False propaganda

Dear sir:
I just read Health and Long-Term Care minister Elizabeth Witmer’s letter to the editors of the newspapers across Northern Ontario praising the job her government has done in health care in Northern Ontario.
I don’t know what information her propaganda experts are feeding her at Queen’s Park but it bears no resemblance to the growing health care problems people face in Northern Ontario communities.
She says there are more doctors than ever. I invite her to Red Lake, to Kenora or Dryden, or Sioux Lookout, Ignace, Atikokan, Thunder Bay, Sudbury, or Kirkland Lake, and make her outrageous statement. The fact is tens of thousands of people in Northern Ontario communities no longer have access to a family physician.
Then we have the nursing shortage that has become a very serious problem in communities like Dryden and Kenora. Despite her announcements and re-announcements that she has hired thousands of new nurses, it isn’t happening–because she laid off thousands of nurses and then insulted all nurses by suggesting they were “out of date like hoola-hoop workers.”
The nursing shortage is becoming worse and as thousands of nurses retire over the next four years, the problem will grow.
Finally, there is the “health care apartheid” that Northern Ontario cancer patients experience as a direct result of her government’s misguided policies.
Cancer patients in southern Ontario have all of the travel costs paid when they must travel to access cancer treatment. But cancer patients across Northern Ontario, who have to travel further to access cancer treatment and under the most difficult of circumstances, are denied full payment of their travel costs.
Minister Witmer, don’t insult the people of Northern Ontario by feeding us false and phony propaganda about the state of our health care system in the north. If you really want to see what is happening, come to our communities and talk to the parents who can’t access a family doctor for their children, and talk to the nurses who are burning out because there are too few of them to staff our hospitals.
Come and talk to the cancer patients who regularly drive four or five hours to access cancer treatment and pay for the lion’s share of transportation, hotel, and food costs out of their own pockets while you pay everything for cancer patients from southern Ontario.
I would be quite willing to schedule your trip, minister. When would you like to visit?
Yours truly,
Howard Hampton
Ontario NDP leader