Brampton Caledon Health Coalition

Please copy this email, make it your own with your own story and opinions, and send it to your representative.

You can find your provincial MPP:

https://www.ola.org/en/members/current.

You can also send this to your City Council member and Mayor for Brampton:

https://www.brampton.ca/en/City-Hall/CouncilOffice/Pages/Welcome.aspx

Or Caledon:

https://www.caledon.ca/en/government/mayor-and-council.aspx

Or your federal MP:

https://www.ourcommons.ca/members/en

(Bonus! Email the Region of Peel Transition Board and ask them to keep Peel Paramedics together:)

peeltransitionboard@ontario.ca

Every level of government has a part to play in improving our healthcare, even if they say that healthcare is provincial.

Please copy and paste the following:

Hello [Name], my name is [XXXX] and I am a concerned resident in [RIDING]. I am writing because I am deeply concerned about the direction of healthcare in the province and the lack of healthcare and hospital services in Brampton, Caledon, and Ontario at large. The healthcare inequity in our cities is staggering and it is only getting worse.

[Please add a personal story, opinion, question, or comment here]

Truly universal healthcare does not exist in a two-tier system, where wealth determines the accessibility of care, while the public system is starved of funding. We do not need new private operating rooms. Existing operating rooms are closed on evenings and weekends, or even permanently.

For-profit hospitals & clinics only take the fast, easy, profitable patients, not risky, complex cases. They also take their staff out of our local public hospitals. These hospitals are routinely billing OHIP as well as the patient, overcharging on patient prices by 3-10x the amount procedures cost, and upselling medically unnecessary procedures and tests. All of these practices are federally illegal under the Canada Health Act and morally wrong. They also charge OHIP more than public hospitals do. These charges are not being regulated and would be expensive to regulate. For-profit privatization is a grave threat to our cherished system of Canadian public health care for all & is more expensive.

Private hospitals and clinics have been shown to be less safe, less effective, and more expensive for both the patient and the government. They systematically extract profit from our tax dollars while masquerading as fiscally responsible. This is not good for anybody but the people profiting at the top.

Ontario funds our public hospitals at the lowest rate in Canada. The Ontario government underspent its own healthcare budget by $1.7 billion in 2022-2023, even while patients are waiting, our emergency departments & other vital services are closing, and our nurses & hospital staff are leaving by the thousands due to overwork, burnout & frustration.

The Ford government’s hospital privatization plan takes money away from our local public hospitals. It will be damaging to all public hospitals & particularly devastating to medium & smaller hospitals that lose surgeries, diagnostics, doctors, nurses & health professionals. 

Truly universal healthcare applies to everyone, including those who are uninsured, whether they are undocumented, temporary foreign workers, non-status migrants, those with status in process, those waiting for an unnecessary 3-month waiting period. These residents live and work here and they are human beings deserving of care, and migrants and newcomers are an essential part of our society and economy. Cutting Physician and Hospital Services for Uninsured Persons Program (PHUP) program that was started during Covid has delayed and prevented access to healthcare for people without insurance, lead to financial hardship and catastrophic medical bills, caused immense suffering, burdened our already-strained healthcare system, and caused moral distress and trauma to patients and providers.

  Truly universal healthcare does not allow an area with 827,500 people (Brampton and Caledon) to have one emergency room and only 645 hospital beds. We have the same number of emergency rooms that we did when William Osler was first built and Brampton had a population of 5,000 people. Brampton is 81% nonwhite, 53% not born in Canada, according to the 2021 census, and it is curious that we lag so far behind other cities in hospital services. The institutional neglect of the health of a city that is so overwhelmingly populated by people of colour, immigrants, migrants, and newcomers, is shameful.

This chart shows you how many hospitals and hospital beds we would need to add to our cities, just to get to the provincial, national, and OECD averages:

To get Brampton and Caledon to:	Beds Per Thousand People	# of Beds	# of Full Service Hospitals the Size of Brampton Civic we would need to build
Current levels	0.78 beds/1000 pop	645 beds	N/A
Ontario Average	2.33 beds/1000 pop	1,928 beds (1,283 more beds needed)	2 more hospitals needed
National Average (excluding Ontario)	3.2 beds/1000 pop	2,648 beds (2,003 more beds needed)	3.1 more hospitals needed
OECD (Developed Countries) Average	4.4 beds/1000 pop	3,972 beds (3,327 more beds needed)	4.6 more hospitals needed

If the beds aren’t there, the care isn’t there. This cannot continue.

Having only one fully functioning hospital in a city of our size is dangerous. There is a danger of delayed transport time with one hospital in a city with so much traffic. It is dangerous to limit the options of people in rural areas of Caledon who are already so far away, and even people in Brampton, and force them to seek treatment elsewhere. In a hospital that is so overloaded there is a danger of treatment mistakes and neglect from overworked workforce, and a danger of staff burnout, injury, and abuse, especially in a P3 hospital that has a private consortium giving away government contracts without adequate oversight to prevent corruption. Brampton Civic Hospital is considered the “birthplace of hallway healthcare” and has truly unacceptable wait times in the emergency room and for surgeries and tests. This puts our population at risk and widens health inequities.

It is laughable to call our healthcare universal while so many of us don’t have access, while our one hospital is so inadequate, and while those who can’t afford private clinics suffer and wait because of artificially created backlogs and defunding of the public healthcare system.

As a resident I demand:

1. A moratorium on private hospitals and clinics opening and an Integrity Commissioner investigation into healthcare privatization
2. Adequate funding of public healthcare (and for Ontario to spend its whole healthcare budget, and increasing wages to public healthcare workers in line with inflation.
3. I demand healthcare for all, including the immediate reinstatement  of Physician and Hospital Services for Uninsured Persons Program (PHUP) program, and study of expanding eligibility of OHIP to all Ontario residents, regardless of immigration status. I demand that Peel Memorial Centre have full testing and surgical capacity, and its beds be connected to its ER services. 
4. To get Brampton and Caledon to the Canadian Average for hospital beds to population by immediately starting to plan and build its 4th and 5th hospitals to keep up with population growth. These hospitals must be publicly run, not P3 hospitals, and have emergency rooms, fully equipped operating rooms, adequate testing facilities, and overnight beds. This would start with the allocation of land and funding for our third hospital, and expanding the capacity of Peel Memorial’s expansion.

I am proud of Canadian Universal Healthcare, or at least I used to be. We do not want an American style system of healthcare bankrupting and endangering people because of money. We are in a record affordability crisis, and we do not need private healthcare, inadequate funding of public healthcare, and denying healthcare to the uninsured making these inequities even wider. OHIP is a part of our social safety net, and we need it more than ever in these difficult times.

[Name]

[Postal Code]