Michael Parsa

Michael Parsa is an Ontario Conservative MPP who served as Long-Term Care Minister. Long-term care in Ontario was one of the most catastrophic failures of the COVID pandemic — people died in conditions that a public inquiry described as neglect. Parsa came in after the worst of it to try to fix things. I don't blame him personally for what happened before he got the job. But the fixes have been slow, underfunded, and insufficient. Staffing in long-term care is still a crisis. Families are still choosing between bad options. The government he belongs to has not treated this with emergency-level urgency.

Michael Parsa serves in Doug Ford's Ontario cabinet including the Long-Term Care portfolio. COVID-19 exposed the state of Ontario's long-term care system in the most devastating way — hundreds of residents died in conditions that a Canadian Armed Forces report described as horrifying. The sector was chronically underfunded and understaffed for years before Parsa was involved, but the response and pace of reform since has not been fast or bold enough. Families putting loved ones in long-term care deserve to know they'll be treated with dignity and safety. After everything that happened in 2020, the system should have been transformed. It hasn't been transformed enough. Not even close.

Michael Parsa oversees one of Ontario's most critical social files — child welfare, ODSP disability support, and community services. The record under his tenure is troubling. The Ford government ordered audits of Ontario's 37 Children's Aid Societies citing concerns about how money was being spent — but those audit findings have been delayed multiple times. The new release target: summer 2026, roughly a year and a half behind schedule. Meanwhile, Parsa himself acknowledged that children are "falling through the cracks" in the system. ODSP recipients receive $1,338 a month in some cases — in a province where the average one-bedroom apartment in Hamilton costs $1,800. The math doesn't work, and this minister hasn't moved to fix it. Ontario's most vulnerable — children in care and adults with disabilities — are being asked to manage on rates set well below what survival costs. Funding increases that don't keep pace with inflation are, in real terms, cuts. That's what's happening on this file.