ONTARIO NURSES DESERVE A BETTER DEAL

It's unlikely Premier Doug Ford will be adding a photo to his scrapbook any time soon of himself posing with Doris Grinspun, head of the Registered Nurses' Association of Ontario. She and the nurses she represents are furious at the way they've been treated by the province during the most demanding days their profession has endured.

Nurses have been at the forefront of the battle against COVID-19. They have paid with their health and well-being. They are fed up and exhausted. And they are leaving the profession or the province in worrying numbers.

All the hearts-and-flowers posters, all the lip service about heroes, lose much of their meaning when provincial legislation pays them, in real terms, less each year instead of more.

In 2019, the Ford government passed Bill 124, capping salary increases for a million public-sector workers in Ontario — including nurses and teachers — at just one per cent a year.

When inflation is spiking — to a two-decade high of 4.7 per cent in October — a one-per-cent annual pay increase means you are falling behind.

Few things have been more evocative during the COVID crucible than photos of nurses after a long shift, eyes exhausted, faces marked by the masks and PPE they've worn for entire shifts.

It was often nurses who held the hands of COVID-19 patients in their final moments. They have called Bill 124 a "slap in the face." It is. That slap stings all the more when police and firefighters — as municipal workers, and no more hardput and heroic than nurses — are exempt from wage caps.

Nursing organizations say the bill is contributing to the nursing shortage in Ontario hospitals, as nurses are lured to the United States or other provinces.

They say it has increased the wage gap between men — who constitute the majority of police and firefighters — and women, who make up the largest proportion of nurses.

The premier must have been feeling pretty good about his relationship with labour after posing recently with a couple of key union leaders when he announced an increase in the minimum wage to $15 an hour in January.

This was an astonishing show of support by UNIFOR'S Jerry Dias and OPSEU'S Smokey Thomas, given that it was Ford himself who had scrapped that increase in 2018, then granted annual minimum-wage increases of just 25 cents an hour in 2020 and a dime in 2021.

Grinspun and the leaders of other nursing organizations are not likely to be so accommodating.

Grinspun told last weekend's rally that she wants Bill 124 gone within 30 days. Otherwise, nurses would be campaigning against Ford's government in the provincial election set for next June.

The premier would do well to take the steely Grinspun and the angels in scrubs she represents seriously. They deserve better than to see their real, after-inflation salaries shrinking before their eyes.