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CALL-OUT: Get on the bus to join the November 21 Giant Rally at Queen’s Park!
Posted: November 10, 2014
(November 10, 2014)
STOP private clinics
SAVE our local public hospitals
12 p.m. Friday November 21
Giant Rally @ Ontario Legislature, Queen’s Park Toronto
Buses will be coming from all over Ontario!
Please see below for a list of buses and who to contact to get on the bus in your community + more information on the threat to our community hospitals.
If you are organizing a bus from your community, please register your bus as soon as possible (Find the Bus Registration form below).
To get on the bus from your area, please contact the appropriate person below:
Belleville – CJ Christie 613-969-4357
Brampton – Val or Maria 905-451-8310 or 905-696-8882
Chatham – Shirley Roebuck 226-402-2724
Hamilton – Ron Wells 905-547-1417 ext. 225
Kingston – Ross Sutherland 613-532-7846
Kitchener-Waterloo – Shawn Rouse 519-502-4300
Lindsay – James Mulhern 705-324-7841
London – Peter Bergmanis 519-860-4403
Midland-Penetanguishene – Fran Moreau 705-549-7611
Niagara – Sue Hotte 905-932-1646
Oshawa – Karen Leitch 905-723-1187
Ottawa – Jennifer at 613-233-7820
Perth/Smiths Falls – John Jackson 613-285-4048
Peterborough – Roy Brady 705-745-2446 or Charlene Avon 705-761-4408
Stratford – Treena Hollingworth 647-537-4357
Sudbury – call Anne Marie MacInnis 705-698-7655 or Felicia Fahey 705-919-4105
Windsor – Andy Schmidt 519-903-1058
A message from Ontario Health Coalition Executive Director Natalie Mehra
Ontario’s government is forging ahead with the most aggressive plan ever to strip local community hospitals of services and cut or privatize them. If we do not take action now, it is no exaggeration to warn that community hospitals as we know them will be totally dismantled.
Ontario’s hospitals have already been cut for 20 years. We have suffered the deepest cuts in Canada. We actually have the fewest hospital beds left per person of virtually every country in the OECD.
Despite the deepest hospital cuts of all peer jurisdictions in Canada and internationally, our government continues to plan to eviscerate hospital services. The Ontario government is already systematically closing down outpatient services: physiotherapy, labs, pain clinics, fertility clinics and so on. Their written plan is to close all outpatient services. They will go to private clinics.
They now plan to cut as many surgeries and diagnostic tests from local public hospitals as possible, and contract them out to private clinics.
Draconian cuts to chronic care (complex continuing care) beds are planned — in some areas, the government is planning to cut 50% of the remaining beds.
Patients are faced with driving further for care as it is taken out of local hospitals and centralized into one factory-like private clinic per region.
Local community hospitals are told to shrink the scope of the services they provide and specialize in only a few things. Patients will have to drive from site to site to get care.
User fees and co-payments are required for virtually every service moved out of our public hospitals. Private clinics are charging user fees in the hundreds or even thousands of dollars for extra add-ons, in violation of the Canada Health Act and the principles of Public Medicare in Canada.
Even most politicians do not realize the full extent of the plan to dismantle our community hospitals. As we have seen for decades, it will not save money — at least not for patients — but it will fragment care, worsen access, lead to wholesale privatization and two-tier health care.
Our response must be commensurate to the threat and the threat is at an all-time high.
Regular Ontarians from every walk of life — local businesses, seniors, care workers, health professionals, students; all of us who care about equal access to health care based on need not wealth — we all have a vital interest in saving our community hospitals.
We are calling for our biggest demonstration ever. We are asking everyone to take one day to lend your voice to protect vital services that everyone in our communities need. Come out November 21 at noon at Queen’s Park Toronto. Buses will be organized from communities across Southern and Mid-Ontario. Please contact us if you want to get on the bus at 416-441-2502 or ohc@sympatico.ca.
