‘Save public healthcare’: Union members, supporters rally in Brockville to protest privatization
Privitization takes resources from public healthcare, and ultimately raises the costs of healthcare for Ontarians. That was the message dozens of local healthcare workers gathered in front of MPP Steve Clark’s Brockville office on Thursday, July 25 hoped to get across.
The rally in Brockville was part of a series of demonstrations that the union [CUPE’s Ontario Council of Hospital Unions (OCHU/CUPE)] organized across communities in Ontario.
Michael Hurley, president of OCHU/CUPE, believes that the Ford government has been underfunding and starving the public system, dangling privatization as a solution.
“But privatization is twice as expensive and comes with longer waiting lists. We are calling for real solutions to the hospital crisis, like concrete measures to attract and retain new staff and the addition of new beds,” Hurley said.
At the rally, he elaborated to Brockvilleist that privatization will disproportionately affect vulnerable individuals, including senior citizens, who may be unfairly tempted to pay for services that are actually provided for free.
“What’s new here is the removal of surgeries performed in public hospitals,” he said. Public hospitals are protected under the Canada Health Act and now performed on a for-profit basis in private surgical centres.”
For example, Hurley said one person who was at the protest had a father who needed cataract surgery. He was told he’d have months to wait at a public hospital, but a private clinic could get it done much sooner for $2,500. The elderly man was also warned by the private clinic that he could have his driver’s license pulled if he didn’t get the surgery done soon.
“In fact, the public hospital called him the next week, and it was performed free,” Hurley said. “But you put yourself in that senior’s position of having your driver’s license pulled, you’re very, very vulnerable.”
Brendan Warwick, a psychiatric orderly at the Ottawa Royal Hospital, said he was at the protest largely due to the continued privatization of positions within hospitals. “We’re having more non-union positions opened to do the work of bargaining units,” he told Brockvilleist.
Keeping these positions public and the services free, he said, is essential for the types of clients he sees. “For our population that we serve, none of them have much money,” Warwick said. “When someone’s on disability, going to see a private psychologist or therapist [is not financially viable].”
In a speech to the group, Angela Hodgson of the union’s Unity 1974 (Kingston Health Sciences Centre) accused Premier Doug Ford and the Tories of being “very misleading in their rhetoric about privatization.” She said they “love to boast about the number of nurses they’re adding to the system, but what they don’t tell us is the number of nurses who have left the system.”
Hodgson said that according to the latest data revealed by the Registered Practical Nurses Association, Ontario added about 1,700 RPNs over the past year. “BUT – we lost 2,100 RPNs in that same period. So overall, we lost just over 400 nurses in one year.”
Hodgson believes that the people of Ontario want to get their care from public hospitals, not investor-owned clinics.
“It means we want real dollar funding increases for our public hospitals to pay staff proper wages, to provide good working conditions, to provide quality patient care, to uphold the dream of public health care as envisioned by the hundreds of thousands of people who mobilized and fought for Medicare going back to the 1940s and ’50s,” she stated, calling for solidarity in this movement to “stop privatization and save public healthcare.”