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?

I am pleased to rise in the House today to speak to Bill 60, Your Health Act.

I’d also like to express my gratitude to our world-class health care workers for their skill, compassion and unwavering commitment to the people of Ontario.

This proposed legislation supports our goal to ensure that Ontario health care workers can provide high-quality, connected and convenient care now and into the future.

Since 2018, more than 60,000 new nurses have registered to join Ontario’s workforce, but we know there is more we can do to increase our nursing numbers further. That’s why we are expanding access to training for our nurses over the next two years by adding up to 500 registered practical nurses and 1,000 registered nurse training spots to help create faster access to primary care. We are investing up to $100 million to add an additional 2,000 nurses to the long-term-care sector by 2024-25.

I know, first-hand, there are unique health care challenges in small, rural and remote communities and that recruiting and retraining health care workers in these regions requires a dedicated approach. Last spring, we launched the Ontario Learn and Stay Grant to help these communities build their own health workforces. This program covers the cost of tuition, books and other direct educational costs for post-secondary students who enrol in high-priority programs in more than a dozen growing and underserved communities and commit to work in those communities after they graduate.

That’s why this year we are expanding the program, beginning in the spring of 2023, targeting approximately 2,500 eligible post-secondary students who enrol in high-priority programs, such as select nursing, paramedic and medical laboratory technology/medical laboratory science. This program focuses on building a stronger health care workforce in priority communities that have been challenged by staffing shortages. It will help to ensure every community in our province is stronger and has access to the care they need, when and where they need it.

We’re also growing the supply of nurse practitioners to facilitate faster access to primary care, long-term care and to add capacity in northern and rural areas. Along with this, we are adding 150 more education seats for nurse practitioners starting in 2023-24. This expansion will bring the total number of seats to 350 annually and will be an incredible investment for constituents in my riding and across northern Ontario.

The Your Health plan, which is supported by this bill, builds on the significant progress our government has made over the last several years. Since 2018, we have increased health care funding in our province by $14 billion. We have expanded Ontario’s health workforce with more doctors, nurses and personal support workers. We’ve added more than 3,500 hospital beds across Ontario, including acute, post-acute and critical care beds. We’re building new hospitals across the province, getting shovels in the ground for 50 new major hospital development projects.

Since 2021, we have provided funding to support operations of 49 new MRI machines. We’ve added nearly 60,000 new and upgraded long-term-care beds and investing nearly $5 billion over four years to hire more than 27,000 long-term-care staff, including nurses and personal support workers, increasing the amount of direct care residents receive.

Our government is better connecting health care organizations and providers in our communities through Ontario health teams. We know that to ensure you have faster and easier access to the care you need, we need to better connect you to care within your own community. Throughout the pandemic, Ontario health teams demonstrated the importance of health providers working together to care for patients. With their leadership, communities across the province were able to establish community COVID-19 testing sites, vaccination programs and other vital services.

Across the province, 54 Ontario health teams are working to improve transitions between health care providers and are ensuring a patient’s medical record follows them wherever they go for care. They’re also focused on embedding home care and primary care services so that you and your family can get care in your home or in your community.

Applications for four additional Ontario health teams are being reviewed. Once approved, these remaining teams will result in the province achieving its goal of full provincial coverage, ensuring everyone has the support of an Ontario health team. Working together, they will ensure that people can move between providers more easily, directly, connecting them to different types of care and providing 24/7 help in navigating the health care system.

We know that when people have health care available in their communities, they are more likely to seek and receive the treatment they need when they need it and stay healthier. Delivering convenient care to people in their communities will help keep our province healthier by diagnosing illnesses earlier, starting treatment as soon as possible and keeping emergency room wait times down when people need urgent care.

One of the key parts of ensuring the right care in the right place is expanding care at local pharmacies. Pharmacists in Ontario are highly trained, highly trusted and regulated health professionals. They are often the closest, most convenient option for health care in communities across Ontario. Throughout the last few years, pharmacists played a critical role in supporting patients across the province by supporting COVID-19 testing and vaccination efforts and educating patients about medication and treatment options. And we are expanding the role of pharmacists by increasing their scope of practice so that families will be able to connect to care closer to home at their local pharmacist, such as enabling them to prescribe medications for 13 common ailments. In the first month that this service was available to Ontarians, over 40,000 people visited their pharmacy for a prescription.

These initiatives are part of our ongoing work with front-line pharmacists, nurses and other regulated health workers to expand their scope of practice in ways that make it more convenient and faster for people to get care in their community.

