Anna Lyall never saw herself as the typical protest person. Flyers, chants, hand-made posters. In her 42 years as an Ottawa-Carleton District School Board educator, Lyall mostly stuck to the four walls of her classrooms.
I was a teacher this is not my forte, the retired teacher said. But when I see what is happening to the regular person, I had to act.
Lyall was among more than 150 people who gathered at the Canadian Tribute to Human Rights near city hall on Elgin Street on Saturday, April 25, to protest health-care and education issues under Premier Doug Ford provincial government. The event marked the first in a series of provincewide demonstrations, with Ottawa being one of seven Ontario communities hosting rallies.
The protests merged two back-to-back demonstrations. The first, organized by the Ottawa Health Coalition, focused on the privatization and systemic underfunding of public Ottawa hospitals. The coalition argues this has forced hospitals into deficits and cuts in recent months. The most recent example was earlier this month when The Ottawa Hospital announced it was cutting three per cent of its workforce, which as of 2024-2025 included 13,281 employees, among them 5,240 nurses.
We consider this to be an unprecedented crisis in the history of public health care, and it is a crisis that we need to mobilize on a mass basis to ensure we do not keep electing politicians and parties that are not committed to public health care, Ottawa Health Coalition spokesperson Kevin Skerrett told the Ottawa Citizen on Saturday.
Skerrett emphasized that the single biggest issue in health care right now is the systematic underfunding of the system in Ontario. He said this is leading to an unprecedented crisis with embarrassingly low quality services that will result in worse health-care outcomes.
The second demonstration, held around 1 p.m., protested against OSAP grant cuts and changes to freedom of information laws. Velvet LeClair attended wearing a paper mache face of Doug Ford during the second rally.
Local residents were not the only ones who showed up. Protester Ross Sutherland made the trip from Kingston, where he is co-chair of the Kingston Health Coalition. Sutherland, a retired nurse of more than 25 years, described the current health-care landscape under Ford as facing the most serious threat to our public health-care system in decades.
We have had problems for a long time with underfunding and privatization, but Doug Ford has now made a conscious effort to transfer funds from public hospitals into private for-profit clinics, Sutherland said. He added that people are getting less care but somehow paying more. As a retired nurse, he recalled seeing hallway medicine countless times, where patients are treated in hospital hallways with portable dividers because hospitals lack sufficient rooms.
Lyall, who handed out flyers, chanted with the crowd and held a handmade poster that eventually flew off, summed up the sentiment: It is time to demand better.
