Op-Eds
Nothing is more dangerous than an idea.
Émile Chartier is credited with those words or similar, finishing with “…when it’s the only one we have.”
Canada has tried for nearly 80 years to implement “national pharmacare”—defined here as a fully public national drug insurance plan—without success. We should ask why.
One reason is an unrelenting insistence that only a fully public plan will work. Fifty years ago that may have been true. When Ottawa didn’t act, we found an alternative: provinces and employers stepped in.
Between us and a good-quality universal drug insurance plan lie four problems, all of which matter right now. The Liberal-NDP supply-and-confidence agreement promises national pharmacare…
Canadian governments’ lack of transparency is a high-profile concern – and for good reason. Alongside such problems as bureaucratic circumvention of freedom of information laws and ministers responding to questions in legislatures or from the media with mechanical talking points, government finances are far too opaque.
Which brings us to the pandemic of 2020. COVID-19 was not only a health and economic crisis, it was a fiscal crisis. It prompted unprecedented jumps in government spending and borrowing. But how much exactly was going where? We don’t know.
Two years have passed since our federal, provincial and territorial governments closed their books on the fiscal year that ran from April 1, 2020, to March 31, 2021, with…
Following passage of the Ford government’s Bill 60, Ontario’s ministry of health now has the option to contract out to independent clinics the provision of certain kinds of health-care services normally provided in hospitals. Its opponents have cast the bill as favouring “privatization” and as a threat to the Canadian model of public health care. An emotionally charged television commercial commissioned by the Ontario Public Service Employees’ Union (OPSEU) conjures up a dystopian future where stone-faced capitalists in dark suits push a gurney with a teary-eyed post-surgery patient through dim hospital corridors and present her with a touch screen that she must push to pay for pain relief. In case anyone missed the message, the camera…
This past May, six family physicians in a Kingston, Ont., practice retired, leaving no successors to refill a prescription, check out a child’s persistent cough, the pain in dad’s knee, mom’s upset stomach, grandpa’s aches and pains, granny’s forgetfulness—every family’s worrying signs of potentially failing health. Ask any of the approximately 8,000 now-orphan patients about this being a crisis.
Combine that with hours of waiting in an emergency room—even longer to be admitted—and longer still to be discharged from hospital in the absence of an alternative, either a nursing-home bed or what people really want: home care and support in the community. These and other problems have been around a while. What’s new is that they are…
When Canada’s premiers journey to Manitoba for a crucial Council of the Federation meeting from July 10 to 12, the route to health care reform should be top of mind. Rarely has a summer road trip been so vital to the present and future of Canada’s once cherished health care system. The premiers need to come out of the meeting prepared to follow a roadmap back home on real health reform.
From coast to coast to coast, Canadians are increasingly worried that health services will not be there for them. Memories of the record number of deaths from COVID-19 in long-term care homes still linger. There are millions of Canadians without family physicians and other providers of primary care, while long wait times and even closings of…
