Thank you for the presentation.

The Standing Committee on Finance and Economic Affairs just finished travelling the province for pre-budget consultations. We heard from many delegations who are deeply concerned about the impacts of Bill 124 and the health care human resources crisis that has been created by such. Not once did the committee hear any support for Bill 124. Not one delegation supported this demeaning, degrading and, as one delegation called it, humiliating piece of legislation. We heard about the nurses who left and the health care human resources crisis that needs to be addressed. There’s an opportunity here for this government to undo the damage through Bill 60 that they have created with Bill 124.

My question is: Why is this government more concerned about health care profiteers, instead of people who need care from highly skilled nurses?

Thank you for the question from the Leader of the Opposition.

I’ll tell you, when we took office in 2018, the health care system was an absolute disaster. There was hallway health care. It was just a total, total mess. Since 2018, we’ve hired 60,000—I repeat, 60,000—new nurses, 8,000 new doctors. We’ve put a medical school together that’s going to graduate more doctors. Just last year alone, Mr. Speaker, we hired over 12,000 nurses that came on board. We’ve spent $14 billion more—a record in Canada when it came to health care. We’re building 50 new sites across every single region, community and city, spending over $40 billion making sure they have the infrastructure they need.

I’ll finish on question number 2, there. Thank you.

Just think: You have an elderly mother or an elderly father that’s been in pain for a year because they can’t get a hip replacement. They’re going to be able to get that hip replacement and change their lives every single day.

When it comes to the nurses, there’s 30,000 nurses studying in colleges and universities that are going to join the Ontario health care team.

We will continue building health care to make sure we have the best health care system in the entire world, Mr. Speaker.

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 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.

“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.

This petition is entitled “Stop Ford’s Health Care Privatization Plan.

“To the Legislative Assembly of Ontario:

“Whereas Ontarians should get health care based on need—not the size of their wallet;

“Whereas Premier Doug Ford and Health Minister Sylvia Jones say they’re planning to privatize parts of health care;

“Whereas privatization will bleed nurses, doctors and PSWs out of their public hospitals, making the health care crisis worse;

“Whereas privatization always ends with patients getting a bill;

“Therefore we, the undersigned, petition the Legislative Assembly of Ontario to immediately stop all plans to further privatize Ontario’s health care system, and fix the crisis in health care by:

“—repealing Bill 124 and recruiting, retaining and respecting doctors, nurses and PSWs with better pay and better working conditions;

“—licensing tens of thousands of internationally educated nurses and other health care professionals already in Ontario, who wait years and pay thousands to have their credentials certified;

“—making education and training free or low-cost for nurses, doctors and other health care professionals;

“—incentivizing doctors and nurses to choose to live and work in northern Ontario;

“—funding hospitals to have enough nurses on every shift, on every ward.”

I couldn’t agree with the petition more. I’ve affixed my signature to it and will hand it to Mary for the table.

Yes, see how long before you get an answer.

Private, for-profit, investor-owned corporations are going to set up surgical suites, so if they decide to use nurses in their surgical suites—because they don’t have to. A physician can delegate any act they want to anyone, so it could very well be that the nurse who is in the operating room with the physician is not a nurse at all—she is the hairdresser of his wife, and she is the one who puts in your IV, takes your blood pressure and makes sure that everything goes well through the surgery.

If they decide to have surgical nurses—think about it, Speaker—they will offer a Monday-to-Friday day-shift job, with no night shifts, no evenings, no weekends, no statutory holidays. Hmm. If I’m a nurse, a single mom with two kids in school, I could work a day shift, drop my kids off at the daycare and be there to pick them up after, and never have to work a statutory holiday, a weekend, an evening or a night shift, or I could go work in the hospital, where for the first 10 years of my career I will be working weekends, night shifts and statutory holidays. Which one would you pick, Speaker? You can choose to work in a private, for-profit, investor-owned corporation that will only pick the healthy and the wealthy people to work on, where the surgeries will all be successes—unless they don’t follow IPAC procedures, or else. And somebody with mental health and addictions? You send those to the hospital. Somebody who doesn’t speak English? You send those to the hospital. Somebody who has other comorbidities, other problems? You send those to the hospital. All you have to do is the easy cases. The healthy and the wealthy will come and have surgery there.

As a nurse, what would you pick? Working weekends, night shifts and statutory holidays, or working steady days, Monday to Friday? Hmm. tough choice, isn’t it? We are all human beings; nurses are human beings also. When those jobs open up, they will go to the steady day jobs, not because they don’t care about the patients, not because they don’t care about the people they work with, not because they don’t care about our hospitals. It’s because they have kids to feed, they have daycare and they have responsibilities just like everybody else.

That’s why the Ontario Hospital Association made it really clear that those community-based surgical suites have to be linked to our hospitals. The physicians will have to have privileges in hospital—all good, but what about the rest of the staff? The rest of the staff will leave our hospitals in droves. There are fewer and fewer all the time who are still working in our hospitals, and once this opens, they will move.

The Ontario Hospital Association was really clear. Those surgical suites have to be under the purview, under the responsibility of a hospital so that you have quality control in place, you have infection protection and control in place and you make sure that the staff get some steady dayshifts, Monday to Friday, and some hospital work. They get to work with some of the healthy and wealthy patients that will go well, but they also get to help the persons who are just as deserving of having surgery but happen to have a comorbidity, happen to have a mental health issue or addiction, happen to not speak English, happen to have early signs of cognitive decline or whatever else that makes them a little bit more complex. This is what our hospitals tell us they want, but it’s not what the government is moving forward with. The government is moving forward with private, for-profit, investor-owned corporations.

When we asked them how many of those they plan on opening, it was a great big question mark.

Interjection: No limit.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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?

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?

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.

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.

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

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