Health-care reform and election slogans don’t mix well

It was former prime minister Kim Campbell who said “an election is no time to discuss serious issues.”

In the context of modern elections in general and this Ontario campaign specifically, Campbell sounds prescient. We desperately need substantive discussion and debate, and we’re getting sound-bites and slogans instead. There is no better example than health care.

Even though Doug Ford’s run for Queen’s Park has bogged down, there is still a 51.3 per cent probability that his PCs will win a majority government. (That math is courtesy CBC’s Polltracker.) So let’s start there.

While Ford has no problem promising buck-a-beer to cure what’s ailing Ontarians, he still has not delivered a costed platform. Voting is now officially underway and we still don’t know what the PCs will do and how it adds up financially. There is the sense that they’re not costing their promises because the math doesn’t add up.

Ford’s key health slogan is that “We’ll fix hallway medicine.” How much it will cost and how long it will take we don’t know. He has promised to invest in 15,000 new long-term care beds over the next 10 years. No price tag on that, either, but he says that he’ll deliver half of them within the first five years. The Ontario long-term care association says that is “impossible.”

Ford promises to spend $1.9 billion over the next decade on mental health and addiction support, which sounds vastly inadequate considering the opioid crisis and fractured mental health system. He would oppose all supervised injection sites, recruit doctors to northern Ontario by cutting their personal taxes to as low as zero, and introduce denticare for low-income seniors.

And critically, he has promised to cut 4 per cent from every departmental budget. That adds up to $2.4 billion a year from health care. That’s not fixing hallway medicine. It sounds more like Ford’s ideological godfather, Mike Harris, who closed 28 hospitals and fired 6,000 nurses.

Compared to the PCs, the Green, NDP and Liberal plans are expansive, although the Greens are short on costing, too. They promise $4.1 billion for mental health services, to consolidate mental health and addiction programs, push for expanded pharmacare and increase funding for LHINs.

The NDP would invest $19 billion into hospitals over the next decade, create 2,000 new hospital beds and 15,000 long-term beds by 2023. They’d hire more hospital staff to reduce wait times. They’d implement a $475 million pharmacare plan covering the 125 most common prescription drugs. They would hire 4,500 nurses in their first year in government, and expand full dental care to contract and part-time workers as well as low-income kids and retired seniors without a pension or insurance.

The Liberals would hire 3,500 nurses by the end of this year. They would offer dental care for adults and seniors without coverage and expand to senior citizens the pharmacare program that provides 4,400 free prescription drugs to everyone under age 25.

Both Liberal and NDP platforms miss a central point. We don’t just need triage, we need a fundamental shift in health care. We need more proactive intervention upstream, before people end up in the ER. We need to help people have a decent standard of living so they’re less likely to get sick. In short, we need to stop treating symptoms and start treating the disease. That’s heavy sledding, especially during an election campaign. But it’s the truth.

In the end, Liberals and the NDP have by far the most credible and sound health platforms. The Greens are too vague, and the PCs are just embarrassing.