how much better it was than—if we had private long-term care, how it would be better for our moms, our dads, our aunts, our uncles, our brothers and our sisters. Guess what happened? It wasn’t true. That whole debate was a lie. It wasn’t about care; it was about profit. Shareholders got rich. Do you know what happened to our moms and dads, our aunts, our uncles during COVID in these long-term-care facilities? They died—5,400 of them died, most of them in for-profit long-term care.

My question—she did a great presentation, by the way—is, why would anyone want to privatize, for profit, our publicly funded, publicly delivered health care system after what we’ve seen and have gone through for the last three years in long-term-care facilities?

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.

The member from Carleton.

Speaker, when it comes to your health, the status quo is no longer acceptable.

I appreciate that the member for Nickel Belt is speaking about this in a very calm and collected manner, but that does not solve the problem. That does not negate the fact that the member from Nickel Belt and the entire opposition party has ignored the needs of the people of Ontario.

My question to the member is, will you actually focus on supporting the people of Ontario? Will you stop the fearmongering? Will you stop making people think that they will have to pay with their credit card, and make them stop thinking that privatization is a bad thing? The reality is, our family doctors are privatized, our labs are privatized, our eye clinics are privatized. Privatization doesn’t mean spending money out of your pocket. Privatization means making sure that anyone can get access to health care by paying with their OHIP card, not with their credit card.

We all got a glimpse as to what for-profit delivery of care looks like through the pandemic, when we saw the number of deaths in for-profit long-term-care homes that was five times higher than in not-for-profit homes.

The Conservative government of Saskatchewan bought back every single long-term-care home from Extendicare. They kicked all of their for-profit long-term-care homes to the curb, and they brought them back into not-for-profit. Why? Because not-for-profit delivery is the only way to make sure that quality patient care is always priority number one, not making a profit.

Do we have a crisis in our health human resources? Yes, absolutely. There are hundreds of nurses who leave the hospitals every single day. Why? Because they feel discouraged and they feel disrespected by this government. Show them respect. How do you do this? You don’t take them to court about Bill 124. You let them bargain. They have always been reasonable. Look at the last 50 years of collective agreement of nurses. They have always been reasonable. Why are you doing that to them? Why are you disrespecting them?

The status quo has to change. Respect health care workers if you want better care.

Who in this House right here, right now, would say, “I’m proud of our home care system that fails more people than it helps every single day because they cannot recruit and retain a stable workforce because those jobs don’t pay and don’t pay the bills”? This is what the private sector does—they get lots of money for their shareholders, but no money for the people who actually deliver the care.

We’ve seen the disaster in long-term care, in home care, and now we are about to see it in surgical care. They are opening the door like they did before.

On aurait voulu voir le projet de loi s’assurer qu’il y a des mesures en place pour protéger les patients contre les surcharges, et il n’y rien de ça dans le projet de loi. Non, on ne l’appuiera pas.

J’ai bien écouté le discours offert par la députée de Nickel Belt. Elle a fait référence à la chirurgie de la cataracte, et j’aimerais faire la même chose. Mes citoyens d’Essex ont beaucoup de confiance en le D^r Tayfour et le D^r Emara. Ce sont des médecins qui pratiquent la chirurgie de la cataracte.

Ce projet de loi devant nous offre la chirurgie de la cataracte avec le D^r Tayfour et le D^r Emara. Les patients vont payer avec leur carte OHIP, non pas avec leur carte de crédit.

La députée de Nickel Belt soutient-elle cela? Votera-t-elle pour cela?

The member for Thunder Bay–Atikokan.

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.

My question is for the great member for Thunder Bay–Atikokan. I just wanted to ask him—I know recently he was at a science festival, and this is something that has been going on in the Thunder Bay area for quite some time. We talk about bringing more people into the profession. What do science festivals like the one that you attended—how do those types of events inspire the next generation to get into health care and the sciences?

Thank you for the question. Obviously, events such as the science fairs and going out into the communities, into the schools, to attract our young into these professions are going to have an everlasting effect on our communities. The ability to bring these students into a love of learning and a love of the health care system is going to go a long way to address the health care crisis that we’re facing and the shortages that we’re facing.

And let’s be clear: It’s not a shortage we’re just facing here in Ontario; it’s a crisis that’s being faced across the world. That’s why we have to come up with innovative new approaches to attract these students and these children coming out of post-secondary to get into the health care field, because we’re in competition in the world. If we don’t up our game and make sure that we’re making it more attractive and better for these students to want to stay and practice in Ontario, and in particular in the underserviced areas in northern communities, we’re failing our communities and we’re failing Ontario. So these are great opportunities for us to do that. Thank you.

