Far too many people, especially racialized women and non-binary, trans and gender-diverse folks, experience sexual harassment and sexual violence. It’s common and it’s a brutal feature of the university experience, but I would like to say it is also an everyday experience.

I want to talk a little bit about—I support the bill, I think it’s useful, but I don’t think it addresses some very key aspects of why sexual violence and other forms of violence, particularly against racialized or somehow lower-on-the-gender-hierarchy people, who are subject to violence.

I’m just going to give a little bit of a story. I know we don’t have a lot of time, so I’m skipping through what I have to say, but let me tell you how often this happens in graduate school, where there is close one-on-one contact and where a student is utterly dependent on the support of their advisers for their future careers and for their future lives. These relationships are of necessity close, and they’re relationships of power.

What is missing for me in this bill is an understanding that we’re actually dealing with relationships of power and a culture of entitlement. I want to tie this also to what the member from Kiiwetinoong had to say about the violence of colonization experienced by Indigenous peoples, because it’s a violence that’s borne out of entitlement, the entitlement to dominate somebody else.

If you look at court cases about where Indigenous women have been raped and killed, you’ll be horrified, because so often, right up until today, the perpetrators are never punished. Those women are understood to be deserving of what they got. Part of what is taking place is that the perpetrators are reinforcing their sense of entitlement as male, as white and having the entitlement to act out their superiority over somebody with less power.

Now we see this with gender-non-conforming people; you see it with women, with people deciding to teach them a lesson. So we’re not talking just about sexual interest, sexual tension. We’re talking about sexual acts as an acting-out of a relationship of power, of proving oneself to be higher up in that hierarchy of who counts and who’s entitled to be dominant.

What I see as being completely necessary is a very big education piece. We need to understand what is meant by consent. I would like to see this government accept the bill that brings consent to younger people, so that people are actually learning and thinking about this at a young age. But I would also like to see all of us make the connection between something like Bill 28, which assumes an entitlement to exploit the lowest-paid workers to death—“They’re mostly women and they’re low down on the hierarchy. Who cares if they don’t get a living wage?” There is a sense of entitlement, that it is okay to pay people nothing—hardly anything—and expect them to work themselves to death. I connect this to this culture of domination, this culture of entitlement that is also connected to sexual violence, and the acting out of putting yourself in a pecking order and having somebody you can look down on to prove your superiority.

I want to say that yes, this bill is important for students, but it’s only one piece, and it’s not really going to change the culture of universities. It’s going to add a punitive element—excellent; if some people start to realize that they have to be accountable, excellent—but it is not going to change the culture until we really dig deep and start to look at what the formation of Canada is. On what basis was a whole group of people dismissed, raped, slaughtered, pillaged, whatever, and a whole new population brought in to replace them? On what basis? What kind of thinking does that reflect? That is the thinking of entitlement and the entitlement to dominate others. That’s got to be part of what goes into any program—

I would like to welcome Carlos Santander, Matthew Roy and Gordon Robitaille, who have come here from Thunder Bay. Gordon had to do an extra hour to get here from Nipigon. Welcome.

To the member from Guelph, thank you for your comments.

I’ve heard a lot of concern about the mental health of students, but I’m wondering if the member from Guelph would like to speak to the mental health of the workers. I wonder about what their mental health will be like when they have their human rights overridden, when they have their charter rights overridden, when they are taking second and third jobs to survive, when they are accessing food banks, when they don’t have the money to look after their own children. I wonder what kind of mental health we can expect from them when they are working with the most vulnerable of our students.

While in Thunder Bay this weekend, I learned that our hospital is already overflowing with COVID and flu cases and that RSV, the virus that threatens young children, is spreading rapidly. This is concerning.

Between the deliberate underfunding of health care and the calculated imposition of Bill 124, our hospitals and clinics are losing staff in droves and, as a result, we are losing the experience of those most qualified to mentor the next generation of health care workers. The health care crisis will continue until the Ford government decides to value those already working in the system.

Sadly, today, we are again seeing this government’s callous disregard for workers. For months, our lowest-paid education workers have been trying to negotiate a living wage, and now, rather than negotiating in good faith, the Ford government is set to crush education workers by again taking away their bargaining rights and imposing an unfair settlement.

