Legislative Assembly of Ontario

Whereas staffing shortages in Ontario have forced emergency room and ICU closures across Ontario, reducing access to complex and potentially life-saving care in many communities; and

Whereas other hospitals have been forced to close units, redirect patients to other facilities and reduce beds, contributing to ER wait times of up to 36 hours for patients that require a hospital stay; and
Whereas health care job vacancies have more than quadrupled since 2015, resulting in more than 45,000 openings in primary care, and research by the Financial Accountability Office of Ontario underscores the urgent need to train and hire tens of thousands of extra nurses, PSWs and allied health professionals to meet the government's own 2024-2025 LTC targets for hands-on-staffing-care, while the College of Nurses of Ontario reports over 15,000 nurses in Ontario are licensed and not practicing; and
Whereas health care workers are overworked, underpaid, subject to violence, and distressed by their inability to provide the care patients need due to poor working conditions and inadequate staffing, driving many to leave the profession in record numbers; and

Whereas Ford government policies such as the Protecting a Sustainable Public Sector for Future Generations Act, 2019 (previously Bill 124) and other stopgap measures have failed to fix the problem, leaving nurses, allied health professionals and other frontline health care workers with wages falling far short of inflation, while the Government of Ontario chose not to invest over one billion dollars of the money allocated for hospitals in the 2021-2022 Budget; and

Whereas this government allowed the health human resource crisis to persist while billions of dollars in unspent public funds have been allocated to discretionary funds instead of Ontario hospitals that are struggling to maintain quality of care because they are dramatically understaffed; and

Whereas the Ford government has failed to develop a comprehensive health care staffing plan to train, recruit and retain sufficient numbers of health care workers and have ignored the advice of health care professionals on how to solve the staffing crisis in hospital and primary care; and

Whereas the Ministry of Health's inadequate temporary retention bonus for nurses fails to address systemic issues in the sector and falls far short of the efforts to retain, retrain and recruit front-line health care staff in Quebec, British Columbia, and Atlantic Canada; and

Whereas the Minister of Health's recent directives on internationally trained health care professionals fails to provide the funding, education spaces and internships needed to help address the staffing shortfall, and fails to implement many of the painful lessons learned during the pandemic; and

Whereas nursing vacancies in Ontario hospitals increased by almost 300% between March 2020 and March 2022, the turnover rate for nurses has increased by 72% since 2020, and the turnover rate for RPNs, PSWs, and other healthcare workers more than doubled since 2016;

Therefore, the Legislative Assembly calls on the Ford Government to create, in consultation with unions and other health sector stakeholders, a multi-layer Healthcare Worker Recruitment and Retention incentive package that includes short, medium, and long-term solutions to recruit, retain, and return workers across the health sector with full-time, public, unionized positions and immediately repeals Bill 124, restoring workers' right to bargain for wages that reflect their worth and the significant impact of rising inflation.