The Canadian health minister confirms they have no plan to address ME

I forgot to say I understand Jen Brea et al., may be planning an educational film at some point. This would be great.

 

With our next Federal election just over a year away, it may be an opportunity - and enough time to get organized - to make ME an election issue.

Perhaps to build capacity / reach we'd partner with other illnesses / orgs that are marginalized like Lyme, fibro, etc so if would effectively be a 'marginalized / mis-treated illnesses' election issue. It dilutes the ME message but the bigger message would have much more push from communities behind it and we'd get out of talking in our bubble / to the choir.

There is a govt program that will pay the salary of a new hire (of a person on EI) for a non-profit for one year to work on a specific project. If a few orgs collaborated and each applied to this program, theoretically we could hire (and the govt pays) a handful of healthy full time folks to roll out a campaign.

 

Very interesting. How do we make this happen?

 

Great idea to access federal gov't funds to hire organizers; how about journalists, researchers of many stripes?

Student programs: any co-op programs out there for these students the ME community could engage with?

There are also provincial job creation programs.

So surprising, and yet not, given 3 decades of disdain, that governments don't see 580,000 pissed off people and supportive others as a gap in their votes. Why don't they court this community? I know...they don't care; don't see this number as a threat etc. However, Canada has 37 million; if we count just one supporter per pwME, that equals over 1.1 million, or 3% of the population. Maybe enough to make a difference. I also know many pwME in the community still need to find out about the government negligence within all countries, and this is a stumbling block. But, we're getting there with more and more mainstream press coverage. Just look at the push back in the press about "Afflicted", and all the press "Unrest" received.