Mike Bisallion believes the people of North Bay have spoken, now he’s just hoping the provincial government will listen.
The OPSEU Region 6 Executive Board member released the Ontario Health Coalition’s Stop the Cuts provincial campaign numbers.
From April 28th to May 28th, residents of North Bay and area were able to sign a ballot to vote “yes” to restoring funding the Health Care across the province.
Bisallion says 4,080 residents voted “Yes” with only eight ballots coming in stating Health Care didn’t need that funding restored.
Locally, the group was hoping for between 5,000 to 10,000 signed ballots, but 4,000 is still a good number according to Bissallion.
The ballot read: Ontario’s government must stop the cuts to our community hospitals and restore services, funding and staff to meet our communities’ needs for care. Answer: Yes or No.
“We are very happy the way the campaign went,” said Bissallion during a Monday afternoon press conference at the OPSEU office in Fraser street in North Bay.
“We fell a little bit short as far as ballots cast, but the main reason for that is what turned out to be a very good problem.”
The ballot boxes were set up at the union office as well as other places around the city. They were impressed by the feedback.
“What we didn’t anticipate is the amount of engagement that the citizens here in our community brought us into,” he said.
“At the end of the day it cost us some ballots but we were more than happy to get into conversations and discuss peoples experiences about health care in our city.”
Bissallion believes the union coordinated event became more of a community event.
“This hits all demographics and all political stripes, it hits all members of the community the same way, we all really need the services and they have to be there,” he said.
While the provincial numbers for the Ontario Health Coalition haven’t been release, Bissallion admits North Bay ranks as one of the top vote gathering communities in Ontario.
“What’s really important that we had more than 354 layoffs at this hospital in the last three years, how can that not effect services, that’s the question we put out there and that really resonated,” he said.
Bissallion will be traveling to Queen’s Park today where he will bring all those ballots to present to the Wynne Government at 11:30 Tuesday morning.
