Toronto - Activists from Sarnia, Kingston and Toronto are joined today by activists from Los Angeles, Buffalo and Washington on a bus tour of corporate offices. While on tour, the protesters are delivering the biggest privatizer award to one head office, dispatching privatization clean up crews and holding other events at the headquarters of key corporations pushing health care privatization and deregulation on both sides of the border.

"Our organization has partnered with Canadian activists because we share a common struggle to ensure access to quality health care and quality jobs in the health care sector for all people " stated Patty DeVinney, President of the Communication Workers Association, Local 1168 (CWA), an American trade union and tour sponsor. "It is important that we recognize the vested interests of those corporations who are working with governments to deregulate and privatize health care across this continent."

"We are building bridges between activist organizations on both sides of the border - something that is critically important in the face of the growing dominance of huge multinational corporations who are pushing to take over public services world-wide," added Karl Flecker of the Polaris Institute, an organization dedicated to building democratic social change in Canada and internationally.

"We can learn from U.S. experience in health care because many of the corporations who are moving into Ontario's health system are the same profiteers who have driven up costs and limited access to care in the United States. Our nursing homes and homecare are now being taken over by corporations that have been found guilty of fraud and substandard conditions in American jurisdictions. The common threat to peoples' health is what this tour is about." stated Natalie Mehra of the Ontario Health Coalition, a public health watchdog organization.

The bus tour is part of a week-long series of meetings and events held by the Polaris Institute, Jobs with Justice (United States), the Ontario Health Coalition, AGENDA (Los Angeles), West Los Angeles Metropolitan Alliance, Nurses United (Buffalo), and the Coalition for Economic Justice (Buffalo).