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Anna Lyall never saw herself as the typical “protest person”. Flyers, chants, hand-made posters. In her 42 years as an Ottawa-Carleton District School Board educator, Lyall mostly stuck to the four walls of her classrooms.
Ottawa demands better from Doug Ford in first provincewide rally
Posted: April 26, 2026
(April 25, 2026) By: Abyssinia Abebe, Ottawa Citizen
Ottawa was one of seven Ontario communities holding the first in a series of protests across the province
“I was a teacher … this isn’t my forte,’’ the retired teacher said. ‘’But man, when I see what’s happening to the regular person … .”
Lyall joined more than 150 people who took to the human rights monument near city hall on Elgin Street on Saturday, April 25, to protest health-care and education issues under Premier Doug Ford’s provincial government.
Lyall handed out flyers, chanted alongside the crowd and clung to a hand-made poster that eventually flew off.
In the first wave of two back-to-back protests, the Ottawa Health Coalition invited local residents to protest the privatization and the systemic underfunding of public Ottawa hospitals, which the coalition says has forced hospitals into deficits and cuts in recent months.
The most recent was earlier this month when The Ottawa Hospital announced it was cutting three per cent of its workforce. As of 2024-2025, the hospital had 13,281 employees, including 5,240 nurses.
“We consider this to be an unprecedented crisis in the history of public health care, and it’s a crisis that we need to mobilize on a mass basis to make sure we don’t keep electing politicians and parties that are not committed to public health care,” Ottawa Health Coalition spokesperson Kevin Skerrett told the Ottawa Citizen on Saturday.
Ottawa was one of seven Ontario communities holding the first in a series of protests across the province. Around 1 p.m. was another anti-Ford demonstration, this one protesting against OSAP grant cuts and changes to freedom of information, or FOI, laws.
Skerrett said, in his opinion, the single biggest issue in health care right now is the systematic underfunding of the health-care system in Ontario.
He said this is leading to an “unprecedented” crisis, with “embarrassingly low quality” services that he says will lead to worse health-care outcomes.
Local residents were not the only ones who showed up to the Saturday provincewide protests.
Protester Ross Sutherland said the cause was worth the trip from Kingston.
Sutherland, who was a nurse for more than 25 years before retiring 10 years ago, said he is now the co-chair of the Kingston Health Coalition.
Sutherland described the current health-care landscape under Ford as facing “the most serious threat to our public health-care system in decades.
“We’ve had problems for a long time now with underfunding and privatization, but Doug Ford has now made a conscious effort to transfer funds from public hospitals into private for-profit clinics.”
He said people are getting less care but somehow paying more.
As a retired nurse, he said he has seen “hallway medicine” countless times, which he described as a phenomenon where people are treated in hospital hallways with portable dividers because hospitals don’t have enough rooms for everyone.
For Lyall, who started advocating for health care after retiring from education, Ford’s response to long-term care issues during COVID was an eye-opener. Lyall said she quickly realized that the government “was not interested in looking after the welfare of its people.
“My parents came here from home … from Poland, and my dad chose Canada because he felt it was a really good country,” she said. “He chose Ontario because it was a really good province, and what he came to and what we now have are two different pictures.
“I don’t want my kids and my grandkids growing up in a world where they can’t afford anything.”
Ontario funds for health care and hospitals are the lowest rate of any province, according to the Ottawa Health Coalition.
But health-care issues are not exclusive to Ontario. Skerrett said the Alberta government went even further than Ontario when it passed Bill 11 legislation in December 2025, opening the door to the full U.S.-style privatization of all health-care services.
“This legislation, in our view, is widely recognized as a direct violation of the Canada Health Act,” he said, calling on Prime Minister Mark Carney to do the same.
Jo Wood, now 87, was one of about 20 of the active members of the Raging Grannies who sang in harmony at the Ottawa Health Coalition protest Saturday at noon.
Wood has been with the activist group since her retirement in 2003. The group was on stage Saturday to sing, “Mark Carney: they’re breaking the law!”
Wood said the tune was based on My Bonnie, but the lyrics were adapted to reflect the protest.
Wood wore a bright yellow knitted hat, which she called “a silly cap” to go along with her colourful dress.
Ontario’s dire health-care system is no joking matter, but Wood said the hats were a historical sign of resistance among older women activists.
Wood said the backstory for the silly hats at protests started in Victoria when the nuclear-powered submarines entered Victoria Harbour from the U.S. around 1986, and local concerned women at the time were trying to protest it but were getting ignored.
“They started to wear these silly hats and got recognized,” she said, adding that the Raging Grannies have carried on with the tradition.
Silly hats aside, Wood said the premise of the Raging Grannies is to ultimately “make the world a better place” for their grandchildren.
“You name it, we’re there,’’ she said of protests related to housing, education, poverty and health care.
“I don’t know what we can do to fight it, but we have to fight it.”
