PV Ontario Bureau
The Doug Ford government is redirecting more than $1 billion per year in Ontario public funding to for-profit corporations to privatize healthcare, rather than use those funds to restore and improve public hospitals that have been pushed into deficits.
Ontario hospitals and long-term care homes pay for-profit staffing agencies nearly $1 billion per year for nurses and PSWs. The Ford government announced nearly $3OO million for 61 new private surgical and diagnostic clinics, on top of previous $27 million annual funding increases.
As part of the ongoing fight against privatization and to save public healthcare, the Ontario Health Coalition and its local groups organized a massive protest outside the provincial legislature for May 28. Calling on people across Ontario to “Get on board to stop Ford’s hospital privatization train wreck,” the coalition mobilized groups to come to Toronto by train, to rally at Union Station and march to Queen’s Park.
As of press time, organizers were expecting several thousand protesters.
Jack Copple, the Communist Party’s Ontario organizer, told People’s Voice that Doug Ford’s push for further healthcare privatization marks “another escalation in his pro-corporate war against working people – the ongoing cuts to public healthcare will not improve wait times or health outcomes for working people, and instead are only intended to further fatten corporate profits.”
“Ford’s most recent attacks on Medicare in Ontario are some of his most egregious, funneling hundreds of millions of dollars into for-profit private clinics across the province,” said Copple. “Some of these clinics, based on their size on the services offered, will even de facto operate as private hospitals — a major escalation of Ford’s privatization scheme.”
This latest escalation follows decades of underfunding of Ontario’s healthcare system from successive Liberal and Conservative governments. The system is now stretched to its limit and has the lowest level of per capita healthcare funding in the country, setting the stage for the increasing privatization happening now.
But instead of increasing healthcare funding, Ford is now demanding further cuts to the struggling public system to address their “fiscal mismanagement,” and is threatening takeover of hospitals which are unwilling to further compromise patient care.
“This is the same brazen neoliberal playbook Ford is using to impose his regressive agenda on education,” Copple notes. “First, impose billions of inflation-adjusted cuts to create a crisis of ‘fiscal mismanagement’; second, use the manufactured crisis as a pretext to seize control; third, privatize assets and divert public dollars into private hands.”
In the face of this, however, the labour and people’s movements are continuing to escalate their fightback against Ford and his privatization agenda, to prevent further erosion of Medicare, which is under attack across the country.
Copple says this is key.
“It is worth remembering that organized public pressure has been able to halt Ford’s regressive attacks in the past, and coordinated fightback can win gains for working people in Ontario. By uniting together, the labour and people’s movements can win a healthcare system which rejects the drive to increase corporate profits, and instead focuses on improving the health and wellbeing of all working people in Ontario.
“The Communist Party has long called for an immediate ban on private clinics and labs, a halt and reversal of all P3 developments and contracts, and for these services to be fully provided through publicly owned and administered institutions.
“We are the Party of Dr. Norman Bethune, a pioneer of socialized medicine in Canada, and were the first political party in Canada to call for Medicare to be expanded to include full and universal coverage for dental care, vision care, pharmacare, mental health care and long-term care. We are proud to stand in active solidarity with all those fighting back against Ford’s regressive anti-worker agenda, including those rallying across the province against this recent wave of cuts to public healthcare.”
Copple says that the Communist Party also calls for putting all long-term care facilities under public ownership and operation, with funding for adequate and well-paid staff and sufficient protective equipment and procedures; for full healthcare coverage for all residents of Ontario including temporary foreign workers, international students and refugees; and for the elimination of health premiums, co-payments and the University Health Insurance Plan (UHIP).
He also notes that the struggle for public healthcare needs to connect with other popular struggles, particularly the campaign against increased military spending and the war economy.
“Mark Carney’s promise to increase military spending to $150 billion over the next few years is a huge barrier to maintaining and expanding crucial social programs like Medicare and public education. Those fighter jets, naval vessels and tanks are all going to be paid for through deep, deep cuts to those programs and other public services. Working people in Ontario and across Canada need healthcare, they need education, and they need decent sustainable jobs – to get there, we need to defeat Carney’s war economy.”
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