Posted: May 28, 2026
By: Marney Carmichael
Thousands of Ontario Health Coalition members and supporters marched Thursday to protest Premier Doug Ford’s hospital privatization and demand that the government return the funding to public hospitals.
They say more than 5,000 people marched on Queen’s Park, in a fight to protect health care from policies they say would devastate health care in Ontario.
Thousands of people walked to bring attention to what the coalition says is the provincial government’s plan to “redirect hundreds of millions of taxpayers’ dollars away from our public hospitals to private, for-profit clinics/hospitals.”
“Without question, the Ford government is attempting the biggest privatization of our public hospitals in Ontario’s history, unless we stop them,” says Natalie Mehra, executive director of the coalition.
The Ontario Health Coalition says that local hospitals have been pushed into deficit and forced by the Conservative government to make cuts.
People from across Ontario came to the protest, including from the Hamilton and Niagara regions.
Protestors marched from Union Station through downtown Toronto to Queen’s Park for the protest.
People had lined up early in the morning for trains to head to the rally from as far away as Windsor, Kingston, and Ottawa, including Aldershot Station in Burlington.
Protestors demand that the government addresses hospital wait times and commits to a multi-year plan to increase Ontario’s hospital funding to meet the average of the other provinces, and for the “restoration of public access to information and government records.”
Read more and see the video at CHCH News
