Connect  |  Newsletter  |  Donate

Open letters & petition to enforce the Canada Health Act & stop user charges for patients

Posted: June 17, 2025

(June 17, 2025)

Open letters to the provincial and Federal Health Ministers, as well as a petition to call on the Government of Canada to uphold and enforce the Canada Health Act and take all possible measures to stop the Ford government from violating it, can be found below.

This morning, the Ontario Health Coalition held a press conference to announce that they have filed formal complaints on behalf of 50 patients who were charged user fees at private clinics. You can watch the press conference here. A press release can be found here.

We released open letters to Sylvia Jones, the provincial Minister of Health and to Marjorie Michel, Federal Health Minister. We are calling on the Ford government to reimburse the patients and take action to stop the private clinics. We are asking the federal government to take all action possible to enforce the Canada Health Act in Ontario where the Ford government is violating it, and we also launched a petition to that effect.

Our heartfelt thank you to the patients who took part in the complaint and told their stories at the press conference. Let build on this and do everything we can to stop the privatization of our health care. Thank you so very much!

 

Open Letters to the Ontario Minister of Health and the Federal Minister of Health

The open letters can be found as printable PDFs below as follows:

Federal petition to enforce the Canada Health Act

This is the wording of the petition for your information. You cannot send it in by email. We have attached it in English and French (in vertical and horizontal versions — please use whatever works for you). Please print off the petition that you want to use, sign it and fill in the required information (and get others to sign it also!) and mail it in. Our address is at the bottom of the petition. There is no deadline at this point. We will be collecting petitions all summer and submit them in the fall. 

Printable versions of the petition can be found below as follows:

The wording of the petition is as follows:

Petition to the House of Commons, Prime Minister & Minister of Health

We, the undersigned citizens and residents of Canada, draw the attention of the House of Commons to the following:

WHEREAS:

Ontario’s Doug Ford government has redirected thousands of surgeries from public hospitals to private, for-profit clinics and hospitals, and;

The private MRI/CT and cataract surgery clinics are extra-billing patients, charging user fees, and manipulating patients — particularly elderly patients — into paying thousands of dollars when they go in for care, and;

Patients are reporting exorbitant charges of $4,000, $8,000, even up to $11,000 for cataract surgery in Ontario’s private clinics, as well as hundreds of dollars for access to primary care in private for-profit nurse practitioner clinics, and;

The Canada Health Act bans user fees and extra-billing of patients & requires that our medical care be funded by taxes (OHIP) and provided without financial barriers, based on Canadians’ medical need not how much money a person has, and;

No patient should be forced or manipulated into paying for their cataract and other surgeries, MRIs and CTs, and primary care – in fact these charges are just what the Canada Health Act was set up to prevent, therefore:

We, the undersigned, call on the Government of Canada to uphold and enforce the Canada Health Act and take all possible measures to stop the Ford government from violating it.