This story is drawn from a recent episode of Coming of Age, OLTCA’s podcast on leadership and long-term care. Listen to the full conversation.
One weekend afternoon at Copernicus Lodge, a Polish LTC home in Toronto, Minister Natalia Kusendova-Bashta went carolling. Moving from floor to floor with a group of musicians, singing in Polish, she watched as some of the seniors in the common room stirred from sleep.
“I started to see their lips moving,” she recalled. “And some of them started to cry.”
One woman, a former dancer, rose from her walker and began to move.
It’s a story the Minister tells, not as a feel-good footnote, but as evidence of something she believes deeply: that long-term care, done right, reaches people in ways that nothing else can. That cultural care is not a nice-to-have. That dignity looks like hearing a carol in your own language.
This kind of moment is what grounds Minister Kusendova-Bashta’s leadership. A registered nurse, MPP, cabinet minister, wife, daughter, and mother of a young son, she is now in her second term as Ontario’s Minister of Long-Term Care. She brings a clinical lens and a personal one to one of the most complex files in the province’s health system.
Before she was a politician, she was a nurse in a busy emergency room, spending 13-hour overnight shifts in hallways, patients lined up beside her while she tried to document, carts and equipment rolling past in tight quarters. She said it was demoralizing. But instead of walking away, she started asking questions. How do we spend our healthcare dollars? Who makes those decisions? Can we do better?
That led her to run for office in 2018 at 28. She knocked on doors and heard, over and over, the same stories: loved ones stuck on stretchers, families navigating a system that felt impossible to understand. People trusted nurses, she said. And she believed politics needed more of them.
She still holds her nursing licence. She still picks up shifts. When she is in the hospital, she says, she is just a nurse, part of a team, asking questions and staying grounded in the realities of the system she is working to change.
When asked about her proudest moment in office, the Minister pointed not to a policy announcement but to a gathering. Standing with her former nursing professors, her mentors, and her political colleagues, she announced funding for 2,200 new nursing seats across Ontario. She spoke about what the profession had meant to her, and what it could mean for the students in the room. She described it as a collision of all her worlds.
At the close of the conversation, she was asked a simple question: What gives you hope?
She did not hesitate. Seniors, she said. And the people who care for them.
She described visiting a home and watching dietary aides serve lunch, knowing every single resident by heart. This one takes ketchup on the side. This one doesn’t eat carrots. This one likes their coffee a certain way. Not because it’s policy. Because they love the people they serve.
Ontario has committed to building and redeveloping 58,000 long-term care spaces. More than 160 home projects are already underway. The scale of investment is historic. But for the Minister, the measure of it has always been simpler than the numbers: every home should be a place she would be comfortable sending her own grandmother.
She believes we are getting there. And she thinks it’s time we started saying so.
