Columns and Letters

Column: A penny’s worth of health care: The national debate that isn’t being debated at all

-by Frank Macdonald

       What interests those of us who meet regularly in that modern Agora called Tim Horton’s or similar establishments pushing the drug, caffeine, is a wide-ranging series of topics. It is in these sites that politicians claim to glean the insights that inform the policies by which they will govern us.

I have sipped a double double in various Tim’s often enough to toy with the conclusion that Canadians are indifferent to the fate of our public health care system, because it seldom comes up as a subject for discussion. Toy with the idea perhaps, but I don’t believe it for a second.

It is possible that our public health system isn’t a pressing topic at Tim’s because Canadians care so deeply about it, take such pride in it, depend so desperately upon it when a family member or themselves is stricken ill. In other words, it is taken for granted because we believe it will always be there.

Meanwhile, back in Ottawa where Canada’s Republican Party takes its marching orders from our micro-managing prime minister, the federal government has been, for a decade now,  undermining Canada’s public health care system by stealth. Prime Minister Stephen Harper is too astute a politician to tell Canadians that our public health system is an act of out-dated socialism and must be destroyed. 

Instead, quietly, with no public protests from the provinces, the federal government is disengaging from public health care funding. The nations’ premiers remain generally silent despite the fact that it will eventually become their job to reduce public health care to a shadow of itself because of the ongoing loss of federal dollars. 

No premier in recent years, despite knowing what is looming in Canada’s public health care future, has uttered a protesting word, has tried to ignite the kind of public rage that would make public health care the nation’s number one concern.

No opposition leaders are raising the issue in Parliament. No media is screaming headlines about Harper’s undermining of the public health care system.

So it is while sitting in a Tim Horton’s along a Nova Scotia highway that I find myself dwelling on Stephen Harper’s efforts to undermine health care as we know it in Canada.

When first elected prime minister one of Harper’s first steps was to reduce the HST by one per cent one year, followed another per cent the next. What that meant to me and most Canadians was about a one cent saving on the price of a double double. What it meant to Canadians across the country was the reduction of $60 billion tax dollars, dollars that would have worked far more magic inside our health care system than would the penny left in my pocket after my Tim’s purchase.

In fact, that penny isn’t even left in my pocket at all. That one cent that I was saving on a cup of coffee? Well, Prime Minister Stephen Harper made that saving disappear by getting rid of the penny. So today there is no saving at all on my double double.

That was Stephen Harper’s first volley across the bow of public health care. Since then, the prime minister has refused to initiate a new Health Accord with the provinces, an accord that would allow provinces to plan three to four years ahead for coping with a health care system that needs long term planning and better financial planning (which is all but impossible without knowing where the federal government sees its role in helping finance and improving Canada’s public health care system). 

In a couple of years time, as has already been legislated through one of Stephen Harper’s none-of-our-business Omnibus bills, federal health care funding will drop dramatically from 6 per cent of the GNP to as little as one per cent, meaning billions more will be taken out of the health care system. 

The ultimate goal, it is easy to argue, is that Stephen Harper is undermining public health, a strategy that will reduce the provinces’ ability to deliver any kind of comprehensive health care to its citizens. It will be at this desperate point that the Republican factor of the Conservative Party of Canada will be able to open the door to US-style insurance, HMOs and other highly profitable opportunities for everyone but those Canadians who can’t afford to pay for their own health care: those Canadians who had been paying for our public health care system with their taxes for decades.

There may be misconceptions among many Canadians that a public health care system is free. It has never been free. We have paid for it through our tax dollars every day, every step of the way. Those tax dollars should continue to do so, as an overwhelming majority of Canadians want.

Meanwhile, Canadians and their public health care system are at the mercy of Prime Minister Stephen Harper who, in 1997, told the American right wing think tank, the Council for National Policy, that:

"Canada is a Northern European welfare state in the worst sense of the term, and very proud of it. Canadians make no connection between the fact that they are a Northern European welfare state and the fact that we have very low economic growth, a standard of living substantially lower than yours, a massive brain drain of young professionals to your country, and double the unemployment rate of the United States."

These are the words of a man who clearly despises the country he lives in, and currently governs. 

Despite these words, despite this contemptuous attitude toward Canada, we have elected this prime minister again and again (and unfortunately may elect him again), a prime minister who is apologetic about the country he governs because we tend to resist his insistence that we become more like Americans. His government is paving the road to an American style health care system by refusing to help Canada’s public health care system cope with its challenges, instead is trying to starve it out of existence.

The only looming question in the next federal election among all political parties, in the media, in the coffee shops, in the universities, and anywhere else Canadians gather, is the future of our public health care system, and whether or not we actually care enough about it any more to be bothered voting out those who would destroy it.


Oran Dan - The Inverness Oran - www.invernessoran.ca

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