Dear: all of you who came to the Fort Erie public meeting to save our hospital services,
We are writing in follow up with some information for those of you who tried to contact Premier Doug Ford but first, a heartfelt thank you for coming to the public meeting to save the hospital services in Fort Erie last week.
Many of you tried calling or texting Doug Ford. Thank you for doing that! We have heard your accounts of what the Premier is saying and wanted to share with you a fact-checker in response, included below.⬇️ Also, if you are looking for facts, the Ontario Health Coalition released a report on hospital cuts and closures at the end of November that has a lot of useful information about this, and you can read it here.
We also wanted to congratulate you. Your calls and texts have captured the Premier's attention and he is feeling the pressure. Now is the time to keep it up! This is how we will win a reopening of the services. A huge heartfelt thank you to all of you who are helping to make this happen.
A final quick addition: At the public meeting we indicated that Premier Ford would be in Niagara Falls for the Ontario Conservative Party Convention Friday, February 2- Saturday, February 3. It turns out that the Ontario Federation of Labour is organizing a rally on February 3 from 12-1 pm at the Niagara Falls Convention Centre. We asked them if they are willing to highlight our fight to keep the Fort Erie hospital open and to stop Ford’s privatization plans of health care and public services and they have agreed to do so. They are inviting all of you to come and bring the most powerful message possible to the PC Party of Ontario in Niagara Falls. If you can attend, please contact forterie@healthcareSOS.net
With warm regards,
Natalie Mehra, executive director, Ontario Health Coalition
Sue Hotte, chairperson, Niagara Health Coalition
Heather Kelley, Fort Erie Healthcare SOS
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Hospital Service Cuts & Closures
JUST THE FACTS:
1. The responsibility for planning and providing needed health care services is the provincial government's -- that is, the Ford government's.
The Niagara Health System (NHS) can make plans and proposals locally, but the Minister of Health has the final say and can direct or order the hospital to provide services or any part of a service, or cease providing services or any part of a service. (See the Connecting Care Act, Ontario (2019) sections 20 and 33). That includes the power to order or direct the NHS to restore the Urgent Care Centre services in Fort Erie, or not to have closed them in the first place.
In addition, under the Canada Health Act, the province is supposed to be providing accessible, comprehensive, public hospital and physician services, without user fees or extra charges.
When or if the Premier and Health Minister claim they are not responsible, or it is not their decision, that is not the truth.
2. The Niagara Health System has also, for a long time, been trying to close down the services in Fort Erie.
While the provincial government is ultimately responsible for the planning of our province's health system, including its hospitals, and has the power to stop the closures, as noted above, the local hospital corporation itself has been trying for a long time to close down the services in Fort Erie. They also bear responsibility for continuing to make proposals and plans for a local health system that has eroded and closed services in the southern tier of Niagara and in Niagara-on-the-Lake.
Their ultimate goal is to close Fort Erie and Port Colborne's hospitals entirely, close Welland's inpatient acute and long-term care, and have a day hospital only in Welland. That is, unless the population gets the Ford government (or the next provincial government) to stop it.
As you know, the new Niagara Falls hospital and the St. Catharines hospital are not large enough to provide adequate care for the population if they close down Fort Erie, Port Colborne and the services they plan to close in Welland, not to mention the distances, lack of public transportation (and even night time taxi service) etc.
The Niagara Health System can and should also be held accountable for the inadequacy and injustice of their plans.
3. The responsibility for planning health human resources to meet the needs of the Ontario population is the provincial government's -- that is, the Ford government's.
As noted by the federal government of Canada: "The federal government provides financial support to the provinces and territories for health care services. However, the responsibility for managing health workforces falls within provincial and territorial jurisdictions."
The immediate reason given for the closures is staff shortages including nurse, health professional and physician shortages. It is true that staffing shortages that were emerging prior to the pandemic have grown over the last three years into the worst crisis anyone has seen. The staffing crisis has been compounded by choices by the Ford government that have actively undermined staffing efforts, including wage suppression legislation (Bill 124), privatization of staffing through for-profit staffing agencies, the government’s decision to end emergency COVID funding for locums and other funding, and extremely short-term funding arrangements announced after short staffing has become critical. There is a lot that can be done to get staff back into our hospitals if the government chose to do it. See more details under #4 & #5.
4. Despite shortages or claims of shortages, when the Minister of Health has intervened under previous governments, the local hospital has kept the services open.
The Ontario Health Coalition has, for more than a decade, worked with local groups to stop the closure of their local hospitals' emergency departments, birthing units, ICUs and more. In a number of these cases, the local hospital claimed inability to attract staff was the reason for the closure. In at least some of the cases in the amalgamated hospitals, they didn't really try to recruit staff because their plan was to close down those services and/or move the funding to another hospital that they cared about more.
In every case, when the Minister of Health intervened and told the local hospital corporation that they could not close down the service, they were able to find staff to keep it open.
In 2017 under the previous government, we were able to get the Minister to intervene to stop the closure of Welland Hospital emergency and other hospital services. The Niagara Health Coalition and the communities in Welland and Port Colborne organized thousands of people to sign petitions, held protests and brought people from Welland up to the Ontario Legislature to pressure the Minister. He responded by making a commitment that the Welland Hospital would remain open as a full service hospital. Under the current government, the NHS is planning once again to close an array of services in Welland and is already in the process of doing so, unless we get the government to stop them.
5. The Ford government is not doing everything it can to fund and resource our public hospitals. In fact, it brought in real dollar cuts when they took office, and now have again cut the COVID special funding and reimposed real-dollar cuts this year.
The government's own financial documents show that in the current budget year, the Ford government is planning to increase operating funding to Ontario's hospitals by only half a percent (0.5%). At the same time, according to their most recent data, Statistics Canada reports that the inflation rate for health & personal care is 3.3% (December 2022-2023). When funding falls below inflation, economists call it "real dollar cuts". There is no possible way for hospitals to keep up existing programs if their funding does not even meet inflation, let alone meeting population growth and expanding services to deal with the patients waiting and the staffing crisis.
Overall health care funding is also increasing at significantly less than the rate of inflation (1.2%). That means real dollar cuts.
At the same time as the public parts of the health system are being starved, the sky is the limit when it comes to privatization. Over the last year, according to its own documents, the Ford government has tripled the funding to private clinics (called Independent Health Facilities). In addition, public hospitals are going into deficit to pay private for-profit staffing agencies up to triple the cost for nurses and health professionals while the government refuses to do anything about price gouging.
And lest anyone worry that we cannot afford it, government data shows that Ontario funds its hospitals at the lowest rate of any province in Canada. Ontario has cut our hospitals so much that Ontario has the fewest hospital beds staffed and in operation of any province. We also have the fewest nurses per person in the country and that gap has widened under the Ford government.
This is not the picture of a government doing everything they can to stop the closure of local hospital services.
Sources: Health spending data is calculated from Government Estimates 2022-23 and 2023-24 and the provincial budget. Inflation data is from Statistics Canada.
We hope this information is helpful.
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