Mr. Speaker, nurses are the backbone of our healthcare system, and across Canada, we face a nursing shortage. The market is highly competitive to attract and retain nurses. We in the North have long struggled to fulfill all of our nursing positions. This last year has shown just how important our healthcare workers are. Our pandemic response was informed by our ability to manage the threat, and we took no chances, Mr. Speaker. However, we need to take that bold spirit to attracting and retaining our nurses.

I have had many exhausted nurses reach out to me over the course of this pandemic, offering solutions and looking for change. I believe we need to reintroduce service agreements, offering incentives to continue employment in the North. We rely on locums to a great extent in the North. However, at some point, when it is more attractive to be a southern resident nurse than it is to be a local one, many seize that opportunity and look for more flexible hours and higher pay.

Mr. Speaker, we need to offer better training opportunities for our nurses who want to stay. We need to build on the success of the Aurora College nursing program, one of our best programs that has led to many great local nurses. We need to then allow those nurses to further specialize in different fields. Many of those specialized positions are filled by locums presently, and increased training opportunities would work to solve both of those issues, Mr. Speaker. By doing this, our local nurses, particularly in remote communities, will stay longer. They will have a stronger connection to their communities, and the culture in our healthcare system will build to retain our nurses.

Presently, one of the biggest reasons our nurses leave is workplace culture and burnout. We need to offer more flexible working hours, increase part-time options for nurses, and allow nurses to come back from retirement should they wish. We can't make it a binary of forcing nurses to either burn out or leave. Mr. Speaker, I know this is a priority of this House, and the department knows it, too. We need to make that spirit that we applied to COVID-19 and focus on retaining the nurses that we have to make sure that our healthcare system capacity remains.

I believe that our situation is actually getting worse, Mr. Speaker. We risk a downward spiral where more nurses leave for other markets, making the current nurses work more overtime, causing more to leave. We need to commit to serious action to ending such a spiral. I will have questions for the Minister of Health. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.