This is a fantastic example. CUPE has members right now—I was speaking to some in northern Ontario last week—who are working at facilities where full-time, 16-hour, get-lots-of-overtime agency nurses are working beside them. The agency workers don't necessarily have the history in the department either, so they actually ask the public workers to do more work, to take care of the agency nurses and to provide some of that continuity of care that is so important. The agency nurses can work between institutions and travel around to fill gaps, which might help the scheduling manager but doesn't improve the quality of care. It actually is very disrespectful to the workers who are at their home station. You're actually increasing their workload. You're not offering them the overtime opportunities, and you're paying them less than this person who's coming in.
It's also really expensive. Some of the nurses I was talking to are paid $25 an hour. The agency nurses who are coming in to work alongside them are paid $60 an hour. The temp agency that manages them gets an extra $40 on top of that. We're paying four times the cost of a regular nurse to have this agency nurse there working alongside them, and that agency nurse doesn't have the same capacity to do the job because they're switching between organizations.
That is exactly the type of thing we would want to sit down to talk about at a table. We would gather data through CIHI in order to be able to make these types of decisions and have evidence-based discussions about where we're wasting money. I can tell you that nine times out of 10, we're wasting it by privatizing. It's a shortcut that we're trying to take to fix an immediate problem, to stopgap, which is actually creating cascading problems. Those nurses who aren't getting paid $60 an hour are ready to leave the profession now, because they're just not getting the respect they deserve.