As the Immigrant Workers Centre, we raise our voices against the organized attack on public healthcare in Canada.
As the federal Liberal convention takes place, we say clearly: you cannot claim to defend public healthcare while overseeing its erosion as part of Mark Carney’s “Elbow’s up” strategy which is about corporate greed and privatization at the expense of public services.
There is no lack of resources—only political choices. Billions are being poured into military spending, while billions are cut from public services. Under the banner of “fiscal responsibility,” jobs are eliminated, care is reduced, and privatization advances.
This crisis is built on exclusion and exploitation. Undocumented migrants are denied access to healthcare, forced to live, work, and get sick in the shadows. Refugees are facing cuts and restrictions to already limited care. This is not a gap in the system—it is a deliberate policy choice.
At the same time, migrants make up a large share of the underpaid, precarious frontline workforce in healthcare. They clean hospitals, care for patients, and sustain the system through crisis after crisis—while being denied the care they themselves need. This is the logic of austerity: exploit our labour, deny our lives.
From Alberta’s Bill 11 to backroom deals at industry events like Première ligne en santé, the direction is clear: shift public care into private profit.
These attacks are connected. Cuts to refugee healthcare, the exclusion of undocumented migrants, and anti-migrant laws like Bill C-12 are all part of the same project: divide, exclude, and privatize.
We refuse this future.
We fight for a healthcare system that is truly public, universal, and accessible to all—without exception, regardless of status, and without fear.
Because when they deny care to migrants, they are setting the stage to deny care to everyone.
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