A press release, on Apr. 24, from the South Grey Bruce Health Centre, announced it was taking action to address urgent/emergent care needs. The announcement said that effective June 3rd, 2024, 10 inpatient beds from Durham will relocate to the Walkerton and Kincardine sites and urgent/emergent care would be available at the Durham Hospital site from 7am to 5pm. The community was not consulted and stakeholders, including the mayor, were blindsided by this announcement. Everyone was asking how and why this decision was made. At a rally, in Durham, on Tues. May 7, I explained the broader context of this decision. I see it as a direct result of the Ford
government’s create a crisis and expansion of privatization policy.
Brenda Scott and I, under the guidance of Natalie Mehra, Executive Director of the Ontario Health Coalition, formed the Grey Bruce Health Coalition approximately 14 months ago. It is one of the approximately 500 member organizations of the Ontario Health Coalition. We have been working in conjunction with the Ontario Health Coalition to help people understand how the provincial government policy choice, of privatization, has negatively affected the delivery of health care in Ontario. It has resulted in what will be, in effect, the closure of Durham hospital on June 3. Hopefully community action can reverse that decision.
A quote from Noam Chomsky, the world famous political activist and philosopher, describes the provincial play book that is rolling over, actually bulldozing, all sectors of Ontario services. He said:
“That’s the standard techniques of privatization; defund, make sure things don’t work, people get angry, you hand it over to private capital.”
The Canada Health Act passed unanimously in 1984 and ever since pressures to privatize have operated across Canada. The OHC mission is to fight against privatization of healthcare no matter which party is in power and it has been doing so for the past 40 years. We ran the referendum last May in Grey & Bruce Counties and ten thousand plus people voted “No” to privatization of our healthcare. Province-wide about four hundred thousand did the same.
Before he died in 1986, Tommy Douglas, lovingly referred to as the father of universal healthcare, warned:
“ Unless there is a concerted effort to apply pressure on the Federal and
Provincial Governments, the erosion of Medicare will continue unabated
and might even be accelerated.”
Those were prophetic words. The Federal government could be doing more to enforce the Canada Health Act and our Provincial government is claiming loopholes exist to justify what they are doing. In doing so they are reinterpreting the Act. The loopholes do not exist. All medically necessary care must be covered by OHIP and that is being seriously eroded by privatizing services. Premier Ford’s choice and expansion of privatization, as the solution to the crisis, and the speed of the changes are unprecedented. If we let this continue it will be impossible to get back universal healthcare.
How do you make a crisis? It is death by a thousand cuts and sadly, until it affects you personally, most people do not pay enough attention. We must change that. The current cuts to services are:
- labs hours reduced or in Durham’s case it looks like the lab is closing
- lab appointments in many locations, such as Owen Sound, can only be made
online leaving out those without that capacity - the poverty rate in Grey and Bruce is 11% compared to 7% nationally which
means many people can’t afford mobile phones or computers - this appointment policy forces unwelcome dependence on family or friends,
which is a loss of individual privacy - meanwhile Dynacare Lab in opening in Port Elgin
- temporary or permanent closure of ERs, maternity and obstetrics, & ICU units
- small towns are hard hit but big cities are not spared
- OHC records show 1,199 temp. or permanent department closures in 2023
- real $ funding cuts to healthcare
- Ont. has the fewest hospital beds per person in Canada – the result of long
term downsizing but the Premier has done nothing over the past 6 years to
turn this around - Ontario funds hospitals at the lowest rate in Canada
- Ford government continues austerity with hospital funding increasing by only
.5% this year while inflation has been as high as 5.65% - this equals real dollar cuts which means real forced service cuts
Some say the money is not there and, “ I don’t want my taxes to increase.” I answer, “Do you want medical bills instead?” I guarantee that medical bills will be significantly higher. The reality is that we can never predict when we or a family member will need expensive and extensive healthcare. It is the middle class and the poor in the United States who are doing without or going bankrupt due to healthcare expenses in a privatized system.
Our taxes don’t have to greatly increase. Why? Because it’s about government priorities. Ontario’s government reserve fund was the largest in provincial history a couple of years ago and remains large. Some calculate as much as 70% of Federal covid funding to Ontario, has not been spent on healthcare, This reminds me of the phrase, “ Where’s the money honey?” This govt decision forced hospitals to use their reserves during covid and when the pandemic was declared over and extra funding was ended, hospitals were left with significantly depleted reserves.
