10,000 expected to rally on Parliament Hill on November 28
By Jack Copple
On November 28, thousands of healthcare advocates and health workers all across Ontario will be boarding trains, buses and car caravans as part of a province-wide journey to Parliament Hill in Ottawa. They are calling on the federal government to enforce the Canada Health Act and put a stop to illegal, private billing for healthcare services, which is happening all over the country.
Organized by the Ontario Health Coalition, the “On to Ottawa Trek” is sharply focused on Alberta’s dangerous Bill 11, the Health Statutes Amendment Act which will kick open the doors to private insurers and end the single-payer system in Alberta – a major threat to public care across Canada.
The coalition expects 10,000 people to rally on Parliament Hill on November 28, and other rallies are being organized in communities throughout Ontario.
The urgency of this moment cannot be overstated. Public healthcare in Canada has been steadily eroded over decades of government underfunding, but this has escalated in recent years to wholesale attacks on the public system.
In Ontario alone, Doug Ford has announced almost $300 million for 61 private clinics this year, with some clinics de facto serving as private hospitals based on their size and the range of services offered. Government projections estimate that more than 1 million patients will be diverted from the public system to these private clinics, further bolstering Ford’s cynical case for complete privatization.
The expansion of the private system in Ontario is a microcosm of the same crisis happening across the country, with investment in private healthcare growing at nearly double the pace of investments in the public system since 2020, according to analysis from the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives. Alberta’s Bill 11, if allowed to go forward without federal intervention, will only accelerate that trend.
As the Ontario Health Coalition recently stated:
“While not quite as draconian as Alberta’s new law, Ontario and Quebec patients also face user fees for needed health care that should never be allowed under the Canada Health Act. In Ontario, the Ford government has deliberately chosen to set funding rates for our public hospitals at lower than they need to maintain existing services to force them into deficit. It is requiring them to make cuts to eliminate their deficits. At the same time, it is shunting literally hundreds of millions in public money over to private/for-profit clinics to privatize their services. They are allowing privatization of primary care with pay-your-way nurse practitioner clinics and online companies.
“Both in Ontario and Quebec, the richest patients are buying faster access to care while wait times for the majority are worse and costs are much higher.
“These things should NEVER happen under our public Medicare laws.”
Defending the public healthcare system in Canada will require the broadest possible base of support – to be successful, the fight must be linked to movements and struggles beyond healthcare. This includes mobilizing forces within the labour movement, within peace and international solidarity struggles, in the tenant movement and beyond.
Some of these connections are obvious enough. It is directly in the interest of the labour movement to stand in solidarity with public healthcare workers to fight privatization, both as a principled show of solidarity, but also to protect their own contract bargaining from having to fight for private insurance coverage – something which evidence shows drives down gains in other areas like wages and retirement benefits. There is a reason the history of the public system in Canada is deeply intertwined with the labour movement.
But this struggle is a comprehensive one that has direct connections with many others.
Peace activists are organizing contingents for November 28 under the slogan “Healthcare, not warfare!” They are focussing their effort on connecting the ongoing austerity agenda to the shift of public dollars to fund the ballooning war budget, which the government plans to balloon to an outrageous $163 billion in 2035. Activists in the tenant movement are linking between the shift away from public housing construction and the development of the Canada-wide housing crisis – a grim reminder of where we are headed should the broader privatization drive take root.
The fight for healthcare must be built as part of an escalating campaign to resist and smash the intensifying privatization and austerity agenda of Mark Carney, Doug Ford, Danielle Smith and others, which is sweeping through the whole public system. The problem is not lack of money – Ottawa’s shameful military spending target shows that clearly. Rather, the problem is a political one in which governments are committed to diverting public funds away from health, education and social programs and toward monopoly corporations and the military-industrial complex.
This means that a mass struggle to defend and expand public healthcare against the privatization being pushed by pro-monopoly forces, both inside and outside Canada, could serve as the basis for a genuine anti-monopoly alliance of the labour and progressive movements. It could help launch the fight for a more comprehensive, radical program to excise the system of rapacious profits from all of public life in Canada, and fight against the imperialist drive to war which threatens the whole world.
But it starts with the struggle to defend public healthcare – against Bill 11, against two-tier care, against privatization. Working people across Ontario need to speak out loudly at their union meetings, within tenant groups and in every community they organize in: All aboard to defend public healthcare on November 28!
For information about transportation to Ottawa from your area, or about local rallies on November 28, please visit the Ontario Health Coalition website
[Photo: CLC]
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