We have a profound staffing shortage in health care, and we know that for-profit health corporations will poach those health care workers from the public system. We also know that large corporate interests will set up shop where they can make the most money, where there is a critical mass of people, like in Toronto, London, or perhaps Ottawa.

We already have a drastic shortage of health care workers in northwestern Ontario, and I’m hearing from these workers daily about how burnt out they are from overwork and that their wages are not enough to keep up with the cost of living. I really wonder where the members opposite think we will be finding nurses and health care workers for remote regions. Yes, you’re offering some scholarships; that’s great. That will help for a while. But basically those nurses are going to be drawn to the easier places in southern Ontario where they have an easier workload. They are not going to be staying in remote communities.

So my question is, where do you think those health care workers are going to come from after they’ve been poached from the public system?

Questions?

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.

Speaker, through you to the members opposite: You know, simply—we all know we have a staff crisis in hospitals in Ontario. If for-profit health care clinics result in an exodus of nurses from hospitals, it’s a failure—period, the end. When the government’s own documents admit that Bill 124 contributed to the worsening of the staff crisis in public hospitals, why are we not correcting bad policy first, to ensure families get the public health care they deserve instead of selling it off?

It’s an honour for me to rise today to add the voices of the great people of London North Centre to this incredibly important debate. You see, people in London take their health care very seriously. We have wonderful institutions; we have wonderful education programs that bring people into the health care system.

I want to also thank the member from Nickel Belt for her remarks in clearly stating for this House that the NDP, His Majesty’s official opposition, is the party of Tommy Douglas, and it is the party that brought medicare to Canada and to Ontario. It seems most appropriate that I should begin my remarks with a quotation from Tommy Douglas. It reads, “I felt that no” child “should have to depend either for” their “leg or” their “life upon the ability of” their “parents to raise enough money to bring a first-class surgeon to” their “bedside”—and I could not agree more.

You see, Speaker, over the last number of years, both with this government and the government prior, we have seen an overt and deliberate destruction of medicare, but nothing like we’re seeing in Bill 60. This is taking it to the next level. This was not an election promise; this was not even an election threat by this government. This has been a crisis of Conservative design. This has been wrought by a staged process. And the COVID-19 pandemic has been often used and trotted out in this chamber as a convenient excuse to explain why they’re doing what they’re doing, to justify why they’re doing what they’re doing, to excuse why they’re doing what they’re doing. But nobody believes these lines.

What we’ve seen are cuts, year over year, to the health care system. In the second stage, we’ve seen a weakening of the workers: the people who provide that excellence of care, the people who have held up a system that has been cut and eroded and neglected year over year, leaving that in a situation where the only option is private, independent health facilities where people will profit off someone’s ill health.

Let me state here for the chamber: Publicly funded and publicly delivered health care is not a profit-making business, nor should it ever be.

In terms of the cuts to our system of care that we’ve seen, Ontario’s spending on health care is the lowest among all the provinces, despite the fact that we are the richest province. A solution, an antidote to this would be for this government to properly fund health care, like the other provinces—to not be the last, to not be bringing up the rear, to not be making it over the finish line after every single other province. Ontario could do better—but it’s not under this government and certainly not under the last government.

We also have the lowest number of health care workers per capita in Canada. The solution to that would be things like repealing Bill 124, treating nurses with fairness, treating nurses with respect, letting them have the opportunity of free collective bargaining, which is their charter right. Imagine that: being fair to nurses.

We hear a lot of words, but we don’t see the actions. We hear a lot of words from this government saying how they respect health care workers, and they ought to, but their actions tell an entirely different story, and when actions and words don’t match up, that should make everyone concerned.

We heard, for many years, this talk of hallway medicine, and this was very much a Liberal invention. We saw cuts year after year—not keeping up with inflation and not making sure people were getting the surgeries they needed. I remember, when I was first elected, people and seniors coming to my office, living in pain, waiting years and years for knee replacements and hip replacements, and they told me—and we could clearly see—it was a result of Liberal underfunding. It was a result of them placing arbitrary caps on the number of joint replacement surgeries that could be performed in operating rooms. Surgeons were ready, willing and able to do it. But they chose to let these people languish in pain. Pain changes a person. Pain makes you less than yourself. It affects everyone around you, and not only just that—not just the social, not just the emotional, but also the health impacts. If you’re not moving in the way that you should, if you are overcompensating, then it has a dramatic result on the rest of your body, and so your health gets worse and worse and worse. And that was all on the Liberal watch. But this government, after they took power, did not fix that. They maintained that status quo. They are responsible for that status quo. We hear a lot of talk about them saying the status quo is not working; they have upheld it. They have kept it the exact way it was under the Liberals and made it yet worse.

