Mayor Wayne Redekop, June 8, 2023, VOL. 4 ISSUE 21
This week’s announcement by Niagara Health that the Urgent Care Centres in Fort Erie and Port Colborne will be reduced to 12 hours beginning July 5, 2023, is just one more bitter pill to swallow for the residents of our communities. It is one more infuriating stop on the journey begun by the provincial government and implemented by Niagara Health 25 years ago.
Most residents know the story of how Douglas Memorial Hospital came into existence. On his death at age 83 on August 30, 1929, Dr. William Douglas (who was born, raised, lived and died in the same house on the Niagara Boulevard at the bottom of Bertie St.), left the unheard sum of $600,000 to build and maintain a hospital for the residents of the Fort Erie area. The hospital opened its doors on July 3, 1931. It is said that Dr. Douglas was generous with his time and his service to those in need of medical attention. Service to others, not money, was his motivation.
Since 1947, beginning in Saskatchewan, provinces began to provide universal hospital care to residents. By 1961, all provinces in Canada had agreed to provide publicly funded in-patient hospital and diagnostic services. The following year, Saskatchewan introduced a universal medical insurance plan to provide doctors’ services to all residents. This was quickly followed by all other provinces, including Ontario, so that universal health care across the country was a reality by 1972. Universal health care – the ability of every Canadian to receive required publicly-funded health care services anywhere in the country – has become a cherished value for all Canadians. But by the mid-1990’s, cracks began to appear in the structure as the strain of the cost of expanding services and advances in medicine grew. The era of “rationalizing” hospital services in Canada to balance provincial budgets began, ironically starting in Saskatchewan.
These government initiatives to cut health care services have never been popular anywhere in Canada. The program is always the same: a plan to reduce services is introduced by the government, the public protests, communities rally, the government ignores the public and the cuts proceed. Hospitals closed, emergency rooms down-graded to urgent care centres, urgent care centres closed, in-patient services cut or reduced on the road to being cut. Five thousand people gathered at the Leisureplex in Fort Erie in 1997 to voice objections to the government’s proposed Hospital Restructuring Plan and 5,200 gathered at the same facility in 2009 to object to the Niagara Health System’s Hospital Improvement Plan to no effect. The sad message: people are not the priority.
Until recently, the rationale has been to save money or to balance the provincial budget. The unintended consequence is the current predicament – lack of human resources to provide the services that residents need. Ontario and Canada are in a health care services emergency. We live in one of the wealthiest provinces in Canada, which is one of the wealthiest countries in the world. Yet successive governments have failed to recognize the gathering storm clouds. They have failed to plan for and implement the policies that would have ensured that Ontario had the doctors, nurses, health care workers necessary to provide the health care services that residents require. In fairness, the lack of foresight and planning is not limited to Ontario – the entire country is in a health care emergency. But the government shrugging its shoulders, letting local health care networks take the blame for service reductions, paving a path for private clinics that strip health care workers from the public system and implementing half-measures to deal with the crisis or failing to recognize the value of those who care for us when we are ill do not make the grade.
The provincial government is implementing extraordinary policies to address what it refers to as a housing crisis. The population of Ontario is expected to grow significantly over the next 3 decades, so we need to plan to provide the housing that will be required. One wonders if it has occurred to the government that the same increased population will require health care services, not to mention schools. An emergency requires a response. When it comes to health and hospital care, the focus has to be people. It is far past time for the provincial government, regardless of stripe, to begin to focus on the residents of Ontario, develop and implement policies that will provide the human resources and funding necessary to meet the health care needs of the residents and support its health care systems and the communities that they serve. It is time to listen to the public.
The challenge is daunting, but the Town Council is working to ensure that our residents will have the health care services that they need and deserve. That includes on-going dialogue with a variety of partners, including our Indigenous community and Niagara Health, establishing a business case that identifies and provides a plan to meet those needs and pushing the provincial government to consider new policies and work with us to address those needs. Our focus is and will always be people. We need our residents to continue to speak out on behalf of our community.
