TORONTO, April 24, 2026 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) — On Saturday, April 25, local residents in seven communities will send a loud and clear message to the Ford government, as follows:

• Ottawa: 12 pm at the Human Rights Monument, 220 Elgin St.
• Windsor: 11 am outside MPP Andrew Dowie’s office, 5452 Tecumseh Rd. E.
• St. Catharines: 11 am near the Penn Centre at 221 Glendale Ave.
• Port Colborne: 1:30 pm at 64 Clarence St.
• Kitchener-Waterloo: 12 pm at the Waterloo Town Square, 75 King St.
• City of Kawartha Lakes: 12 pm outside MPP Laurie Scott’s office, 14 Lindsay St. N.
• Elmvale (Simcoe County): 11 am at the Elmvale Maple Syrup Festival (at the tent across from the arena)

Photo editors/TV: The protests will be very visual with big banners, signs and more.

The demonstrations this weekend are the first in a series. Across every geographic region of Ontario over the course of this year, local volunteers with the Coalition aim to mobilize 10,000 people to demand the Ford government stop privatizing our hospitals.

While his government has forced our local public hospitals into deficit and cuts, Ford is pouring hundreds of millions into private for-profit clinics and almost a billion per year into for-profit staffing agencies. To add insult to injury, the private clinics cost significantly more per surgery and the private staffing agencies charge double to triple more per hour, the Coalition reports.

Like the billions of public dollars for the private spa contract at Ontario Place, millions for the private jet, half-a-billion subsidizing corner store booze and so on, the Coalition is warning that the Ford government is pouring our money into private contracts while depriving the public of needed care.

No government has ever privatized Ontario’s public hospitals to the scale and scope that Ford is trying to do, warns the Coalition. Ontario’s public hospitals are funded at the lowest rate per person in Canada and have operating rooms, MRIs and other services that are sitting unused because they don’t have the funding to run them while Ford is shunting hundreds of millions of our public money to open redundant ORs and diagnostic suites in private clinics.

For further information, contact:
Natalie Mehra, Ontario Health Coalition executive director, (416) 230-6402; Salah Shadir, Ontario Health Coalition administration & operations director, (647) 648-5706.