To health care workers, education workers and all workers keeping our province operating: Thank you for your care, compassion and dogged persistence. We see you, we appreciate you and we stand with you.

During the last session, this government already undermined the ability of conservation authorities to manage where development takes place in relation to wetlands and watersheds. In this new legislation, they’ve further undermined their ability to fulfill their responsibilities by removing the ability to monitor potential development for pollution. No community is going to be happy with development that threatens the health of the land, air or waterways. So it’s beyond me that they would remove this ability from conservation authorities.

Second, they are pressing conservation authorities to offer up conservation lands for development. We have these lands for a reason. They’ve been fought over, fought to attain. So I’m wondering why the government is creating conflict within communities over revered conservation areas, and equally, why they are asking conservation authorities to abandon their responsibility to monitor for pollution.

My question is to the Premier. Street Outreach Services, known as SOS, provides a critical service for vulnerable people in Thunder Bay. For those experiencing homelessness, the SOS van provides a warm space, meals, transportation to shelters, and has literally saved lives these last two winters. Unfortunately, Thunder Bay’s Shelter House has announced that it must permanently close its SOS service because it hasn’t been able to secure funding.

Will this government step forward and supply the funding needed to keep people alive this winter in Thunder Bay?

Anna Betty Achneepineskum, a Deputy Grand Chief with the Nishnawbe Aski Nation, notes that with Thunder Bay being the hub for many individuals—not only First Nations but other individuals who come here for services—the lack of street outreach threatens lives. With winter quickly approaching, will the Premier move further to do what is necessary and provide the funding needed to keep these important street outreach services open in Thunder Bay?

My question is to the Premier. For two weeks, along with several of my colleagues, I am living on a social-assistance grocery budget of $47.60 a week. Many people who have to rely on social assistance have contacted us since this action went public to tell us that the meagre amount we have allowed ourselves for food is almost double what a single person living on social assistance has available for food after paying rent.

Indeed, it is abundantly clear that the government needs to double the rates of ODSP and Ontario Works. Will the Minister of Children, Community and Social Services join us for this two-week advocacy effort so that she might better understand, even briefly, the hardship that ODSP and OW recipients have to endure in their daily lives?

My question is to the Premier. This government spouts a lot of numbers about the thousands of new health care professionals they hired during their last term, but there is—

Interjections.

As I said, this government spouts a lot of numbers about the thousands of new health care professionals they hired during their last term, but there is no evidence whatsoever that any of these new professionals exist. They are nowhere to be seen in Thunder Bay–Superior North, and given the staffing crisis gripping every single health care setting in the province, they’re nowhere to be seen anywhere else.

Is your refusal to negotiate a fair wage with existing health care workers, thus sending them out of the profession in droves, part of your long-term plan to privatize health care, ultimately leading to low-waged and precarious work for all health care workers once you have destroyed the existing workforce?

The $5,000 bonus given to nurses but not other health care workers not only did not represent a permanent wage increase, it continues to cause division and resentment amongst all those health care workers who are not eligible for the bonus—an entirely predictable outcome in the government’s divide-and-conquer strategy.

I was called recently by a young nurse who was adamant he did not want their “damn $5,000.” He wanted to see across-the-board pay and benefit increases so that more health care workers would stay in the profession and they wouldn’t be working in a constant state of exhaustion.

Will this government admit it is deliberately driving existing health care workers out of the profession in order to gut the public system?

I would like today to talk about Suomi Koti, a non-profit seniors’ residence that has been providing our elders in Thunder Bay–Superior North with exemplary independent living residences for over 30 years.

Suomi Koti is one of the few organizations in Thunder Bay that offers independent living for seniors at not-for-profit rates. It is affordable, beautifully maintained, close to amenities, surrounded by trees, and I would be very happy to live there myself.

Suomi Koti has plans to build an additional 60 apartments, 20 of which will be reserved for low-income seniors, but to do this, they must rely on donations and government funding to create this new and much-needed housing. There is currently a five- to seven-year wait-list to get into this and the two other non-profit homes in the city, so the need is clear.

The board of Suomi Koti has worked with the most respected designers and planners to put together their funding and building plans. Unfortunately, federal and provincial funding levels are no longer what they were when Suomi Koti was first established, and they are struggling to access funding even though this type of housing is clearly needed.

