Health Ministers from across Canada

will be meeting in Toronto for the Federal/Territorial/Provincial

Conference on health care wait times

Friday, February 9 th,9 am

Westin Harbour Castle Hotel

Protest

to Protect Universal Access to Health Care from the Harper Government privatization schemes!

Protect and Improve the Public Health System It’s the Best Coverage for All!

Join Health Coalition Representatives from Across Canada who will attend and/or send in messages of support. It is imperative that we make this a key issue leading into the federal election, or we risk losing our single tier system in the tide of privatization that is happening across the country.

The Harper Government is exploiting wait times to promote a privatization agenda. Harper's promised so-called "Care Guarantees" are a ruse for privatization. (You can’t have a Care Guarantee without a parallel private health system.) Harper has made Tony Clement his Health Minister - remember Clement wrote the Harris' government's brutal "Common Sense Revolution" and oversaw the forced privatization of hospitals, diagnostic clinics, long term care and homecare as Ontario's health minister.

But two-tier clinics siphon doctors and resources out of the public health system to serve wealthy queue-jumpers, destroying the gains in access to health care for all provided by public Medicare. Private clinics don’t create doctors, public universities do that. For-profit clinics push for more out-of-pocket fees as revenue streams from which they take profits. These are not solutions: they are the purposeful destruction of public Medicare.

The Harper government is not improving the public health system. They are not enforcing the Canada Health Act to protect equal access and stop two-tiering. They buried the federal wait times report. They didn't show up for the press conference on creating a national pharmaceutical strategy. Tony Clement just gave up his own majority shares in a private drug company months after becoming Health Minister, only after the Canadian Health Coalition made a public scandal out of it!

There is a clear solution that protects equal access for all and reduces wait times: a properly funded well-coordinated public Medicare system. Help us win this for all Canadians.

Ontario Health Coalition

416-441-2502