Canadians really love public health care. That’s why hucksters promoting private health care here — and yes that’s you, Premier Doug Ford — typically pretend they’re not out to undermine the public system, just fill in a few holes.
But while public health care has long enjoyed iconic stature among Canadians, it suddenly has a vital new importance: it’s a key economic sector that is beyond the reach of Donald Trump.
The danger of our overreliance on the U.S. as a market for our exports became emphatically clear last week when Trump continued his bizarre petulance towards Canada by imposing a 35 per cent tariff on Canadians goods not covered by the Canada-U.S.-Mexico Agreement (CUSMA).
Ottawa was right to let negotiations for a new trade deal stall, rather than knuckle under and accept a deal strongly titled towards U.S. interests, as demanded by the cantankerous U.S. president.
But Trump’s outrageous tariff should drive us, not just to find new markets for our exports, but also to focus on strengthening our domestic industries — over which we have much more control.
Among its other features, public health care is one of our major domestic industries. In fact, the broader health-care sector is Canada’s biggest single industry — employing three million Canadians, adding $200 billion a year to our GDP, and creating 500,000 new jobs over the past decade, notes economist Jim Stanford, director of the B.C.-based Centre for Future Work.
Yet, despite the clear economic importance of the health-care sector, business and conservative commentators promote the fallacy that only industries producing exportable goods — like oil, mining and auto manufacturing — actually create wealth.
The business crowd tends to portray our public health care and education systems as little more than costly drains on our public resources.
Nothing could be farther from the truth.
Of course, health care and education are essential to a good quality of life. They’re also key to wealth creation, since they make a country’s workforce more productive — so says the World Bank. That’s why the World Bank has a Human Capital Index, by which it measures the future productivity of countries, based on their health and education levels.
Yet, swayed by business arguments, governments in Canada have neglected our public health care and education sectors. (Ontario has been particularly negligent, providing the lowest health care funding per person of any province. It also underfunds education.)
Economist Marjorie Griffin Cohen, professor emeritus at Simon Fraser University, argues that Canada places too much emphasis on the growth of our export industries: “The focus is all on the ‘rip it, strip it and ship it’ industries.”
She points out that the “care” sector — which includes health care, education and social assistance — actually contributes more to the total income of the economy than key export-led sectors like oil, mining and autos.
Cohen says that conservative economists tend to denigrate public health care and education as “unproductive” sectors, because, when government pays, there’s no consumer price to help measure productivity gains.
Clearly, public health care is an enormously valuable public good, as well as a national unifier at a time when Trump admits to deliberately battering our economy in order to annex us.
Canadians are united in their preference for Canada’s public system which provides health care to all, compared to the mostly private U.S. system which leaves 27 million Americans without coverage.
Yet our business elite has responded to the Trump menace by amplifying its perennial demand for smaller government and lower taxes, which deprive governments of the funds needed to strengthen our public health care and education systems.
Neglecting health care and education has always been a recipe for making us poorer, not richer. But now, as Trump wreaks havoc with our export industries, it would be downright foolhardy for us to continue to neglect these sectors, which are crucial — and gloriously beyond his reach.
This article was originally published by the Toronto Star.
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