Our hospitals are undeniably in crisis. Throughout the province, hospitals are struggling with overflowing pediatric ICUs, closed emergency rooms, and critical shortages of health care workers.
The current health care crisis has been decades in the making. Following the neoliberal playbook, Ontario governments in the last 20 years repeatedly attacked public health care with cuts, let the quality of care decline, and attempted to privatize these services in the name of efficiency.
Since taking office, Ford has seemed determined to make it worse. The Conservatives have continued to underspend on health care, worsening the staffing crisis by restraining wages and failing to boost frontline staffing. Instead of addressing the crisis at hand, Ford is privatizing public hospital services, transferring millions of public dollars to for-profit clinics.
We are calling on the Ontario government to put care before profit. They must back down from the latest profit-driven effort to privatize health care in Ontario and fix the crisis in our public hospitals. The Ford government must invest in our public health care, boost staffing, support frontline staff-focused solutions, and collaborate with the federal government on long-term solutions like national pharmacare.
