“Hey, didn’t I vote for you?” asked the patient in the emergency department waiting room.
“You might have!” replied Dr. Adil Shamji, the second-term Liberal MPP for Don Valley East, masked and wearing scrubs, as nearby patients chuckled at the coincidence.
That type of encounter is part of the job for doctors and nurses doing double duty as public servants — politicians who set aside time away from the legislature to work occasional shifts in a health-care system struggling to meet the needs of patients.
They do it to fulfil their role as healers, to keep an eye on conditions and trends, to keep their skills up and to inform their decisions as policymakers in a province where health care, at $91 billion, is the biggest expense in Premier Doug Ford’s annual budget of $232 billion.
Health Minister Sylvia Jones has pledged that every Ontarian will be able to get a family doctor by 2029 amid concerns from opposition parties that there are not enough resources in place to do so, resulting in continued long waits in hospital emergency rooms.
Jones is leading efforts to connect Ontarians with family physicians through expanded health clinics, linking them by postal code in much the same way children are assigned to schools.
“You can say you’ve done the work to bring in as many family doctors as you can, but it takes one minute in an emergency department to know that they haven’t,” said Shamji.
“We have people who are coming in, they haven’t been able to get medications refilled, they are not up to date on their testing, we’re making the diagnosis of things like diabetes for the first time.”
In 2018, Ford came to power promising to end “hallway health care” in hospitals, but then the COVID-19 pandemic hit and today the problem remains.
Dr. Robin Lennox, MPP for Hamilton Centre, says she uses her hospital shifts to note how many patients are waiting in hallways and regularly hears from physician and nursing colleagues about snags in the system and barriers that patients face.
“It was always very important to me to bring the front-line perspective,” adds Lennox, elected for the New Democrats in last February’s provincial election that returned Ford’s Progressive Conservatives to power with a rare, third consecutive majority. She just had a third child and is taking a break from hospital shifts for now.
It’s not just opposition MPPs doing double duty.
During the height of COVID-19, registered nurse Natalia Kusendova-Bashta, MPP for Mississauga Centre and now Ford’s minister of long-term care, put on her scrubs and worked in an emergency room at a critical time for hospitals.
“There’s always a million extra shifts you can pick up because of how short we often are,” says Tyler Watt, a registered nurse and Liberal MPP for the suburban Ottawa riding of Nepean.
He works in a hospital geriatric rehabilitation unit where seniors get three to six weeks of treatments.
“They often come in bedridden, and then I get to see them walk out the front door,” Watt adds, smiling. “I try to pick up at least one shift a month.”
The occasional flash of recognition from patients is, by nature of the task at hand, a fleeting moment that is quickly steered away from politics.
“I never bring it up,” Watt said.
“You kind of say, ‘yup, that’s my role, but today I’m your doctor and so I’m focused on you,’” Lennox told the Star.
“People are just really keen to get their issue treated, because in most cases, they’ve been waiting hours,” said Shamji.
“It’s important to maintain that level of professionalism and draw a distinction between the work I do as a politician and the work that I do as a physician. People come from different political stripes. It’s not necessarily true that everyone agrees with everything that I’ve been saying, but that’s never proven to be an issue.”
As doctors, Lennox and Shamji say they entered politics because they grew frustrated at seeing patients facing systemic issues that require solutions at a higher level. A prescription for antibiotics or antidepressants can solve an immediate health problem but that only goes so far.
They recently collaborated on an opinion article in the Star calling on Ford to sign a bilateral agreement with the federal government to bring pharmacare to Ontario.
“How many times can I sit across from a patient and call shelters that turn them down because there’s no space?” said Lennox, who specializes in refugees, people facing addictions and homelessness.
“How many times can I sit with my patients and tell them that, unfortunately, they don’t qualify for any medication coverage and all these sorts of things? It just felt like, at a certain point, I just couldn’t keep doing the same.”
She made the decision to run in the summer of 2024 amid swirling rumours about a pending early election call from Ford, and downloaded the NDP candidate application.
“I wasn’t tapped by anyone to run. I filled it out and sent it in cold.”
Shamji said he grew increasingly frustrated with the provincial government during the “terrifying” early days of COVID-19 and began to “engage” with the Liberal party, was approached for his interest in running but put that off until the June 2022 election once vaccines had arrived to ease pressure on the health system.
“I’ve worked in First Nations communities throughout Ontario and in the Northwest Territories and what was really clear working in all those settings is that my patients were suffering because government, society and public policy weren’t working for them,” he adds.
“It was very frustrating to be able to prescribe antibiotics for a problem but not to be able to address the root causes for why they weren’t well in the first place.”
Aside from helping with patients, it’s important to keep current because politicians have to reapply for their jobs every few years when the next election comes along, said Watt.
“This job is not exactly the most guaranteed, stable job imaginable.”
Shamji finds a measure of irony in his dual role.
“It’s not lost on me that I’ve gone from the most-trusted profession to the least-trusted profession.”
