BLOG: A heartfelt message, for those who’ve suffered from privatization: from Natalie

Posted: May 4, 2026

(May 5, 2026)

When I think about the lessons of the last thirty years of privatization, and the people who have suffered as a result, I feel more resolute than ever that we must do everything possible in their memory.

I know that many of you hold them in your hearts also. I hope this special message inspires, gives you information you need, and that you take any part of it that is useful and share it widely.

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I’ve been thinking about our failure to stop the privatization of home & long-term care — a disaster that has contributed to death and suffering on a scale none of us ever imagined. We cannot let them do the same to our hospitals, nor our blood services, mental health & addictions, primary care, public health & the rest. We must find a way draw a line under this period of privatization and shift to rebuilding. And we must do it soon.

If we don’t fight back they will not stop. Quite the opposite. In fact, we are now facing an emboldened set of well-financed and politically connected interests. It can feel overwhelming but we have to remember our own power. We outnumber them, by far. We need to inspire that mass of people who believe and care, make it visible, impossible to ignore, and as powerful as we can possibly be.

We have done it before and we won! Let’s show them what we are capable of doing together.

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It was almost thirty years ago when the Mike Harris government started privatizing long-term care and home care. The 1995 budgets (federal and provincial) were the most regressive in Canadian history to that time.

Truthfully, at the time, we really didn’t know much about the privatization of the delivery of health care services. But we were about to learn.

By 2003, when the Ontario Liberals won the election and the Conservative Harris/Eves government left, the balance of who owned long-term care and home care had fundamentally shifted. What was once a majority public and non-profit care became a majority private and for-profit. Ever since, the consequences have been suffered by people needing care, their families and the staff working to care for them.

What started as private “mom-and-pop shops” were bought up or pushed out as the for-profit chains moved in. Today, our health care landscape is dominated by large chain for-profit long-term and home care companies. Profits came from de-unionizing the workforce in home care and reducing wages and working conditions in both sectors. Also — and this is critical for people using those services — from reducing the number of care workers and thus the amount of care.

A study done by the Ontario Auditor General of home care showed that by 2015, the billing rates to the public purse for home care companies were double what the actual nurses and PSWs were paid. They charged the province double what they paid. On top of that, they took an additional 18% in administration. For their part, in 2003, the federal government tried to reverse their cuts but privatization by the provinces had already taken hold and funding — more and more — was being shunted off to profits.

In Ontario’s profit-dominated home care system, less than half of Ontario’s public home care funding actually makes it to the front-lines of care — from nursing to physio, occupational therapy, speech-language pathology, social work, and personal support.

In home care the consequences are hidden in individual homes. Often, the stories are never made public of people waiting for home care that never shows up due to perilous staffing shortages, of elderly people who have been pushed off home care rolls in favour of post-surgical patients being moved out more quickly to facilitate the hospital cuts, of the impossible cost of paying for private home care, of workers living in poverty and more.

The home care clients, as they call them, and the families of long-term care are near to my heart and will forever haunt my conscience.

In long-term care, the pandemic laid bare what turning long-term care into a profit-seeking industry actually means for human beings. The for-profits had far higher infection and death rates compared to publicly owned and non-profit long-term care homes. Those owned by chains and private equity firms had the highest death rates.

That horrific, reprehensible, tragic record — which exploded into the public eye in the pandemic —  was not new, though the pandemic brought everything to a scale never before seen. The higher death rates were the case prior to the pandemic also. 

It is no wonder. While the for-profits have taken their profits literally every month of every year, even as their residents died in droves in conditions that would result in jail time if it were done to a pet, they didn’t provide the care residents needed. Residents who are human beings deserving of compassion, love, and care in the last months of their lives, were deprived of it. In those homes that are chronically understaffed, staff describe having to choose who is going to get care and who isn’t.

Over the years, the industry has intertwined with government leading to many close connections and lobbying power. They systematically push for more funding and less regulation — including required nurse to patient ratios, staffing levels, inspections and enforcement. Despite a lot of PR promises getting actual improvements in care levels has been very difficult to achieve.

The truth about private health care is that it isn’t more efficient. It wastes millions upon millions in public money that never makes it to care (billions when they do it system wide, like in the U.S.).

Looking back, we did a lot, but really we should have gone to the wall to fight those privatizations.

