PCWO 91st AGM - April 2014

Report on the Annual General Meeting at the Provincial Council of Women of Ontario

The PCWO annual AGM took place on April 26th-27th, 2014 at the Holiday Inn Toronto Downtown Centre.

            The meeting was opened by the president of the PCWO, Mary Potter. It was a full day of reports from the vice presidents and a lively discussion of the Resolutions. There were 16 delegates present from St. Catharines, Ottawa, London, and Burlington; including the president of the NCWC, Denise Mattok. TAWC member Sr. Sheila McAuliffe as vice-president of Economics for the PCWO and past-president of TACW, Connie Zboch also attended.

            The theme of the conference was the Canada Health Act and the guest speaker was Kim Johnson, Campaign Chairman of the Ontario Health Coalition. The group works to improve the public health system. Kim talked about the Federal government’s Health Accord which expired in March 2014. The government will now fund health care at 6% a year to 2017 and reduce funds to Ontario by 36 billion dollars over the next 10 years. The province will be responsible for its own funding which probably will include fees to patients. As an example she said 18,500 beds have been cut from our hospitals over the past few years. She also explained about ‘wait times’ for certain procedures; i.e. cataract surgery, MRI’s and the imperfect partnership of private/public services where the hospitals prefer to send patients to private clinics. Funding is the big problem, as well as shortages of health care workers due to low wages in some fields.

            On a lighter side, funds were raised by Gracia Janes as auctioneer for items donated by the delegates.

            Later the delegates met for dinner in the ‘Rosedale Room’ and the speaker was Wendy Thompson from her company “Happy Being Me”. The conference continued on Sunday until noon, followed by a Post-AGM Board Meeting.

Connie Zboch