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Hope remains despite ‘existential threats’ to public health care, including Niagara’s: coalition
Posted: January 23, 2026
(January 22, 2026) by: Allan Benner, St. Catharines Standard
Ontario Health Coalition’s executive director says legislation recently approved in Alberta undermines Canada’s public health-care system and sets a precedent that could embolden other provinces to do the same.
It’s one of several “existential threats” to public health care across Canada, including Niagara, Natalie Mehra said while addressing Niagara District Council of Women members during an online meeting Wednesday.
Mehra said it might not be too late to stop the privatization of health care here and across the country.
“We have lots of cause for hope,” she said.
However, she said, “much more needs to happen if the fight back is going to be commensurate to the level of the threat that we’re facing.”
Mehra said Alberta’s Health Statutes Amendment Act, which received royal assent Dec. 11, defies the Canada Health Act by establishing a two-tier system that allows doctors to charge fees at for-profit clinics for medically necessary procedures, while also working in the public system. It also opens Canada to U.S.-based private insurance corporations.
“That legislation, for the first time since the inception of public medicare in Canada, actually defies the Canada Health Act. It contravenes completely the Canada Health Act,” she said. “It sets up the legislative framework to bring in private health insurance and two-tier health care legally in Alberta.”
Mehra said “the whole legislation is written to create a market for private health insurance in Alberta, and thus in Canada.”
She said the Canada Health Act ensures all Canadians have equal access to health care, regardless of their income, while user fees and extra billing of patients for medically necessary services are not permitted.
“All of those provisions are contravened by this law,” Mehra said.
“The suffering and inequality that led to the creation of public medicare in the first place in this country will re-emerge. It means that other provinces that are like-minded may follow suit.”
Once private health insurance companies move into Alberta, “I think we’d be very naive to think they would stop at the Alberta border,” she said.
“It’s a crisis. This has never happened before and we are going to have to fight.”
Meanwhile, she said, privatization is being implemented in Ontario, though it’s occurring incrementally through increased investment in private clinics, expanded contracts for long-term-care providers and a recent agreement with Grifols, a for-profit multinational pharmaceutical company, allowing the company to pay for plasma donations.
She said Ontario’s public hospitals are at risk, too, calling it the “most serious and urgent threat.”
Mehra said the provincial government is investing $300 million for new private clinics, adding some “are essentially hospitals.”
“They’re large — they have multiple operating rooms, they have diagnostic suites, the whole nine yards. This is the privatization of Ontario’s public hospitals.”
She said all of the potentially profitable medical procedures are being moved out of public hospitals “into the ownership and control of private for-profit clinics.”
“It’s tens of thousands of diagnostic tests and surgeries that they’re talking about.”
She said this is occurring at the same time Ontario is dealing with a “profound” shortage of medical staff and hospital underfunding.
But while Mehra called the shortage of physicians and other health-care professionals “a huge problem,” she said recruiting people to this area shouldn’t be difficult.
“In all these years we’ve heard in Niagara that we can’t get staff — utter nonsense,” she said. “You live, like I do, in the most populous part of the country, in the most populous part of Ontario and you live in a beautiful area. It’s attractive for people to settle in.”
Mehra said hospitals could find the staff they needed if “they provided working conditions that were reasonable for staff.”
“If they wanted to, they could do it.”
Instead, she said staff shortages are often used as an excuse to cut services and downsize hospitals.
Despite assurances that public health care is being preserved, she said “the privatization machine marches on in this province.”
Still, she said there is hope.
“All across Ontario we’ve saved services. We forced governments to improve funding. We’ve forced things to the top of the agenda,” she said.
Mehra said the coalition hopes to reach more than a million Ontarians through the distribution of leaflets in the coming months, as well as health-care workers and patients, to ensure they know about the threats public health care faces.
She said similar campaigns in the past have been “incredibly effective.”
“We have to build a fight-back to save the Niagara hospitals and other places where public hospital capacity is being closed down, downsized or otherwise undermined,” she said.
She said the coalition is working on organizing a “rolling 10,000 person protest,” an initiative that would bring out 1,000 protesters at each of the 10 most hard-hit communities in the province.
“We will also fill the galleries (at Queen’s Park) again, as soon as the legislature resumes at the end of March to stop the closure of our public hospital services … and demand answers from the health minister,” Mehra said.
“The fight back in Ontario is on.”
