Day of Action to Protect Canadian Public Health Care

The following is from the Ontario Health Coalition:

Hundreds came out to call on our federal Liberal MPs to help us stop Alberta & Ontario’s privatization, enforce the Canada Health Act & bring this issue back to their caucus as a priority. 

On Monday March 16, people across Canada rallied outside the offices of their local Liberal Members of Parliament in a nationwide Day of Action to warn that public health care for all in Canada is under unprecedented threat and to call on the federal government to enforce the Canada Health Act. We held seven events in Ontario in Ajax, Hamilton, London, Peterborough, Toronto and Waterloo — and one more is coming up in Kingston on Friday, March 20 at the Hon Mark Gerretsen’s office at 234 Concession St.

The Key Issues:

Alberta’s Danielle Smith government has launched an unprecedented frontal assault on the Canada Health Act to end single tier Public Medicare. The law brings in private for-profit health insurance like they have in the U.S., enables physicians to charge patients for care, brings in queue jumping for the wealthy pushing everyone else back in line, and more. It is not “like” U.S. style health care. It is U.S. private health care, and for-profit health care interests are lined up to cash in.

Closer to home, Ontario’s Premier Doug Ford is privatizing public hospitals and is allowing private clinics to charge patients thousands for needed care. By the government’s own numbers, their latest set of private clinics (some of which are essentially hospitals, a number of which are chain owned) aim to redirect 1.2 million patients away from public hospitals. While the government is giving hundreds of millions more to private clinics, it has pushed the majority of public hospitals into deficit in a direct transfer of public resources. Patients are already being charged more than $4,000 per eye in the private cataract surgery clinics that Ford brought in, in violation of our medicare protection laws.

Thank you from the bottom of our hearts to all of you who helped!

Please find below just a sample of some of the media coverage from the events. We will be uploading photos in an album on our Facebook page here: https://www.facebook.com/ontariohealth. We hope you are proud of our collective work together!

Health care rallies held in London, Ont.

CTV News London

Rallies were held outside of Liberal MP offices across the country – including London- demanding the feds enforce the Canada Health Act. 

Link to video coverage: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yIGPZAaC7Lw