I would like to start by thanking the Deputy Premier and Minister of Health for her strong commitment to patient-centred care and her leadership in building a strong public health system that better addresses patient needs. I’m pleased to rise today in the House to speak to the Your Health Act on behalf of my constituents in the riding of Eglinton–Lawrence and as parliamentary assistant to the Minister of Health. This proposed legislation is another important step forward, ensuring that our health care workers can provide high-quality, connected and convenient care, now and in the future.

I would like to express my deepest appreciation for our world-class health care workers for their unwavering commitment and tremendous contributions to our province.

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’ve increased health care funding in our province by $14 billion. We’ve expanded Ontario’s health workforce with more doctors, nurses and personal support workers. In fact, since 2018, we’ve grown our health care workforce by 60,000 new nurses and 8,000 new physicians. We’ve added more than 3,500 hospital beds across the province, including acute, post-acute and critical care beds. We’re building new hospitals in every region of the province, getting shovels in the ground for 50 new major hospital development projects.

And since 2021, we’ve provided funding to support the operation of 49 new MRI machines. I recently had an opportunity to visit a couple of the sites which are getting their first MRI machine in some of the smaller rural areas, and it’s very exciting for those hospitals and for patients in those areas because they won’t have to travel as far to be able to get an MRI.

We’re also adding 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, and increasing the amount of direct care that residents receive in long-term care. We continue to make it easier and faster for individuals of all ages to connect to mental health and addiction supports by building on our Roadmap to Wellness. We’ve made it more convenient to book or take a health care appointment by launching virtual care options and adding more online appointment booking tools.

Our government is better connecting health care organizations and providers in our communities through our Ontario health teams. Ontario health teams bring together providers from across health and community sectors, including primary care, hospitals, community care, mental health and addiction services and long-term care, for example, who work as one collaborative team to better coordinate and share resources. 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 our health care system.

Speaker, Ontario is making historic investments of more than $75 billion annually in health and long-term care. But it’s clear to all of us, and I think to all Ontarians, that money alone is not enough. We need to innovate and continue to build on our successes to create tangible, lasting improvements to our health care system and to the health care that is delivered to Ontarians. They deserve no less.

The Your Health plan is a decisive strategy to ensure Ontarians receive more convenient and connected care. The three pillars of the plan provide a solid foundation to continue modernizing and improving patient care in our province.

I’d like to speak to one of these pillars: the right care in the right place. Having the right care in the right place means supporting more care in people’s own homes and communities, leveraging virtual care, supporting targeted care needs with specialized supports, building on mental health and addictions supports and services, and creating stronger long-term care. It also means reducing pressures in our emergency departments.

When people have health care available in their communities and in ways that are convenient for them, they’re much more likely to seek and receive the treatment that they need when they need it, and to 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 our local pharmacies. Pharmacists in Ontario are highly trained, highly trusted and regulated professionals. They are often the closest, most convenient option for health care in communities across Ontario. Throughout the last few years, pharmacists have really 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.

Pharmacists continue to offer families the kind of convenient care close to home that we know Ontarians are looking for. 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 pharmacies, such as enabling them to prescribe medications for 13 common ailments. 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.

Another significant way we are working to provide the right care in the right place is expanding the delivery of home and community care services to help more people connect to the care they need in the comfort of their own home. From more nursing and personal support services, caregiver supports and respite services, bereavement and behavioural programs to assisted living services, adult day programs and programs for people with brain injuries, work is under way to provide faster and more convenient access to the care that people need.

The province is also working with our Ontario health teams and home and community care providers to create new and innovative programs for people wanting to connect to care at home, to help ensure people receive these important services sooner. We’re making it faster and easier for young people to connect to mental health and substance use support, primary care, social services and more by adding eight new youth wellness hubs to the 14 that are already operating in communities across the province.

We’re also expanding One Stop Talk, a virtual walk-in counselling service for children, youth and families that provides access to mental health care with a clinician by phone, video, text or chat.

Through our new Health811 service, Ontarians can chat online or call 811 to talk to a registered nurse, day or night, for free and in multiple languages. Health811 can also help people find services like community health centres, mental health support or a walk-in clinic close to where they live. Future improvements planned for Health811 will allow people to create a confidential profile, schedule video visits with clinical advisers and manage their health more easily through accessing their own personal health records and tailored information about the services and programs available through Ontario health teams, including mental health and addictions supports. We’re expanding and making investments in Ontario health teams to further support connected care, including virtual and digital care.

Speaker, Ontario already leads the country in how many people benefit from a long-term, stable relationship with a family doctor or primary care provider. But we’re doing more by expanding access to team-based models of primary care, with up to 1,200 more physicians being added to family health organizations to provide comprehensive primary care services. When family physicians work in a team model alongside other family physicians, nurses, dietitians, social workers, pharmacists and other health care professionals to deliver programs and services, you get better continuity of care and more access to after-hours care.

