Long federal campaign still finds little time for millennials, health-care budget

The longer we put off discussing them, the harder it will be to fix problems

Seven-eighths of the way through the longest federal campaign in recent memory and no party has talked about two of the most intimidating problems Canada faces: The trouble young people have getting footholds in life, and the vast, yawning horror bearing down on our health-care budgets.

These are problems everywhere. But they are especially problems here in Ottawa and they are getting worse.

New employment figures released Friday show last month was a bad one for unemployment in Canada and, as usual, a worse one for the youngest workers. The rate of 15- to 24-year-olds who are actively looking for work but unable to find it is nearly double the national average of 7.1 per cent. We’ve priced postsecondary education as if it’s a guaranteed ticket to a good job, which it hasn’t been for a while. Entry-level jobs, where they exist, are more precarious than ever — increasingly difficult to plan a stable life around. People are getting married and having kids later and later in life, with long-term demographic implications for the country.

Ottawa’s mainstay industries, the public service and high-tech, are unfortunate leaders in this, with perma-temps staffing the government and the cycle of startup-growth-acquisition-disappearance making many tech jobs well-paid but short-lived.

A lot of this is an unavoidable consequence of innovation and globalized competition. So be it. But our governments need to acknowledge the reality of it in their policies, rather than assuming everybody will have a regular 9-to-5 job for 35 years.

The campaign’s been all about the middle class rather than those hoping to join it, and when we’ve talked about jobs, it’s been about restoring manufacturing — good jobs, but not a lot of them. The Liberals and the NDP promise tuition grants and programs to encourage employers to hire young workers, but this is nibbling at the edges. Perhaps younger people would vote if somebody gave them a reason.

Enough about the young. What about the old?

In Ontario, health spending eats more than one-third of the provincial budget — and even so, the province’s attempts to hold spending down have led to layoffs at the Ottawa Hospital and the Children’s Hospital of Eastern Ontario, plus straight cuts to the fees the province pays doctors for patient care. We don’t have much of a plan for how we’re going to deal with growing demands for service or the fact that although we’re living longer, it often requires ongoing medical treatment to sustain us. That frequently means prescription drugs, too, which can be ruinously expensive for people who don’t have workplace insurance.

Many years after we realized that a lack of home care and nursing-home spaces are major reasons why frail patients are stuck in hospitals even though they shouldn’t be there, we’ve done little about the problem.

Eastern Ontario has one of the longest waits for admission to long-term care in Ontario: half a year if you’re moving in from home, two months if you’re going from hospital.

The Conservatives are constitutionally indisposed to intergovernmental entanglements, so they’ve made annual payments to the provinces with predictable hikes, which are set to decline sharply starting in 2017. If the provinces want to spend more, they’ll have to impose the taxes themselves.

This is tidier, for sure, after many years of ever-deepening federal involvement in a service it doesn’t directly provide, but it means we haven’t had any Canada-wide discussion about what the heck we’re going to do about the terrifying future.

The Liberals promise to spend $1 billion extra a year on home care and to negotiate a new health accord that will presumably include more money, though they haven’t built the cost of a new accord into their platform. They also say they’ll combine forces with the provinces to buy pharmaceuticals in bulk, which should reduce the costs of drugs to hospitals.

The New Democrats say they’d bring in national drug insurance, hire 7,000 family doctors, nurses and other health-care providers, expand home care and open 200 community clinics.

Total cost: $4.5 billion more than the Conservatives’ plan by 2017.

This isn’t all the government’s responsibility, and no government could solve the parts that are in just four years.

The longer we put off discussing these things, though, the harder they’re going to get to deal with.

We’ve priced post-secondary education as if it’s a guaranteed ticket to a good job, which it hasn’t been for a while. Entry-level jobs ... are more precarious.