On Friday afternoon, I spoke over the phone with Dr. Philip Berger, one of the organizers behind Canadian Doctors for Refugee Care, about the recent demonstrations by doctors against the Harper government’s changes to refugee health care. The following is a condensed transcript of that conversation.

Q: How organized are these demonstrations?

A: Well, they’re only organized to the extent that when we find out about events, we pass on the information to our physician contacts in the particular locale where the event is happening and leave it up to them to decide if they’re able to show up on short notice and how to conduct themselves—with certain guidelines, like to be respectful of the event itself. Tthe purpose is not to disrupt the event or to show any antagonism to the Pan-Am Games or the Olympics or seniors or kids or anything like that, we make it very clear, then to make a judgment about whether they should interrupt the minister speaking or wait until afterwards, it depends on the situation. But to clearly get our message across that if the government refuses to speak to doctors, including organized national medical organizations, then we’re left with no choice but to use these venues, these public venues.

Q: The decision to pursue this, was this based on something? Was there an example of this having been done in the past? Where did the idea come from?

A: The idea is it’s a number of different strategies that our group is pursuing at a national level, to be quite frank. The first action similar to this was the sit-in at minister Joe Oliver’s constituency office on May 11. That idea originated amongst a few of us in Toronto. This is just a natural extension of that sort of action. Continue…