ONA members, including Elisha Vank, Sara Zinkie and Leigh Anne Cecchetto, spent three hours at Sudbury’s Northern Lights Festival Boréal this past July to garner public support and hand out an array of goodies, including snacks and stickers.
Fruitful, fun and fulfilling are just three f-words our northern members could use to describe their participation in Sudbury’s Northern Lights Festival Boréal this past July.
“Regional Political Action Committee [Region 1] members organized our participation in the festival as part of ONA’s Community Month of Action events that members in all parts of Ontario were participating in to stop the privatization of health-care services and support safe staffing ratios,” explains ONA239 member (health-care professional group) Penny Jacob, referring to the petitions ONA is circulating with these key demands.
“Members from our Local and ONA13 attended the event, but we also had help from ONA2 and ONA12 during the planning stages.”
During one day of this annual summer event, the second time ONA has participated, Canada’s longest-running outdoor music festival, these dedicated northern members set up an ONA table, complete with petitions, posters, treats, stickers and other goodies, and went about talking to attendees about our health-care system – with tremendous success.
Many of them talked about long wait times, closed emergency rooms and having to pay for health-care services to get the care they needed.
“We had six members who participated in our three-hour event, speaking to a variety of people from all over Ontario who had come to Sudbury for the festival,” says Jacob, who is also a member of ONA’s Regional Political Action Committee for Region 1 (northern Ontario). “Many of them talked about long wait times, closed emergency rooms and having to pay for health-care services to get the care they needed. We had a lot of positive engagement with the public.”
And because of that engagement, these members were also able to gather an incredible 311 signatures for our petition!
“It was very empowering to know that these issues are a concern for Ontarians,” Jacob notes, “but frustrating [another F-Word!] that the Ford government is continuing to cut health-care spending.”
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