Ontario’s NDP Leader Slams McGuinty Government Over Health Care Cuts In Niagara

By Doug Draper

Families across the Niagara region have a “right to good-quality health care close to home”  and not more cuts to health care that put them to risk, said Ontario’s NDP leader Andrea Horwath during a town hall meeting this April 6 in Niagara Falls, Ontario.

Joy Russell, a Fort Erie resident and member of the Yellow Shirt Brigade, a Niagara citizen group fighting for hospital services in the region, speaks as Ontario NDP Leader Andrea Horwath and Welland Riding federal NDP member Malcolm Allen listen on.

“Hospitals in the Niagara region are buckling under the strain of the government’s decision to shut down local emergency rooms,” said Horwath of the provincially appointed Niagara Health System board’s decision to close emergency rooms at hospitals in Fort Erie and Port Colborne to save little more than $1 million annually – even as it passes the cost of additional ambulance services, estimated at more than $3 million, to send emergency patients off to hospitals in Welland and Niagara Falls on to Niagara’s regional government and its property taxpayers.

“Dalton McGuinty (Ontario’s Liberal government premier) is handing out $4.5 billion in corporate tax cuts but says the well has run dry for local health care,” added Horwath. “Families deserve better.”

Horwath stressed that the 1.5 per cent increase in hospital funding announced in McGuinty’s recent budget (less than the association representing hospitals across the province insisted is needed, just to sustain existing services) falls below the rate of inflation and will mean hospital boards like the NHS will be forced to make even more cuts.

“Corporations and well-heeled executives are raking it in while our hospitals are struggling and families are being asked to pay more under the HST (the McGuinty government’s soon-to-be-implemented harmonized sales tax),” she said. “It is pretty clear Dalton McGuinty has his priorities reversed. It’s time he started putting the needs of Niagara families first.”

Ontario NDP Leader Andrea Horwath takes notes as Niagara residents express concern over hospital cuts in region.

Horwath then went on to listen to a host of ordinary citizens, retired nurses and doctors and others who told her over and over again that the hospital system in Niagara is in crisis.

Wayne Gates, a Niagara Falls president of Local 199 of the Canadian Auto Workers, expressed concern that people working for the NHS are being threatened with retribution if they speak out against cuts to hospital services while NHS administrator are commanding “six-figure salaries.”

Others, including Port Colborne resident Pat Scholfield, condemned the NHS for closing services in Niagara’s southern tier while building the only new hospital for which the region is likely to receive funding for decades to come in west St. Catharines. She went on to argue that populations of people in Niagara’s southern tier were not considered in the NHS’s decision of where this new hospital, which will ultimately be the centre for most hospital services in Niagara) will go.

Where this new hospital will go (and this is Doug Draper of Niagara At Large making this point) is in the riding of Jim Bradley, a Liberal MPP for St. Catharines and an all-to-loyal minister in the cabinet of the McGuinty’s government.

Good for Bradley and his constituents, I guess, and to hell with the rest of Niagara.

(Click on www.niagaraatlarge.com for Niagara At Large and more news and commentary of interest and concern to residents across our binational Niagara region.)