CUPE has joined with the CFNU, NUPGE and SEIU Canada to call on the federal government to increase the Canada Health Transfer, while also demanding stronger national standards for how provinces spend the money.
As the Council of the Federation prepares to meet Friday, the coalition issued a statement urging the federal government to tighten rules to prevent provinces and territories from spending federal dollars in ways that weaken our universal health care system.
“Privatization, for-profit medical facilities, ‘experiments’ with for-profit care, and for-profit care delivered through virtual health care systems, should be red flags for us all,” say the presidents of the four unions. “We need to look no further than our patchwork systems of long-term care to see the damage done by chronic underfunding, the lack of national standards, and profit-based health care.”
The four unions together represent 635,000 health care workers nationwide.
Read the full statement here.