Shut Down CANSEC and The Council of Canadians co-organized a bus tour on Wednesday May 27, 2026, the first day of the CANSEC arms show in Ottawa. Thirty-nine community members registered for this educational excursion.
The promotion on social media highlighted: “Join our ‘Fund Healthcare, Not Warfare’ Ottawa Bus Tour to call for public money to support healthcare, not conflict. The tour is organized by the Council of Canadians and the Shut Down CANSEC campaign, and endorsed by the Ottawa Health Coalition, the Canadian Friends Service Committee and the Ottawa chapter of the Council of Canadians.”
The promotion further explained: “Together, we’ll travel to Ottawa and learn more about how the fight for public healthcare and against militarism are intertwined. This 90-minute bus tour … will include brief stops at Ottawa-area institutions that are profiting from the unprecedented billions being spent on weapons systems, like the Canadian Association of Defence and Security Industries (CADSI), Lockheed Martin, and the CANSEC ‘defence, security and emerging technology’ arms show at the EY Centre.”
Featured speakers at key stops during the bus tour included Laura Shantz, Senior Advisor for Advocacy and Campaigns at the Canadian Association of Professional Employees (CAPE) and Amy Roberts, the president of the Ontario Nurses Association Local 83, which represents nurses at The Ottawa Hospital.
The United Nations recognizes health and care workers as “key protectors of the right to health, and thus human rights defenders.” UN Special Rapporteur Tlaleng Mofokeng says they are both “rights holders” and “protectors of the rights of health seekers, since both aspects are interlinked.”
While health care professionals in Canada face a normalization of “hallway medicine” and a prioritization of billions of dollars for the military and weapons purchases, Front Line Defenders has documented that “those defending the right to health and the right to life as doctors, nurses, or ambulance workers, those exposing and documenting war crimes as journalists, and those providing humanitarian support as volunteers or employees of aid agencies were all specifically targeted by Israeli bombs or guns.”
The bus tour visited both The Ottawa Hospital that announced in April 2026 it would be cutting 400 jobs, the majority of which are nursing positions, including about 200 registered nurses, and other frontline health workers, as well as the corporate office of Lockheed Martin, a US-based company that manufactures the Hellfire R9X missile implicated in the bombing of the al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza City in 2023.
More photos from bus tour
