U.S. citizens: Demand Congress investigate soaring excess death rates
(LifeSiteNews) — Premier Doug Ford’s Progressive Conservative Ontario government recently tried to stop the release of figures showing a massive nursing shortage in the province.
According to figures released May 13 by The Canadian Press, Ontario will need 33,200 more nurses and 50,853 more personal support workers by 2032 to fill the healthcare workers shortage – figures the Ford government had asked the the Information and Privacy Commissioner to keep secret.
“It’s the government that has to have the will to address it,” Service Employees International Union Healthcare president Sharleen Stewart, the representative of the largest healthcare union in Canada, told The Canadian Press.
“When they’re hiding it so that we don’t solve the problem by increasing wages and improving the conditions of work and conditions of care in the workplace, then they’re obviously not serious about solving this problem for seniors of our province,” she continued.
According to The Canadian Press, the numbers it requested and received were originally kept secret after the Ford government had asked the Information and Privacy Commissioner to withhold the figures from media outlet Global News, which had sought the figures via a freedom-of-information act request.
According to the outlet, the documents show that Ontario was already short a total of 6,000 nurses in 2022, a number that went up to 10,110 in 2023.
In 2024, Ontario is projected to be 13,200 nurses short, while 2027 is expected to see a shortage of 20,700 nurses. The number is then projected to balloon to 33,200 in 2032.
The situation for personal support workers is even worse, according to The Canadian Press, with Ontario already having needed 24,100 additional PSWs in 2022 and 30,900 in 2023.
In 2024, the number is expected to rise to 37,700, then to 48,977 in 2027 and 50,853 in 2032.
The projected worsening of the healthcare worker shortage is of concern for Canadians, as wait times to receive care in most provinces have gone up dramatically in recent years, with the national average now sitting at 27.7 weeks.
Ontario in particular has been criticized for exacerbating its healthcare worker shortage by levying COVID vaccine mandates as a condition of employment. While the official number of nurses and other workers relieved of their duties for refusing to take the experimental injections remains uncertain, Raphael Gomez, director of the Centre for Industrial Relations and Human Relations at the University of Toronto, told CTV News that as many as 10 percent of nurses in the province either quit or retired early as a result of the mandates.
Officials tried to justify the mandates by claiming that the unvaccinated were “unprotected” from COVID while the vaccinated were believed to have immunity from the virus. However, there is overwhelming evidence that the COVID vaccine does not prevent transmission and can also cause a plethora of negative side effects.
U.S. citizens: Demand Congress investigate soaring excess death rates