It has been days since the federal Liberals told Canadians that their budget shortfall was 50 per cent higher than expected, and Canadians are still reeling from the arrogance and financial malfeasance that produced a $61.9-billion deficit.
Canadians are angry and perhaps, for the first time, our Prime Minister is questioning the validity of his juvenile financial philosophy whereby “the budget will balance itself.”
The sheer size of the deficit is unmistakable evidence of a government that no longer cares to rein in reckless spending and patently ridiculous ideas like sending $250 cheques to those making $150,000 per year.
As often happens with governments that are no longer working for the public good, common sense has given way to political expedience ‒ at great cost to taxpayers.
Sadly, this story is as old as time or, at least, politics.
The creation of our now crumbling Medicare system is another case in point. Sixty years ago, bureaucrats and politicians pushed pragmatic issues like costs under the rug in favour of a system grounded in ideology. We started Medicare without knowing how we would pay for it and, decades later, our universal health-care system is on life support because we never bothered to figure it out.
Medicare emerged incrementally in Saskatchewan under Premier Tommy Douglas and his CCF Party (the precursor to today’s NDP), beginning in 1944. It started by funding all cancer diagnosis and treatment costs. Three years later, it expanded to cover in hospital costs and diagnostic tests.
Fifteen years later, to make the provincial plan universal, the CCF brought the province’s physicians into the Medicare system. The doctors were furious, and their stand-off with the government led to the infamous, but relatively short-lived, Saskatchewan Doctors’ Strike of 1962.
Meanwhile, Saskatchewan taxpayers were becoming increasingly weary of the governing CCF and, in 1964, after 20 years in power, the CCF was defeated by the Liberals. A Liberal government under Premier Ross Thatcher was elected and, for the first time since its inception 22 years previous, the Medicare file was taken from the CCF and passed to another party.
Thatcher had long been skeptical about how the province could pay for universal health care and immediately sent a fresh group of accountants to review the Medicare books.
Sure enough, the CCF politicians had been misleading the Saskatchewan taxpayers: The province could not afford universal Medicare, and they had no idea how to control the growing costs.
Thatcher quickly fired the bureaucrats who created the Medicare system under the guise that it was financially feasible. But government bureaucrats never really go away, and the same bumbling bureaucrats whom Thatcher fired for financial incompetence were immediately hired by the federal Liberal Party to develop a national Medicare plan.
Prime Minister Lester B. Pearson had a minority government and was functioning under the constant threat of losing power in a snap election. He wanted to create a national Medicare program that would serve as election bait so that he could gain a majority government.
Back in Saskatchewan, the provincial Liberals and taxpayers were furious about the financial mess they inherited from the CCF. Thatcher sent his Chief of Staff, Edward Odishaw, to Ottawa to warn the federal Liberals of the financial chaos that underpinned Saskatchewan’s Medicare plan and would, no doubt, be a factor in the national program.
Unsurprisingly, the federal team was having trouble producing realistic costs for Medicare. One of the former Saskatchewan bureaucrats came up with a brilliant solution to the problem of costs ‒ the federal government “did not need to work out or legislate the details of a shared-costs program, [they] only needed to define, clearly, the principles of what it meant by Medicare. Then it [the federal government] would contribute to the costs of any provincial program that satisfied those principles.”
This was the ignoble beginning of our treasured universal health-care system: concealing the costs and realistic financial details for political expediency, with no regard for fiscal responsibility. Sound familiar?
Today, universal health care, as is, is a failure. It cannot deliver on its promises and its costs are uncontrolled.
Three months ago, I attended a health-care conference that featured a plethora of data, ideas, and discussions from members of various think tanks across Canada. For me, however, the biggest takeaway was an off-hand remark made by one participant who simply stated, “We have the health-care system that we planned for.”
Indeed, we do.
Susan Martinuk is a Senior Fellow at the Frontier Centre for Public Policy. A longer version of this article can be found in her book, Patients at Risk: Exposing Canada’s Health-care Crisis.
