NDP was close to leaving Liberal deal, insiders say
Negotiations grew tense as New Democrats pushed for more coverage
It was January, and it was the closest the New Democrats had ever come to ditching the deal that keeps Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s minority government alive.
It had been just a few weeks since the NDP had agreed to extend the deadline for a core priority of the parliamentary accord: a longsought plan to establish a universal, national drug coverage program.
Both sides couldn’t agree on the scope of what that program would look like. With the original endof-2023 deadline to pass pharmacare legislation now gone, and with negotiations still hitting a wall, the New Democrats had a decision to make.
They started preparing to pull out of the alliance — just in case — said senior NDP sources, speaking to the Star on the condition they not be named.
“How are we going to communicate that? Who do we have to talk to about that? What does it mean to not be in the agreement? How would we handle the budget votes coming up?” one source said of the questions that swirled within the party at the time.
“We started talking to the party about accelerating election planning. We let the staff know that this was a possible scenario and people should start getting their minds around it. We let caucus know that this was a possible scenario and they should get their heads around that.”
It wasn’t something the New Democrats wanted to do. The party’s pact with Trudeau’s Liberals was about to hit the two-year mark: a relatively harmonious alliance, by many accounts, that has seen progress on priorities like dental care, workers’ rights and climate change in exchange for the NDP’s support.
But pharmacare was big. Commissions and advisory councils have recommended prescription drug coverage in Canada for decades. Previous Liberal governments have cited it as a long-term objective since the 1990s. It was such a core philosophy for the New Democrats that the party’s membership last year gave leader Jagmeet Singh their backing to exit the deal if he couldn’t get it done.
So when both parties finally unveiled legislation last Thursday that outlined a framework for a national and universal program, along with a plan for single-payer coverage for diabetes and contraceptive drugs and devices, they felt they had accomplished something momentous.
Behind the scenes, government and NDP sources say tensions broke out while both sides wrangled over the shape and size of a pharmacare program.
Those frustrations spilled beyond staffers, policy advisers, house leaders and ministers, coming to a head during a late January conversation between the prime minister and Singh.
The NDP characterized the discussion as “testy,” with “some impatience exhibited on the side of the prime minister and some resolve exhibited on behalf of (Singh),” one party source said.
“It was not a very pleasant meeting,” another NDP source said. “(Trudeau) was wanting commitment for less.”
According to one senior Liberal source, the Trudeau government was wary of creating a new national plan. For starters, their governing pact only committed to setting the stage for a program through legislation. The way the Liberals saw it, national pharmacare was an expensive proposition with a small political payoff, since millions of Canadians already have public or private drug coverage. For many people, a new publicly funded pharmacare program would simply shift whether it was their private benefits or the government that paid for their medicine, the source said.
The government was also worried about costs, especially after the pandemic spending spree jacked up federal deficits as the Trudeau government covered expensive emergency programs to keep businesses and households afloat during the cycle of COVID-19 lockdowns.
Their worst fear, the Liberal source said, was that creating a big new pharmacare program too quickly would juice Canada’s recent inflation problem and help prompt the central bank to further increase interest rates — thereby further increasing the costs of household debt and mortgage payments.
“The worst thing you can do is trigger a rate hike,” said the source.
The words “single-payer” and “public” were also never included in the original deal, and the first draft of the bill the NDP saw was rejected because it didn’t go far enough towards promising that the federal government would front all the costs.
“I think in our minds when we’re talking national, universal pharmacare, we’re talking single-payer,” an NDP source said. “I think it was later on where it became clear that that was not a mutual understanding.”
As talks continued into the new year, and Parliament returned from its winter recess, the Liberal source said officials negotiating with the New Democrats started to get frustrated. In pushing for the broadest possible pharmacare program, the NDP was less willing to help the Liberals pass their agenda through the minority Parliament. Slow progress on one bill in particular, legislation to pass the billions of dollars in spending from last year’s fall economic statement, was “upsetting” to the Liberals, the source said.
This was especially the case because Liberals felt like they were already negotiating something — actual national drug coverage rather than just legislation to establish a foundation for coverage — that wasn’t written into their parliamentary deal.
“Holding us hostage to what we already had, in order to add new stuff, that’s no good,” said the source, who also claimed the Liberals never truly feared their government would fall if the New Democrats weren’t satisfied.
The NDP, meanwhile, was happy to dig in.
“If we don’t want something to move in the House, it doesn’t move,” an NDP source said.
The two sides eventually landed on an agreement to cover diabetes drugs and contraception, which the Liberals liked because it wasn’t going to be prohibitively expensive and could be sold to voters as a “new” program instead of just shifting who pays for existing coverage, the government source said.
The contraception idea, which the source said started to percolate in public policy discussions in recent months, was also seen as a smart political move, by framing birth control as a matter of public health coverage instead of a moral issue, the source said.
Other ideas were thrown around: what if hypertension medication, antibiotics, cancer drugs and mental health prescriptions were also covered? But the two most serious proposals on the table were always the two classes of drugs that were officially announced last Thursday.
The main hang-up, the NDP says, was whether the Liberals would cover supplies and devices needed for diabetes treatment, like syringes, insulin pumps and continuous glucose monitors.
“That came back a number of times with a ‘no’ from them and we did not move,” an NDP source said.
The negotiations continued throughout the Family Day weekend and into the following week, at which point — days before the March 1 deadline — the final legislation was set in stone.
‘‘ I think in our minds when we’re talking national, universal pharmacare, we’re talking single-payer. I think it was later on where it became clear that that was not a mutual understanding.
NDP SOURCE