We’re increasing the number of spots for physicians to join a team model of care through the expansion of existing family health organizations and allowing new ones to form. This will add up to 1,200 physicians in this model over the next two years, starting with an additional 720 spots for physicians interested in joining a family health organization model in 2022-23 and 480 spots in 2023-24. These family health organizations will be required to provide comprehensive primary care services, extend evening and weekend hours of practice, and provide more weekend coverage so you can access a family physician when you need it.

Team models of primary care have demonstrated how bringing health care providers together into one team can improve the patient experience and how you access care. We’re building on this through our Ontario health teams. Teams of primary care providers regardless of model will be central to all Ontario health teams across the province.

Dr. Mekalai Kumanan, president of the Ontario College of Family Physicians, said, “We are pleased to see the Ontario government recognize the important role of family doctors and primary care in our health system. The actions taken in this plan will improve local primary care planning, access to team-based care, and will support the training and development of more family physicians in Ontario. These are aligned with the recommendations from our plan of action, Solutions for Today: Ensuring Every Ontarian Has Access to a Family Doctor. Today’s announcement is a step in the right direction, and we look forward to working closely with the government to ensure all Ontarians have timely access to a family doctor.”

These are some of the important innovations that our government is putting in place, expanding what is possible for health care in Ontario and delivering a new level of care and convenience to families across Ontario.

I will now take the opportunity to turn things over to the member from Newmarket–Aurora, parliamentary assistant to the Minister of Health, to tell us how patients in Ontario are being provided with a better health care experience, which is supported by our proposed legislation.

Thank you very much for the question. Obviously, a lot of this is still going to be spelled out in regulations, but the oversight is determined—we’re going to make sure that we have oversight. We have the Patient Ombudsman, of course, if people have a concern.

There’s also, of course, the Commitment to the Future of Medicare Act. We want to make sure that people are able, if there is some concern, to raise that concern to an appropriate person who will deal with it. In the legislation, each of the entities would have to have their own complaint mechanism.

All of this will be under the auspices of Ontario Health because it will be integrated into our health care system. That is the whole point of that part of the legislation: to integrate these community clinics into our broader health care system.

The important part of the announcement was that Georgian Bay General Hospital has never had an MRI there. We were able to provide the funding to continue operations and hire staff, etc., to have an MRI right there on the premises of the hospital. This is among 49 MRIs we’re putting in community hospitals. I know the other parliamentary assistant, PA Gallagher Murphy, has done some announcements as well in various venues.

I also went to the riding of Hastings–Lennox and Addington and announced an MRI in that hospital, which had never had one. This will make a huge difference for convenience for people to get services closer to home, and that’s part of the plan.

The member opposite will continue to protect a small group of individuals who don’t want to change, who don’t want to see change. What we are protecting, what we are advocating for, are patients—patients who are waiting far too long for cataract surgeries, for knee surgeries, for hip replacement. We want those individuals to be able to be back with their families, back in their communities, back in their jobs. We’re doing that by making the investments that we have with your health care Ontario act. I am very, very proud of the work that our stakeholders have done—clinicians, hospital leaders, individuals who are working in the system, who understand that innovation is not a bad word.

We’re making those investments. We’ve ensured, through our investments, like the medical school in the city of Brampton, that we’ll have new graduates and new students starting next September who will be able to have those opportunities here in Ontario in our publicly funded system.

There is no doubt that we want to make sure that our most challenged and youngest patients have health care where they need it and when they need it.

I will never, ever talk down SickKids. They are a world-renowned hospital that has been providing exceptional care, including, I might suggest, when we saw a surge in RSV. In fact, it was actually SickKids clinicians, nurses, doctors who stepped up and assisted community hospitals to make sure that they had the same level of knowledge and appreciation of how to deal with children coming into their emergency departments with RSV. When we saw those surges in our sick kids’ hospitals across Ontario, we made immediate investments that have now turned into permanent investments, including pediatric ICUs.

The hospitals themselves—the clinicians, the staff—have stepped up, and we, as a government, will continue to support their work to make sure that our most vulnerable are protected.

As I said, in the fall, when we saw the RSV hitting our pediatric hospitals, in particular, most dramatically, we did a number of things, including making additional investments in ICU beds that have now become permanent. We have more pediatric ICU beds in the province of Ontario today than we did as recently as six months ago. We will continue to make those investments. Premier Ford has made it clear we will not leave our hospital partners behind.

Now, would I have liked to see those investments happen 10 years ago? Absolutely, but we’re getting it done now. We’re fixing a system that frankly was ignored for far too long under previous governments.

