Helen Zacharkiw isn’t giving up.
The longtime resident of northwest Winnipeg collected more than 4,000 of the 7,500 signatures on a petition in support of keeping the ER at Seven Oaks General Hospital open.
The signatures — which filled a four-inch binder nearly to bursting — were presented to Manitoba NDP leader Wab Kinew Tuesday.
“I’ve been in Garden City for 52 years. This is my hospital,” Zacharkiw said. “I fought before, when it was going to be closed many, many years ago, under the conservative government.”
“I took it upon myself to do the petition then, and I said I ain’t letting this one go either.”
The petition came as a surprise to Greg McFarlane, who founded the Save the Seven Oaks ER Coalition.
“I didn’t know that she was doing it — all of a sudden at the rally (in May), she comes up to me and she says ‘Excuse me sir, my name is Helen and I’ve collected 4,000 signatures myself,'” McFarlane said.
“We were just blown away. And then from there, momentum just came.”
McFarlane said since he found out what Zacharkiw was doing, he’s also helped collect more signatures, driving around northwest Winnipeg and filing them into the binder for today’s presentation.
“I spent a lot of time on my feet,” Zacharkiw said of her efforts over the past few months, noting she often spent up to five hours a day encouraging people to sign the petition. “People offered chairs and coffee and ice water and hamburgers and everything, to help me along so I wouldn’t quit.”
“A lot of people cried on my shoulder, gave me hugs, saying that the Seven Oaks Emergency and the ICU unit had saved their parent, or a brother or a sister, whatever the case was,” she continued. “I had teenagers — children as young as 11 and 12, because I asked their ages — and they had said they were very displeased about the ER closing.”
“So to me, that meant I had to work all the harder.”
Kinew plans to pass the stacks of paper onto Premier Brian Pallister as soon as possible — with the hope of having the plans to convert the emergency room at Seven Oaks into an urgent care centre in September reversed immediately.
“When we see the severity of what’s happening with the emergency room closures causing all sorts of chaos at other hospitals in Manitoba, I wish it weren’t a political issue to be quite honest,” he said. “I wish the government would just do the right thing and stop putting money ahead of people.”
The emergency room at Seven Oaks is slated to become an urgent care centre in September, following the same transition at the Concordia Hospital earlier this month.
The union representing staff at Seven Oaks has said its members are increasingly stressed about their job security leading up to the transition — as they have been issued deletion notices and made aware that they will have to select new positions, none of which the union says are full-time.