I’ll be sharing my time this afternoon with the member from Don Valley East.

It’s an honour to speak to Bill 135, the Convenient Care at Home Act, today. When I first saw the bill being introduced, I thought to myself, “Finally. The government is going to do something about the state of home care in Ontario.” But, Madam Speaker, I don’t think this bill does what is needed.

Most Ontarians, and certainly those that I speak to, would like to stay at home as long as possible as they age or as medical conditions arise. There’s comfort in being at home where you raised your family, where you live your life. As the scourge of illness or disease and the impacts of Father Time affect us, sometimes taking our dignity, it’s essential to hold on to everything that we can, to maintain that sense of normalcy, to maintain our dignity as much as possible. Home care services are essential for those who may need assistance with their daily activities: bathing, dressing, eating, using the washroom, taking medications, amongst many other things. It should be and must be a top priority for our government to ensure that Ontarians can stay in their own home as long as possible and can do so with dignity and respect while receiving world-class health care.

However, as a result of this government’s underfunding of health care, home care services in Ontario are facing a crisis. They’re underfunded, understaffed and, as our population ages, they are overburdened. The government has failed to address the issues head-on—including by imposing Bill 124, which continues to add to Ontario’s health care retention issues.

Madam Speaker, I’d like to share the story of a constituent of mine, Martine. Martine is impacted by the chronic underfunding of home care services each and every day and is not being treated with the dignity and respect she deserves from this government.

Here’s Martine’s story. Martine is an active 50-year-old. She’s smart, articulate and funny. She enjoys movies and concerts, good food, great company, and sometimes just a quiet night in. She has a family life, friends, interests and hobbies, just like the rest of us. She has much to contribute to her peers, her family and the community at large. The only difference is that she is not able-bodied. Martine requires a wheelchair and help with daily living tasks. Throughout the day, Martine receives home care services from two separate home care agencies. But as a result of the continued underfunding, mismanagement and lack of prioritization, Martine routinely goes without the home care services she needs—services she is entitled to. Martine needs help getting in and out of bed. Like any vibrant adult, she has an active social life. She enjoys going out with friends, hosting dinner parties, and all of the other social activities we take for granted.

Routinely, Martine is told that she needs to make a choice: continue to be a vibrant, active adult or receive home care. How is this choice given to Martine? By being told she can only receive service with help to bed at 8 o’clock, or sometimes as early as 5 o’clock in the afternoon. Imagine being told that you have to go to bed at 8 o’clock every night and cannot get out of bed again the next morning until 7:30 or 8 o’clock. Imagine the indignity of being told that you cannot enjoy the same life we all enjoy because you’re being put to bed early. Imagine what it would be like to have plans with friends and family and to get that last-minute call saying the PSW is no longer able to put you to bed when you get home—or how you’re going to go to work on time in the morning when the last-minute call comes in that morning saying there’s no one to get you out of bed.

Madam Speaker, I look around the room. There are many with us at the moment who, I would guess, are 50 years or perhaps a little bit older right now.

How many of you can go 12 or 13 hours without using the washroom? That’s what Martine faces routinely.

She is incredibly lucky. She has support from family and loved ones who, at the last minute, can drop everything to help her in these situations. But it shouldn’t come to this. Not everyone has that support network.

Martine and other Ontarians should have the confidence in our health care system to provide the care they need at home and to live healthy and dignified lives.

I had the pleasure of meeting Martine at her home a few weeks ago, and I was amazed at the changes she has made to her home to adapt to her illness and how her illness will progress. As a result of her physical condition, every day is already a challenge, but she works hard to navigate life with a positive mentality. After spending some time with Martine, hearing her story, I don’t think I could be that positive. Surely we need to help Martine maintain her dignity and live a productive and fruitful life, and that includes a social life. I wish she was here to be able to explain to all of you the things that she has had to go through and how she has had to adapt her life to this medical condition.

Tragically, Martine’s story and situation is not unique. Too many Ontarians who require home care services are in similar circumstances.

Bill 135 is nothing but a cosmetic change that will not address the root causes of the crisis in home care. It’s putting lipstick on a pig. It doesn’t provide a pathway for more funding to hire more PSWs and nurses. It won’t improve conditions to help retain the workers we already have. It won’t enhance accountability or transparency in the delivery of home care services or ensure public oversight. In fact, it creates a one-size-fits-all solution to a province that the Premier himself has said many times isn’t a one-size-fits-all province. It doesn’t make any sense.

Bill 135 could make things worse by opening the door for more privatization and profiteering in the home care sector.

We need a different vision for home care in Ontario, one that is based on ensuring dignity—dignity for our friends, our family and our neighbours.

It’s always a pleasure to rise in the House to discuss the issues that worry my constituents in Don Valley East and across Ontario, especially as it relates to something that is as important to all of us as health care.

On this occasion, I’m speaking about Bill 135, the amendments to the Connecting Care Act, which aim to provide some material changes to home and community care services here within Ontario.