My question is to the Minister of Health. While the government is proceeding with its for-profit surgery plan, there are operating rooms in Toronto that are empty. SickKids hospital is not able to open two of their operating rooms because of staffing shortages, at a time when 3,400 children are waiting for necessary surgery.

Minister, why are you proceeding with for-profit surgery delivery when we have operating rooms sitting idle in public hospitals?

I want to go back to the Minister of Health. This isn’t just an issue with SickKids. The University Health Network told me their ability to meet overwhelming surgery demand is not because of a lack of operating rooms; it’s due to a staffing shortage. UHN is cancelling scheduled surgeries because they don’t have the staff. Allowing for-profit surgeries is not going to alleviate the staffing shortage. It’s just not.

Minister, my question to you is this: What is your plan to solve the staffing crisis in public hospitals in order to increase operating room capacity in public hospitals?

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.

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.

We’ve heard some pirate references this afternoon. We’ve heard the term “myth” thrown around a little bit. I think maybe, for those watching at home, for those in the room, for those in the gallery—let’s do a little bit of myth-busting, shall we, Madam Speaker?

There are already 800 independent health clinics that are doing procedures in the province of Ontario—licences extended by the NDP government in the late 1990s, the Conservative government and the subsequent Liberal government. We’re performing roughly—correct me if I’m wrong, colleagues—26,000 procedures at these facilities already.

The member opposite sits beside the member from Waterloo, and so my question to him is—in Waterloo, we have TLC laser institute. They’ve been in partnership with St. Mary’s hospital for the last several years doing these cataract procedures outside of the hospital, with great success. So my question to the member from London North Centre is: Does he believe that the people of Waterloo should have to wait longer for their cataract surgeries to be able to have them performed in hospital, or should they be able to be performed in independent clinics?

They’re just leaving it up to chance.

It has been very clearly stated that there is a limited pool of talented, trained health care workers, that there’s a limited pool of nurses. Many have left the profession, and this opening up of these private, for-profit—predatory, quite frankly—clinics will drain yet more resources from the public system. That also should be a tremendous concern, but yet it seems to be this crisis by design. It seems to be as though that is exactly what the government wants. They want the public system to fail, because they want their insiders, the people who are talking to them in the backrooms, the people who want to skim off the system and want to make money—apparently, this government wants them to have their pockets filled. That’s not fair. Our public health care system is the definition of democracy, it’s the definition of fairness, because it ensures that people are going to get the care they need regardless of their ability to pay. Just like education, it’s a democratizing force, and this is completely undermining it.

I wonder as well, is this an attempt to change the channel from recent news? I can’t be sure.

As I begin to close my remarks, I think it’s important that we recognize that we cannot go backwards in terms of public health care. We can’t sit and watch government after government undermining and strangling—it’s like this government is strangling the health care system and then asking it why it’s not able to breathe. It needs to be funded properly.

Let’s look for solutions. Let’s repeal Bill 124. Let’s have a health care human resources strategy, like has been recommended across the province, to recruit, to retain and to return nurses. Treat them with respect, treat them with fairness, and hopefully they will come back. But that’s on you. You need to listen to Ontarians.

I want to conclude my final remarks by again quoting Tommy Douglas. He stated: “Health services ought not to have a price tag on them, and ... people should be able to get whatever health services they require irrespective of their individual capacity to pay.” I could not agree more, Speaker.

I hope that this government will change course. I hope it will listen to Ontarians, who want to see nurses treated well, and embark upon a comprehensive plan to have a health care human resources strategy to recruit, retain and return nurses and fund the system properly.

Don’t maintain your status quo of cuts. Don’t maintain your status quo of not keeping up with inflation. Take that $20 billion you’re hiding and spend it where people need it the most.

What we have here is a question of oversight. There is no reason to think that these different surgical suites could not be within the hospital’s purview. In London, there are operating rooms which are able to operate at this capacity—but the key difference here, and one that I wish you could understand, is that it’s publicly funded and publicly delivered. Nobody is skimming money off the top and putting it in their pocket. I know that’s what you love, but that’s something that is wrong. It’s care or profit—you stand for profit, we stand for care.

I’m not sure if I missed something; I don’t think that anything is for sale in this piece of legislation. What I said is that what’s critical is that the safeguards are in place to ensure that the facilities are professionally run, that the professional credentials of those who run them are there, that they are safe and that they are universally accessible. That would be the advice that I would provide to this government if they’re going down this path of outsourcing surgeries outside of hospital: that they are safe, that they are professionally run and guaranteed and that access is universally guaranteed for Ontarians.

Issuing a licence is the first step, and it’s an important first step. But there is much more that goes into ensuring that something is safe and professional and that access is universally guaranteed than simply issuing a licence.

This bill isn’t perfect. There’s lots in it to criticize and lots of questions that need to be answered. We’re committed to asking those questions and trying to get a resolution to that. But take off the partisan blinders.