Many nurses suffered moral injury during the pandemic and because of wage restraint legislation, Bill 124, they fled to nursing agencies or retired early. Hospitals had to pay 3 to 4 times the public hospital fee to hire agency nurses. Much of that money went to increase the profit of the nursing agency. While Ford fought Bill 124, in costly court cases with our money, some retroactive wages had to be paid. However, he did not give hospitals enough funds when they were needed so again hospitals were forced to go into already depleted hospital budgets. This hurt small rural hospitals in particular.
Forced expenditures of reserves resulted in hundreds of hospitals having a deficit last year, an unprecedented and illegal situation. Ford had to permit this or many hospitals, especially small/rural hospitals, would have gone bankrupt. What happens next year? I give Ford credit, he has perfected art of crisis making.
All of these actions represent a deliberate policy to reduce the capacity of public, nonprofit health care and force people to choose private options, encouraged and funded by the government. While this has been happening, the Government. funding to private hospitals/clinics has more than tripled – a 212% increase compared to .5% for the public sector. Service cuts are the result of deliberate underfunding of public healthcare.
This government’s values are different from mine and Tommy Douglas. I believe the government role is to use tax dollars to provide health care services for all people, not to create a second parallel system to make money for stockholders, owners, and profiteering politicians. Former Premier Mike Harris is on the Board of Directors of Chartwell long term care and retirement homes, which is now the subject of a class action lawsuit for it’s lack of care and excess deaths during covid. His wife is the owner of a nursing agency. Former Minister of Health, Christine Elliott is a lobbyist for Clearpoint private hospital, whose funding increased by 278% after she left the Ford government. I want care to be the first priority of health care not profit making. There are better, less costly solutions to health care issues, starting with funding the public system appropriately.
The promise of The Canada Health Act is that all medically necessary healthcare is paid by OHIP. Access to care must not be based on ability to pay or where you live, your race or religion. History proves that government’s have been unable or unwilling to prevent the violations of this promise by for-profit entities. Illegal charges and other violations are rampant and prey on vulnerable seniors in particular. Bill 60 legislation, passed in 2023, removes accountability and oversight from private clinics and hospitals.
Rural areas are losing access to quality care close to home. Privatization is an equity issue. We should not be second class citizens and our votes must not be taken for granted.
The South Bruce Grey Health Centre announcement is full of bafflegab. Some others, especially farmers, may know that term by another, more commonly used term. The announcement does not contain the phrase, “Durham hospital is closing.” It is. No Emergency Department means no hospital. No in patient beds means no hospital. The Durham lab is already being dismantled. The government is attempting to change the definition of a hospital by using the term urgent/emergent care. It does not exist in the 22 classifications in legislation. Exactly what is it? Will doctors want to work there? Will it be safe to do so? Urgent/emergent care sounds like a clinic, not a hospital.
To stop this closure just a few of the steps the government could do are; reallocate money from private clinics to small hospitals, create and implement a long term staffing and retention plan, treat health care workers with respect, improve work conditions, reinstate permanent funding for locums, recognize distance and driving conditions in rural areas and most of all, value the contributions of rural hospitals by providing stable hospital funding, recognize and honour the fact that communities have fund raised and built their hospitals for 100 years.
Citizens were LIED to during the election. Prior to the last campaign, then Minister of Health, Christine Elliot, let it slip out that they were going to privatize health care. However, during the campaign, Premier Ford and his spokespersons said he would not privatize healthcare. A few months post election he announced his plan to privatize hospital services. There continue to be other more effective and less costly solutions to wait times, staffing, lack of primary care etc. Minister of Health, Sylvia Jones recently said there was no crisis in primary care and blamed doctors for not working hard enough. The 34,000 people in Grey and Bruce without a primary care provider live and feel the crisis daily. The government needs the will to acknowledge the problems and to invest in solutions that will cost less than privatization and be more effective in the short and long term.
Albert Einstein said, “ The world will not be destroyed by those who do evil, but by those who watch them without doing anything.” The citizens of Durham, Chesley and every community enduring cutbacks and potential closure, can influence and change decisions about their corner of the world and their beloved community hospital, if they take action. The best change is what happens from the grassroots and there are people who are organizing community action. Mayor Eccles, Save Durham Hospital Committee, Chesley Hospital Community Support and Grey and Bruce Health Coalition along with the Ontario Health Coalition and others will work together so that, “the power of the people is stronger than the people in power.”
Norah Beatty
Co-chair, Grey Bruce Health Coalition