10/24/2025
We can do this! If you are in Toronto please participate. Please share this widely.
Please fill the Legislature Galleries on Wed, Oct 29 and RSVP by emailing your name and town/city to info@OntarioHC.ca ASAP. If you live too far from Toronto to attend, please organize a Legislature Watch event. Please spread the word and do everything you can to pour on the pressure because if we don’t fight back against Ford’s accelerating privatization, we are going to lose Public Medicare.
The suffering and inequities that led to the creation of Public Medicare are already on their way back in for elderly patients trying to get cataract surgeries. We have heard from a woman in her 80s who had to take out a loan to get her surgery and now she is struggling to pay it back from her pension. We heard from a 71 year old who had to go back to work to pay for his surgery. We have heard from seniors who have been told that they have to pay $8,000, $10,000, $11,000 for their eye surgery.
Imagine what will happen when we have 57 more private clinics – announced by Ford this summer – taking more than 100,000 diagnostic tests out of our local public hospitals, along with funding and staffing. The plan is to expand them to do surgeries. Ford is no longer hiding his intentions. His government is essentially building private day hospitals and they are shifting hundreds of millions in public funding over to them.
Yet, the Ford government hasn't even investigated the formal complaint that we lodged from fifty patients who had been extra-billed in the for-profit surgical and diagnostic clinics that the Ford government has been expanding. None of the patients who made complaints have even been contacted to investigate their extra-billing claims since we filed the complaint on June 17. It is now mid-October. Nothing has happened to stop the private clinics that are violating our medicare laws, undermining the Canada Health Act, and demonstrating a complete lack of medical ethics.
This is just the beginning, unless we are strong enough and relentless enough to stop it.
🔴 Wed, Oct 29 Itinerary 🔴
(more details to come)
9:00 a.m. Arrive at Queen's Park security (or as soon after 9 a.m. as you can)
9 - 9:30 a.m. Start to go through security to fill the Public Galleries in the Legislature
10:00 a.m. Fill the Public Galleries
We will be welcomed in the Legislature by various political parties and MPPs
Watch Question Period where the Premier and Health Minister will have to answer questions from the Opposition Parties about what they are doing
12:00 p.m. Lunch
1:00 p.m. Press conference in the media studio of the Legislature
2:00 p.m. We will be finished and ready to leave at this time
🔴 Planning to attend? 🔴
Please RSVP as soon as possible by emailing back in response to this email (to info@OntarioHC.ca) with your name and the town/city you are from. If you are carpooling, please send us the names and towns of anyone else who is attending. This information is a requirement for Queen's Park security and they need at least 24 hours notice, so please RSVP by Monday, October 27 at 12 p.m. noon. We also need this information so you can be welcomed from the floor of the Legislature.
🔴 Organize a Legislature Watch event that day in your town 🔴
If you live too far away from Toronto to attend and can organize a Legislature Watch event, please email us and let us know. What this involves: invite a group to meet at someone's house or in a community venue and watch the Legislature through the link on the Legislative Assembly website. We will send you more information if you let us know you are organizing a Legislature Watch. Invite the media to come and those of you in attendance can provide comment and a local perspective, helping us to raise the alarm and mount public pressure to stop this privatization.
If you can't come but are going to watch on the Legislative Assembly website on your own, please also RSVP but specify that you will be joining virtually and we will send you the links to the livestream of Question Period and the press conference. If you send us your name and town, we will arrange to have your virtual presence recognized also.
Please note: it is much more powerful if people can come in person and we have a LOT of people in the Legislature that day! So, please do come in person if you can.
🔴 Directions 🔴
By public transit: go to Queen's Park station on the Line 1 Yonge-University subway line.
By road: There is street parking on Hoskins Ave. near Queen's Park Circle. There is also parking on Grosvenor Street near Queen's Park Circle. Joining Grosvenor, there is street parking on Surrey Place and Grenville Street and also a parking lot at Women's College Hospital and a parking building almost next door to the east of it. There are also parking lots behind Mount Sinai Hospital, an underground at University Health Network (Toronto General Hospital/Peter Munk Cardiac Centre) and on Elizabeth Street behind Toronto General Hospital/the Peter Munk Cardiac Centre.
