Nurses
Fighting
for
Change
The Ford government is failing our health-care system
The facts are very clear: a worsening nursing shortage, ER closures, huge backlogs of surgeries and services, impossibly long waiting lists for long-term care, and chronic underfunding and understaffing throughout Ontario’s health-care system. Although the causes have a long history, it’s undeniably true that, far from solving these problems, the Ford government is directly responsible for making them worse.
It’s time to hold the Ford government to account
Through their first-hand experience of providing care to patients, nurses have an inside view of the gaps in our health-care system. We’re asking nurses to tell their stories to increase public awareness and build momentum for the solutions that are so urgently needed.
Priority Actions
Repeal Bill 124
Doug Ford’s Conservatives passed Bill 124 in 2019. It penalizes nurses by unfairly suppressing their wages and should never have been passed. When the pandemic hit and nurses and health-care professionals were being celebrated as heroes, a reasonable government would have repealed the bill as a show of appreciation and respect. Instead, Doug Ford dug in his heels. Not surprisingly, this has led directly to lower morale among nurses and increasing anger. Many nurses are voting with their feet and leaving the profession. The government should be taking decisive action to decrease the nursing shortage; instead, Bill 124 is making it worse.
End the Nursing Crisis
It’s simple: when there aren’t enough nurses or health-care workers in the system, patient care suffers. Understaffing increases risk for individual patients, residents, and clients and causes system-wide delays for surgeries, cancer assessment and treatment, and other critical services. It’s important to understand that the pandemic didn’t cause the nursing shortage. In fact, the nursing shortage made the pandemic worse than it needed to be. If there had been more nurses, our health-care system would have been better prepared to handle the surge, and the lockdowns and school closures would have been less extensive. For many years, Ontario has had the lowest nurse-to-population ratio in Canada. We need to hire 22,000 nurses just to catch up.
Protect Public Health Care
Underfunding the health-care system is a covert way of opening the door to privatization. When for-profit care expands, the balance shifts in favour of wealthy individuals, disrupting the principles of fairness and equal access to care that ordinary people rely on. Private facilities, including private nurse staffing agencies, pull precious resources – including nurses – away from the public system, which then must struggle even harder to keep going. Everyone in Ontario deserves excellent and timely health care. The best way to make that happen is to fund the public system properly, ensuring there are enough skilled nurses and health-care professionals to meet the need.
