To the member from Eglinton–Lawrence: In Niagara, many residents have expressed concern about privatization of our home care system. While other provinces, like BC, choose to reinvest in their public health care, Ontario has looked to privatization. Seniors who built our province and have supported health care for a lifetime with their wages want to know public health care will be there when they need it the most.

Niagara has a mix of not-for-profit care providers. Speaker, to the member: Why doesn’t the bill explicitly prevent for-profit entities from dominating the home and community care sector in regions like Niagara, ensuring patient care remains paramount?

I was wondering if my colleague from Niagara Falls could explain to me why the government, after one year, has refused to do anything about health care temporary staffing agencies and is perfectly prepared to spend hundreds of millions of dollars more than we need to to access the nurses, PSWs and other health care professionals that people need?

I want to thank the member from Niagara Falls. I’d like to say that he was warming you up for me, but he’s just a really hard act to follow. And I’m glad he’s got a lot of wind, and it’s good wind. I like the passion that he expresses his views with. He obviously cares a great deal.

So we’ll get into why I think this bill is the wrong thing to do, because it’s starting to take, again, away more of the local component in health care. But what is the problem you’re trying to solve? The problem the government is purportedly trying to solve is that we’ve got a problem in home care, and they’re right.

But why do we have a problem in home care? Well, is it because we don’t have the right agency? It might be because 2.2 million Ontarians don’t have a family doctor. Do you know how hard it is to get home care if you don’t have a family doctor or a nurse practitioner? It’s virtually impossible to find a way in. Even through an emergency department, it’s virtually impossible.

The government, well, they’re not really seized with this problem because, over the last five years, they have not added one brand new nurse-practitioner-led primary care clinic in this province—not since 2018.

What’s happening in my riding of Ottawa South is, because there’s this desperate need for primary care—which you need to get into home care—people are paying subscription fees. The Premier promised—like he did with the greenbelt—no one is ever going to have to use their credit card; they’re only going to have to use their OHIP card. Well, tell that to families in my riding who are having to pay $60 a month just to get access to a nurse practitioner. That’s a problem. And the solution to the primary care crisis is, “Let’s have the Wild West and if people have to pay, well, we just won’t worry about that. We won’t worry about that because they’re getting what they need,” instead of actually thinking about how they’re going to solve that problem, how they’re going to get everybody working to the top of their scope and working together.

But the OMA is here today. What’s their top ask? Primary care. Because they know. They know that people can’t get access to care that they need, like home care, unless they have a primary health care practitioner.

So we’re debating this new organization when, in actual fact, the underlying causes of what’s creating this problem right now aren’t being addressed. We’re not talking about how we get 2.2 million Ontarians a primary care provider. We’re not talking about that today. Although, if we don’t solve that, it doesn’t matter what you create, you’re not going to fix the problem.

What’s the second problem? Anybody guess? We don’t have enough people. Why don’t we have enough people? My colleague from Niagara Falls says, “Well, Bill 124 is a good start.” Right? You say to nurses and other health care workers and PSWs who have bargaining rights, “You don’t have bargaining rights, but if you’re over here, you do.” It’s a matter of—it’s not just money; it’s respect.

We talked about heroes and how important they were to us, but when it came to their wages? Not so much. Really, to be fair, not so much. They have a right to feel that way.

Then the question that I asked the member from Niagara Falls is that now we’ve got this challenge where we’ve allowed temporary health care staffing agencies to—another case of the Wild West—expand incredibly, and we’re spending two and three times what we need to spend on a nurse or a PSW or another health care professional. The government said, a year ago, “We’re going to do something about that.” And you know what they’ve done? The square root of nothing, zippo.

There’s a long-term-care group of homes out by Kitchener. They usually spent $300,000 a year, in all their homes, on temporary nurses. Do you know what they spent in the last fiscal year? Three million dollars. And you know what? That extra $2.7 million didn’t get anybody an extra hour of care.

So why are we doing it? Why is the government allowing temporary staffing agencies to be out there like the Wild West on the public dime? I thought you guys were really good at watching that. Obviously not.

I am concerned about what’s going to happen here when we further take away the local component of health care.

The problem is, you’re not addressing the underlying root: 2.2 million Ontarians don’t have access to primary care, and when you don’t have access to primary care, you can’t get into home care. It just doesn’t work. There’s no way in.

Interjection.

There’s a fundamental misunderstanding of how people get into the home care system. I have been, through four family members, through home care, through long-term care, through retirement homes, so I know how it works. And it’s not going to work if you don’t have a family doc or nurse practitioner. So unless you get serious about solving that problem and stop saying, “You know, it’s okay for people to pull out their credit cards because they can access primary care that way”—which is against what the Premier said, which is not really a surprise, given all the things that we’ve seen recently.

Lastly, you’ve got to solve the staffing problem. If you were creating an agency to hire people and pay them decent wages and manage them and manage the health care system, I would say “great.” That’s not what you’re doing here. You’re creating another agency to hire another agency—which is what we’re doing right now—to bring people in and pay a premium on top of what we normally pay so that agency can make some money. How is that going to get home care to Mrs. Smith in my riding? I don’t think it is. She needs a family doc. She needs to make sure there can be somebody there in her home, and you’re not doing anything about that with this bill.

Thank you very much, and I’ll turn the floor over to my colleague.

Thank you to the member from Niagara Falls for his interesting comments. I listened to him throughout his speech, and I noticed that he didn’t really talk much about the bill and not much about home care. Maybe that’s because he didn’t have a lot of time to prepare, even though he is a long-term critic—seemed more like long-winded critic, if you ask me.

But anyway, seniors, as I said, are entitled to dignity. We want to keep them in their homes as long as possible, but surely, the constituents of your riding, the riding of Niagara Falls, also have the same need that we’ve heard from others for fast and reliable access to home and community care. So I just want to say that this bill is a major step toward providing that kind of care to seniors in Niagara Falls and everywhere else.

Would the member be voting in favour of helping his constituents access home care in their community faster by voting for this bill?