Speaker, I look forward to meeting with representatives from the provincial government to advocate for financial support for Suomi Koti so that they can continue to do what they already do so well: provide first-rate, affordable housing that seniors in Thunder Bay–Superior North need and deserve.

I would like to focus my time today on talking about the failure to seriously address climate change and the lack of environmental protections in this bill.

During the previous Parliament, this government made significant changes to the province’s environmental policies: for example, a 70% funding cut to the Anishinabek/Ontario Fisheries Resource Centre, a 30% cut to the Canadian Environmental Law Association and a 100% cut to the Ontario Biodiversity Council. The budget of the Ministry of the Environment, Conservation and Parks was slashed, and in 2019, without any consultation, the Ford government gutted the province’s 36 conservation authorities, removing their ability to protect crucial waterways and wetlands.

In November 2021, the Auditor General accused the government of deliberately undermining its own rules by not following the province’s Environmental Bill of Rights, by passing changes to environmental assessment procedures without consulting the public. These cuts were not about saving dollars. In 2018, the Ford government killed the Green Ontario Fund, which included 227 clean energy programs. Okay, they didn’t agree with anything designated as clean energy, but it cost the people of Ontario more than $230 million in fines and legal fees to shut down these projects, and then there was the enormous cost of taking cases to the Ontario Court of Appeal and the Supreme Court of Canada, only to be found guilty of acting illegally by cancelling programs without public consultation. Note the pattern here of refusing to have public consultations whenever the government doesn’t want scrutiny of its plans.

Now, regarding Highway 413: The people of Thunder Bay–Superior North do not support the government spending billions of dollars on an unnecessary highway that will, not incidentally, pave over 2,000 acres of farmland, cut through 85 waterways, damage 220 wetlands and disrupt the habitats of 10 species at risk. Claiming that new highways will reduce emissions because there will be fewer idling cars is a case of magical thinking. Decades of research show that new roads do not resolve traffic problems in the long run; rather, they attract even more drivers with even more cars.

The government has also not been able to answer the question of how the food production lost through this significant loss of farmland will be replaced. The last environmental review of these highway projects actually took place in 1997, and it found that they posed significant risks to groundwater, surface water and air quality and were not worth pursuing. However, this government has exempted both highways from undergoing another full review before construction begins.

My concern is thus that while there are many projects to expand the development of natural resources, environmental protections have been gutted, leaving nothing in place to protect the land, trees, air and water that are also under our care.

Growth that doesn’t have environmental stewardship at its centre risks burdening present and future generations with the long-term poisoning that we have seen in Grassy Narrows and Indigenous communities in the Sarnia area. In southwestern Ontario, we had the devastating explosion in Wheatley that has drawn attention to the thousands of abandoned oil wells in the province, an issue the province is currently ignoring.

Climate change mitigation, environmental protections and respect for Indigenous rights needs to be baked into every single government project from the outset. Between this government’s silence on climate change, their record of abandoning injured workers while repurposing the WSIB as a cash cow for employers, and their record of dismantling environmental protections, I cannot support this bill.

I’m pleased to speak further to the misleadingly titled More Beds, Better Care Act that looks to free up hospital beds by forcing seniors and those disabled into long-term-care homes not of their choice. Since the bill was introduced I, along with my colleagues, have raised urgent concerns with this bill, and in fact it seems the population of Ontario is also alarmed and outraged. The government’s heavy-handed move to bypass committee and thus public consultations is an affront to democracy.

First and foremost with this bill, we are bypassing the Patients’ Bill of Rights, and in this province, or indeed anywhere in civilized society, the government should never, ever use force or coercion by putting someone into a facility without their informed consent.

Speaker, hospital discharge coordinators have long had the authority to have conversations with patients regarding the discharge process. We also know that patients or their designated caregivers have been required to submit a list of their top five long-term-care home destinations. But this bill bypasses the discharge conversation, and instead patients are told where they’re going, to places that could be up to 300 kilometres away from their families.

This side of the House had their own public consultations yesterday morning, and we continue to hear from a frustrated and frightened public. For example, I was contacted yesterday by Michelle from Thunder Bay, who wanted to tell me about her experience looking for long-term care for her mother. Her mother wound up in hospital due to failing cognition and physical decline, and it was clear she needed to be moved into long-term care. In keeping with the rules at the time, Michelle chose five long-term-care homes, but none of these were available at the time.

