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QUEEN’S PARK – Official Opposition NDP Health critic France Gélinas released the following statement:
“Long, gruelling waits and ER shutdowns are hurting patients all over Ontario.
Premier Doug Ford’s meeting with Atlantic premiers is not going to recruit, retain or return a single health care worker in Ontario. Whining that Ontario’s crisis is all Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s fault is not going to solve the crisis.
While Ontario’s NDP agrees strongly that federal health care transfers need to increase, Ford isn’t even spending his own health care budget. Last year he left $1.8 billion in health funding sitting in the bank.
The hospitals crisis we have today is rooted in bad decisions and gross underfunding and cuts by the Conservatives and the Liberals before them. Ontario spends less, per person, than anywhere else in Canada.
The NDP will keep championing a strong, universal, public health care system. The solution to today’s hospital staffing crisis starts with Ford getting back to Ontario to repeal his damaging wage-restraint bill, Bill 124, giving nurses and other frontline health care workers the pay and the respect they deserve, and investing in the public system instead of siphoning staff and funding away to hand it to private for-profit health care corporations.”
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