I’m sure the member opposite appreciates and understands that nursing agencies and health care agencies have been in operation for many, many decades in the province of Ontario. They are a way to deal with surges and challenges that we have when we see a disproportionate rise in illness or issues.

I must say, I find it interesting that the member opposite would choose to focus on something that exists in the province of Ontario. We have 800 community surgical diagnostic clinics in the province of Ontario—which, by the way, the previous Liberal government approved and allowed to operate for many, many years. Why? Because I think they do understand that there is value and there is a place to ensure that people have access in their community, in a timely way. We will continue to do that work.

“To the Legislative Assembly of Ontario:

“Whereas Ontario has one of the most dedicated and highly trained health workforces in the world. Over 60,000 new nurses and 8,000 new doctors have registered to work in Ontario; and

“Whereas hiring more health care professionals is the most effective step to ensure Ontarians are able to see a health care provider where and when you need to; and

“Whereas starting in spring 2023, the government will expand the learn and stay grant and applications will open for eligible post-secondary students who enrol in priority programs, such as nursing, to work in underserved communities in the region where they studied after graduation. The program will provide up-front funding for tuition, books and other direct educational costs; and

“Whereas with new as-of-right rules, Ontario will become the first province in Canada to allow health care workers registered in other provinces and territories to immediately start caring for you, without having to first register with one of Ontario’s health regulatory colleges. This change will help health care workers overcome excessive red tape that makes it difficult for them to practise in Ontario;

“Whereas we are investing an additional $15 million to temporarily cover the costs of examination, application, and registration fees for internationally trained and retired nurses, saving them up to $1,500 each. This will help up to 5,000 internationally educated nurses and up to 3,000 retired nurses begin working sooner to strengthen our front lines;

“Therefore we, the undersigned, petition the Legislative Assembly of Ontario as follows:

“To urge all members of the Legislative Assembly of Ontario continue to build on the progress of hiring and recruiting health care workers.”

I will sign this and provide it to page Vedant.

I have a petition to the Legislative Assembly of Ontario.

“Whereas Ontario has one of the most dedicated and highly trained health workforces in the world. Over 60,000 new nurses and 8,000 new doctors have registered to work in Ontario; and

“Whereas hiring more health care professionals is the most effective step to ensure Ontarians are able to see a health care provider where and when you need to; and

“Whereas starting in spring of 2023, the government will expand the learn and stay grant and applications will be open for eligible post-secondary students who enrol in priority programs, such as nursing, to work in underserved communities in the region where they studied after” they graduate. “The program will also provide up-front funding for tuition, books and other direct educational costs; and

“Whereas with new as-of-right rules, Ontario will become the first province in Canada to allow health care workers registered in other provinces and territories to immediately start caring for you, without having to first register with one of Ontario’s health regulatory colleges. This change will help health care workers overcome excessive red tape that makes it difficult for them to practise in Ontario;

“Whereas we are investing an additional $15 million to temporarily cover the costs of examination, application, and registration fees for internationally trained and retired nurses, saving them up to $1,500 each. This will help up to 5,000 internationally educated nurses and up to 3,000 retired nurses begin working sooner to strengthen our front lines;

“Therefore we, the undersigned, petition the Legislative Assembly of Ontario as follows:

“To urge all members of the Legislative Assembly of Ontario continue to build on the progress of hiring and recruiting more health care workers.”

I fully endorse this petition, will sign it and give it to page Adam.

“To the Legislative Assembly of Ontario:

“Whereas Ontario has one of the most dedicated and highly trained health workforces in the world. Over 60,000 new nurses and 8,000 new doctors have registered to work in Ontario; and

“Whereas hiring more health care professionals is the most effective step to ensure Ontarians are able to see a health care provider where and when you need to; and

“Whereas starting in spring 2023, the government will expand the learn and stay grant and applications will open for eligible post-secondary students who enrol in priority programs, such as nursing, to work in underserved communities in the region where they studied after graduation. The program will provide up-front funding for tuition, books and other direct educational costs; and

“Whereas with the new as-of-right rules, Ontario will become the first province in Canada to allow health care workers registered in other provinces and territories to immediately start caring for you, without having to first register with one of Ontario’s health regulatory colleges. This change will help health care workers overcome excessive red tape that makes it difficult for them to practise in Ontario;

“Whereas we are investing an additional $15 million to temporarily cover the costs of examination, application, and registration fees for internationally trained and retired nurses, saving them up to $1,500 each. This will help up to 5,000 internationally educated nurses and up to 3,000 retired nurses begin working sooner to strengthen our front lines;

“Therefore we, the undersigned, petition the Legislative Assembly of Ontario as follows:

“To urge all members of the Legislative Assembly of Ontario continue to build on the progress of hiring and recruiting health care workers.”

Speaker, I endorse this petition and will give it to page Maya.

Resuming the debate adjourned on February 22, 2023, on the motion for second reading of the following bill:

Bill 60, An Act to amend and enact various Acts with respect to the health system / Projet de loi 60, Loi visant à modifier et à édicter diverses lois en ce qui concerne le système de santé.

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.

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.