The provincial Conservative Party government, headed by premier Ralph Klein, has put forward legislation that would give private, for-profit clinics the right to perform a significant number of surgical and other services currently available free or at low cost through the public system.

The legislation, known as Bill 11, has been the focus of ongoing protests. The day before the Edmonton rally a similar protest, held in Calgary, Alberta, attracted some 3,000 people.

The two rallies have been the largest actions to defend publically funded medical care to date in Canada. Nurses, farmers, youth, older and retired workers, and others took part in the actions, many of them with homemade signs.

The presence of many union members, some of them engaged in strikes and other struggles, marked the rallies. One of the signs read, "Better a left-wing nut than a right-wing screw," referring to a statement made by premier Ralph Klein denouncing the protesters as "left-wing nuts." Many of the participants wore ribbons with nuts attached to them.

A feature of the rally was the presence of groups of farmers and rural residents who came in buses from small communities in the province.

Many people are actively campaigning to stop the bill, including through door-to-door canvassing and lunchtime and after work vigils at the provincial legislature in Edmonton.

The rally speakers included actress Shirley Douglas. She is the daughter of Thomas Douglas, founding leader of the social-democratic Cooperative Commonwealth Federation (CCF) government in Saskatchewan that was brought to power in 1952 by the movement of workers and farmers in the prairies demanding the first public health-care system in North America. This gain won by working people in Saskatchewan was later extended to all the provinces and became known as the Canada Health Act.

Douglas's statement that the government "forgets how hard we fought for this, and how hard we are going to fight to keep it," brought the crowd to its feet.

Other speakers included Dr. Harold Swanson, a surgeon whose hospital privileges were revoked after he publicly spoke out against Bill 11, and other opponents of the bill.

Some of the speakers presented the attacks on health care by the capitalist government in Ottawa and the various provincial governments as being examples of "opening up" to "American-style" health care.

The fighting spirit at the rallies reflected a deepening resistance of workers and farmers in this region, and their willingness to fight against the effects of the capitalist economic crisis. Journalists at Calgary Herald, members of the Communications, Energy and Paperworkers Union (CEP) who have been on strike since last November, set up an information table at the Calgary rally and distributed material about their fight. Some 100 press operators and production workers, members of Graphic Communications International Union Local 34M, vote this week on whether to join the strike. The workers rejected the company's final offer by a 92 percent margin.

Three new strikes began in Alberta over a six-day span in late March. At a Canbra canola processing plant in Lethbridge, 165 workers, who are members of the United Food and Commercial Workers, struck against a $4 wage cut. Brewers Distributor, a warehousing and transportation company in Edmonton jointly owned by Molson and Labatt, has locked out 104 workers organized by Retail Wholesale-Canadian Auto Workers after they refused to take a 30 percent cut in wages and benefits. The strike vote was 100 percent solid. And 120 paperworkers who are members of the CEP at a Weyerhauser plant in Edson, who have been without a contract for a year, are fighting for improved pensions and against attempts to take away paid lunch breaks.

It is in the context of struggles such as these, and the devastating farm crisis in Canada and around the world, that the fight to defend Medicare as a social right is taking place.

Francis Olsen, a farmer from Red Deer, said in an interview at the Medicare rally in Edmonton that he was there because "the banks kicked me out of my house. They kicked me off my land, and now four of my children have moved from Canada because of the way they treat us here."

Coinciding with the strikes and the fight to defend health care, the city of Edmonton sponsored a "Law Day" at the Edmonton courthouse April 15. There, the Edmonton Police Service tactical squad, clad in full military gear, set off smoke bombs in a demonstration of their ability to use armed force in "civil disturbances."

Vuk Krcmar-Grkavac is a member of the Young Socialists.  
 
 
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