The Ontario Government’s draft plan to ration access to at-capacity critical-care is discriminatory and must be revised immediately, said the CUPE Ontario and Joel Harden, NDP MPP for Ottawa Centre and the Critic for Accessibility and Persons with Disabilities.
“The fact that the draft plan says that doctors will look at your short-term mortality risk or your capacity for self-care to decide if you get access to limited intensive care units is nothing more than blatant discrimination against people with disabilities,” said Fred Hahn, President of CUPE Ontario. “This dangerously violates the foundational rights of Ontarians our members care for and the rights of many of our members themselves.”
While Health Minister Christine Elliott recently said that Ontario may not need to resort to rationing, due to reduced demand for ICUs, concerns raised by CUPE Ontario, the Ontario Human Rights Commission (OHRC), disability organizations, and the six bioethicists on the government’s advisory Bioethics Table remain.
“I’m not reassured by that at all,” said Michele Gardner, member of CUPE Ontario’s Workers with Disabilities Committee. “This discriminatory triage protocol can still be used at any time. It makes it clear that people with disabilities are at risk of not getting the critical-care they need because of explicitly biased criteria.”
“The protocol must be revised to remove any discrimination and we must be consulted moving forward,” added Gardner. “The OHRC has raised the problem of lack of consultation, and so have the six members of the bioethics table, who rightly said that without it this government is only intensifying the vulnerability of people with disabilities.”
“More than a year has passed since over 200 community organizations wrote to the Ford government urging it to remove disability discrimination from its triage protocol. The response so far has been silence,” said Harden. “It’s time to stop the secrecy surrounding critical care triage and for the Ford government to remove disability discrimination from its protocol.”