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Protest against health care, education cuts held in Stratford
Posted: December 17, 2024
(December 16, 2024) By: Bill Atwood, The Stratford Beacon Herald
Chants of “hey hey, ho ho, Doug Ford has got to go” rang out in front of the Arden Park Hotel Monday morning as some Stratford residents and others from across Southwestern Ontario gathered outside where the province’s standing committee on finance and economic affairs was holding its pre-budget consultation.
A protest organized by the Ontario Health Coalition against cuts to health care by the Progressive Conservative government, the rally focused on what coalition officials say is the deliberate “underfunding” and “privatization” of the province’s public health-care system.
Jim Stewart, chair of the Waterloo Region Health Coalition, said the Ford government is “continuing to dismantle and destroy something that we have established for over 100 years.”
“At the same time, they’re underfunding our public health care — our public hospitals — each and every year by underspending their budgeted dollars,” he said.
Peter Bergmanis, co-chair of the London Health Coalition, highlighted the roughly 1,200 emergency room or urgent care closures across Ontario in 2023, noting the 2024 total, when calculated, will be even more.
“If you had ever heard of ER closures (prior to the Ford government), you would have been in pure shock. The government of the day would have moved heaven and earth in order to make sure all resources would have been funnelled to get that ER open again,” he said.
During his impassioned speech, Bergmanis alleged health-care access for the wealthy has grown by 22 per cent, likely alluding to the the increase in surgeries at for-profit clinics, while “the public wait list grew by almost 10 per cent.”
“That’s not helping wait lists. It’s only helping the rich. We’re not paying for them to get ahead of us. These should be paying for all of us,” he said.
The province, she added, has been underfunding its schools by about $1,500 per student per year.
While more people being hired would “be wonderful,” all sectors of education need more funding, Matchett said.
“It’s the people that make our public education system work as well as it does. Those people are getting burnt out because they have been trying to do so much more with so much less, and they are reaching the breaking point,” she said.
This is now the third protest against health-care cuts in Stratford since July. Members of the Canadian Union of Public Employees have held two protests, including one that brought a large Trojan Horse to Stratford’s public hospital in October. However, the protestors were not joined by the teachers’ union at those rallies. Still, public education is looking at the “same dire consequence that health care is facing,” Stewart said.
“How is it possible that this government can be so philosophically opposed to public health care and public education, two bedrock components of our entire society? It’s just ridiculous,” he said.
A call to the Ministry of Health for comment was not returned by deadline while Ministry of Education officials were unable to provide a response.
