To the Premier: 40-plus ministerial visits to the north, and this government still has no idea of our lived realities—or they don’t care.

The government is now studying whether district health units in northern Ontario should be merged. Can you imagine one health unit to cover 400,000 square kilometres?

The government is limiting funding increases to 1% per year, far less than inflation, and, shamefully, they are downloading another 5% of costs onto already strapped municipalities.

Why is this government trying to reduce health care services for the people of northern Ontario?

We saw after the Mike Harris government privatized long-term care that conditions for workers and people in long-term care have been disastrous, but enormously profitable to the former Premier himself.

Given the terrible wages and working conditions of PSWs in home care at this time, are you worried that those working conditions and the quality of care will decline even more in order to provide profits to investors?

I think we can all agree that home care done well is what seniors want, and we certainly support that. But home care done well is not by any means going to come out of this bill. We have seen the effects of privatized long-term care brought in first by the Mike Harris government and entrenched further with this government, and with this plan we see up to 30% of tax dollars going into shareholder profits from that large amount of money.

My question is, why should taxpayers be paying for shareholders profits when that money could be going to support pay for PSWs and quality care for our seniors?

The government allotted $10 million for dementia support, including respite care for families, but not a single dollar of this commitment has ever been spent.

The recent report on the Accessibility for Ontarians with Disabilities Act stated that without a significant change in direction, the Ford government would fail to make Ontario fully accessible by 2025—however, rather than increasing efforts to meet the needs of Ontarians with disabilities, the budget for this ministry has been cut by $50 million.

The Ford government also shot down my bill to create an advocate for older adults as an independent officer of the Legislature; however, creating an independent advocate remains one of the primary recommendations of seniors’ organizations across the province, including RTOERO, which represents 80,000 retirees from the education sector.

With such a large gap between rhetoric and what is actually being done, the Ford government is gaslighting older adults and people with disabilities. This needs to change.

I am calling on the government to create an independent advocate to address the needs of older adults, guarantee the funding needed to make Ontario fully accessible, and get those dollars out the door to support dementia services.

We know how bad things were in long-term care during the pandemic, with people, frankly, left to rot in their beds without care. We also know that the government refused to spend $1.8 billion of money allotted to health care during the pandemic, during the worst health crisis of a generation.

What I see is that you are pinning the blame on seniors instead of improving the retention and respect of health care staff by rescinding Bill 124. The government has announced that hospitals can blackmail seniors with high fees if they don’t agree to wherever they’re being shipped off to. How is this not coercion?

All right. I will be careful about that. I will note, though, that some of the things I referred to are part of the public record.

And I am finished. I think the last thing I would like to say is that the PSW who has been in contact with me and in tears about how difficult it is to look after the people under her care because she’s left there alone, time after time, has said she would never, ever put her own mother into a long-term-care home, because she knows she would not be taken care of properly.

Interjection.

Members on your side talked about trying to create a home space that they can move into—that’s not of their choosing, that’s not of their family’s choosing. And will that space have the correct number of people on staff and the four hours of care that have always been promised but have never happened?

As I say, the condition in so many long-term-care homes has been clearly documented as not supporting the well-being of the seniors who are living there and not supporting the work conditions of the people working there.