URGENT EVENT: Fill the Legislature Galleries on Wed Oct 29 to stop private clinics charging patients

Posted: October 17, 2025

(October 17, 2025)

Come to the Ontario Legislature
Wednesday October 29

Or host a Legislature Watch event in your community
if you are not close enough to Toronto to come out.
Please share widely.
The situation is extremely urgent.

At stake is our single tier public medicare & the services and funding in our local public hospitals. Don’t let Ford destroy them.

We cannot let two-tier medicare and the charging of patients thousands of dollars for surgeries and diagnostic tests to become normalized. We are on the cusp of it now. If we don’t fight back we are going to lose public medicare.

Please spread the word. Please come out if you can and if you do not live close to Toronto, please host a Legislature Watch event in your community and invite the media. Speak out. Do everything you can to pour on the pressure.

Ford is not stopping. He is now accelerating his hospital privatization. This summer, Ford has announced 57 new private clinics that will take more than 100,000 diagnostic tests out of local public hospitals– along with funding and staffing. The plan is to expand them to do surgeries. Ford is no longer hiding his intentions. His government is essentially building private day hospitals and they are shifting hundreds of millions in public funding over to them.

Yet, the Ford government hasn’t even investigated the formal complaint that we lodged from fifty patients who had been extra-billed in the for-profit surgical and diagnostic clinics that the Ford government has been expanding. None of the patients who made complaints have even been contacted to investigate their extra-billing claims since we filed the complaint on June 17. It is now mid-October. Nothing has happened to stop the private clinics that are violating our medicare laws, undermining the Canada Health Act, and demonstrating a complete lack of medical ethics.

Remember when Premier Ford promised that no patient would ever have to pay with their credit card, only their OHIP card? When asked if patients would have to pay anything if they had surgery at a private clinic, Ford said it would be “100 per cent” covered. “We’re never gonna waver from that,” he said. Those claims are completely untrue.

Wednesday, October 29 Itinerary (more details to come)

9:00 a.m.
Arrive at Queen’s Park security (or as soon after 9 a.m. as you can)

9 – 9:30 a.m.
Start to go through security to fill the Public Galleries in the Legislature

10:00 a.m.
Fill the Public Galleries.
We will be welcomed in the Legislature by various political parties and MPPs.
Watch Question Period where the Premier and Health Minister will have to answer questions from the Opposition Parties about what they are doing.

12:00 p.m.
Lunch

1:00 p.m.
Press conference in the media studio of the Legislature

2:00 p.m.
We will be finished and ready to leave at this time

Please RSVP as soon as possible

Planning to attend? Please RSVP as soon as possible by emailing us at info@OntarioHC.ca with your name and the town/city you are from. If you are carpooling, please send us the names and towns of anyone else who is attending. This information is a requirement for Queen’s Park security and they need at least 24 hours notice, so please RSVP by Monday, October 27 at 12 p.m. noon. We also need this information so you can be welcomed from the floor of the Legislature.

Organize a Legislature Watch event that day in your town: If you live too far away from Toronto to attend and can organize a Legislature Watch event, please email us at info@OntarioHC.ca and let us know. What this involves: invite a group to meet at someone’s house or in a community venue and watch the Legislature through the link on the Legislative Assembly website (click on “Live House Video” when the Legislature starts at 10 a.m. on Oct. 29 here. Question Period will start between 10 a.m. and 10:30 a.m. You can also watch the video of our press conference at 1 p.m. here.) We will send you more information if you let us know you are organizing a Legislature Watch. Invite the media to come and those of you in attendance can provide comment and a local perspective, helping us to raise the alarm and mount public pressure to stop this privatization.

If you can’t come but are going to watch on the Legislative Assembly website on your own, please also RSVP but specify that you will be joining virtually and we will send you the links to the livestream of Question Period and the press conference. If you send us your name and town, we will arrange to have your virtual presence recognized also.

Please note: it is much more powerful if people can come in person and we have a LOT of people in the Legislature that day! So, please do come in person if you can.

Directions

By public transit: go to Queen’s Park station on the Line 1 Yonge-University subway line.

By road: There is street parking on Hoskins Ave. near Queen’s Park Circle. There is also parking on Grosvenor Street near Queen’s Park Circle. Joining Grosvenor, there is street parking on Surrey Place and Grenville Street and also a parking lot at Women’s College Hospital and a parking building almost next door to the east of it. There are also parking lots behind Mount Sinai Hospital, an underground at University Health Network (Toronto General Hospital/Peter Munk Cardiac Centre) and on Elizabeth Street behind Toronto General Hospital/the Peter Munk Cardiac Centre.

A final note:

We HAVE to build a fightback that is commensurate to the threat

We cannot be naïve. The forces that oppose public medicare in our province are in power. The first step is to hand over control of our hospital services to private and for-profit entities that lobby the government for contracts. That is in process. Then the Ford government has purposely chosen to let the private clinics bill OHIP plus upcharge patients. Now they are purposely refusing to take action when those clinics turn upselling of medically unnecessary procedures into extra-billing, charging user fees, lying about wait times in public hospitals, and manipulative upselling and coercion to get patients to pay extra on top, because that is how the private clinics maximize their profits.

The next step? The demand for private health insurance to cover all the extra charges will get stronger and stronger as people find out they have to pay. Those of you who are in unions will face demands to bargain health benefits to cover the extra charges. Those benefits will reduce your ability to bargain real increases in wages. For those of your who are non-unionized workers, the elderly and others, there will be no option.

The suffering and inequities that led to the creation of Public Medicare are already on their way back in for elderly patients trying to get cataract surgeries. We have heard from an 85 year old who had to take out a loan to get her surgery and now she is struggling to pay it back from her pension. We heard from a 71 year old who had to go back to work to pay for his surgery. We have heard from seniors who have been told that they have to pay $8,000, $10,000, $11,000 for their eye surgery. Imagine what will happen when we have 57 more private clinics doing thousands of MRIs, CTs, endoscopies, and hip, knee and shoulder surgeries and more. This is just the beginning, unless we are strong enough and relentless enough to stop it.