Here’s why the Liberals will cave on universal pharmacare
But don’t expect the plan in March budget
In the spring budget, just over three weeks from now, the Trudeau government will once again pass on the chance to finally give Canadians the universal pharmacare that doctors and a multitude of studies have shown is needed to improve patient outcomes and reduce the country’s prescriptiondrug bill.
Universal pharmacare has long been in place widely in Europe. The Liberaldominated Commons health committee called last year for universal pharmacare, because about 20 per cent of Canadians are uninsured or underinsured for drugs. And roughly one in 10 Canadians goes without prescription drugs because they cannot afford them. But in his next budget, which was set last week for March 19, Finance Minister Bill Morneau will reject that holistic solution. He will instead announce narrowly targeted partial coverage of selected patient groups.
Morneau will speak glowingly of how the Trudeau government is “filling the gaps” in our patchwork system of drug spending by government, private drug plans, and the $3.6 billion that
Canadians spend out of pocket on prescriptions. Actually, Morneau will add complexity to the patchwork system rather than streamline it.
That’s not what the doctor ordered, but it is what the insurance lobby wants. And the Trudeau government will oblige the private insurers, who fear having to compete with universal pharmacare.
A government that has already broken its promise to balance the books by now understandably blanches at the estimated $20.4 billion annual cost of universal pharmacare. But the country’s total drug bill would actually drop by an annual $4.2 billion, according to the federal budget watchdog, due to volume buying by a single provider.
Putting private-sector insurers ahead of the people doesn’t sound like an effective means of winning a tight election contest in October. Jason Kenney vs. Canada The Alberta election campaign hasn’t officially started yet, and already the man poised to win it has effectively declared war on the rest of the country.
As premier, after a provincial election that must be held by May 31, Jason Kenney will demand that Ottawa sunder the federation by withholding transfer payments from provinces that don’t do Alberta’s bidding (that would be B.C., Quebec and, to a lesser extent, Ontario) by deep-sixing their misgivings about new heavy-oil pipelines in their backyards.
If those pipelines don’t rapidly materialize, Kenney will hold a nationally divisive Alberta referendum on the equalization-payments system. And he wants Ottawa to debauch the Federal Court of Appeal, which ordered a halt to the Trans Mountain pipeline expansion, by using a Constitutional provision to overturn that decision.
At home, Kenney will set Indigenous communities against each other, favouring pro-pipeline communities with subsidies (that sure sounds like a bribe) and withholding the same from pipeline opponents.
He’ll throw Alberta teachers into confusion over elements of the curriculum that strike him as an NDP socialist plot. And he’ll strip farm workers of recently won means of redress for workplace injuries, on the untested theory that a safe farm is an unprofitable one.
Premier Rachel Notley has already blamed Canada for Alberta’s self-inflicted woes. Expect four more years of the same, only ramped up to firebrand level.
But understand that the next spell of Wildrose Country vitriol is coming from a good place. Kenney says he is simply “moving Alberta from an apologetic or defensive posture to an assertive posture.”
Apologetic? We await with interest a list from Kenney of Alberta’s apologies. No rush; our patience is infinite.
Tariff-bully Trump: First Canada, now Germany
Canada may soon have an ally in Germany in our mutual despair over the U.S. as a threat to our economies.
Germany is bracing for the same 25-per-cent tariffs on U.S. auto imports that U.S. President Donald Trump threat- ened Canada with in pressuring Ottawa for a makeover of the North American Free Trade Agreement that neither Ottawa nor Canada’s business community much likes. The looming tariffs on the German auto sector threaten to pitch Europe’s biggest economy into recession.
Recall that Trump justifies America’s continued 25-percent tariffs on Canadian steel on the specious grounds that imported Canadian steel girders somehow threaten U.S. national security.
A long-awaited report by Trump’s commerce secretary, Wilbur Ross, a former steel baron, is expected to make the same bogus assertion about imports from Volkswagen AG, Daimler AG and BMW AG.
Likely the best way this turns out is a compromise that imposes quotas on German auto imports, but that would be damaging in reducing the revenues of a key German economic sector. A more productive outcome would be a German commitment to make more vehicles in the U.S. The Germans already do so, of course.
Angela Merkel, the German chancellor, said recently she doesn’t understand how the BMWs built in South Carolina are a threat to U.S. national security. She might be wiser to put ironies aside and accurately broadcast Trump’s tariffs as an attack on Europe, given that the German auto sector assembles vehicles and sources parts widely across that continent.
None of this would be an issue, of course, if only Detroit made cars as well as the Germans, who perfected the internal-combustion engine in the 19th century and have never looked back.
We await with interest a list from Kenney of Alberta’s apologies. No rush; our patience is infinite