Should doctors land on the Sunshine List?

How personally difficult it is to write about Ontario doctors and whether they and their pay should be included on the Sunshine List. After I wrote about dentists, I found myself in a dentist’s chair with a masked man causing me terrible pain as he told me how much he didn’t like columns “with opinions.” I shut it down and left the office with my slobber bib still on.

Up next are doctors, one of whom will attend to my revolting arm lesions this week — it’s a gardening allergy with buboes and possibly a bearberry thorn — and I don’t want to annoy her. I do love doctors. They’ll never say, “Ugh, that’s gross.”

Here’s the quarrel: Ontario needs to spend $50.8 billion in yearly health-care costs more wisely — this may be the only thing the two sides agree on — and doctors’ fees will probably have to be cut, or at least rearranged. This follows a kind of public catastrophe: last year, Toronto police employees got an 8.64-per-cent pay increase over four years. In 2015, 80 per cent of uniformed GTA police earned more than $100,000. Those numbers are a bell that will ring through every public pay negotiation for a decade.

We know what police earn thanks to the Sunshine List, which covers public sector employees earning 100 grand and up. It’s peculiar not to include doctors when the list includes police, nurses, teachers, professors and hospital workers.

But doctors are due at least an asterisk. They pay for office rental, staff and equipment. Doctors may have jobs for life (their self-serving self-regulation assiduously protects bad doctors) but why not? They’re highly educated, so must often work into their unpensioned senior years to cover long years of training.

The doctors say they’re not employees. Rather they’re independent professionals, presumably like Uber drivers, which would be more convincing if they were not paid by government.

There’s a war everywhere now over definitions of employment. Allowed briefly into the U.K. for work or study, a group of Romanian women are now fighting deportation on the grounds they are working as prostitutes. They are “self-employed,” as we all will be soon if current trends continue.

I make no judgment on pay disclosure. For the Sunshine List is both admirable and terrible.

I am appalled by how easily Canadians accept ideas drilled into us from the American hard right. When we read about pop culture, it’s always American. “I feel like” our phrasings are American. We hear more about Americanized anti-racism movements than we do about the struggles of our own desperate suicidal indigenous people.

The notion that government is a tyranny and tax is theft is an American idea, and the Sunshine List is its first-born child.

University of Missouri professor Andrew Hoberek recently wrote a striking analysis in the Los Angeles Review of Books titled “Melissa Click and American Anger.” Click, a hyperactive social justice warrior-professor, was fired for bad behaviour at a local campus protest. A measured Hoberek noted three provocations of American life: free speech rights, the remnants of slavery history and, finally, rage against government-paid tenured professors.

The last factor “is the anger of people who no longer have workplace protections or autonomy, and feel resentment toward the remaining few who do.” Witness the backlash against unionized Ontario teachers. Hoberek said Click revived “a perfect storm of symbolic targets,” and this may also be true of doctors’ pay. Queen’s Park isn’t stupid; its Sunshine List threat is effective.

When Ontarians see what doctors earn, they will be angry if it is more than they themselves earn. This is human nature. But remember, when you are angry at someone, there is something in yourself that angers you. Your job is precarious and relatively ill-paid. Doctors are secure, and worse, taxes paid their fees.

Anger at doctors, and Clicks, has been stoked for decades by the American right and nurtured by politicians here: we’ve been told to resent all taxation and all the workers it pays. Americans no longer see themselves as citizens but as taxpayers, Hoberek wrote. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has been trying to reverse that. Canadians should listen.

The Sunshine List would stoke anger in a toxic way. I say yes to transparency but please, hold off on blaming doctors for a badly designed system that treats doctors like employees but pays them like self-employed contractors.

Also, there is no fee in Ontario high enough to compensate my doctor for prodding the plowed field that is my rash. Doctors live to serve. Wish us both luck.