Ford and Jones fail on nursing
The one obvious thing that could help is to repeal the wage restraint legislation, but so far they aren’t budging
When the Ontario legislature resumed last week, Premier Doug Ford and his government — in particular his health minister — found themselves in a quandary. Or, to put it more colloquially, between a rock and a hard place.
The hard place is the meltdown of the province’s health-care system, in particular the ongoing and growing exodus of experienced nurses. The rock is his own making — his government’s wage restraint legislation, Bill 124, that restricts public sector increases to one per cent.
Bill 124 was one of those tempestuous and seemingly impulsive moves that the Ford government excels at — much like his announcement days after the election about creating strong mayors for Ottawa and Toronto. The wage restraint came out of the blue in 2019, and Ford and Health Minister Sylvia Jones are standing by it in the face of the health-care crisis.
That crisis manifests itself in many ways: emergency rooms shutting for a day or days; lack of acute care or ICU beds; and long, long waits for emergency care at hospitals large and small for example.
But the biggest pressure point is nurses, and the rising number of experienced nurses opting out of the health-care system. Many are burned out or on the verge of being burned out after working through the pandemic.
Others are seeking greener fields by moving to employment agencies that specialize in providing experienced nurses on demand, and wages are higher.
Both Ford and Jones kept a low profile as pressure mounted this summer. Their plan, when they emerged last week, was to expedite the hiring of foreign-trained nurses. Jones gave the regulatory agencies all of two weeks to come up with a system to register them. The response, if Twitter is a gauge, was not positive. “Despite how easy it sounds to just bring in nurses from overseas, it’s not that simple,” wrote one doctor, Deepa Soni, an emergency room physician with more than 23 years experience.
“A senior nurse has a lived intuition. They can see a child at triage and in 60 seconds make an assessment that this child needs immediate care. That intuition takes years to develop.”
“When people don’t feel valued by a system, you get the results we see in front of us today.”
Like other professionals in the trenches at Ontario’s hospitals, Soni said the starting point to getting ahead of this crisis should be to repeal Bill 124.
Ford kiboshed that idea at one of his rare summer media encounters.
Others may see crisis-level problems, but he touted a 90 per cent success rate in Ontario hospitals. That won’t sit well with patients and families in the unsuccessful 10 per cent.
And he saw no reason to roll back Bill 124.
As far as he’s concerned nurses have been treated well with a $5,000 retention bonus spread over two years that’s supposed to keep Ontario nurses in Ontario hospitals.
Nurses see it differently. By the time federal and provincial taxes and inflation take their toll, there’s not much of an incentive to stay in a high-pressure, highdemand job where they’re often subject to harangues from frustrated patients.
Bill 124 expires in November. If it’s not extended, the fractious and fractured relationship between Ontario’s nurses and the provincial government will still linger into the next round of negotiations.
And if it is extended, the exodus of experienced and highly trained nurses will only grow, crippling even further an already damaged and chaotic health-care system.
And that’s when Ford and Jones will find out just how hard and rocky their jobs have become.