Same old griping over health funding a bad look
One supposes a return to federal/provincial bickering over health-care funding can be seen as somewhat of a return to normalcy in this country where most everything has been far too dominated by a pandemic for a year now.
Alas, provincial leaders once again squabbling was anything but reassuring.
Perhaps it's because we all recognize the COVID-19 crisis has likely worsened the long-standing problems in Canadian public health care and there's too much at stake to tolerate a return to childish whining.
As suggested by Saskatchewan Premier Scott Moe, catching up on postponed surgeries and other elements related to acute care will be costly. (That said, it's no small irony to hear a healthcare cost argument from a provincial government that refused even a short-term circuit-breaker — one that might have helped avoid expensive hospital admissions — because of feared economic costs.)
However, the pitch during a Thursday press conference featuring Canada's premiers for $28 billion more a year for health funding from the federal government would have been more credible had it been a sincere and forthright approach to look beyond their own short-term acute care delivery problems.
Given the size of this ask, wouldn't it have made sense to commit new health dollars to mental health, pharmacare or long-term care?
Instead, it came across as a disingenuous and somewhat deceitful cash grab that neither deals with all the health issues nor acknowledges the realities and history of health-care funding in this country.
If this pitch was about the provinces' shortfall related to added COVID-19 costs, maybe the premiers could have better acknowledged the federal support they have received.
By the Saskatchewan government's own admission, those extra federal COVID-19 dollars flowing into this province would include $53.2 million for the wage supplement program, $338.1 million for the Safe Restart Agreement and $75 million for the Safe School Re-opening plan. That not only exceeds the $322.8 million in out-of-budget special warrant spending the Saskatchewan government recently approved, but actually covers much of this spending for which the province has taken full credit.
It also neglects national programs like the $400 million for oilpatch workers or $3 billion in overall wage support programs like CERB of which Saskatchewan people have been able to claim their share. Yet Moe and Alberta's Jason Kenney chose this opportunity to again gripe about the slowness of vaccine procurement. It came across as churlishly political.
But if this is truly about longer term transfer payment shortfalls from Ottawa happening even before COVID-19, any such conversation in Saskatchewan begins with the 2009 decision by this Sask. Party government under former premier Brad Wall to abandon the legal action to make the Stephen Harper government exclude non-renewable resources from equalization.
Excluding those was a 2006 federal Conservative election promise but the provincial government here dropped the fight for political reasons even though it would have provided Saskatchewan $800 million a year — similar to what Saskatchewan's share would be if Ottawa did grant Thursday's $28-billion-ayear ask. The difference? Saskatchewan would have received more than $12 billion over the past 15 years for health care and other matters had it effectively pressured Ottawa into keeping its transfer payment election promise.
All that said, the premiers do have a point that healthcare funding was a problem before this pandemic and will only become a bigger problem if we expect to live up to the five principles of universal medicare under the Canada Health Act: public administration, accessibility, comprehensiveness, universality and portability.
The problem, however, is the premiers weren't even forthright Thursday about categorizing Ottawa's share of health funding as the 22 per cent it is (the added $28 billion a year would take it up to 35 per cent). It's complicated, but smart people like University of Regina political science professor Tom Mcintosh point to agreed-upon tax points in federal transfers that years ago added billions of dollars to what the provinces receive.
More to the point, we seem to have returned to the old game of simply demanding more from Ottawa without accounting for either history or future health-care needs.
This pandemic should have taught us better.