Ontario Health Coalition members protest provincial hospital privatization

Posted: May 29, 2026

(May 28, 2026) By: Marney Carmichael, Co-author: Al Sweeney, CHCH News

Thousands of Ontario Health Coalition members and supporters marched Thursday to protest Premier Doug Ford’s hospital privatization and demand that the government return the funding to public hospitals.

They say more than 5,000 people marched on Queen’s Park, in a fight to protect health care from policies they say would devastate health care in Ontario.

Thousands of people walked to bring attention to what the coalition says is the provincial government’s plan to “redirect hundreds of millions of taxpayers’ dollars away from our public hospitals to private, for-profit clinics/hospitals.”

“Without question, the Ford government is attempting the biggest privatization of our public hospitals in Ontario’s history, unless we stop them,” says Natalie Mehra, executive director of the coalition.

The Ontario Health Coalition says that local hospitals have been pushed into deficit and forced by the Conservative government to make cuts.

People from across Ontario came to the protest, including from the Hamilton and Niagara regions.

Protestors [sic] marched from Union Station through downtown Toronto to Queen’s Park for the protest.

People had lined up early in the morning for trains to head to the rally from as far away as Windsor, Kingston, and Ottawa, including Aldershot Station in Burlington.

The Ontario Health Care Coalition says in the past year alone, the Conservative government announced almost $300 million to open 61 new private clinics — the vast majority of them run for-profit.

“Doug Ford is using our tax money to create an infrastructure of private, for-profit hospitals that will bring in American style health care to the detriment of regular people unless we demand in no uncertain terms that he stop and stop immediately,” said Mehra.

Protestors [sic] demand that the government addresses hospital wait times and commits to a multi-year plan to increase Ontario’s hospital funding to meet the average of the other provinces, and for the “restoration of public access to information and government records.”

Unifor, Canada’s largest private-sector union, says its members will join the rally at Queen’s Park to “demand urgent action to protect and strengthen public health care.”

In the legislature, Hamilton Centre MPP Robin Lennox challenged the health minister over privatization, saying “this conservative government likes to starve our health-care services to the point of dysfunction and then move toward privatization.”

In an email to CHCH News, a spokesperson for the Minister of Health says the “claims made by the Ontario Health Coalition are misguided.”

The email continues, “We lead the country with some of the shortest wait times for critical procedures, including MRI, CT scans, and surgeries, with over 83 per cent of people receiving surgery within the clinically recommended times. Since 2018, we have increased the number of publicly funded, same-day hip and knee surgeries by 4,260 per cent and 5,840 per cent respectively, and we’re investing $280 million to connect nearly 300,000 more people to publicly funded MRI and CT scans, endoscopy procedures, and orthopedic surgeries. This builds on the expansion of publicly funded cataract procedures which has allowed 32,000 more people to receive their procedure, per year.”

They go on to say that the Ontario government is continually making record investments, with over $101 billion being put towards the provincial health care system this year.

But NDP Leader Marit Stiles says the Ford government is putting profits ahead of people.

“We have seen governments like the Ford government, and governments before them, whittling away at our health-care system while these private health-care corporations in the United States are circling like vultures,” said Stiles. “They want to make money off it, they want to make money off of people being sick.”

Some of the folks that went to Queen’s Park Thursday morning were from Niagara, where health care has been hit by cutbacks.

Niagara Falls MPP Wayne Gates says the system would collapse under privatization.

“The rich people that have money will get health care,” said Gates. “People that are less fortunate with today’s cost of rent, groceries, gas — the list goes on — you won’t be able to afford to have health care.”

The health care coalition is planning more protests, including taking people into the legislature who’ve had to pay for service at private clinics.
They also say the Ford government has the lowest rate of hospital funding of any other province in the country.

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