Participants in a virtual town hall hosted by the local NDP riding association say if a snap provincial election is called in the near future, the unmet health-care needs of northern Ontario residents should be top of mind for voters in the region.

Titled Our Health Care: What We Need, the almost two-hour session brought riding association officials and stakeholders to discuss the state of health-care delivery in northern Ontario.

Lynn Dee Eason, the Algoma-Manitoulin Ontario NDP riding association president, told the 50 participants in the town hall that it comes down to making different choices about how government dollars are spent than the decisions being made by the ruling Ontario PC party.

“For example, would you have chosen to have $225 million of our provincial coffers go to in order to break a 10-year-long beer store contract a few months early?” she asked.

“[That’s] equivalent to $382,653 per day each as a cancellation fee, or would you have chosen to invest in our health care?”

Although the meeting was hosted by the local riding association, the panellists who participated were non-partisan.

The first to address the meeting was Dr. Dannica Switzer, a Wawa-based family doctor who no longer practices there full time, but instead casts a wider net by travelling and taking on patients across the region.

“I would call myself a rural generalist physician. I take locums, which are short-term contracts, throughout northern Ontario extending from the northeast border in Englehart all the way out to Red Lake,” Switzer explained.

Northern Ontario represents about 90 per cent of the province’s land mass, said Switzer, while supporting only about six per cent of the overall population.

Although the population is much smaller in the north, Switzer estimates there is a shortage of about 400 family doctors in the region.

“These are huge shortages,” she said.

While much of the current attention is being paid to recruitment of health-care professionals in the north, Switzer said not enough time and effort are put into retention of those who are already here.

“We cannot recruit our way out of retention crisis. In order to retain practitioners we need to have a manageable workload, we need to have supportive environments. This is going to create desirable working conditions,” she said.

Natalie Mehra, executive director of the Ontario Health Coalition, told the attendees that Ontario trails all of the provinces across Canada when it comes to funding hospitals.

“What they have done is purposely — I mean, there’s no other way to explain it — purposely starved the public health-care system and shift now more than a billion dollars per year over to private for-profit clinics and for-profit staffing agencies,” said Mehra.

She added: “We were talking with a woman who was charged $8,000 for her cataract surgery. Another woman who was told it would be $10,000 and she had to put down a $1,500 down payment. That should never happen in Canada.”

Mehra said health-care spending should be a ballot box question in the upcoming provincial election.

“We’re calling for an ambitious, very clear agenda. We need to move health-care funding back up to the average of the rest of the country,” she said.

Speaking from the audience, Township of St. Joseph Mayor Jody Wildman said more and more the municipality is being forced to spend taxpayer dollars on health-care needs he said should be addressed by the provincial government.

“This is becoming a real problem because we don’t have the capacity to fund a lot of these these things,” he said.

In a video statement, Nickel Belt MPP France Gélinas said health-care should be delivered based on need, not on the ability to pay. She noted recent issues at the Group Health Centre in Sault Ste. Marie and spoke about how the Lady Dunn Health Centre in Wawa has not received a meaningful base budget increase in about 10 years.

“When thousands of people cannot gain access to primary care, when our hospitals are full to overcapacity, when women cannot give birth in their communities anymore because the obstetric department is closed, when our emergency departments keep closing, we are facing a crisis,” said Gélinas.

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