On September 25, the Ontario Health Coalition will be holding mass protests to stop the privatization of our public hospital services in the following locations:
Toronto
Location: Queen’s Park, Toronto
Time: 12 noon
Thunder Bay
Location: Mini-Queen’s Park, Thunder Bay (protest to be held at South James St.)
Time: 12 noon
Dryden
Location: Outside MPP Greg Rickford’s office, 439 Government St., Dryden
Time: 11:30 am
Algoma
Location: Sault Area Hospital, 750 Great Northern Rd, Sault Ste. Marie (protest to be held outside the hospital at Lukenda Drive)
Time: 12 noon
Click here to sign up and register for buses.
Make a major show of strength to set the tone for the reopening of the Ontario Legislature. We are not going away. We are unalterably opposed to the privatization of our public hospitals. We paid for them. We built them. They do not belong to the Ford government to run them into crisis, gut their core services and privatize them.
Come out to demand that the Ford government:
- Stop the privatization of our public hospitals.
- Stop creating a crisis in our public hospitals by underfunding them, cutting and closing services, and trying to roll back wages of nurses, health professionals & support staff.
- Expand the use of existing ORs in our public hospitals.
- Expand capacity in our public hospitals & restore closed services.
The Ford government will try to move forward and ignore the citizen-led referendum that we just built together. We cannot let them.
More than 400,000 people voted, and 99% of them votes against the privatization of our public hospitals’ core services. That is massive and unprecedented. It means 1 of every 30 Ontarians voted. It means almost everyone will know someone who voted. Opinion polls are showing upwards of 80% of Ontarians think the Ford government is doing a poor or very poor job on health care. Ontarians get it. As the Ontario Legislature re-opens in the fall, let’s make it visible and powerful. Let us build on our extraordinary achievements and make it impossible for the Ford government to carry on unchallenged.
Ultimately, it will be politically impossible for them to continue to privatize our public hospitals’ services against the will of the vast majority of Ontarians. Let us make that happen sooner than later because every service we lose is extremely hard to get back.
Click here to sign up and register for buses.
Note on Yom Kippur:
The Ford government has chosen the date of the re-opening of the Legislature and it falls on Yom Kippur. We asked the Opposition NDP and Liberals to raise this with the Ford government. They told us that they would do so, but it is the ruling party that sets the schedule and they moved the date to Yom Kippur from the week before to accommodate the plowing match. We also raised the issue with key folks in the Jewish community who brought this concern forward to a Toronto group of rabbis. The feedback we got was they are not lobbying to change the date. Since we cannot change the opening day, our plan is to have a speaker from the Jewish community who will walk to and speak at the event, and to host a second protest for those who cannot attend due to the date being on Yom Kippur.
Thus, we will also host a second event for people who are Jewish who cannot attend on the 25th, on Tuesday, September 26 at noon outside the Legislature. Anyone who would like to volunteer to help with this event and/or attend it, can you please email us with the subject line: “Tues. Sept 26 protest”.