Back when the Liberals were in power, they would blame situations—they would blame the increasingly older demographic; they would say there’s a complexity of care. They would say that medicine is getting better, people are living longer—and all of these things are true, but those are not things you should blame. Those are wonderful things, but you should fund accordingly. You should make sure that people who have raised our families, built our communities, have the care they deserve when and where they need it—because they deserve it the most.

It’s ironic, too, that they’re actually blaming the medical system, which has helped these people live longer, and then not funding it. It’s a very strange situation.

Recently, the Financial Accountability Officer, an independent officer of this Legislature with whom I’m sure you’re all familiar, released a report showing that this government is going to underspend on health care by $5 billion over the next three years; they’re going to underspend on education by $1.1 billion over the next three years; they’re going to underspend on justice by $0.8 billion over the next three years. They’re going to be hoarding money. They’re going to be hiding money. They probably wouldn’t have admitted this had the officer not mentioned this—almost $20 billion in an unallocated contingency fund, so that it’s not subject to public scrutiny and they can spend it like drunken sailors wherever they wish, but obviously not on education, obviously not on health care. And yet we have their solution in Bill 60. They’ve maintained the status quo of cuts and underfunding and disrespect for workers, and their only solution is privatization.

This is all going according to plan, and that is very much my concern. This government has been responsible, over the last four and a half years, for maintaining a health care system that has been on its knees, and now this government is effectively kicking it in the stomach. It’s really disgraceful that the health care workers who have worked so incredibly hard throughout the pandemic, who have sacrificed, who have kept time away from their families, were living in fear, were absolutely working hour upon hour upon hour to make sure that we were healthy—and then they deliver them Bill 124. COVID-19 was a one-two punch, but this government made it yet worse. It’s almost impossible to think that this government could take a crisis that enveloped the entire world and make it yet worse with Bill 124.

I had the opportunity to travel with the Standing Committee on Finance and Economic Affairs across this province, and we heard from multiple delegations across many different industries, with many perspectives. I can tell you, Speaker, that not one delegation supported Bill 124—not one. Nobody said it was a good thing. Nobody was even agnostic. I think the words that are most apt and will always stick with me were that Bill 124 was “demeaning,” Bill 124 was “degrading”—but more than anything else, Bill 124 was “humiliating.” Nurses feel humiliated by this government.

Across all of these delegations, people want nurses and health care workers to be treated fairly. It should be easy. It should be a knee-jerk reaction. Small children understand the concept of fairness; it should not be difficult for this government. Yet this wage restraint, this targeted attack still is on the books. Even though the Supreme Court has struck it down, they still continue to appeal it. They’re wasting money on this ideological battle. It’s ridiculous.

Pay people what they’re worth. Treat them with respect. And be fair.

J’ai une question pour la députée de Mississauga-Centre. J’aimerais dire, premièrement, que c’est un plaisir de servir dans la législature avec elle, avec toute son expérience, parce que c’est très important pour nous.

J’ai déjà posé cette question à une autre députée; j’aimerais poser la même question à la députée de Mississauga-Centre. Dans ma circonscription il y a deux docteurs qui s’appellent Tayfour et Emara. Ils sont bien respectés. Ce sont des médecins qui pratiquent la chirurgie de la cataracte. Le projet de loi devant nous offre la chirurgie de la cataracte avec le D^r Tayfour et le D^r Emara, et les patients paient avec leur carte OHIP et non pas avec une carte de crédit. La députée de Mississauga-Centre soutient-elle cela? Votera-t-elle pour cela?

It’s a very interesting debate considering that—and I think even your side will probably agree to this—over the last four years, you created a crisis in health care. You did it yourself. It was manufactured. There is no doubt about that. Bill 124 is—it really says that—

Interjections.

Interjections.

Why are we funding for-profit clinics instead of adequately paying doctors and nurses, which would help increase surgical capacity in public hospitals? Why is this government still challenging the ruling on Bill 124 and attacking nurses and doctors and health care workers?

Thank you for the question. Our government has launched the largest health care recruiting and training initiative in the province’s history. We’re building on the 12,000 new nurses registered to work in the province last year, and our government is investing in a range of initiatives to attract, train and retain more nurses and get them into the system sooner, including $342 million to add over 5,000 new and upscaled registered nurses and registered practical nurses, as well as 8,000 new personal support workers. On top of that, in October, our government announced we were breaking down registration barriers so more health care professionals trained in other provinces or internationally can practise in Ontario.

We are doing the work. We are outside the status quo. We are making the changes that are necessary in this era of time, not the 15 years of the previous government’s time, and we’re going to do what needs to be done.

Interjection.