Each week until the lead up of the provincial election, February 27, The Expositor will post a question to each of the five candidates running to be the next MPP of Algoma-Manitoulin. Candidates Maria Legault, Green Party of Ontario, and Bill Rosenberg, PC, have chosen not to respond to the Expositor’s many invitations to participate.
This week’s question is:
In your opinion, what is the biggest single issue facing the people of Algoma-Manitoulin and what is your party’s plan to address it?
Maria Legault, Green Party of Ontario
Chose not to respond.
Michael Mantha, Independent
I’ve lived my whole life in the North. I love this land and treasure the wealth of benefits and opportunities that come with that privilege. But I also know the limitations and struggles of living in this region. For one, Northern Ontario has never been given a fair shake when it comes to healthcare resources.
One of the best things about Ontario is the diversity of our regions. Unfortunately, successive governments have failed to understand this truth. They insist on formulating policies and allocating funding with a ‘one-size-fits-all’ approach.
Hospitals and primary care teams in the North face unique challenges that the government has failed to address and refuses to recognize, no matter how many times and ways they have been informed. I know these problems well from my many meetings with hospital administrators and primary care teams across the riding.
The North lacks family physicians, specialists, surgeons, nurse practitioners and nurses. Hospital administrators have no choice but to rely on for-profit staffing agencies that charge 2-3 times more than permanent full-time workers. This results in staff doing the same job with extreme wage differentials, leading to resentment and job retention issues. Financially, this is just not sustainable.
In addition, Northern Ontario is desperately short of homecare workers like PSWs. Without a permanent local workforce, seniors are not getting the support they need to stay in their homes, further stressing our hospitals with overcrowding.
Northern hospitals lack the funding to meet their communities’ needs. Doug Ford and his Health Ministers would have you believe that they have increased hospital funding by 30 percent. However, when you factor in inflation and rising costs, this increase drops to just 20 percent over seven years. In some cases, the funding has not kept pace with inflation.
Let’s be clear about what these cuts mean to Northerners: the lack of adequate funding means staffing shortages and service reductions, putting patients’ lives at risk. Under this Conservative government, Northern hospitals are operating with growing deficits, leaving them unable to invest and grow with their communities.
In addition to doctor and health worker shortages and across-the-board inadequate healthcare funding, Northerners face challenges in affording travel costs when they must go to larger centres for treatment.
The creation of the Northern Health Travel Grant brought significant relief to people who have to travel for medical purposes. But, after being implemented in 1985, the benefits and support were almost forgotten as rates stagnated. After the initial launch, the mileage rate didn’t rise until 2007, when it was brought to 34 cents per kilometre.
When re-elected in 2022, I immediately introduced legislation to review the travel grant to determine how it could be improved with necessary modernization and increased rates. My team focused on raising this issue’s profile with the government and rallying Northerners to push for change.
As a result, on December 1, 2024, the grant application was simplified by removing the need to have a family physician sign the application, the number of accommodation nights was raised to 8, the minimum travel distance was lowered, and the 100-kilometer deductible was removed.
Ontario can’t afford to continue with this government’s policy of deliberately starving the healthcare sector. Their actions demonstrate a clear bent toward the privatization of our public healthcare system.
To meet the needs of Northern residents, the government needs to drop this one-size-fits-all approach. To rescue our healthcare system, I will push the next government to immediately: Enact the dedicated Northern Ontario Health Equity Strategy, created in 2018 but never implemented; increase base funding for small hospitals in rural communities by 10 percent; recognize that the North faces unique challenges in delivering healthcare (i.e., large service areas and limited public services) and allocate resources to primary care accordingly; and implement legislation to protect our public healthcare system by limiting the use of for-profit staffing agencies and their fees.
Reg Niganobe, Ontario Liberal Party
The biggest issue facing Algoma-Manitoulin is the overall quality of services and assistance it receives from the current provincial government, which is essentially no service. The Ford government has largely ignored our region. We have 40,000 citizens without family doctors, which impacts the health, safety, and well-being in Algoma-Manitoulin. If elected, the Liberal government plans to educate, attract, and retain thousands of new domestic and internationally trained family doctors. We also plan to help modernize family medicine by making appointments available on evenings and weekends. However, this is just one issue as several issues impact the lovely region. I look forward to highlighting more over the next few weeks.
Bill Rosenberg, PC Party
Chose not to respond.
David Timeriski, Ontario NDP
Algoma-Manitoulin voters tell me that the biggest issue they face is accessing healthcare, for themselves, their children, their parents and other loved ones. In our riding, the distances are large and we depend on having emergency medical care close by as minutes can make the difference. That means we need rural hospitals in communities to have functioning, open Emergency Departments with paramedics able to get critical patients to the hospital and where hospital professionals have the tools they need to save lives.
Healthcare takes many forms and touches us all. We often think of doctors and nurses first as we interact with them so often. I want to give a shout out to the many behind-the-scenes workers who support front-line staff—technicians, administrative support, dietitians, cleaning staff, food prep workers and more. It takes a team of top-notch professionals to deliver the physical and mental health care we need in each of our communities.
You may be thinking that all of these qualified workers cost money. Yes, they do. While the Ford government has found the money for pet projects like getting alcohol into convenience stores, healthcare has been severely underfunded—starved in fact. In 2016, under a Liberal government, 1.3 million Ontarians were without a family doctor—177,210 just in Northern Ontario. By July 2024, this rose to 2.5 million. With many of our family physicians being over 65, the Ontario College of Family Physicians predicts that more than 4 million Ontarians will be without a family doctor by 2026.
At the Healthcare Town Hall held by the Algoma-Manitoulin ONDP on January 12 I heard the concerns about closures, staff shortages, and the difficulty of getting long-term/home care loud and clear. These issues came up at the Ontario Health Coalition meeting last week and in Thessalon on Saturday. I appreciate the sharing of personal experiences and, as a paramedic, I have seen these difficulties first-hand.
We New Democrats believe it doesn’t have to be this way. We deserve reliable access to health care; it is a core Canadian value. As an Ontario NDP candidate, I am committed to publicly funded, publicly delivered health care. We have a plan to:
Expand Primary Care Access: Connect every Ontarian to a family doctor/nurse practitioner by recruiting more healthcare professionals into community-based primary care teams.
Cut Wait Times: Create a centralized referral system to reduce wait times and open underused operating rooms on evenings and weekends to clear surgical backlogs.
Ensure Fair Wages: Establish wage parity and fair working conditions for healthcare workers and stop for-profit staffing agencies from exploiting the system. This will keep workers here in Algoma-Manitoulin with good jobs.
Grow the workforce: Increase residency seats and licensing opportunities for internationally educated doctors and healthcare workers.
Stand up for public health care, and reverse Ford’s sell-off of our healthcare system to profiteers.
The New Democratic Party has always understood the importance of healthcare: a healthy society is a productive society, where people work to support their families and enjoy a good life. Here in the north, we need access to better facilities that are fully staffed by workers who have the supports they need so we can have: our babies close to home without having to spend three weeks living in another community; our elders are able to live at home for as long as possible with supports far less expensive than being in hospital far from loved ones; and quality medical care in our communities that help us avoid travel on winter highways
Ours is a long-term plan to stop selling off pieces of public healthcare built by past generations. It will take some work to breathe life back into the neglected parts of our healthcare system, but as your Ontario NDP candidate, I am up to the challenge. With Marit Stiles, our team is ready to make good decisions to ensure we have quality healthcare across Ontario. I’m proud to say that bringing a deep commitment to better healthcare in Algoma-Manitoulin would be my top priority as MPP.
