Assemblée législative de l'Ontario

Whereas more than a third of operating rooms in Ontario's public hospitals do not meet the 90 per cent target for operating room use, mostly due to lack of funding and staff needed to run all the province's operating rooms simultaneously; 

Whereas the government permitted the crisis in our healthcare system to persist while billions of dollars in unspent public funds are allocated to contingency funds instead of Ontario hospitals that are struggling to maintain quality of care due to understaffing; and 

Whereas the Ford government is appealing the Superior Court ruling declaring Bill 124, Protecting a Sustainable Public Sector for Future Generations Act, 2019, unconstitutional, despite the Minister being told about the devastating impact on hiring, recruitment, and retention of healthcare workers; 

Whereas the infrastructure to expand surgical capacity already exists and is sitting idle in public hospitals but the government is choosing to spend taxpayer funds on investor-owned, for-profit surgical suites; and 

Whereas high-quality facilities across the province have idle operating room time, such as Health Sciences North, which is only funded to use 14 out of 17 state-of-the-art operating rooms and Toronto's University Health Network which is unable to simultaneously run all of their operating rooms because of understaffing; 

Therefore, the Legislative Assembly calls on the government to fund and fully utilize public operating rooms instead of further privatizing hospital operating room services.