Details on OHC activities...

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From: Ontario Health Coalition <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Tuesday, March 7, 2023 10:51 AM
To: Dennis Raphael
Subject: Thank You For Your Continued Support - From Natalie

Dear Dennis,

I am writing to thank you, sincerely, for your donation. We apologize because we are just catching up and we are late in sending this letter. We are deeply grateful for your support.

We hope that you are proud of our collective efforts. We have been instrumental in catapulting privatization and long-term care to the top of the public agenda. We succeeded in getting the Liberals and the Green Party to take a clear position to end for-profit long-term care (and we had a strong part in the NDP adopting that position earlier). We are a trusted media source of information and do anywhere from 500 – 800 media interviews per year.

We are continuing to work our absolute hardest to fight against health care privatization, win long-overdue improvements in long-term care, and advocate for improved care and staffing across our public health care system.

We have grown enormously over the last year and continue to be an effective opinion leader. I have written multiple op-eds with colleagues published in papers such as the Toronto Star. In addition, we are called upon by reporters daily to provide information and contacts for investigative reports and stories. We have held dozens of press conferences, protests and rallies since the beginning of the pandemic and we are an extremely active coalition. We now represent more than three-quarters of a million Ontarians.

In addition to advocating for systematic measures to improve care and staffing conditions, we have also been working our hardest to raise awareness of the threat of privatization to our public health care. This is a short summary of what your support has enabled us to achieve:


•        To fight against the Ford government’s new law that forces elderly hospital patients into long-term care homes against their choice, we launched a Charter Challenge with the Advocacy Centre for the Elderly (ACE) to strike down the law as a violation of the fundamental rights of the patients affected.


•        In response to the unprecedented hospital crisis, as the Ford government continued to deny and downplay the hospital crisis and failure, we arranged 13 local online town hall meetings. More than 1000 people registered as we discussed how to make the fight visible and to show real resistance against the Ford government's refusal to take urgent action to address the hospital crisis while at the same time privatizing our hospitals.


•        To fight back against health care privatization in Ontario we organized a series of emergency summits. More than 800 people joined our two central summits and hundreds of people joined in twenty local summits. We released a series of briefing notes on health care privatization and held a press conference raising the alarm on the privatization of COVID-19 testing in Ontario. Our work has received extensive media coverage and we are making this a key election issue.



•       I have co-authored multiple op-eds that have been published in the Toronto Star to educate the public on the threat of privatization across all of health care and the terrible record of for-profit long-term care.



•       We held a press conference with organizations representing more than a million Ontarians to collectively call for emergency measures to address the health care staffing crisis.



•       We released a major report Public Money, Private Profit: The Ford Government & the Privatization of the Next Generation of Ontario’s Long-Term Care highlighting the Ford government’s plans to award a majority of new long-term care beds to for-profit chains with horrific records. This report received significant media coverage and became an important public resource of long-term care bed allocations, as the government has not made one publicly available. Out of this report we were able to get a 5-part CTV series on the government awarding beds to the homes that the military went into. Then we got a major Globe and Mail investigative report, a Toronto Star story and editorial. These were in addition to cross-province media reporting about the release of our report.



•       We worked extensively to fight against the Ford government’s new Long-Term Care Act. We released an analysis, wrote an open letter to MPPs, got a legal opinion, had releases picked up by the media and wrote a submission to the Legislature. While the bill ultimately passed, the pressure we created generated significant attention and has led to new people joining us in the fight to protect public health care.



•       In May of last year, we held a mass Pack the Public Galleries event where more than 570 long-term care families and workers, along with thousands of people on Facebook, came together to hear the Ford government answer their questions and demands for vital improvements to long-term care. Through individual stories sent in by families and staff, we asked the Opposition Parties to challenge Premier Ford to commit to fast-tracking improvements in staffing in long-term care homes.



•       We coordinated with Health Coalitions across Canada and Canadians4LTC and led the work to release a legal opinion advocating for national standards that would improve care, quality, accountability and public/non-profit ownership in long-term care.

Despite the continuing inadequacies of policy and enforcement we have gained some ground. In long-term care alone, we have won improved funding, improved infection control measures in health care, air conditioning improvements in long-term care and a commitment to a 4-hour minimum care standard. Our work in raising awareness of the plans for health care privatization by the government led to them backtracking on statements and the issue receiving significant coverage in media across the province. We are also holding off hospital privatization. It is not enough. The care standard commitment is for four-years from now, for example, but we are moving the ball down the field together, and we have many initiatives planned to do just that.

There is much more that I cannot fit in here, but I think I have given you a sense of the work your support has helped to achieve.

Thank you very much for your help and support. It has been an honour to stand alongside you in this cause and I look forward to continuing our work together.

With warmest regards,


Natalie Mehra
Executive Director


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