She was then told to check out a home not on her list that had space available. Sadly, this privately owned long-term-care home was chaotic, dirty and understaffed, and Michelle swore she would never let her mother go to this home. Fortunately, she had the choice to wait until a home of her choosing was available, and her mother was well cared for in her final years.

In addition, the PSW named Susan I referred to last week also said she would never allow her own mother to become a resident in the privately owned long-term-care home where she currently works, and we know that is because there is no staff there.

Time and again, we have tried to tell the government that the health care crisis is a direct result of low staffing levels. These low staffing levels come from front-line workers exhausted by COVID, tired of working short handed and demoralized by the wage and bargaining hammer of Bill 124. Add the many for-profit agencies making record profits from public dollars, and you get front-line health care workers who have had enough and are leaving the vocation in droves.

The government’s choice to ignore the many voices calling for the repeal of Bill 124 demonstrates a government determined to bust unions and to privatize health care. We have heard eloquently from the member from Nickle Belt about solutions, about how easily this government could end the health care crisis. With good pay, benefits, paid sick days and mileage compensation so that PSWs can afford to do the work they love, we could solve this crisis now, but the government chooses not to.

Bill 7 is cruel, punitive and sets the stage for real harm to elders and those disabled. There are much better options that would show respect for workers and respect for seniors and people with disabilities, without stripping them of their rights and their humanity. I beg this government to withdraw this cruel and punitive bill. Please, we must stop Bill 7.

It is my honour to be a co-sponsor of this bill, along with my outstanding colleagues from Kitchener Centre and Toronto–St. Paul’s.

This bill, An Act to amend various Acts with respect to racial equity, looks to amend various acts with respect to racial equity in the education system.

A number of amendments are made to acts including the Education Act, the Higher Education Quality Council of Ontario Act, the Ministry of Training, Colleges and Universities Act, the Ontario College of Teachers Act and the Ontario Colleges of Applied Arts and Technology Act.

Mr. Mantha moved first reading of the following bill:

Bill 17, An Act to proclaim Abuse Prevention Week and to establish an Abuse Prevention Framework Advisory Committee / Projet de loi 17, Loi proclamant la Semaine de la prévention des mauvais traitements et constituant un comité consultatif du cadre de prévention des mauvais traitements.

To the Premier: At the recent Association of Municipalities of Ontario meeting, I heard the Northwestern Ontario Municipal Association delegation raise concerns about the proposal to cut Ontario’s health units from 35 to 10 and paramedic services from 55 to 10. The plan is to merge the Kenora, Rainy River and Thunder Bay districts under one health unit covering at least 220,000 square kilometres, and over 500,000 square kilometres if Kiiwetinoong is included.

In the Ontario northwest, we already face enormous geographical challenges to access health care. The proposed mega health unit would serve an absurdly large geographical area with distinctly different communities and distinctly different needs that no single health or paramedic unit could possibly manage without putting people’s lives at risk.

Why is this government looking to make our health care challenges in the north greater by reducing available services?

So my question is: Will this government listen to community members, health professionals and local mayors, stop the amalgamation of health units, return the monthly mobile health units, and strengthen rather than weaken access to health care in northern Ontario?

You had four years to improve the system and made it infinitely worse over those four years. The system has been in desperate crisis for that whole time.

The health care crisis is hitting northerners especially hard, and Bill 7 will make the crisis worse, not better. Forcing seniors to move 300 kilometres away from their loved ones will be devastating and traumatic for elders and their families. Currently in Thunder Bay–Superior North, we face—actually, we have beds. We have some beds, but there’s no staff, and this has been going on for a long time.

Seniors and persons with disabilities are being defined as bed-blockers by this government, only to be repurposed as profit enhancers for privately owned homes when they haven’t fulfilled their 98% fullness to get their full public allotment of dollars. Why is this government refusing to address the staffing crisis that is the source of the funding crisis?

Welcome to the House. We are arriving at the same time to this place, and I’m sure you’re finding it as interesting as I am.

The most important action this government could take to address the health care crisis would be to repeal Bill 124 and remove the wage repression experienced by our existing health care workers. I have noticed that it seems that there are certain words that the members of the government are not allowed to utter.

