Thank you, Mr. Speaker. First of all, I want to thank the Member for Monfwi for seconding the motion, and I want to thank the Member for Range Lake for coming up with the idea for this motion in the first place, as a way to show nurses and healthcare workers that we see their struggle. We see the pain that they endure amidst staff shortages and increased demands trying to keep our healthcare system afloat and do right by the patients that they try to help day after day after night after night.

Mr. Speaker, we cannot run a good quality healthcare system if the majority of our nurses and doctors are temporary contract workers. We need a stable workforce who live in our communities, know their patients, understand cultural safety, and understand who else to reach out to within our health and social services system to make referrals and help patients access the more wholistic supports they need. Temporary workers just can't do those things well.

Now, we've spoken many times in this House about the need for healthcare worker recruitment and retention. We've talked about policies and strategies and statistics, the cost of agency nurses and contract workers in terms of our budget and the health authority's deficit, but we rarely put our healthcare workers themselves at the centre of the solution. We rarely give them a platform to have their voices heard, to have their ideas considered, to let them be co-designers of the system we want to see, to empower them to be leaders in healthcare system reform.

Mr. Speaker, I am a Member of the Standing Committee on Social Development -- I am the seconder of this motion -- the Member from Monfwi is the chair. And the committee has already identified it wants to broadly examine how to make our entire healthcare system more sustainable.

This motion is asking the committee to take a deeper dive into examining healthcare recruitment and retention from the perspective of its workers, to hear from them directly so that our recommendations better reflect the realities of frontline workers.

The committee, of course, should focus on the things that we as MLAs have some control or influence over - our government and health authority's policies and management practices and our own government's legislation, including how we legislate bargaining structures and regulation of health care professionals. I look forward to hearing from my colleagues on how they envision this Assembly and our committees moving forward to address this important issue. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.