NDP touts pharmacare as winning prescription

Horwath unveils major proposal for universal drug coverage. Details are still to come, but the initial price tag would be $475M a year

NDP Leader Andrea Horwath has unveiled her prescription for winning next year’s election: universal pharmacare.

Horwath unveiled the ambitious $475-million-a-year program to about 1,000 New Democrats at the party’s annual convention on Saturday.

“When we win in 2018, we are going to create Canada’s first universal pharmacare plan right here in Ontario,” she thundered to cheering delegates at the Metro Toronto Convention Centre.

“It will mean lower costs, less worry and better health for everyone. It will mean fewer emergencies, fewer people in ERs. It will mean we can save lives.”

Emphasizing that an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure, Horwath said her plan is both doable and affordable.

“Starting with the most commonly prescribed essential medicines, we will provide universal drug coverage for all Ontarians,” she said.

Horwath lamented that one in four people in the province aren’t taking the medication they need “because they can’t afford it.”

Ontario Health Minister Eric Hoskins has been crusading for a national pharmacare program for years with his colleagues across the country, but the federal and provincial Liberals have failed to deliver on it.

The NDP will disclose the details of the program Monday at Queen’s Park but, citing health-care experts, officials say the initial launch would cost $475 million per year.

Even though voters are not heading to the polls until June 7, 2018, Horwath stepped up her attacks against both Liberal Premier Kathleen Wynne and Progressive Conservative Leader Patrick Brown.

“This Liberal premier doesn’t get it,” she said. “And frankly, neither do the Conservatives. The Conservatives have no real solutions to offer for the problems that working people face.”

Mindful that Brown leads in public opinion polls — and that Wynne is in a distant third place — Horwath took aim at the rookie PC chief.

“Their leader, Patrick Brown, has been a Conservative politician for 17 years, including nine years as an MP in Stephen Harper’s government,” she said to boos and shouts of “Shame” from fired-up New Democrats.

“He’ll do what Conservatives always do. They help big companies. They help the privileged few at the very top and they cut and privatize the public services that all the rest of us are counting on.”

Horwath, who has also pledged to raise the hourly minimum wage to $15 from the current $11.40 and make it easier for workers to unionize, took pains to underscore her party’s policy chops with a glossy 40-page vision statement titled “It’s About Change. It’s About You.”

It’s a contrast to the 2014 election, when the New Democrats remained vague, making very few campaign pledges in the belief — mistaken, as it turned out — that they could win simply by bashing Wynne’s Liberals.

Ironically, the Tories, who are not expected to release any significant policy before a platform convention in Toronto in November, have been employing a strategy similar to the New Democrats’ 2014 playbook.

“I’ll leave the speculation of why he’s doing what he’s doing to folks like you,” Horwath told reporters when asked about Brown’s reluctance to share any policy.

“But what I do know is that the people of Ontario deserve so much better than that,” she said.

“The people of Ontario deserve to know what the leaders stand for, what the parties stand for and, importantly, what they intend to do should they form government in 2018.”