I’m going to quote the chief nursing executive at CHEO, who said, “It has been all hands on deck at CHEO this viral season as we have responded to unprecedented volumes due to RSV, the flu and COVID.”

It is not lost on our government that, in the last month alone, CHEO has essentially doubled their pediatric ICU unit. It is an incredible amount of work that they’ve been able to do very quickly. We have now permanently made the investment to ensure that those pediatric beds will stay at CHEO, because we know that that hospital, in particular, because of its large catchment area, has many, many community hospitals that they are serving.

They are doing that with a minimum amount of help from the Red Cross. They are partnering with the Red Cross to return the staff who have been redeployed, and working in those pediatric ICU units to make sure that they can go back to doing their important work.

What I will say to the people of Ontario is that we are fixing a health care system that was woefully ignored by the previous Liberal government. The former Premier, Kathleen Wynne, admitted publicly that she should not have cut those 50 doctor spaces as they did to assist in their health care crisis.

We are making the investments. Already we’re seeing additional health human resources in our communities—over 12,000 new health human resources who are working out in our communities, in our hospitals, in our long-term-care homes. We’re continuing to do that work by increasing residency spots, by increasing access, ensuring that young people who want to choose a career in health care have those options. In many cases, nurses and PSWs in particular are getting that opportunity with assistance financially from our government.

We’ll make the investments. We’ll continue to do the work. But frankly, we were left with a system that had been ignored for far too long.