I listened with great earnestness as young people described the difficulties of beginning work in Toronto. I was particularly caught by the experiences of a newly graduated nurse attempting to work in downtown Toronto hospital and exist on a first-year nurses salary. She lived in a single room apartment with a hot plate to cook on and the room she rented almost required her whole salary.
Over the past six months, television news channels, news magazines, and newspapers have all told the stories of nurses and health care professionals walking away from their careers and leaving wards and institutions understaffed. Part of the issue is burnout. As professionals leave, those remaining are asked to pick up additional shifts leading to more burnout. Often those RN’s, RPN’s and PS Workers move to agencies where they earn more and have greater control of their schedules.
And frequently, those agency personnel are hired back to the hospitals that they had left and are earning more that what the government permits.
The Ontario government in 2019 passed an act “Protecting the Public Sector for Future Generations” known as Bill 124. It restricted increases in salaries and wages of Ontario Public Sector workers to 1 per cent per year. Inflation has grown by far more than the 1 per cent. In the latest review, inflation had grown by 8.5 per cent a with Ontario public service workers seeing a loss of buying power. In the past five years, cities like Toronto, Burlington, Hamilton, London, Windsor, Barrie have seen the price of homes almost double, leaving millennials unable to live or own homes in those communities. Even in Fort Frances, the price of homes has sky-rocketed, but remain far more affordable than those around Toronto.
There is a provincial election coming up in June. You can tell that it is arriving as we are all receiving checks in the mail returning our licence fees for our motor vehicles. I didn’t need the $235 that I received. I figured that it would have been better off spent on health care in the province. But the Conservative Government set out to buy your vote. Health care will be a major topic and the impact of Covid these past two years will have to be addressed as well as staff shortages in hospitals, long term care facilities and nursing homes as well as delays for critical surgeries and treatments. Of great importance will be staff shortages which forced long term care facilities to reduce the number of beds available for patients.
I have read that delays in diagnosis and treatments will have consequences for the next decade on Ontario residents. It could be time to review and cancel Bill 124 and pay health care workers more to move Ontario to a preferred province for health care.
Former publisher
Fort Frances Times
