The People’s Health Movement is a broad network of health justice activists across the world, guided by the principles of the People’s Charter for Health. We have been involved in issues as wide-ranging as accessible primary care, the corporatisation of global agencies and the impact of extractive industries on community health. In Canada, we are a network of volunteers, with no central office or staffing, and limited resources for organising.
We understand health justice in its broadest forms: from access to formal biomedical care to the socioeconomic realities that shape our lives, from recovering Indigenous healing traditions to the physical environments in which we live. We know that class, race and gender are just few of the factors that have an impact on the way we experience our health and our illnesses, and the ways in which we are enabled and are disabled. We also live within an economic system that values certain forms of work and certain types of relationships with the environment – to the profit of shareholders, but to the detriment of our health. Laws render us invisible or illegal, attitudes accuse us of immorality or ignorance – but we know that current systems are designed to protect the interests of the very few, at the expense of the health of us all.
At the moment, PHM Canada has 4 working groups that are currently active and include the following:
- Health justice in anti-extractivist work
- Challenging white supremacy
- Canadian foreign aid and global health governance
- Anti-privatisation struggles
Read more about PHM-Canada’s activities.