Finally, we have heard loud and clear that you and your family want better and faster access to home care services. Last year, we dedicated over $1 billion to expand access to home care services over the next three years. This funding will benefit nearly 700,000 families who rely on home care annually by expanding home care services while recruiting and training more home care workers. It will help prevent unnecessary hospital and long-term-care admissions and shorten hospital stays. Most importantly, it will provide you and your family with a choice to stay in your home longer.

Speaker, our plan and this legislation will support our bold, innovative and creative vision to break with a status quo in our health care system that has stifled innovation and struggled to respond to growing challenges and changing needs. We’re making it easier and faster for people to connect to convenient care closer to home, including and especially the surgeries that they need to maintain a high quality of life.

Thank you again for this opportunity to speak to Bill 60 today.

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?

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.

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.

Time for a question.

Please ask your question.

And they’ll stay.

And perhaps they’ll stay.

As a result of Bill 124, we heard from multiple delegations and we’ve heard from many different organizations that nurses have left in droves because they feel insulted. For many years, as I’ve said, as the past Liberal government strangled and underfunded the health care system, they have been holding up that system by the virtue of their good nature, by the virtue of their hard work. That’s absolutely wrong. Ten years to go without a raise? It’s unconscionable. It’s an honourable profession. It’s a caring profession. It takes a strong and a capable person—but I don’t think that anyone deserves to be treated the way that this government has. Bill 60 could have taken the opportunity to rectify that, to admit that mistake—it’s not.

We also heard from multiple delegations about the wage disparity between home care, long-term care and acute care within hospital settings. This does nothing to do that—in fact, as I’ll get to in my comments if I have time, it actually makes it yet worse.

In terms of profit-making, no one should look forward to or hope for somebody else to become ill because that will line their pockets. That’s disgraceful. I think we should all be able to agree with that. But this bill opens the door for these profiteers, people who will be doing just that. It’s almost worse than ambulance-chasing. When someone is sick, our health care system pays for that care. These are people who want to skim off the top. When they skim these public dollars off the top to put in their own pockets, that means yet less care. They latch on to the public system, and they’re going to slowly bleed it of resources.

We saw this with home care and long-term care. When privatization was suggested as a model for that, it was touted as the greatest thing since sliced bread. They said, “There’s going to be choice. There is going to be competition, and prices will stay down.” Well, we know that the exact opposite is true. The COVID-19 pandemic exposed what has been going on for many years. The Wettlaufer crisis exposed what has been going on for many years. And yet, this government refuses to treat seniors with respect.

Conservatives and Liberals have always been very comfortable bedfellows. There has long been a Liberal-Conservative consortium when it comes to this for-profit care model.

In 2017, Liberals tried to pass legislation to allow for community health facilities, and guess who supported them? The Conservatives. Of course they did, because they have always been in it together when it comes to wresting public dollars from our health care system into private pockets. Fortunately, this bill died at committee. That was 2017. Here we are, in 2023. Oh, they’re not called “community health facilities”; they’re now called “independent health facilities.” It’s old wine in new bottles, but it’s the same program, isn’t it?

There has been an ideological blind adherence to this for-profit model, and I want to point out in my remaining time some of the myths about private health care that have been put forward, because this government has been relying on some very deep misunderstandings.

Our Premier said, “We just can’t as a province keep doing the same thing and expecting a different result.” Well, “doing the same thing” was underfunding health care and strangling it of resources. Of course, it’s not going to have a different result from the Liberals, but this is the result that he wanted.

Funding health care properly and ensuring health care would be different, ensuring that money was spent on front-line care, ensuring it was spent on those nurses would be different from the status quo. But you’ve maintained the Liberal status quo, so congratulations on that.

Myth number two: Private clinics are needed to clear the backlog. This implies by its very nature that publicly funded surgeries are at full capacity, but we know that hospital hallways are not full of people waiting for a knee replacement or a hip replacement. In fact, there is a complexity of care, but this government won’t fund that care properly.

I also want to point out some concerns that I have with this legislation.

Schedule 2 attempts to deregulate health care settings. It expands the definition of “regulated health professionals” to include those who are not part of a regulatory college. Just when you thought that this government could not attack, insult, degrade, demean and humiliate health care workers more, they’re trying to take away their titles. They’re actually making it so that, according to schedule 2, this definition of “physician” becomes nebulous; this definition of “registered nurse” becomes something different. Does that mean, by this, that anyone can be deemed to be this role within these settings? It will be interesting, because, quite frankly, the oversight isn’t going to be here, because that is something that is also not included properly within Bill 60.