On Tuesday, February 7th, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau pitched nearly $200 billion as part of a 10-year healthcare plan to fix the ailing healthcare system, with a $2 billion boost to the Canada Health Transfer (CHT) for each province and territory. While this may seem like an impressive sum, the pitch has received criticism from premiers and healthcare professionals alike. Despite being persistent and well-documented, the problems within the healthcare system continue to be overlooked on an administrative level, which is apparent in the lack of resolution thus far. There is a pluralistic ignorance of the real issue at hand, which is that the healthcare system is highly unsustainable in its current form and needs fundamental remodeling.
Every day, there are greater signs that the Canadian healthcare system is distressed and deteriorating. During the pandemic, hospitals in rural communities had to shut down their emergency rooms and intensive care units. A poll by the Angus Reid Institute showed that 29 percent of Canadians had chronic difficulty accessing healthcare this past fall. The same study found that over the last six months, two in five Canadians said they had difficulty or were entirely unable to access key health services. Following the pandemic, many healthcare workers were dealing with severe burnout. A survey of 5200 nurses by the Registered Nurses Association of Ontario found that over 75 percent of nurses were burnt-out in 2021. This is because the Canadian healthcare system is designed to operate at full capacity on a regular basis. Hence, when there are spikes in demand for healthcare, doctors, nurses, and other workers must put in extra hours, reflecting an incredibly unsustainable and unethical system.
The government has previously attempted to expand surgeries into private clinics to relieve some of the burdens from public ones. However, evidence suggests that privatization does not mend the fundamental issue. It would certainly shorten wait times for those who can afford private care, but they would almost assuredly increase in the public system. Resources would be drawn out from the public system and accorded to the private one. The broken public system would, thus, remain neglected.
The Prime Minister’s new plan is highly money-focused, with little explanation as to how this will address the rampant unsustainability of the system. Trudeau claims these investments will build a system with “a resilient and supported healthcare workforce” and “access to timely, equitable, and quality” health services. However, there is a lack of any meaningful procedure to achieve these changes. The Prime Minister has asked provinces to produce action plans in order to access the additional CHT funding, but these are to be focused on “how funds will be spent and how progress will be measured”, and not on any reforms to the system. Moreover, no concrete plan or criterion holds provinces accountable should they fail to achieve these improvements. This is highly concerning as, without accountability, the same cycle of inaction will likely persist.
The continued ignorance of the government is particularly disappointing, given that healthcare workers and organizations have been, for a while, calling for immediate and specific changes. The Canadian Medical Association (CMA) and Canadian Nurses Association (CNA), along with numerous health organizations, held the second of two emergency meetings in March 2022 and agreed that conditions have worsened since the first meeting in October 2021. They have urged the government for immediate action in the healthcare system to address backlogs, shortages, and staff burnout. Collaboration among healthcare professionals, patients, and policymakers has indicated other needs, such as expanding team-based care, creating a national human resource strategy to rebuild the workforce, and investing in new training to increase the supply of physicians, nurses, and nurse practitioners.
Even on the financial side of the argument, Canada’s premiers have voiced concerns and criticism of the deal. One central point of the letdown was the proposed $17.3 billion increase in additional funding to the CHT starting this year, falling over $10 billion short of their initial $28 billion request. This means that the federal government only pays 22 percent of the cost of providing health care. Federal Health Minister Jean-Yves Duclos has stated that he would be willing to increase the funding if provinces and territories commit to improving. Still, no formal plans have been devised for this to come to fruition. Funding has been a matter of contention between the premiers and the federal government for a while, but Duclos presses that the government should focus more on strategies for change rather than arguing about funding.
The debate over Canada’s healthcare system seems to be everything but what it should be: specific, sincere, and exacting. Years of meetings, polls, and calls to action seem to fall on deaf ears as government officials and healthcare workers get lost in debates over trivial details. While the Prime Minister’s new healthcare plan does propose some increases in funding and guidelines for the next steps, there is a general lack of urgency and concrete planning. The repercussions of Canada’s broken healthcare system have caused problems that almost every Canadian has had to confront, so we must not allow this new deal to become a cause for complacency and ignorance of the real and persistent issues at hand. The government must take actions based on recommendations from health organizations like CMA, such as expanding team-based care and creating a national health human resource strategy to facilitate faster and more sustainable care. The government may have taken a step toward further discussion, but it has fallen a bit short as urgent and fundamental changes to the system are necessary moving forward.
Edited by Sabrina Nelson
Setareh Setayesh is a second year student at McGill University, currently pursuing a B. Sc degree in Psychology. She joined Catalyst as a staff writer this year and is particularly interested in social epidemiology and the interaction between culture and politics in relation to human rights and development.