Windsor West MPP calls for 'urgent' repeal of Bill 124 in wake of Essex County state of emergency

NDP MPP Lisa Gretzky is calling for the "urgent" repeal of Bill 124 in response to news of a state of emergency declared in Essex County, due to persistent delays and wait times for ambulances in the region.

The law was passed in 2019 and limits wage increases at one per cent per year for Ontario Public Service employees as well as broader public sector workers, including nurses and teachers. 

The provisions of the bill were to be in effect for three years as new contracts were negotiated, and the Tories had said it was a time-limited approach to help eliminate the deficit. Critics have long called for the bill to be repealed, saying it has contributed to a severe nursing shortage. 

"Hearing that Essex County went almost three consecutive hours without a single ambulance available is simply horrifying," said Gretzky, in a news release. 

It's stressful and it adds to a lot of heart ache for county workers.— James Jovanovic, president of the paramedics union, CUPE Local 2974

"A critical and systemic lack of hospital funding, staff, and access to primary care physicians are forcing them into impossible situations. Doug Ford has not acknowledged the depth of this crisis. It's clear that in Essex County, Ford's lack of health care funding has reached an emergency level," she said.

Gretzky added that the Ford government should direct money from its $2.1 billion surplus into health care to ensure critical care is available to Ontarians when they need it. 

In the first two weeks of October alone, Essex-Windsor EMS said there were nearly 500 minutes where a Code Black alert was in effect, meaning there were no ambulances free to respond if there was an additional emergency. 

Contributing factors

On Monday, EMS Chief Bruce Krauter said the issue is caused by offload delays at hospitals, saying, "The causes of off-load delays are complex and relating to long-standing issues of hospital capacity, patient flow, a lack of local primary care providers, which causes increased usage of [the] 911 system."

But James Jovanovic, president of the paramedics' union, CUPE Local 2974, told CBC Windsor that there are other contributing factors that need to be addressed.

"Such as increase in call volume, in EMS specifically, due to such things as an increasingly aging population," Jovanovic said. 

"Ultimately it's a bottleneck of, again, those increasing emergency calls, increasing volumes of patients going to the hospital and not enough beds, not enough staff to care for them and properly process them," he said. 

Jovanovic added that the situation has contributed to poor morale among the county's paramedics. 

"When we are faced with these conditions where no matter what we do we're unable to help the situations we're seeing - that weighs heavily on health-care workers and the emergency responders, so it certainly adds to a decrease in morale, the level of burnout," he said. 

"It's stressful and it adds to a lot of heart ache for county workers."

Jovanovic said the union is in full support of the state of emergency. Hopefully, he said, the declaration will motivate different levels of government to take action. 

He said more staffing and increased funding is critical in addressing the issue in a meaningful way.