You can't cut your way to a healthy population.

We've got issues here in Ontario. Over the last five years, we've given the banks over sixty billion dollars - that's a billion dollars a month in interest alone!

That's absolutely unbelievable, but what's worse are the candidates who have no better ideas than to cut, cut, cut.

I'll say it again; you can't cut your way to a smart and healthy population.

The Big Idea: Here's how we start to reduce the strain on our emergency rooms and our most vulnerable populations like seniors, the homeless and families with no family doc.

Solution One: We MUST hire more doctors and nurses. Specifically, Ontario needs at least 3,000 new doctors over the next five years, with 400+ of those going to Northern Ontario, and we need at minimum ten thousand new nurses (likely closer to 15 or 20,000). "But Mark! That's going to cost more money!"

In the short term, my friend, you are absolutely correct - probably close to $2.5bn - but emergency room-visits cost us a lot more. Besides, remember that billion dollars a month we're wasting on interest?

That one's easy. Now we start getting radical.

Solution Two: It's time to aggressively expand our community paramedicine and nursing program. Let's take veteran paramedics and nurses, couple them with brand-new EMS and nursing students and send them out to gain incredible experience by meeting our most vulnerable patients who usually don't get the care they need...and then wind up in Emergency. We do this now, but we don't do it anywhere close to enough; if this program can reduce 911 calls and ER visits by even five percent, that would save a lot of lives and money, and I would be aiming far higher than that; twenty to twenty-five percent reduction's the ultimate goal. (By the way, this one's got a bonus that's really close to my heart; paramedics and nursing staff get burnt out, and having them take a break from pages and pages of heartbreaking 911 calls will show them the care they deserve.)

Solution Three: We're way behind the curve on health-care education and research.

There are some fantastic teaching and research hospitals in the world, and it's time we in Ontario took our rightful place amongst the world leaders. I'd like to see us establish two not world-class but world-beating medical universities, one right here, radically expanding the new Windsor-Essex Acute Care hospital space that's breaking ground in 2026: it's a great start, but we're not dreaming big enough here.

Ontario in general and Windsor specifically should be world leaders in innovation and just plain love for our seniors and other vulnerable people.

While I am grateful for every medical professional no matter where they're born, our need for foreign-born docs & nurses just shouldn't happen; there's no reason our kids can't fill that need.

Solution One-A: The Next Three to Five Years

• Until we can get our best and brightest young "home-grown" docs and nurses into the pipeline, I would ask Ottawa to take a minimum of 1,000 more non-citizen docs and 2,000 non-citizen nurses in per year than we do now, reducing non-critical immigration accordingly to reduce the strain, with the lion's share coming to Ontario.

• I would work with Ottawa to require those doctors to sign on to the Canadian Forces Reserves for a minimum of five years. That would lead those new docs and nurses to not only uphold Canadian lives and values but to do a weekend's service every month and two weeks' service every year.

• If those new docs were not needed by the Forces (to attend to a world disaster zone like Haiti or Fukushima, for example), their required Reserve time would be spent in the emergency room of a critically understaffed area where wait times were excessive.

• When not on deployment, new doctors would be assigned to live in and work in an underserved community, but would be permitted to work outside the Emergency Department, learning how to be specialists, the salaries for which are their eventual reward and true incentive.

• Once the new docs complete their five years, they may of course stay in the Reserves, but they now get permission and help to go open their own clinics; they would get more help if their clinic was in an underserved area such as Northern Ontario or regions where there aren't enough family doctor teams.

Accountability: I'll say it again, again, again; you STILL can't cut your way to a smart and healthy population. Tired of me saying that yet? If so, you're not getting it.

However, we should be in a state of constant review in government; if a bureaucratic position in health care does not directly and tangibly help a front-line worker, we need to take a closer look; our tax bucks need to arrive at the front line and very little other places.

If a restructure or cut means that patients wait longer or have their health risks, though, that's a hard no; that position STAYS.

I'll work to put those guidelines - different for each department! - into place.