Universal healthcare in a pandemic must mean that everyone can access testing, treatment, vaccination, hospital stays and telehealth without barriers or fear, regardless of location or immigration status.

Personal Protective Equipment must be readily available to those on the frontlines of care: ie all healthcare, janitorial, and personal support workers.

The government must guarantee an ample supply of PPEs by repurposing factories to manufacture them. Some bedding and apparel businesses have already done this: but it should not be left to the market.

Shelters and prisons lack space and health services, making homeless and incarcerated people doubly vulnerable. Overcrowding must not be a death sentence: we must expand care immediately.

Incarcerated people with existing health risks must be released into the care of family and community.

Declare harm reduction programmes life-saving services, expand their funding and outreach during the crisis and beyond.

The pandemic has strained access to contraception, pregnancy care, and abortions.

During the emergency and beyond, 100% of the cost for all contraception must be covered, and barriers to surgical and medical abortion must be removed – in every community, including remote and rural regions.

If the federal government can float the entire economy for months, it has the resources to restore public health care after decades of austerity.

That means crisis-level federal dollars to re-open facilities and beds, ensure equal access and care everywhere, and prepare for future pandemics.

It also means freeing Health Canada from corporate money, and increasing its power to keep healthcare public and develop vaccines.

The pandemic has shown us the deadly risk of market competition in essential medical supplies. The federal government must create a local, public medical equipment industry.

This will create good, unionized jobs and make sure we have the masks, ventilators, and other medical tools we need before the next crisis hits.

We must have a full national public drug plan, with no hidden costs, for everyone.

For-profit health facilities – including blood collection – must be banned.

We must end health discrimination by urgently creating a network of community health centres in poor neighbourhoods for primary and preventative medicine.

The death toll is unacceptable: priority testing, PPE, and treatment for everyone living in, working in, or visiting long term care.

We need an immediate, significant, and permanent boost to staffing at long term care facilities.

Staff must be permanent, paid a lot more, and should work in a single location.

Home Care workers must be better paid and protected too.

Our society treats its wisest members as disposable. We have contracted-out elder care to slash spending. The result has been countless deaths in the pandemic, and we have learned that care workers are almost as vulnerable as the people they care for.

Long term and home care must be taken into public ownership, and the essential workers who provide it must be protected and well paid.

It is long past time for our health care system to be truly universal and comprehensive. If we believe that access to doctors and hospitals without payment is a human right, then why are some parts of our bodies left out?

Eye care, dental, and mental health are fundamental to our well-being, and must be brought into the public health system.

Big Pharma invests in the most profitable drugs – not the most needed. As a result, life-saving medicines are either too expensive or simply not developed. This can include vaccines and testing.

We need a public option – a national pharmaceutical company to develop and provide drugs at low cost to all who need them.

The pandemic highlighted both the vulnerability of drug users in times of crisis, as well as the opportunities for safe drug distribution and support from health workers.

De-criminalization of all drug use is long overdue. It must be accompanied by easy access to health support and a safe, regulated supply for drug users to eliminate toxic additives and end overdose deaths.