Health Care Summit Shows Liberals At Their Best
Health Care Summit Shows Liberals At Their Best
On The Health Care Summit
Here’s a fun fact that nobody except Andrew Coyne has managed to unearth: since 2000, the Canada Health Transfer has grown 400%. Provincial Health spending? Only up 300% in the same time frame. In dollar figure (again, per Coyne), that’s a $62Billion – Billion, with a B, Billion – shortfall of provincial spending over this time.
This is, of course, at the same time as the Provinces are trying to blame a spendthrift Federal Government for the ills of health care in this country. It’s bullshit – the Provinces are perfectly willing to use health transfers for other shit, and then come back to the Feds. It’s a game to them, which is why we already know the outcome of the eventual health care deal that will come.
The Provinces will claim that there’s not enough new federal money, the Feds are going to try and dazzle everyone with Very Big Numbers, and they’re going to meet in the middle. If the Federal offer is $46B in new dollars over a decade, the Provinces will come back in the $70B range in new dollars, and everyone settles on something like $60B over the decade. Manitoba’s Premier has said it’s significantly less than what the Provinces wanted, which means they’re at the negotiating part of this dance.
What’s interesting about this to me isn’t the health outcomes – I am not going to contradict yesterday’s column and suddenly pass myself off as an expert in whether or not the Feds are offering enough money or too much or whatever – but the politics of this. It’s fascinating to see the Feds coming out swinging today, because for the first time in a while they are driving the narrative. And if the Liberals are going to seize back the narrative, this is step one of a mission they need to get right.
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Saturday’s National Post led with the incendiary front page seen across the political news – 67% of Canadians think Canada is broken. It’s a stupid poll question because it conflates Theo Fleury’s band of right wing nonsense with my shade-short-of-communism brother, who both agree in a vacuum but propose entirely different solutions. But what it also has is a lot of people who are sick of fragility.
There’s a lot of issues right now, and a lot of that isn’t going to get fixed overnight. It’s not an easy thing to come back from societal change, and for a lot of people, there were losses from the pandemic. Either actual losses, people they’ll never get back, and for others, years, opportunities lost in the vagaries of lockdowns, illnesses, or fear of one or both. For some, those periods were traumatic. For others, and many fewer, they were revelatory. As the guy who wrote and released a book in lockdown, I know both the sense of complete withdrawal from the world and know what that isolation unearthed in me, but for so many, there isn’t a silver lining to years lost.
Be it inflation or health or schools, things feel fragile right now, because there’s so many things all coming together and leaving a world that makes less sense than it did in 2015. Some of that could be said to be the Liberals’ fault, if you want to say that the Liberals overspent during COVID and that led to increased inflation, but a lot of it isn’t. It’s not Justin Trudeau’s fault that Vladimir Putin is a madman or that there was a pandemic. But nobody cares.
Canadian voters have shown a willingness to grade on a curve – yes, Harper had a shit economy on polling day in 2008, but nobody blamed him for it, because he was very obviously not responsible for the Global Financial Crisis in general or the way the US economy completely tanked when they let Lehman go bust. The problem is, they trusted Harper to handle things from where they were as well as could be reasonably expected, and that will be the standard Trudeau is held to. Not whether it was his fault, but from where he was, whether he responded well or not.
A lot of people want to absolve Trudeau of blame for a lot of the ills, and in doing so, they also absolve him of any responsibility to try and fix it. I get jurisdictional arguments are fine in an academic sense, but this isn’t an academic problem. This isn’t trying to figure out whether or not Nico Rosberg “deserved” his world title or whether he just got lucky that Lewis had more issues, these are real lives and real crises. You know what happens when health care crumbles? People die who shouldn’t have.
For months the Liberals have been stuck in a paralysis of legality and jurisdiction, unable or unwilling to grasp when they needed to overstep and get in the middle of a situation. The problem for the Feds has been they end up coming to the table, but too late to get any credit and they end up taking a lot of blame for taking so long. Rightly or wrongly, nobody views the Provinces in totality as co-equal partners to the Feds, they view them as lesser than. Whether it’s actual federal jurisdiction or not, people tend to blame issues in the country as the fault of the government of the country.
With the Health Transfers deal, we can start to see what the Liberals could do if they get on the front foot. The Liberals have won the PR battle on this, painting their increased funding as a more radical investment than it realistically is, and when the money gets out the door and we see some of the impacts over time, I assume we’ll see the Liberals trumpeting lower wait times in hospital ERs as proof of concept.
This is what they need to do – after finding a way to massively change the fortunes of working parents with the CCB and the Child Care deals, and now with what will hopefully reduce the problems in the health care sector, there’s hope that the Liberals might actually have a path forward now to finding their way back to the front foot. What the health care deal reminds us is that the Liberals can meet the moment, which makes it so much more fucking frustrating when they don’t.
“Only love can break your heart/Try to be sure right from the start/Yes only love can break your heart/What if your world should fall apart” is playing right now, a fitting reminder of how the world actually works. I don’t get disappointed when governments I hate do shitty things – I get mad, but I don’t get disappointed. This government routinely disappoints, because the only people who have the capacity to disappoint me is a government I think is fundamentally good, and fundamentally capable of being good.
This government, for good or for ill, has earned a status for me, and I know for many of my ideological brethren. There is not love for this government anymore, but mostly just exasperation. It’s a boyfriend we can’t quit, because the good moments are amazing and the bad ones are disasters. The original dream of the Trudeau era – a form of liberal technocratism, fealty to expert opinion, and lack of damaging ideological purity – is still alive, but only sometimes with this government. Sometimes what we get is Trudeau sticking with his guns on more money only with strings while being fine with any form of free-at-the-point-of-use health care that has the mechanism to expand total supply of service, and sometimes we get the government who is paralyzed on housing to the point of having all their good housing ideas be demand-side help for new buyers in a supply crisis.
This is a government with the capacity to be great and a tendency to be self destructive, and who were handed two straight elections by useless oppositions. This health care summit is a reminder that they can be effective at both politics and policy – but also a reminder that when they fail to meet that standard it’s willful failure, not inability.
For the love of God let there be no further failure.
This is exactly how I feel about the Liberal government, it's almost as if they toddle along quite well, then suddenly decide to shoot themselves in the foot, for no apparent reason whatsoever. So frustrating.