On Wednesday, May 31 at Queen’s Park in Toronto, the Ontario Health Coalition (OHC) announced the results from over 1,000 polling stations across Ontario of its citizen-led referendum on the provincial Tories’ privatization plan. With a small number of votes still being counted, the results showed an overwhelming majority of Ontarians oppose the for-profit scheme of Doug Ford’s Progressive Conservatives: 99 percent casted a vote against privatization, with 1 in 29 eligible Ontarians voting in the referendum.
Do you want our public hospital services to be privatized?
| Spoiled ballots | 341 |
| Yes votes | 7 001 |
| No votes | 378 726 |
The OHC is a public interest activist coalition with a mandate to protect and improve public healthcare under the principles of the Canada Health Act: universality, comprehensiveness, portability, accessibility, and public ownership. The OHC represents more than 500 member organizations and a network of Local Health Coalitions. Member organizations include labour and student unions, physician organizations that support the public health system, women’s organizations, ethnic and cultural organizations, and the Communist Party of Canada (Ontario). The OHC is a member of the Canadian Health Coalition.
In January of this year, Ontario Tory Premier Doug Ford announced his plans to move half of all surgeries from hospitals to for-profit clinics. The Liberal Prime Minister of Canada Justin Trudeau has called the move “innovative.” The justification for the move to privatize is that it is necessary to clear the backlog of 200,000 surgeries in the province. However, successive federal and provincial governments of all political stripes have been underfunding public healthcare for years. This underfunding of public healthcare has caused the backlog, and the public system can and will overcome this backlog when the workers of the healthcare system get the funding they call for to provide a quality system with universal access for all.
The OHC launched the campaign when Ford announced his privatization plan in January. Over five months, the OHC distributed 1.5 million leaflets, recruited thousands to volunteer, attracted mainstream press, brought new organizations and regions of the province into the coalition, and garnered moderate political support from the three opposition parties.
Natalie Mehra, the executive director of the OHC, powerfully summed up the campaign after the votes were cast on May 26 and 27 by calling for more action:
“That is why we held a people’s referendum. It set a deadline. It requires massive public outreach. We would have to make it visible, and do the deepest public education that we could. It would bring that massive public opposition to privatization out into the light for everyone to see. It would galvanize the forces of good and the public interest. It would capture the imagination of volunteers. Could we do more? Yes, of course, always. And we will!
This is the beginning of what will be a relentless campaign to stop them from privatizing our public hospitals. We have no choice because once we lose them, I don’t know how we will get them back. It will be very difficult if not impossible to get them back.”
The crisis in healthcare was manufactured by the ruling class. Ontario’s government has underspent on health care by $1.25 billion during the first nine months of the 2022-23 fiscal year, according to the Financial Accountability Office. During the same three quarters of this fiscal year, the province spent 104 percent of the budget attributed to private clinics. The backlog in surgeries is a direct result of chronic federal under-funding, coupled with provincial hospital closures, bed closures, extensive delisting of publicly funded health services, understaffing, falling real wages and wage restraints like Bill 124, and galloping privatization including P3 (public-private partnership) hospitals and services.
This crisis has been developing over many years, with legal challenges from private doctors wanting the courts to open the doors to two-tier healthcare in Canada. The Chaoulli decision in 2005 was a serious attack on Medicare, in which the Supreme Court did not reject two-tier healthcare. The Cambie Surgery decision in B.C., which supported the single-payer public system and opposed privatization, is likely to be appealed to the Supreme Court, where that battle will continue. At the same time, provincial governments in the Prairies enabled the introduction of private for-profit healthcare services as public hospital and healthcare services were deliberately underfunded, as waitlists grew, and as hospital workers’ unions and the public cried out for government action to support the public system.
Rather than diminishing Medicare through underfunding, delisting, and privatization, the government must be forced to adequately fund it and expand it to include dental, pharmacare, vision, mental health, and long-term care.
People in Ontario and throughout Canada fought long and hard to win socialized medicine, supported by the heroic campaigns of communists and progressives like Dr. Norman Bethune, Manitoba MLA James Litterick and MP Fred Rose, all of whom organized struggles for public healthcare in the 1930s and 1940s. These efforts laid the stage for the major breakthrough when the CCF/NDP successfully introduced public healthcare in Saskatchewan in 1962.
Medicare in Canada was never a gift, it was the prize fought for and won by working people in struggle for their health, for the health of their children and their communities, against greed and the drive for wealth and profits. Sixty years on, the struggle continues.