SOURIS — The line in the sand being drawn over health service cutbacks in rural P.E.I. sparked a major protest meeting here Thursday night with more than 200 people jamming the local hospital to fight back.

They filled the meeting room, they lined the halls and they blocked the stairwells, and while the mood was peaceful, the anger was palpable.

“I came back here to live, to raise a family . . . but the way things are being cut back so badly, it’s turning this place into a ghost town,’’ said Kyle MacDonald.

“We’re all taxpayers, but we’re being treated as second-class citizens.”

The government is scaling down the new high school here, has closed the walk-in clinic at the hospital and is now shutting down the dialysis unit.

It means about a dozen local residents will have to travel to Charlottetown three times a week for treatment but for many, it represents a slippery slope towards losing all services.

“It’s going to cost me an extra $200 a month to take dialysis now,’’ said Nathan Bushey.

“Not to mention it will take up the entire day to do it. Some of these patients here are on social assistance and sending us all to town three times a week only clogs up their system.”

Bushey insisted the protest/petition was not a Souris versus Province House arm wrestle, and noted a public meeting was being held in Alberton aimed at similar goals to stop the bleeding of rural health services.

The 28-year-old said he’s even been contacted by Charlottetown dialysis patients who agree the funnelling of all patients into the QEH will only overwhelm the service.

“I hope we can form a coalition of all rural people and patients being affected on this Island and demonstrate a much greater show of force,” he said.

Moderator and businessman Alan MacPhee insisted the meeting was not a political battle, but rather a fight to save the services of rural P.E.I.  

However, some well-known Liberal supporters didn’t mince words when they took to the podium microphone.

“You have to be a little more aggressive than signing a sheet,” insisted Lloyd Soloman. “As far as I’m concerned, we should sue Health P.E.I. and Mr. (Keith) Dewar and make him accountable. It’s not a political issue, it’s a human issue and we don’t know what the next thing will be that is taken from our hospital.”

The wages of top-ranking officials were published in The Guardian that very day, and some like Health P.E.I. CEO Keith Dewar — making almost $200,000 a year — were verbally burned in effigy.

Mayor David MacDonald said if Bushey was a civil servant and got travel allowance, his trips to Charlottetown three times a week for an entire year would add up to $11,000.

Photographer and community activist Waldron “Wally” Leard, who is battling cancer, said government is contributing to rural decay.

“We are definitely being looked after by the health-care people in this province, but not by the health-care administration,” he said.

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