I want to begin, as the member of Toronto–St. Paul’s just did, by thanking the member from Nickel Belt. The member from Nickel Belt is the best Minister of Health this province is yet to have, but I see a day coming soon when this member is going to sit on that side of the House, and we are going to make sure we do what she is proposing today: make sure there are livable, attractive working conditions for every single health care professional in this province.

Do you know what we call people like the member from Nickel Belt back home, Speaker? We call them solutionaries. That’s what we call them, because it is easy for us, given the havoc in the health care system, to talk about all of the problems and we need to assess them, but we need to also celebrate the moments when someone puts forward a viable solution that people are doing elsewhere.

As my friends in government are talking about how “everything’s fine, there’s nothing to look at here,” I want to remind them that we are breaking records in hospital services closing. I want to note the fact that there were 1,199 instances in the past year where health care services were closed. That includes 868 emergency rooms. Those are not the kinds of records we want to break in the province of Ontario. Who suffers when the workplace ratios are so bad? Patients suffer, nurses suffer, the staff suffer, and there’s no amount of gloss you can put on this picture, Speaker.

I want to zoom in on Winchester District Memorial Hospital’s birthing unit. They have been unable to fill a vacancy for two RNs since 2007, and because of that, they’ve had to close this birthing unit for 763 hours in recent years. This is alarming. Can you think of the joy that families experience when their child is coming into the world? Can you think of the stress put upon that family when they have to go further afield to a different birthing unit? And it’s unnecessary. Just like the billion dollars we are paying to private nursing agencies, like Canadian Health Labs, that is putting hospitals in deficit positions under this government as they talk about how wonderful the situation is.

I want to thank people like Rachel Muir from ONA Local 83—hi, Rachel, if you’re watching this—who leads the Ottawa Hospital nursing unit. She remembers a time when she got into the nursing profession in the 1980s when you could count on having a patient-to-nurse ratio of four to five, but now people are getting upwards of six, eight, nine, 10, and we’re burning people out, and we don’t have to burn out.

If deputy ministers in this government can get 16% pay raises, if we can pork-barrel out money to beer companies, we sure as hell can give money to nurses who work hard in this province. Thank you, member for Nickel Belt.