Funding eliminated for health watchdog
The Health Council of Canada will no longer receive money from the federal government to keep tabs on an expiring federal-provincial health-care deal.
The independent body is responsible for monitoring implementation of the 10-year, $41-billion health accord struck in 2004.
But the council has been told there will no longer be a need for its work once that accord expires next year.
Chief executive John Abbott said Health Canada told him last week that funding would continue through this fiscal year, but come to an end after that.
“There’s two tenets they’ve wrapped it in,” Abbott said Tuesday.
“One is the federal fiscal environment. And because the current accord finishes next month, they felt our primary mandate would be complete and it was legitimate then to fold up the organization.”
The council relies entirely on federal money to fund operations, which include monitoring and reporting on the progress of the 2004 health deal as well as the 2003 First Ministers’ Accord on Health Care Renewal.
The government will continue to give the council $6.5 million for the remainder of this fiscal year, and $4 million to close up shop in 2014-15.
The decision to cut off funding caught the council by surprise.
“This did come right out of the blue,” said Abbott.
Steve Outhouse, a spokesman for Health Minister Leona Aglukkaq, said the time is right to end the council’s funding.
Canadian Medical Association president Dr. Anna Reid slammed the government’s decision, calling the move a “failure of its responsibility to protect and strengthen Canada’s health care system.”
“How are we to transform the health care system to improve patient care if we can’t measure what we’re doing well and what we need to improve?” she wrote in a press release.
Outhouse said the federal government is instead focusing its health spending “on patient-oriented research, things that are connected to front-line health-care service to Canadians, including transfers that go to provinces and territories.”