There is one thing that we can count on from every Canadian political party – no matter what is going on in the world, they are always going to ask you to donate money. Good times and bad times, old parties or new parties, it doesn’t matter; they want your cash so they can run elections and there is nothing better than to raise a couple bucks off of a manufactured crisis.
So it was no great surprise when emails from the provincial PCs started rolling in a couple weeks ago asking for my money. Consider this one that showed up in the inbox from Health Minister Sylvia Jones:
Stewart,
You and I both know the status quo in health care isn’t working.
We need bold solutions that put you first.
That’s why we’re shortening wait times by expanding community surgical and diagnostic centres.
More surgeries. Shorter wait times. All paid for by OHIP.
It’s a no brainer.
Because it’s about you, Stewart. It’s about your health.
Click here if you agree.
Sylvia
Let’s unpack this note, shall we? The health minister has made assumptions here that we need to dig into, but let’s start with common ground where we agree: we definitely need bold solutions. An excellent start, yet that is where our common ground runs out, because the rest of the message is carefully concocted with nothing of real substance and is predicated on the reader not actually digging into what the Ford government is proposing.
The most disingenuous piece of Ford’s entire privatization pitch is the notion that the status quo is not working. Consider my 2022 experience with the ‘status quo’:
At the beginning of August I finally went to an optometrist despite running into chairs and doorframes for multiple months. Why did I wait, you ask? Because we had no insurance until my partner started a new job and I get very anxious about drawing money out of the farm for non-farm expenses. Within four weeks of that appointment, I was flat on my back, in tube, having my first experience in an MRI machine. I received the results of that MRI – THE SAME DAY. Thankfully, the results showed that I did not have a brain tumour (as was first expected by specialists) but instead I had suffered a stroke.
Fast forward to Christmas and I had been poked, prodded, and about every angle of my insides had been scanned. The good folks at the stroke clinic in Stratford gave me the final synopsis that other than the lack of vision on my lower right side, I am fit as a fiddle. All told, I had about a dozen trips to see specialists or specialized testing, and my total cost beyond the gas to drive there was two parking garage validations in London.
‘Status quo’ worked pretty darn well for me and it worked because of the people working in our public system.
But we should not be so lazy to think that our own personal experience is the rule; perhaps Ontario is a laggard. Not so, according to the (very right wing) Fraser Institute’s recent report on health-care wait times that was released in December 2022 – Ontario was the national leader in shortest wait times across multiple metrics of measurement.
So Sylvia is playing a little fast and loose here with her reader. Instead of leading with good news… i.e. Ontario is leading the country in delivering health care and we can do even better, it is “the status quo isn’t working.” So why mislead? Why frame this as a negative problem that can only be solved by privatizing our most important public asset? Because the only way you will get a Canadian to support privatization in health care is to convince them that the public system is beyond saving. There is a litany of issues plaguing health care and we haven’t even started dealing with the real health-care costs of an aging baby boomer generation. Wait for another 25 years when the pickleball courts have taken their toll and today’s healthy 65 year old is looking for a bed in long-term care.
There are smarter people than I who can make a case for further incorporation of private delivery of care within our system and there are areas where this is already happening every day. Yet this particular move has a stench of political opportunism and the messaging is working hard to gloss over how badly the Ford government has managed the health file since coming to power in 2018.
Again, if Sylvia were being honest with her reader she would remind them that under her watch, health-care workers in the public sector have had their wages capped since 2019. Meanwhile, over on the private side where demand continues to grow, there is no wage cap. Nurses, specialists, technicians and tradespeople have all seen their wages capped while hospital administration (and the minister herself) has been given nice fat raises throughout. There is an exodus of public sector frontline workers into the private sector right now because of one thing and one thing only: Bill 124. Why stay in the ER working shifts trying to keep people alive when Galen Weston’s for-profit online health start up offers you 57 bucks an hour to work 8:30-4:30 from the comfort of your home office?
So no, Minister Jones, I won’t click your link to the fundraising page asking me to chip in five bucks, because I don’t like giving money to folks who actively gut a public resource and then claim it cannot be saved. The status quo isn’t working because you refuse to acknowledge that you are asking people to take a pay cut every time they come into work during these inflationary times. Every day the already ruled unconstitutional Bill 124 chips away at the pillar of social equality that is universal health care.
As long as the Ford government ties the hand of the public system behind its back with a lack of funding, it has absolutely no moral standing to reform the system.
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Stewart Skinner is a local business owner, former political candidate, and has worked at Queen’s Park as a Policy Advisor to the Minister of Agriculture, Food, and Rural Affairs. He can be reached at stuskinner@gmail.com or on Twitter: @modernfarmer.
