The Communist Party of Canada condemns Doug Ford’s push for further healthcare privatization, which marks another escalation in his pro-corporate war against working people. Ford’s ongoing cuts to public healthcare will not improve wait times or health outcomes for working people, and instead are only intended to further fatten corporate profits.
Ford’s most recent escalation in his attacks on medicare in Ontario are some of his most egregious, funnelling hundreds of millions of dollars into for-profit private clinics across the province. Some of these clinics, based on their size on the services offered, will even de facto operate as private hospitals — a major escalation of Ford’s privatization scheme.
This follows decades of underfunding of Ontario’s healthcare system from successive Liberal and Conservative governments who have set the stage for the privatization we are seeing now. The public healthcare system is now stretched to its limit in Ontario, which has the lowest level of per capita healthcare funding in Canada. But instead of increasing healthcare funding, Ford is now demanding further cuts to the struggling public system to address their “fiscal mismanagement,” and is threatening takeover of hospitals unwilling to further compromise patient care through Ford’s cuts.
This is the same brazen neoliberal playbook Ford is using to to impose his regressive agenda on education: first, impose billions of inflation-adjusted cuts to create a crisis of “fiscal mismanagement”; second, use the manufactured crisis as a pretext to seize control; third, privatize assets and divert public dollars into private hands.
The Communist Party of Canada stands in solidarity with all those fighting back against Ford’s regressive anti-worker agenda, including those rallying across the province against this recent wave of cuts to public healthcare. Labour and the people’s movements must continue to escalate their fightback against Ford and his privatization agenda to prevent a further erosion of our public medicare system, which is under attack across the country.
It is worth remembering that organized public pressure has been able to halt Ford’s regressive attacks in the past, and coordinated fightback can win gains for working people in Ontario. By uniting together, labour and the people’s movements can win a healthcare system which rejects the drive to increase corporate profits, and instead focuses on improving the health and wellbeing of all working people in Ontario.
The Communist Party of Canada demands:
- Immediately ban private clinics and labs, halt and reverse all P3 developments and contracts, and fully provide these services through publicly owned and administered institutions
- Expanded public healthcare to include full and universal coverage for dental care, vision care, pharmacare, mental health care and long-term care
- Put all Long-term care facilities under public ownership and operation, with funding for adequate and well-paid staff and sufficient protective equipment and procedures
- Provide full healthcare coverage to all residents of Ontario, including temporary foreign workers, international students, and refugees; and eliminate health premiums, co-payments and the University Health Insurance Plan (UHIP)
- Put all doctors and healthcare professionals on a provincial salary
