As a Canadian, I’m proud to call this country home, and our universal health care system is one of the main reasons. Because of great Canadians like Tommy Douglas, residents use their OHIP card for health care—not their credit card.

But this government seems determined to destroy that system by underfunding it. Ignore and underfund our health care system, watch it buckle under the pressure of COVID, and then say the only solution is to find innovative approaches to fix the mess they created.

Unfortunately, those innovative approaches are really just new ways to give health care services to private corporations, whose main focus is to make more and more profit. But there are more problems with this approach. It’s been proven time and time again that it costs us more.

The Toronto Star reported yesterday that temp nursing agencies are skyrocketing health care costs. In fact, they’re paying as much as $110 an hour to temp agencies. Front-line health care workers like our great nurses at ONA have said this is already a form of privatization. Toronto’s Sunnybrook Hospital has spent $8.2 million this year on temp agencies.

We literally can’t afford to continue down this road. Not only will the quality of our health care suffer; costs will become unsustainable. We must stop all forms of privatization, invest in our public system, repeal Bill 124 and start reminding the world why it’s so great to be a Canadian: It’s our publicly funded health care.