Ontario Premier Doug Ford is hoping you’ll see his health-care fight with Ottawa as just more federal-provincial mud wrestling, rather than as a battle for the country’s heart and soul.
That may sound lofty, but if anything could be said to represent this country’s heart and soul, it’s our public health-care system.
In 2004, when the CBC ran a six-week TV series to determine who could be crowned “the Greatest Canadian” in history, more than 1.2 million votes were cast. In the end, Canadians passed over prime ministers, wartime generals and inspirational figures like Terry Fox, to select Tommy Douglas, the father of medicare.
Canadians appear to have a special fondness for a system that, quite simply, enshrines access to health care as based on need, not money.
In an age dominated by billionaires and their extravagance (and idiocy), this unadorned, egalitarian principle of medicare shines like the brightest star in a dark and deranged firmament.
But, beloved as it is, medicare has always been endangered, threatened by those who prefer that the vast health-care field be open for private profit.
Back in 1960 when Douglas, then premier of Saskatchewan, introduced the first public medical insurance system in North America, local doctors staged a bitter, three-week strike. They had backing from business, the Canadian Medical Association, and strong financial support from the American Medical Association, which was determined to prevent public medicine from establishing a beachhead in North America.
Remarkably, Douglas prevailed and, in 1966, Parliament voted for a Canada-wide medical insurance system by a stunning margin of 177-2.
But the privatizing forces have never given up. Over the years, they’ve launched pricey court challenges to medicare and enlisted support from politicians — both Conservative and Liberal — who’ve helped by underfunding the public system.
Now, with hospitals overwhelmed by the pandemic and years of underfunding, Ford and other premiers see a splendid opportunity to shift the blame for today’s serious health-care crisis to Ottawa, and advance their privatization agendas in the process.
The premiers argue, correctly, that the federal contribution to health care has dropped significantly over the years. The Trudeau government accepts that Ottawa must increase its contribution. The real battle is over whether there will be strings attached. The premiers don’t like strings.
But without strings, the floodgates will open to privatization. This is particularly true in Ontario and Alberta, where staunchly pro-business premiers appear to have learned nothing from the disastrous privatization results in areas like long-term care, which is now dominated by corporate nursing home chains. Care is often so inadequate that, at the height of the pandemic, the Canadian military was brought in to manage some of the worst private facilities.
Privatizers basically subscribe to a theory sometimes called “the tragedy of the commons” — the notion that humans are, by nature, purely self-interested, so society should be organized around private property and the marketplace, with everyone looking out for themselves.
But the anthropologist Karl Polanyi (as well as the ancient philosopher Aristotle) came to a different conclusion: while it’s true that humans are self-interested, we are social animals first and foremost, reliant on society for our survival, sustenance and well-being. Yes, we fight — but mostly we co-operate.
At our best, we devise collective solutions which benefit us all — like public health care and education — to ensure we all have a chance to live healthy, educated lives and that each of us has a shot at developing to our fullest potential.
Rather than tragedy, our public health-care system represents the triumph of the commons.
This isn’t just wishful thinking. Most advanced nations, Canada included, have developed successful public health-care systems. Imagine how much more successful these systems would be if they weren’t constantly undermined and sabotaged by privatizers and their political allies.
We must never let the privatizers rob us of what we can achieve collectively. We must never allow their limited view of human nature — and their schemes for profiting from it — confine us to the grim, every-woman-for-herself world of the private marketplace.
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