Now, Doug Ford is privatizing our public hospitals. Already, we have experienced poor quality that resulted in missed cancers and even dangerous practices in private clinics. To add insult to injury, not only are we paying for their profits, governments have had to put in extra resources (paid by the public) for inspection and enforcement. Still, whenever inspection and enforcement fall off the radar, they cease to happen. Like in long-term care, it requires constant political advocacy and public resources to make them happen.

That’s not all. The imperative to maximize their profits leads private clinic owners to bill every source of revenue they can to get more money. Privatization doesn’t add any extra money into the health care system. The corporations and owners take that money out of health care for themselves. And one of the key “revenue streams” is patients.

I have studied the private clinics in Canada now for twenty years. Where they have been allowed to exist, they have routinely charged the public system (OHIP in Ontario) and, as an additional revenue stream to make more profit, they charge user fees for care to patients on top — in contravention of the Canada Health Act and Ontario’s Commitment to the Future of Medicare Act.

In Doug Ford’s Ontario, patients are being flagrantly charged for cataract surgeries and diagnostic tests in the private clinics that currently exist.

Others are being manipulated into thinking they have to pay to get decent quality (totally untrue). Others are being sold queue-jumping (which is illegal), while being lied to about what the actual wait times actually are. Yet Ford is quickly ramming through more and more… unless we stop him.

We have repeatedly raised complaints with the federal and provincial governments, done investigations and reports, protested and pushed the government to stop these. Local health coalitions, too, have exposed extraordinary costs and profit taking through their research and reports. With herculean effort, we were able to stop further privatization and win progress on enforcement, only to have these reversed by the Ford government.

Now, Ford is steamrolling ahead, having pushed the majority of Ontario’s public hospitals into deficits and forcing them to cut while redirecting hundreds of millions of dollars to for-profit clinics to privatize their services. He has begun privatizing our blood services. Not just that, the closure of the safe injection sites has been accompanied by a significant privatization of addictions and mental health services. The province is allowing for-profit nurse practitioner clinics and online companies to charge patients for primary care. The list goes on.

I am doing everything I can to inspire every organization, every person, every gathering of people I can think of to get us to mount a fightback commensurate to the threat. Every one of us can make a difference but we need to care enough. Please care enough.

This is what you can do:

• Help distribute leaflets – everywhere. In your workplace, community groups, faith organizations, markets, door-to-door.
• Donate — we need to fund trains to the giant protest on May 28 (details below), leaflets, promotion, legal challenges. The size and scale of everything we do is reliant on donations from people who care. Please do help if you can.
• Give monthly — the best and most reliable funding comes from monthly automatic donations. They are critical for us. I give every month, as does my mother, our staff, many of my friends. If you can afford $5, $10, $20, or $50 per month — it makes a huge difference.
• Get on the trains, travel in, or come out if you are in Toronto on May 28 — we are holding the first giant protest to stop the privatization of our hospitals on Thursday, May 28 starting from the Royal York across from Union Station at noon to march up to Queen’s Park and the Ontario Legislature. Register for the train from your town here.
• Write, email or call your MPP and tell them to stop the privatization of our hospitals and health care as a top priority issue.
• Write an opinion article for your local paper, community organization newsletter, or any other publication you can.
• Make a video for social media telling people why you care about public health care, the urgency of the threat, and why not privatize.
• Spread the word in every way you are able.

Let us take hope from each other.

In this period of increased awareness about threats to our sovereignty, I am inspired
by people’s messages about the values that make our country independent of the U.S.

Even while economic integration has been cornerstone to successive federal governments, millions of Canadians believe in and are proud of the fundamental principles of equity and compassion that underlie the best of Canadian social policy and our health care system. Most of us believe in social inclusion and helping one another, of the primacy of taking care of people, and of thoughtfulness over greed.

And together we have won! Over the years, since the privatization of home and long-term care, we have stopped repeated attempts at privatizing a whole range of public health care services. We collectively stopped the privatization of blood services, under the Liberal government (Ford has brought back in for-profit plasma but we are mounting a fightback on that again), cancer care, hospital surgeries & diagnostics, mental health facilities, primary care (Ford is trying again but we are mounting a fightback), and more.

We have saved dozens of local hospitals and their services. We have improved care levels and working conditions every time we have fought hard for them. We have won public interest amendments to every major piece of health care legislation in the last 30 years, up until the Ford government (which has not accepted any amendments).

I know you will help if you can. It has been a privilege and joy of my life to do this work with all of you. Thank you for doing everything you can to help once again.