So I have a two-part question. Are you allowed to say the words “Bill 124,” and if so, could you please address why this government will not repeal the bill or even mention it?

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?

I think this brings me back to the basic math that I referred to earlier. We move people out of hospitals into for-profit long-term care, and that solves the profitability problem for those long-term-care homes. But it does not address the fundamental needs of dignity for our seniors.

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.

It is a pleasure to rise today and speak on behalf of the residents of Thunder Bay–Superior North to the government bill, Bill 7, the More Beds, Better Care Act, 2022.

In my inaugural speech last week, I spoke of the crisis in health care and the assault on public services initiated by massive funding cuts and an aggressive campaign to undermine unions that began under the Mike Harris government. These cuts continued through Liberal and now again Conservative governments. People on the other side of the House like to claim that the NDP is somehow responsible for this shameful debacle. But it is the Conservatives who were the official opposition during the years of Liberal mismanagement, and surely they bear responsibility for the slashes to health care spending undertaken with such glee by the Harris government.

Former Minister of Education John Snobelen advised Mike Harris, who was Premier at the time, that his Conservative government needed to create a crisis in public education in order to create an appetite amongst the public for for-profit education. This is exactly what we are seeing today in the crisis created four years ago by this government with the implementation of Bill 124.

The privatization of health care services and the restriction of bargaining rights for public sector unions with Bill 124 have increased the strains on our health care system and have, in fact, helped to manufacture a health care crisis. Bill 7 before us here today looks to amend the Fixing Long-Term Care Act, 2021, by including a provision to allow hospitals to discharge patients determined to need alternative levels of care so that hospital capacity can be increased.

I know from watching the debate this week that the Minister of Long-Term Care denies that patients can be discharged without their consent. The fact is, however, this bill talks of hospitals being expected to make a reasonable attempt to obtain consent, while clearly giving hospitals the authority to carry out actions needed to transfer patients if the resistance of patients or the family is deemed unreasonable.

We also know that hospitals threaten patients with impossibly large fees if they don’t agree to be moved, something this bill could, but does not, address.

It is in section 2, part 3 of the bill where it is outlined that the authority for clinicians and placement coordinators to determine eligibility for a patient to be transferred into long-term care can be found. As far as I can see, anyone within the hospital system can be designated to make this assessment. That designated person then chooses a home for the patient based on their assessment, and there is nothing in this bill that talks of patient or family consultation or consent. This bill, Bill 7, in its haste to free up hospital beds, seems not well-thought-out and does not place the patient, their needs and their families as a priority.

Of further concern are the government’s claims about the quality of care in for-profit long-term-care homes. During the COVID pandemic, members of the military brought in to help with crisis conditions in long-term care reported horrendous conditions that directly contributed to the high number of deaths in these same for-profit homes, and yet not one of these homes has been shut down.

Today I am hearing exactly the same concerns originally reported by the military being reported again by front-line workers and family members. I was recently contacted by a PSW I’ll name Susan, who told me she is frequently the only staff member looking after residents—no nurses, no other PSWs, no cleaners, no one on the front desk screening visitors and not even paper towels at the handwashing stations—just one PSW to provide what this government referred to yesterday as the highest level of care in the country. Is this the standard of care you were boasting about?

The four hours of care you keep referring to doesn’t exist. You keep claiming to have hired thousands of additional health care workers, but where are they? Are they wearing cloaks of invisibility that only members of the Conservative caucus can see? They certainly are not visible in any of the health care settings in the riding of Thunder Bay–Superior North.

Susan, the PSW who continues to find herself working alone on all floors of the home, shift after shift, made a formal complaint to an inspector, who called her back saying that there were no problems at the home. Clearly the inspector did not attend the home in person, or the standards the Minister of Long-Term Care keeps touting are extremely low. This is the reality of for-profit long-term-care homes.

It worries me deeply that after learning of the dreadful conditions in for-profit homes during COVID, the government has not shut down homes that do not meet even the most basic standard of care. Even more egregiously, they have sold 35-year licences to the same long-term-care homes already discredited as the sites of the greatest number of COVID-related deaths. If the Conservative government is claiming to have mandated the highest standards in the country, why are inspectors not shutting down homes that are clearly not in compliance?

