in Chatsworth, Grey Highlands, Southgate, West Grey
February 03, 2025
BY JOHN BUTLER — From the point of view of civic mobilization, it will be very warm in Orangeville on Saturday February 8, and folks from Grey County will be there to help apply the heat on behalf of publicly funded and managed health care in Ontario. The Grey Bruce Health Coalition would love to see you at the event, to keep the torch burning.
The grass-roots volunteer-powered Grey Bruce Health Coalition is one of three health coalitions in Ontario that are sponsoring a rally on February 8 in Orangeville in front of the office of Ontario’s Minister of Health, Sylvia Jones, to protest what many people consider the vast and dangerous privatization of Ontario’s health care system. The rally will gather at about 11:30 am, at 180 Broadway Avenue in Orangeville — the site of Jones’ constituency office — and the protest will run from noon until 1:30 pm. The Greater Toronto and Brampton Caledon Health Coalitions are also co-sponsors of the rally, supported as well by the Ontario Health Coalition.
Says Norah Beatty, a retired teacher living near Meaford who is a co-founder of the Grey Bruce Health Coalition:
“Our goal for the protest is to make healthcare a key issue in the election. We want to say why we and the public are so worried about the future of single tier health care in Canada. If the policies demonstrated by the Ford government to date continue for another four years, the questions are: How many more local hospitals and emergency rooms will close? What services will be lost from the public system? How many people will still not have access to primary care? How much longer will wait times for diagnostic tests, surgeries and emergency care be? Will home care and long term care ever be improved, to actually meet vulnerable peoples' needs, instead of ineffectively reorganized, resulting in chaos for individuals and their families? Will more healthcare workers be recruited, trained and retained in the public system? Will the funding of our health care at the lowest rate in Canada continue and to what end?”
Norah points out that the Coalition remains non-partisan: it doesn’t support any one political party. Nevertheless, she maintains, to pinpoint the flaws of government policies or practices that threaten our public health care system, and to propose alternatives, lie at the heart of the Coalition’s mandate.
Norah is delighted that the February 8 protest is co-sponsored by coalitions that reflect small-town and rural health care issues as well as urban and suburban ones. “Some system failures affect all of us everywhere” she says, “but some — hospital emergency department closures for instance — fall more heavily on people living in rural and northern areas.” Rural and urban areas need to support each other in ringing alarm bells and promoting solutions, she says.
A pamphlet to be widely distributed before, at and after the protest expresses the depth of the coalitions’ concerns about healthcare privatization and system underfunding in Ontario:
“Plundering public health care... for profit. For more than a hundred years, Ontarians have donated, paid our taxes, fundraised and volunteered to build a world class public health care system we could be proud of. Privatization couldn’t happen unless they dismantled our public health care: underfunded our services, pushed them into crisis, and left them without the resources they need to provide for our communities... and that is exactly what is happening. Privatization is a terrible plan. It enriches a few corporations at the expense of the health and well-being of regular Ontarians. Ontario funds our public health care at the lowest rate in Canada. In 2O16, before the Ford government was elected 1.3 million Ontarians did not have a family doctor. By July 2O24, there were 2.5 million Ontarians without a family doctor.”
Michelle Robidoux, Chair of the Greater Toronto Health Coalition and initiator of the three-coalition protest, points out that people sometimes need to vote with their feet and their voices as well as their ballots. That’s why she and her fellow organizers encourage people to turn out in large numbers to bear witness to health care concerns on February 8. “We understand why some people may not feel their voices make a difference” she says, “But the Ford government, while it has been overconfident, is also vulnerable in the face of massive concern about concerted attacks on our hospitals and the intrusion of the private sector into health care.”
Michelle’s own activism goes back to 1996, the year the Harris government in Ontario amalgamated hospitals. She also credits well-known fellow activist Shirley Douglas, the daughter of medicare champion Tommy Douglas, with inspiring her. She hopes the February 8 protest will inspire others. “It’s good for people’s health to protest,” she says with a smile.
Norah Beatty points out the need for action to flow from the street to the ballot box in Grey Bruce and elsewhere: “Words are cheap. Look at the actual record. We want to inspire hope for the future by reminding people to vote to protect and improve our public health care or we are going to lose it," she says.
The Grey Bruce Health Coalition was established in 2023 to advocate for health system improvement and reform — one of many local health coalitions across the province that are allied with the Ontario Health Coalition. Says Norah:
“Our Coalition is fighting against privatization — to save individuals and the government money, to ensure the best care and to preserve access based on need, not the ability to pay. The Federal government transfers money to provinces with conditions attached but it is the responsibility of each province to decide how to spend that money. I never want to see the day when Canadians have medical debt, go bankrupt or go without care. This is not scare-mongering. It is the reality in many countries.”
In May 2023 the Ontario Health Coalition held a province-wide mass community-run referendum on whether privatization should take place in Ontario’s health system. Across the province, 378,726 people voted “no” to privatization (98% of the total vote.) Grey and Bruce alone produced over 10,000 votes opposing privatization. As well, a Queen’s Park rally on the opening day of the Ontario Legislature last year drew about 10,000 participants, 4,000 of whom arrived from other parts of Ontario. This past summer the Grey Bruce Health Coalition hosted a public hearing in Chesley on the future of health services at which a blue ribbon panel of health experts listened to people air their concerns about health care shortcomings — one of a series of hearings sponsored across the province by the Ontario Health Coalition.
You can reach the Grey Bruce Health Coalition through its website, www.greybrucehc.ca or through its Facebook page or by sending a message to greybrucehc@gmail.com . The Ontario Health Coalition’s website provides a wealth of background papers on health system issues being tackled by the Coalition.
In terms of the details of the Orangeville protest, people are encouraged to bring their own homemade signs. Protestors who gather about 11:30 a.m. at 180 Broadway Avenue in Orangeville will find that parking is free for two hours on Broadway near Main Street in Orangeville, and parking is unlimited off the next street south of Broadway. Washrooms and warming locations are nearby at Tim Hortons and at the comfy Orangeville Library.
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