"There comes a time when one cannot sit on the sidelines and let it happen," said Giroux.
Giroux was running an event in North Bay in conjunction with a much larger protest taking place at Queen's Park hosted by the Ontario Health Coalition.
"When conscience and community compel one to action," he said, "I believe we are there.
"It is like we have reached a tipping point. If we do nothing, we accept the ever-accelerating destruction of the public health care it took generations of Canadians to build."
Giroux believes healthcare privatization will have a ripple effect through generations.
"We are fighting for our kids, we are fighting for our grandkids and our great-grandkids," continued Giroux.
"We never had to pay OHIP, now it is under the employer but they are going to have to start paying more than we do as seniors and that is not fair."
Giroux says it has everything to do with greed.
"Doug Ford's government is now transferring more than a billion dollars of our public money each year away from our public non-profit health care over to private for-profit interests like for-profit clinics and hospitals, for-profit staffing agencies, for-profit long-term care chains, and so on," he stated.
However, Fedeli, who was not present at the protest calls the Ontario Health Coalition, "an out-of-touch special interest group."
"Facts matter, the Coalition has spent the last decade accomplishing nothing while standing ideologically opposed to the innovation taking place in the health care system, our government is taking bold action to connect more people to the care they need when they need it," Fedeli stated bluntly in a release.
"Under the leadership of Premier Ford, our government has made record investments in our publicly funded healthcare system. Since 2018, we have increased the healthcare budget by over 31% billion dollars, investing over $85 billion into the system this year alone, this includes a 4 per cent increase to the hospital sector and, is the total healthcare budget of almost every other province and territory combined (Canadian Institute of Healthcare Information).
"Through our government’s Your Health plan, we are continuing to take action to build on the progress we have achieved including having a record-breaking year in 2023, adding 17,000 new nurses and 2,400 new physicians to our healthcare workforce, achieving the shortest wait times for surgeries in Canada, eliminating a 180,000 person PAP test backlog while returning the surgical backlog to pre-pandemic levels and making historic investments in pediatric and primary care."
