Some seniors were not too happy on Thursday when Chris Scott and Jaycob Jacques were no shows at an all-candidates event held at the local legion.
With only a week to go before the polls close, candidates Lisa Vezeau-Allen, Gurwinder Dusanjh and Arnold Heino appeared at the Royal Canadian Legion Branch 25 to each make their case as to why they should be the next member of provincial parliament.
They represent the Ontario NDP, Liberal Party of Ontario and New Blue Party, respectively.
Thursday's event was co-organized by the Algoma branch of the National Association of Federal Retirees and District 3 Algoma RTOERO (formerly the Retired Teachers’ of Ontario).
Not in attendance at the meeting was Scott, the Ontario PC party candidate, and Jacques, the Green Party of Ontario candidate.
SooToday reached out to Scott's campaign manager, Ross Romano, to see if PC Leader Doug Ford asked Scott not to attend the debate, but Romano did not answer the call.
Moderator Folgo Della Vedova noted that organizers went to Scott's campaign office in person to extend an invitation to the event. It is located directly across the street from the Legion building.
"It's a disgrace that the other two parties have nobody here, I personally feel that," said Bob Morgan, to applause.
Morgan was one of about 50 people present to listen to candidates and to voice their concerns about a wide range of topics affecting local seniors, including the physician shortage, universal pharmacare and long-term care, among other topics.
Dusanjh and Heino were each participating in their first all-candidate meeting, while Vezeau-Allen made a solo appearance at a Wednesday event that was also held at the Legion for all candidates.
For the Thursday event, only the local candidates for the four parties that have representation at Queen's Park were invited. Heino showed up at this meeting uninvited, but was allowed to participate.
The discussion of those topics was civil, with the three candidates expressing viewpoints from all sides of the political spectrum.
Dusanjh paraphrased a famous interaction from the 2008 American presidential election when people from the crowd at a John McCain campaign event were offering assessments of his opponent Barack Obama.
"Somebody was talking bad about Obama and he stopped that lady and said, 'no, he's a good gentleman. We just differ on the way that this country should be run.' I believe that we need to return to that as representatives — civil debate," said Dusanjh, to applause from the crowd.
The first question, posed by Linda MacDonald, didn't hold back.
"Ontario ranks last among all Canadian provinces in public hospital funding per person and we have the fewest hospital beds per person compared to all other provinces.
"There are long wait lists for hospital services, patients left waiting on stretchers and hallways for beds, delayed treatments and dangerously high hospital occupancy rates. Ontario has the fewest nurses per patient of any province. Private for-profit staffing agencies are charging exorbitant rates to hospitals and driving up public health-care costs," MacDonald said.
"Sault Area Hospital, like most hospitals across Ontario, has been operating without stabilized funding. The funding it has received has not kept pace with inflation.
"There has been an unprecedented number of emergency room closures in hospitals across the province. What would your government do to address the crisis in Ontario's public hospitals including the nurse staffing crisis?" asked MacDonald.
Dusanjh noted the Liberal platform includes a plan to hire 3,000 doctors across the province and he said more needs to be done to reduce the paperwork expected of physicians, which he said takes away from the time they provide care.
"Their plan also is to have supportive staff in place that would deal with that paperwork in the evenings and on weekends, so doctors can do what they were trained to do — that's to tend to their patients without having to deal with all that paperwork," said Dusanjh.
The Liberal platform also has a plan to offer financial incentives for health-care workers in America to work in their field in Canada, including a $150,000 incentive for doctors.
"I know some doctors — I know some nurses more so — that actually practice their field across the border just because the opportunities are there. If we could attract that talent back here, I think that will go a long way in addressing the shortfalls we have," said Dusanjh.
Vezeau-Allen noted the NDP has a specific platform for northern Ontario that seeks to address the issues at a regional level, not the province as a whole.
"We do have a northern plan to recruit 350 physicians, specifically to the north, with 200 being primary care," Vezeau-Allen said.
"That does not, however, address the hospital budgetary issues, and I know that Sault Area Hospital is running on a deficit. So, as your MPP, I will work with the hospital board of directors to take a look at the funding model and where the gaps are and where we can have improvements."
"The other really critical piece of the northern platform is to have a a regionalized command centre for the north that will handle referrals and make paperwork less, in terms of making it more automated," said Vezeau-Allen.
Heino agreed that doctors are required to do too much paperwork.
"Let them do what they're paid to do and what they're great at," he said.
Heino said the first step in addressing the shortage of doctors and nurses is to hire back the health-care workers who lost their jobs because they refused to be vaccinated during COVID-19.
"Before we bring anybody else in," said Heino.
The Ontario government already lifted its requirement for hospitals to have a vaccination policy in place back in 2022, but some hospitals did not immediately change their own policies.
"One of the reasons for the backlogs in our health-care system is we have too many people coming into our city, into our country, into our province. We don't have the staff, we don't have the resources to take all these people in," said Heino.
"We have to worry about Sault Ste. Marie first and we should actually, along with the public health-care system, give people a choice with private health-care too — I'm not saying privatized health care but give them the option to have public and private health care."
Dusanjh and Vezeau-Allen, as well as some vocal members of the crowd, disagreed that there should be more privatization in the health-care system.
In response to a question about long-term care and the waiting list of seniors for those spaces, Vezeau-Allen said her party intends to invest $830 million into infrastructure upgrades within the health-care system.
"We definitely need to take a look at the whole system because we do have an aging population and we need to improve access to folks, reduce the wait list, and have better policies in terms of ratios for caregivers," she said.
Heino said private institutions need to be held accountable.
"There are a lot of private old folks homes that just skip by and it's something that definitely has to be looked at," he said.
Heino said the New Blue Party promises to end medical assistance in dying.
"There is a lot of people that have contacted me about the MAID program, saying that they've been offered this and that should absolutely not be happening in our long-term facilities," he said.
Dusanjh said he doesn't agree with putting profits above health.
"It seems like every time we blink something else is privatized. It's really concerning," he said.
"Without health there's no wealth and it seems like this government is putting wealth of individuals above the health of society. I believe that is something we should look into," said Dusanjh.
Rogers Television recorded the meeting and is expected to post the video to its YouTube page and broadcast it on its television in the coming days.
Voters will head to the polls on Feb. 27.