CKNW Editorial
for May 16, 2000

When you shut down an important part of a debate you tend to pay in the end. This is why the two major unions involved in healthcare have to be ignored in the claims they make. It’s not that they are trying to add to the great debate about health care – the problem is that this is the last thing they want to have happen – they want it stifled in areas that affect their pocketbook and cloak their arguments in mantras about saving medicare. Much of the entire left is also trying to stifle debate. Shirley Douglas, a very nice lady indeed, is nevertheless trying to get us to debate only as much of the healthcare issue as is to her way of thinking comfortable. It was interesting last week to hear our own Health Minister, Mike Farnworth, and Saskatchewan premier Roy Romanow in separate but nevertheless democratic outbursts agree that all options must be looked at.

There is this great myth, of course, that if we vary an inch, or perhaps even a millimeter from the system we now have – except to throw buckets more money into it – that we will have an American style system with hundreds of thousands of Canadians without health care coverage. This is the typical catastrophe method of argument the left are fond of spouting. You may remember the free trade debates and how we would be pauperized if it came in, a line spouted by the same who now see Yankee gluttony slobbering at the border to get at our health dollars.

It is not only wrong but very silly to argue against the involvement of private sector money in our healthcare system. It’s already here and in a big way.

Would anyone seriously argue that dental care is not health care? It’s entirely private. What about work related medicine? Nearly all done by private medicine. How about Long Term care – I’m not sure of the numbers but an enormous amount done by private interests. Are we still in the stone age and claiming that chiropractic, naturopathy, homeopathy, physiotherapy and diet specialists and the like are not part of health care? Yet they are in large part and often exclusively privately funded.

Do you think that hockey players, football players, basketball players get into the same line for new kneecaps you do? If you believe that your favourite politician, doctor, or other prominent person gets into the public line-up I’ve a bridge for sale you might be interested.

The problem is a simple one. We have never bothered to define just what health care we were prepared to pay for out of the public purse – we have set no priorities that is – and in a system which has expanded enormously since the days of Tommy Douglas we are unwilling to discuss any way help finance this system except with more public money. In fact, we say to the person who wants to fund his own care, no, that is illegal … you can’t do it!

I don’t know what the answers are and I’m not going to try and hide that fact. But I do know that there are successful systems elsewhere in the world that the left won’t let us look at except to say that they are bad … unlike Canada’s which, they say, is the best in the world. And I do know that we’re in so much trouble that we’re in a crisis.

The labour unions who tell us that the matter is not to be fully debatable have a huge conflict of interest. Not only do they have their jobs to protect these jobs are, for the most part, very much higher paid that similar jobs in the private sector. This doesn’t in itself invalidate their arguments but it does raise the warning flag that they have a huge stake in the outcome.

It’s time for another Royal Commission this time exclusively devoted to defining health care, deciding what the state will pay, and how that is to be determined. And this Royal Commission must have a mandate broad enough to examine every system in the world.

I don’t for a moment think that there will not have to be more and more strategically directed money in the system. But I do think that the system is bursting at the seams and that we must examine all ways to prevent that happening. And the best way to do that is open the debate – not just on CKNW or through other media outlets but in the political workplaces as well. It’s all very well for Allan Rock, who has no jurisdiction in health in the first place, to piously claim to be the defender of health care when it is not he who must face people whom the system is failing. He need only say that this is the province’s jurisdiction and claim that this failure by the provinces is why the federal government must exercise control.

In short, the debate as to which government should pay and the shrill shrieks of the left that it should never be the private sector, is keeping Canadians from having the real debate … for if we don’t find ways to get private capital into the system now on our terms, just as sure as God made little green apples we will have that private capital on their terms – and soon.