My remarks will focus on five things: (1) the status of home and community care here in Ontario; (2) how this poor status came about; (3) some of the recommendations from stakeholders; (4) how Bill 135 doesn’t meet any of those recommendations; and finally, (5) exactly what is wrong with Bill 135.

Let’s begin with the status of home care here in Ontario. There’s no way to mince words here. It is a dysfunctional system marked by severe staffing shortages, high staffing turnover, frequent changes to nurses and personal support workers, and a remarkable—not in a complimentary way—amount of rationing of care, with less time spent per patient visit.

In order to illustrate this, I’d like to share the story of one of my constituents, and this constituent happens to be my constituency assistant. His father is bed-bound. His boss—me—is a member of provincial Parliament. His boss is a family and emergency doctor. Despite all of those levers, we still cannot get my constituency assistant’s father the home care services he desires—that he requires. This is a situation that has arisen the moment this government got its grips on home care.

How did this come about? Well, it boils down to a few things. We have a demoralized workforce that is burnt-out from the pandemic, that has moral injury from rationing care. They’ve been rationing care because this government hasn’t been able to retain health care workers—doesn’t have a strategy to retain health care workers.

We also have a problem with the proliferation of for-profit, private health care, again, impacting the retention of health care workers; imposing wage restriction and wage suppression to squeeze out profits; offering part-time work instead of full-time work so as not to pay out benefits; delivering lower quality, rushed care—public pain for private gain.

Then, of course, we have systemic underfunding, marked by Bill 124, leading to the proliferation of for-profit nursing agencies and staffing agencies. We have a government—this government—that isn’t even willing to accept money on the table from the federal government, $1.7 billion to raise wages for PSWs. They will not do it because they do not respect health care workers. And, of course, we have consistent and repeated overpromising—commitments of $1 billion given in the 2022 budget for home care, of which only about $150 million was released, and then in this year’s budget, a promise to deliver $569 million, although the last time the FAO reported on this government’s spending, they had already underspent by $1.2 billion.

So this is how we got there—ignorance, a lack of competence by the current government. We also already have a road map from many stakeholders—stakeholders such as the Ontario Community Support Association, which has said that a mere 10% wage increase would result in an extra almost 1,300 PSWs, would retain one in five PSWs who are about to leave. They said we need to achieve wage parity between home care, community care, long-term care and the acute-care sector. And they have said—and I agree—that we need to pay workers for all the hours worked, not just the ones in direct patient care.

This year, we’ve seen an increase to 76% of organizations saying that the health human resource crisis and inflationary pressures have forced them to either cut services or increase wait-lists.

Bill 135 ignores all of those things. Rather than doing any of those things, it puts the proverbial head in the sand. It ignores the root causes of our problems. It’s the equivalent of throwing darts at a dartboard in the hope that something sticks. Every single one of the fundamental problems plaguing our home care system is completely ignored. It does this because it actually—well, if anything, it makes things worse. It demolishes the existing home care architecture, eliminates 14 local health integration networks and replaces them with a half-baked, poorly conceived monolithic alternative that hasn’t been fully thought out. It proposes to provide home and community care services to patients, proposes to deliver operational supports, proposes to provide information to the public about health and social services and proposes to provide placement management services. Those are lines on a piece of paper. How it supposes to deliver those things? No idea. I met with ministry officials and asked them to tell me concretely what it will do and was met with nothing but business power words like “integration” and “connected care.” What does that mean? Why does this monolithic institution think that it can perform these tasks better than local health integration networks? Never clarified. It might, but if history is a judge, that is an unlikely proposition.

We saw, when Ontario health teams were proposed, they were delivered in a patchy, lumbering rollout that took place in an entirely ad hoc manner, lacking in consistency. Now we actually see that was an attempt to decentralize services.

This is an attempt to centralize services. We can’t even figure out a consistent pattern on the direction we want our health care system to move in. And the point is to centralize services with an expectation that—I don’t really know.

What I can tell you is that the last time we faced a process like this was when we tried centralizing autism intake services under the umbrella of AccessOAP. That has subsequently proved to be an entire disaster, with skyrocketing wait times and a ballooning list of kids exceeding 60,000.

I could go on and on and on, but I don’t have the time.

When I asked the ministry for an example of a single concrete problem that this organization would solve, there was no answer.

So pick your metaphor for this bill—it’s centralizing at one level, decentralizing on another; lipstick on a pig, as my colleague said; shuffling the deck chairs on the Titanic; a tale of sound and fury signifying nothing. I don’t know. It centralizes powers and the minister, who can just reward her friends, as we’ve seen with the greenbelt—

The member from Don Valley East.

Response?

My question is to the member for Don Valley East.

I would say there’s one business power word that I would respectfully submit, and that is the word “accountability.” For the first time in about 15 years, this government is accountable. We’re trying to make changes. We believe that home care is the best.

What part of this bill do you support—instead of being against it?