Today I want to welcome Rabia Khedr from DEEN Support Services. Thank you for being here.

I’m more than honoured to rise today in support of my colleague from Nickel Belt’s bill, a bill to improve patient-to-nurse ratios in hospitals in Ontario.

Speaker, our health care system is in crisis. You know it. I know it. Everyone in Ontario, apparently except the government, knows it. And do you know who knows it more than anyone? It is the nurses that are working currently in Ontario.

Things aren’t getting better, despite the words that were just read to us. There are longer waits in emergency hallways. We have more code zeros, which means that the ambulances aren’t available at any given time. There are 2.4 million people who don’t have a doctor in Ontario, and there are hospital closures. We have Minden, now Durham—permanent hospital closures, and this year Ontario saw over 1,200 emergency departments shutting down, in large part because of a lack of nurses.

So, Speaker, and to my colleagues, what comes to mind when you think of a nurse?

Interjection: Burnout.

Interjection: Exhausted.

There’s an organization called WeRPN that represents 59,000 regulated health professionals, and they identified that 48% are considering leaving the profession—no wonder—and 72% identified patient-to-nurse ratios as the key issue.

So if this government is actually concerned or is actually listening, here’s your solution, because the first step in any problem is admitting that you have a problem, which we do in Ontario: better patient-to-nurse ratios. It’s a win for nurses, it’s a win for patients and it’s a win for hospitals. Improving patient-to-nurse ratios will benefit nurses because they won’t be overloaded, it reduces stress levels, and it makes them less likely to be sick or go on long-term disability.

I can only imagine the anguish experienced by urgent care nurses when they’re expected to go from caring for one patient to handling up to five very sick patients simultaneously. It’s a win for patients who receive treatment with better care and have a better chance of recovery. It’s also a win for hospitals because not only will they have better patient outcomes, there is compelling data to say that they will reduce costs. A recent study revealed that a nurse-to-patient ratio of 1 to 4 would prevent over 1,500 deaths yearly while saving hospitals $117 million per year.

It doesn’t matter how many beds you say are open or how many hospitals are open. Without nurses, a hospital or long-term-care beds are just furniture; they’re just buildings. And don’t say we don’t have the money. We’re spending a billion dollars on beer in this province. We need to spend it on our health care.

I’m hoping this government will finally listen to the stories we’re telling you and finally admit that there is a problem in health care, in nursing, and here is your solution.

I’m pleased to stand and rise today and support Bill 192 from the member from Nickel Belt and congratulate her again on bringing forward a sensible, thoughtful bill. These essentially are international standards. These are things that are accepted across the world.

I come at this from—I’m the son of a hospital nurse. She worked at National Defence Medical Centre for 33 years on the floors. I used to pick her up at work when my dad was away. Here’s the thing I knew: If my mom finished shift at 11 o’clock, I didn’t need to get there at 11 o’clock. I should probably get there around 20 after and then, maybe by a quarter to 12, she’d be coming out. That’s because she stayed to make sure that her job was fully done, and she had good ratios back then.

This isn’t going to work—and I want it to work—if you don’t have the nurses to fill it, to fuel it, to make it work. When I hear arguments from the government like, “You voted against this,” “You voted against that budget,” I could list off a bunch of things like the Nursing Graduate Guarantee that your party voted against; the late-stage nursing program to keep nurses in the profession—you voted against that.

It’s not about that. We don’t have enough nurses, and things like Bill 124 that essentially take away nurses’ rights to bargain—nurses’ rights to bargain. The thing I remember about that is, there was a whole bunch of people who could still bargain. They were mostly men. Nurses are not exclusively women, but they’re mostly women, but you took away their bargaining rights. It’s a total lack of respect. If you want to keep people working for you, you need to respect them, and the Premier’s wrong-headedness and the Minister of Health’s wrong-headedness of continuing with Bill 124 did more damage than anything else.

The second thing is, you’ve got to pay them. That’s the other thing about Bill 124, but right now, you’ve got to pay them. Why are nurses leaving to go to work for private agencies? The pressure they’re feeling at work, not enough staff to help them—they feel like they can’t do what they are taught to do, what they desire to do for their patients. They don’t have enough time. Why did my mom stay for 45 minutes? Because she wanted to finish the job. They want to finish the job, but they have to have enough people. That’s the point.

The government needs to look at how they can do more not just to train more nurses but to retain more nurses, because that’s the problem. And unless we do that, unless we retain what we have and train up as much as we can, we’re not going to get to where we’re going to be able to do this. So I would hope that the government would vote for this today and support it, even though we know we can’t do it today. Because what it does is, it sets a standard that we have to achieve and that we all want to achieve.

We’re talking a lot about nurses. That’s what this is about. It’s about patients. It’s about the care that patients need and deserve so they can get well. That’s why the member is putting this forward.

I’m going to say one last thing about priorities: How is it that spending $1 billion to get beer and wine at the corner store a little more than a year earlier is more important than nurses and their patients, is more important than 2.3 million Ontarians who don’t have access to family medicine? How is it more important than people having to use their credit card instead of their OHIP card so they can get basic services? Those things are the things that are happening here in Ontario right now, and to spend $1 billion to make booze a priority over health care is just simply wrong.