What to expect when the Ontario legislature resumes sitting Tuesday

Questions about Premier Doug Ford's relationship with developers and the expansion of private health-care delivery will dominate the return of the Ontario legislature Tuesday when it's set to resume after its winter break.

The first order of business is expected to be a new piece of legislation containing promised health reforms. That will include allowing community clinics and diagnostic centres to perform more procedures and tests, letting health-care professionals from other provinces work in Ontario without registering right away, and allowing nurses and paramedics to expand their responsibilities.

"It's a great plan," Ford said last week of the upcoming legislation. "We've consulted with the sector over and over and over again. They believe it's a great plan."

The new legislation will expand cataract surgeries performed in private clinics and allow hip and knee replacements to be completed by private organizations. 

The plan is aimed at speeding up health-care delivery, but critics are concerned that it involves a larger role for the for-profit sector. While Ford has vowed the procedures and tests will still be publicly funded, the opposition parties have said it will open the door to private clinics pressuring patients to pay out of pocket for services above what the Ontario Health Insurance Plan covers.

"Public health dollars should be spent on public healthcare," newly minted NDP Leader Marit Stiles told CBC Toronto in an interview Monday.

"There's a lot of work that needs to happen in the public health-care system, but this plan is going to end up costing us all a lot more. And I think it's actually going to worsen the crisis."

Stiles, who on Tuesday will officially rise for the first time as NDP leader since being confirmed earlier this month, said the governments' plan will worsen the staffing crisis by causing competition for health-care workers between public health-care providers and for-profit businesses.

"That, in the end, is going to drag more of our health-care workers out of our hospitals and out of our long-term care centres and into these for-profit facilities because they have the flexibility to pay more," she said.

The province has said its legislation will protect hospitals from losing staff to outside clinics.

Stiles is also working on a new complaint to the integrity commissioner about Ford, developers and the removal of protected Greenbelt lands for housing.

Ford says he did nothing wrong when developers, who are family friends, attended his daughter's stag-and-doe event last summer at $150 a ticket. Media reports cite sources as saying lobbying and government relations firms were asked to buy tickets.

The Office of the Integrity Commissioner of Ontario said based on information provided, Ford had no knowledge of gifts given to his daughter and son-in-law and there was no discussion of government business at the summer event.

But Stiles says there are many questions that Ontarians still want answered.