OTTAWA—Dr. Mark Tyndall rarely wears his white lab coat while working at the hospital, but he knew it would make an impression when he barged onto the race track.

“It’s symbolic. It’s the only time I wear it,” Tyndall, head of infectious diseases at the Ottawa Hospital, said with a chuckle Friday morning shortly after interrupting a Conservative government photo op to protest recent cuts to health benefits for refugees.

Bal Gosal, the federal minister of state for sport, had just wrapped up announcing $4.7 million for Athletics Canada — Olympic and Paralympic track-and-field athletes lined up nicely in front of a poster advertising the Economic Action Plan — at an Ottawa race track with a hearty “Let’s go, Canada!” when he looked up from his notes on the podium.

Tyndall had made his entrance.

Over the past few weeks, a handful of doctors and medical students associated with the group Canadian Doctors for Refugee Care have interrupted ministerial announcements to raise awareness about recent changes to the Interim Federal Health Program, which provides temporary costs of medical coverage to refugee claimants.

Gosal alone was interrupted at three different events last week and his spokeswoman did not respond to a request for comment.

“There is a new way of thinking in medicine, which is that doctors, because of their stature, privilege and expertise, have a duty to speak out and cannot remain silent when the government places conditions on patients that make them sick,” said Dr. Philip Berger, chief of family and community medicine at St. Michael’s Hospital in Toronto, who had heckled Gosal during a Pan Am Games announcement at Nathan Phillips Square on Tuesday.

Still, there is a difference between organizing a news conference and crashing one, and these interrupting doctors confess to feeling some unease over doing something so bold.

“It’s not a comfortable situation for me to be doing this, but we feel that we have been left with few other choices and nobody’s listening,” Tyndall said Friday.

A government source said that while Immigration Minister Jason Kenney has not met Canadian Doctors for Refugee Care, he has discussed the issue with other medical organizations.

Canadian Doctors for Refugee Care stage the protests by sharing the publicly available details of ministerial announcements and photo ops on a listserv and asking for volunteers in the area to show up.

They know they have to be concise and work quickly.

“I know that I’ll have like two lines before I’m shuffled away, so I want to make my quick sound byte that this is a very big concern for us who are treating refugees,” Tyndall explained.

There are also some rules of engagement.

Family physician Dr. Doug Gruner, for example, pointed out he avoided interrupting triathlon champion Simon Whitfield, who last Thursday was revealed as the Canadian flag-bearer for the 2012 Olympic Games in London.

Berger said the group also decides on a case-by-case basis how and when a particular announcement should be interrupted and if it is about help for seniors or abused children, for example, it might not be interrupted at all.

Steve Outhouse, director of communications for federal Health Minister Leona Aglukkaq, said he appreciated it when a family doctor in Ottawa, waited until the minister had finished speaking when she came to an announcement about funding for health-care data on June 27.

“She was very respectful,” Outhouse said of Dr. Megan Williams, who waited for the minister to finish and for reporters to ask their questions before rising to ask her own.

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Outhouse said preparing for the protesting doctors is not much different than preparing for the possibility of any other unexpected interruption.

“There had been a couple of other incidents so we knew it was a possibility, but you go into any event knowing it’s always technically a possibility anyway and the minister was ready to talk about our position,” Outhouse said.

“There will be more of these to come, by the way, so watch out,” Berger said Friday.

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