Speaker, keeping patients close to family members where they live is the most compassionate action to be taken. Indeed, as many of us who have taken of care elders in hospital, long-term care or retirement homes know, family members fill the gap in nursing and PSW shortages and end up taking on a critical role as caregivers. When a family member ends up far from where they live, that support system can’t be maintained. This adds up to emotional and physical stress on both the patient and the family members.

The title alone—More Beds, Better Care—shows the disconnect this government has towards health care. As any health care worker will tell you should you choose to listen, more beds without more staff is simply more furniture. This province cannot retain nurses, PSWs or other valuable health care workers because they are overburdened and underpaid. They frequently work short-handed, and many work two and sometimes three part-time jobs with no benefits just to make ends meet. These are the same workers we keep calling our heroes, yet this government keeps persisting in the same status quo policy of Bill 124, which removed bargaining rights from public sector workers and capped their wages.

The government is subsidizing for-profit agencies with public money to the detriment of our health care system and the morale of health care workers. I note that the Premier this week has, once again, been looking to the federal government for more health care funding. But we should be reminded that, according to a report by the Financial Accountability Office, the previous Ford government underspent on health care by $1.8 billion last year. The FAO report also highlighted that Ontario in 2020 had the least amount of health care spending per person in the entire country. This failure to spend health care dollars fell in the middle of this government’s previous mandate.

Again, as much as you try to deflect criticism by blaming previous governments, you already had four years to do right by health care workers and the people of Ontario, but you chose not to. And frankly, if we want to blame a previous government, we can look to the Mike Harris Conservatives who slashed funding from health and education in a deliberate strategy to generate support for for-profit corporations.

In 2021, the Financial Accountability Office reported that Ontario did not spend any funds from a $2.7-billion COVID response program in the first quarter. That’s two years in a row that this government chose not to spend its available health care dollars. Could it be that this government is following the Mike Harris playbook and deliberately creating crisis after crisis in health care because of its burning desire to turn more public dollars into private profits? Financial transfers from the federal government during COVID have also largely been held back, not properly accounted for, and explained by this government as “saving for a rainy day.” While I’m not a meteorologist, I would suggest to this government that when it comes to health care, it is not only raining, it is a monsoon and we need action now, here, today.

Simply put, public health care dollars must remain in the public system. Every dollar of public money should not be reduced by shareholder dividends, private agency fees or the wage gouging by private agencies that undermine our health care system. We, on this side of the House, have been sounding the alarm about long-term care and retirement homes for years. I recall our former leader Howard Hampton pleading for better standards and more hiring for long-term care decades ago. Neglect by this government and previous Liberal governments have only added to the dire situation we find ourselves in today. But the government doesn’t have to listen to our voices. A wise government would listen to front-line health care workers and community advocates who know the on-the-ground reality of health care.

Natalie Mehra is one such advocate, and she is a member of the Ontario Health Coalition. She states, “The bottom line is the Ford government is using the health care crisis to privatize Ontario’s public hospital services and to push seniors out to fill long-term-care beds in the worst nursing homes that no one wants to go to because they have terrible reputations, most of them for-profit. It is all couched in very carefully selected and manipulative language, but the actual policy changes they are proposing are clear and they clearly benefit for-profit companies at the expense of patients, particularly seniors.”

Speaker, we know that this government has deep ties to the for-profit long-term-care industry. Many ex-Conservative staffers are now back in the House as long-term-care lobbyists. Ex-Premier Harris sat on the board of one of the largest for-profit long-term-care companies, and his partner heads up one of the for-profit health care agencies that is subsidized heavily by public health dollars.

In my riding of Thunder Bay–Superior North, private agency staff are making two to three times the amount that hospital nurses are. Our hospital nurses, who have committed to living in and serving their home communities, wind up training the agency nurses and thus further subsidizing agency staff—talk about adding insult to injury. I have also learned that nursing students who come to hospitals on placements are deciding not to pursue careers in nursing after seeing the workload that full-time nurses are carrying and after seeing first-hand how badly nurses are treated by this government.

