Ontario citizens vote a resounding NO on privatized hospital services

A mass community-run referendum in Ontario conducted by the Ontario Health Coalition has shown that citizens of the province have absolutely no desire for their government to pursue a policy of privatizing its public hospital services.

The non-official referendum asked: "Do you want Ontario's hospital services delivered by private, for-profit clinics?" according to iHeartRadio and Ontarians voted in force to voice their opinion.

More than 386,036 people turn in the non-official referendum with 98% voting in opposition to privatization according to a press release from the Ontario Health Coalition.

“We are unalterably opposed to the gutting and dismantling of our public hospitals and the privatization of them,” said the Executive Director of the Ontario Health Coalition Natalie Mehra.

“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," Mehra added.

On January 16th, Ontario Premier Doug Ford announced that his government was moving to expand the private delivery of public healthcare in Canada’s largest province. 

Ontario from that moment forward would allow private clinics to perform more routine surgeries, including those for cataracts, colonoscopies, and knee and hip replacements. 

Private clinics would also be allowed to provide access to more advanced scanning procedures like MRIs and CT scans in order to alleviate the pressure on Ontario’s hospitals. 

The move to privatize more healthcare in Ontario has been a hotly debated topic since the Covid-19 pandemic crippled the province's hospital systems—leaving nurses, doctors, and patients burnt out.

“The way I can describe it, you have a dam, you have a log jam, are you going to just keep pouring the water up against the logs?” Ford said during his announcement. 

“Or are you going to reroute some of the water and take the pressure off the dam?” Ford added, “You see what happens when the dam has too much water, it breaks.” But not everyone was on board with Ford's plan. 

Five of Ontario’s largest public healthcare unions rallied support against Ford’s plans at the time under the assumption that allowing more privatization of Ontario's healthcare will divert funds from the public system. 

“...this move will further starve our public healthcare system of funding and divert front-line staff to enrich private shareholders and diminish access to publicly-delivered healthcare,” the Canadian Union of Public Employees said in a statement on their website. 

“Patients will wait even longer for healthcare under this scheme and should not be misled into believing they will not pay out of pocket,” the Union added. 

The Ford government unveiled its three-step plan as well as the information that Ontario’s provincial health insurance plan would continue to pay for the necessary procedures needed to clear the province’s backlog of 206,000 patients waiting for routine surgeries, according to Global News’ Liam Casey and Allison Jones. 

“The first stage of the plan involves adding 14,000 cataract surgeries through new centers in Windsor, Kitchener-Waterloo and Ottawa,” Casey and Liam noted. 

Casey and Liam added that Ontario was also investing “$18 million in existing centers across the province for MRI and CT scans, cataract surgeries, other ophthalmic surgeries, certain gynecological surgeries, and plastic surgeries.”

Step two in Ford’s plan included expanding the scope of allowed private surgical and diagnostic centers, while step three would issue more licenses to private clinics to allow them to perform knee and hip replacements. 

While Ontario has turned towards privatization to solve its surgery woes, provinces like British Columbia invested more in their public systems to get them back on track.

“Nearly a year ago, B.C. spent $11.5-million to bring two private surgical centers on Vancouver Island back into the public system,” wrote Globe and Mail journalist Dustin Cook in an opinion piece at the time of Ontario's partial privatization announcement. 

Cook added that the move cut “the number of private surgery clinics across the province to seven and just under 5 percent of all surgeries in the last fiscal year.”

It will be interesting to see how the two different approaches play out over the next few years. But in the immediate future, battle lines were drawn and its clear th people of Ontario have no desire to see their hospital services delivered by private, for-profit clinics.