Labour Council President Henri Giroux speaks during a town hall meeting on public-private partnerships. Photos by Dennis Chippa.
What was scheduled to be a town hall meeting on the problems with using private-public partnership or P3 agreements for public projects has turned into tentative plans for a massive protest.
That’s what 158 job losses at a hospital will do.
With the announcement of the cuts at the North Bay Regional Hospital still fresh and bitter, over fifty people took in the town hall meeting, then decided to make plans to make their voices heard.
Natalie Mehra, the Executive Director of the Ontario Health Coalition, says the three protests are very much in the early planning stages, but North Bay has to be a site.
“North Bay is facing the very worst in Ontario right now. The goal is to get out thousands of people and make it big enough and loud enough that the government cannot continue to ignore it. We’re in the ninth year in a row of hospital cuts in Ontario.”
Mehra was just one of several high profile guests of the North Bay Labour Council to speak.
CUPE’s National President, Paul Moist spoke of the problem nationally with the private-public partnerships, while CUPE Ontario President Fred Hahn spoke of the potential battle in fighting privatization of Hydro One.
Toby Sanger, CUPE’s senior economist, told the group the numbers don’t lie.
CUPE Senior Economist Toby Sanger explains why the hospital's costs have gone up so much.
Sanger says the Auditor General’s report showed the provincial P3 projects cost eight billion dollars more than if they’d been publicly financed and operated.
Sanger says the city’s hospital is no different.
“When it was originally conceived it was estimated to cost 200 million dollars. Then when it was decided to go with it as a P3 the cost increased to 400 million dollars as a capital cost. The P3 contract is for 35 million dollars over 30 years.That adds up to a billion dollars. My calculations of the additional cost of the private financing on that debt is seven million dollars more per year.”
That, says Sanger, has led to the cuts, in both beds and staff.
“This is the fourth round of job cuts for the North Bay hospital. Cut beds, over 60 beds now I believe. This is for a hospital that was just opened four years ago. So the increased costs of the P3s is I think directly related to the cuts both in jobs and in terms of services and in beds for the people of this community.”
Ontario Health Coalition's Natalie Mehra speaks of the patient cost of cuts at care facilities.
Mehra says the province and the hospital management share the blame.
“North Bay was saddled with a P3 privatized plan by the provincial government. They had no choice in that. And the enormous costs of that are borne by the population of North Bay and the rest of the province. At the end of the day, the decision to force hospitals into nine years in a row of cuts is the provincial government’s decision.”
Mehra says the protest also serves as a warning to both provincial and municipal governments thinking about making changes to publicly funded facilities like Cassellholme to turn them into for-profits.
"That would be an absolutely terrible thing to do. The care levels are worse in the private homes”
“Municipal homes take the money that they get and put it into the programs and services for the residents. Most municipal homes have better services and better care levels than the for-profit homes do and they also provide care to harder to serve residents.”
North Bay Labour Council president Henri Giroux, who organized the town hall, says this is just the beginning.
“Because we can’t just stop here tonight. This was just a way of telling people it can be done, it’s possible to get it done. But now we have to have the soldiers on the ground to make sure that it happens. And I think that after tonight we have quite a few people that signed up and I think once we start going, people are gonna start joining in and move it forward.”
The protests are planned to take place this fall, and the public will be invited to provide input.