Bill 124 has created a crisis in health care that is resulting in health care workers leaving the profession in droves. This is the status quo created by this government, and this is the status quo that could so easily be fixed by offering existing health care workers the wages and respect they deserve. It is clear that Bill 124 is not about saving money, but it is about creating an excuse to expand for-profit health care. Bill 7 does nothing to actually address the health care staffing shortage. Emergency departments and hospital intensive care units are staffed by specialized RNs and regulated health professionals, while alternative-level-of-care units are typically staffed by PSWs and RPNs. Clearing alternative-level-of-care beds will not free up nurses or specialized staff to address the recent rise in emergency room and urgent care closures.

The devil is always in the details, and unfortunately, Bill 7 is very weak on actual details. Here are a few key points of what this bill does not have. The More Beds, Better Care Act fails to present a timeline to determine how quickly patients will be moved into long-term care and, just as importantly, whether the homes will actually have an opportunity to do their due diligence in being prepared for additional residents. If long-term-care homes turn down residents because they feel they can’t meet their needs, it is not made clear what options that resident has. Where will they be placed if a home repeatedly rejects residents? What measures are in place so that any of these decisions along the line are being done in good faith?

This government talks of the importance of home care, and this side of the House quite agrees and, indeed, thinks that investments in home care are more important than just talking about it. This bill makes no mention of home care, despite it being a very reasonable and preferred alternate level of care. We know that 90% of Ontario elders would rather have home care in their own homes and communities, but this bill neglects to mention home care or if a patient’s primary care providers could be maintained with at-home support.

The minister has publicly stated that he is hoping to pass this bill by September 1 and, in the week following, to pass regulations. Once again, this government is rushing through a bill and shortchanging the public by not allowing for adequate consultations.

Those details I mentioned that are lacking will be expanded under the regulations. The legislation, for example, makes no mention of how far away a resident may be placed in a long-term-care facility from where they actually live and have family support. The regulations presumably will set that out, but that makes me very nervous, I have to say.

This bill has been met with widespread anger across the province, and the government’s response has been to attack the opposition for even trying to raise salient points we object to in the bill. Seeing and hearing this reaction, it is not a surprise that the government did not campaign on this in the June election, choosing instead to rush it through in a summer sitting.

Any bill worth introducing is worth debating and deserves the proper consultation time for the public to weigh in. Unfortunately, this government’s status quo is wielding their power with a heavy hand and not seeking out or desiring public input and consultation. In the case of Bill 7, the More Beds, Better Care Act, it is seniors and their families who suffer.

We know that long-term-care lobbyists have the direct ear of this government and this minister. I ask them: When will the government listen to front-line workers, health care advocates and families? When will the government listen to seniors themselves about what they need in long-term care, home care and—what we don’t talk about enough—retirement home care, that grand enterprise designed to suck every last dollar out of a senior’s life savings?

We also know that Ontario funds its hospitals at amongst the lowest rates in Canada, so we should not be surprised that we are in a health care crisis. Given the history of the Harris and Ford governments, we shouldn’t be surprised to see innovation touted as grounds to transform even more public dollars into private profits. Public dollars spent on public health care keep money and resources circulating throughout the system. The siphoning-off of public dollars for private profits destroys the system. This is exactly what Bill 7 is designed to do, and I, for one, will do everything in my power—

My question is to the Premier.

During the Mike Harris Conservative government, a major transfer of public assets into private hands took place in the privatization of many long-term-care homes—a transfer of public funds that continues to benefit associates of the Conservative Party.

During COVID, members of the military reported horrendous conditions that directly contributed to the high number of deaths in these same for-profit homes. Sadly, I am hearing exactly the same concerns today.

I was recently contacted by a PSW I will name Susan, who told me she is often the only staff member looking after residents. No nurses, no other PSWs, no cleaners, no one at the front desk screening visitors—and not even paper towels at the handwashing stations.

Can the Premier tell me why, after learning of the dreadful conditions in for-profit homes during COVID, he has not shut down homes that do not meet even the most basic standard of care?

Susan, the PSW, made a formal complaint to an inspector, who called her back, saying there were no problems at the home. Clearly, the inspector did not attend the home in person. The personal support worker subsequently experienced reprisals from the home’s manager for calling an inspector. This is an example of a for-profit home clearly placing profits over care.

Can the minister tell me why they sold more bed licences to the same long-term-care homes already identified as not providing good care, and why inspectors are not shutting down non-compliant homes?