Rather than try to write this myself from afar, I’m pasting in the message one of my relative’s in Ontario province wrote. Bear in mind that he’s speaking to Canadians:
“Thank you so much to the thousands of you who are working toward getting people mobilized to come out for the giant rally to save public health care.
As you know, Doug Ford’s consultant's report calling for the privatization of health care, new user fees, amalgamations, "competition," and restructuring has come out. Their fiscal (budget) review has also come out and they have selected an overstated (outrageous) deficit figure of $15 billion in order to try to set up a financial crisis in order to push through the changes that they want.
Now the government has set up a process to review the recommendations and make deeper, more concrete plans. So far, health care cuts include $335 million cut from planned mental health funding; rolling back OHIP+ so that families with sick children will have to seek private insurance coverage for medications if they have it, prior to seeking public coverage, and they will be subject to deductibles and co-payments; axed funding for safe injection sites funding; a cut to the number of emergency hospital beds funded to take patients out of the hallways down from 1,200 announced this time last year to less than 600, as announced last week. In addition to these cuts, a number of social programs, regulations, and benefits that create equity and alleviate poverty have been put on the chopping block.
We are organizing a giant rally on October 23 in order to make sure that the Doug Ford government knows that we will not tolerate cuts and privatization and that we insist that they live up to their election promises to end “hallway medicine” (which means restoring beds and services).
We are asking all political party leaders to come out and make commitments to the crowd.
At this point we believe we have about 90 buses coming and thousands of people from Toronto. It is shaping up to be big as long as people come out!
It is imperative that we have a significant show of strength. It will make a difference. Already, we can see from the public relations messaging that the government does not want to be seen as cutting and privatizing. But they, are in fact, cutting, and we know that there are thousands of proposals made every day by corporations with connections to the Fords and to the Conservative Party to privatize our public services and health care. We also know, at the City of Toronto [when he was a Toronto City Councillor, 2010-2014], Doug Ford was stridently pro-privatization. So we must make sure that we make it politically impossible for him to privatize our health care.”
If anyone wants contact details for info about the buses, leave a comment to that effect and I’ll gladly send it to you!