We are facing an unprecedented crisis in our healthcare system. Every single day, my office is contacted by someone facing a healthcare-related issue. My staff and I hear consistently from folks dealing with extended wait times, gaps in care and delays in service.
We have a large senior population here in Niagara, and I firmly believe that every single resident of our community, from Fort Erie to Niagara Falls to
Niagara-on-the-Lake, deserves the highest-quality care possible.
But that is not what we are getting.
Let me be clear: this is not the fault of our nurses, doctors, or front-line healthcare staff. Our healthcare workers have been under an enormous amount of pressure: three years of a deadly pandemic, a larger workload from staffing shortages, increasing violence in our hospitals and the financial impacts and disrespect of Bill 124. They deserve our respect and admiration.
The real fault for this crisis lies at the hands of our government. The provincial Conservative government is pushing forward an agenda of healthcare privatization. They didn’t run on this plan — in fact, they denied support for privatization during the last election. But as we have seen from the recent announcement to expand the use of private clinics for surgeries, they are moving forward on an agenda of private healthcare.
We need to be clear about what this means for patients. When you start going down this road, we can end up with a two-tier, American-style healthcare system, which is inherently unequal. People with more money will be able to pay to get better care than middle-
class and working families, who are already struggling to get by with the rising cost of living.
Additionally, this act by this conservative government will make our staffing crisis in healthcare worse, not better. Currently, we are short nearly 20,000 personal support workers and 22,000 registered practical nurses. Many have left the profession they love due to burnout from the pandemic. This government has made the staffing crisis worse, by pushing forward Bill 124, which has kept healthcare wages below the rate of inflation.
Opening private clinics will lead to more and more healthcare workers leaving our public system for more lucrative private roles, which will continue to starve our public system of resources.
Finally, private clinics can often end up being more expensive to the taxpayer, not a cost-saver. And at the end of the day, a private clinic’s obligation is not to provide exceptional care for patients — it’s to make money for their shareholders.
As Canadians, we pride ourselves on taking care of one another. Our publicly-funded, universal healthcare system is one of the greatest things about this country. There’s a reason we voted Tommy Douglas, the father of our public healthcare system, as the greatest Canadian, ever.
Instead of pushing forward private healthcare, we need a plan to invest in our public system. We need a substantial campaign to recruit and retain healthcare workers in our system that offers permanent, full-time positions with competitive salaries and benefits. We need to completely scrap Bill 124 and pay our nurses and staff what they are worth. And we need to invest in our hospital system, both here in Niagara and across the province of Ontario.
I am committed to keeping up the fight to protect our public healthcare. And I want to hear from you: on Thursday, Feb. 9 at 6:30 p.m. to 8 p.m., I will be hosting a healthcare town hall at the Gale Centre in Niagara Falls. I am asking my constituents to come out and have their voices heard.
