Power in Coalition by Amanda; Tattersall

Author:Amanda; Tattersall [Tattersall, Amanda;]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: ebook, book
Publisher: Allen & Unwin
Published: 2010-09-06T14:00:00+00:00

Chapter 4

The Ontario Health Coalition

Imagine compelling your opponent to count the votes for and against an issue that you favor and that they have resisted. Every time they count a vote, they are measuring how much support you have and how much opposition they face. By tallying all the ballots they are calculating how out of touch they are.

Natalie Mehra, the coordinator of the Ontario Health Coalition (OHC) did exactly this. For some time she had intended to launch a citizens’ referendum in Ontario that would let people vote in support of public health care. In June 2005 she finally had her chance to organize a community plebiscite about a proposal to build a public-private partnership hospital in the area surrounding Niagara Falls.

Out of the scores of organizations working on health care in Ontario, only the OHC had the ability to carry out the plebiscite. The OHC brought together numerous groups that were predominantly based in Toronto — yet its plebiscite campaign reached far beyond the city. The coalition was provincewide because it was linked to local health coalitions, like the Niagara Health Coalition, scattered across dozens of the province’s towns.

In June 2005 in a community center in Niagara-on-the-Lake, government politicians counted the 12,700 out of 13,000 votes that opposed a public-private partnership hospital. The plebiscite seeded local awareness and galvanized the anger of the community, which demanded that the government should “build their hospital right.” Canadians once again had taken action to defend public health care, a national icon.

Between 2001 and 2006, the OHC consisted of eight unions and a wide variety of community organizations, including seniors’ organizations, the left-nationalist Council of Canadians, and approximately thirty-five active local health coalitions situated around the province. Although established by the Ontario Federation of Labour (OFL), the OHC operated at arm’s length from its participant organizations. Structurally it was unlike the public education coalition, which consistently remained under the control of the NSWTF, or the Grassroots Collaborative, whose strategies were spearheaded by community organizations. The OHC had a separate coalition office, staff, and a large number of diverse participant organizations, the most important of which were its locally based health coalitions.

The Ontario Health Coalition in Context

The Canadian neoliberal state— with the moderating force of a multiparty political system —has been somewhat open to popular influence. Unions and community organizations have made their mark on state policy. Yet in Canada, coalitions’ social-change victories are a more recent phenomenon than those in Australia — Canadian unions built a labor party half a century after their Australian counterparts. At the same time, progressive political power has been more successful in Canada than in the United States, particularly through Canadian unions’ participation in the New Democratic Party (NDP). The tendency for the NDP to achieve only minority-party status has meant that Canadian unions and community organizations have needed to mobilize public opinion as well as political relationships to achieve social reforms. This need for popular backing contributed to the development of Canadian coalition practice.

In Canada, union political influence was initially complicated by political and geographic fragmentation.

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