PV staff
Health coalitions across the country are warning that the threat to public healthcare is at an all-time high, and they are calling for mass action to save the system.
Their heightened concerns are being driven by changes introduced in Ontario and especially Alberta, which accelerate the drive toward healthcare privatization.
In December, the Alberta government passed Bill 11: The Health Statutes Amendment Act, which creates the framework for two-tier healthcare and private health insurance, while also allowing private payment for medically necessary care. Alberta’s Friends of Medicare group describes the legislation as a country-wide threat.
“It is no exaggeration to say that the passing of Bill 11 through the Alberta legislature is the biggest threat to our single-payer, universal Medicare system that we’ve ever seen. Not just for Albertans, but for all Canadians,” said Friends of Medicare’s Chris Gallaway. “It threatens our treasured public healthcare system. It violates the core principles of the Canada Health Act. It will result in a system where those with money will pay for the healthcare they need, while everyone else will be left waiting even longer for care or have to go without.”
The group says that the privatization in Alberta won’t stop at provincial borders, particularly in the context of the capitalist free trade deals between Canada and the US.
“This legislation will feed a market of private health insurance who will use every method they can to expand across Canada. As long as our health insurance is public, we can stop the US private health insurance industry from moving in. But allowing this foothold in Canada would mean our single-payer healthcare will no longer be protected from trade agreements with the United States.”
The Canadian Health Coalition agrees that the Alberta legislation puts the entire public healthcare system at risk, and says that the federal government has the tools to protect it.
“The Canada Health Act exists to prevent exactly this kind of two-tier system. Federal Health Minister Marjorie Michel has the authority to review provincial legislation and take action when provinces violate the Act.”
“Alberta’s law sets a dangerous precedent that will spread without federal action. That’s why we’re launching a national campaign to flood Health Minister Marjorie Michel’s office and MP offices across the country with one clear message: enforce the Canada Health Act and stop two-tier healthcare.”
While the Alberta law has gripped the immediate attention of healthcare advocates, changes introduced by Ontario’s Conservative government are also cause for alarm.
“Posing as the ‘every man’s man,’ Doug Ford is acting in the interests of private for-profit health corporations: privatizing hospitals, long-term care, blood services, primary care, public health functions and more,” said Natalie Mehra of the Ontario Health Coalition.
“At the same time as his government is redirecting hundreds of millions of public dollars to for-profit companies, local services such as Public Health are threatened with closures and amalgamations, local hospitals are pushed into deficit by purposeful underfunding then threatened to force them into cuts. He is privatizing core hospital services while local operating rooms in public hospitals are underused with closed ORs, idle diagnostic equipment and underfunded staffing.”
Mehra also notes that the drive to privatize healthcare isn’t limited to the Alberta and Ontario governments, as they are backed by a powerful array of corporate interests whose aggressive campaigning includes misinformation spread in the media and on social media.
“Highly organized groups connected to for-profit pharmaceutical companies, for-profit healthcare corporations – and with US funding and training – are campaigning to dismantle and privatize healthcare across the country. They exploit any crisis, failure and underfunding (often that they helped to create) to push privatization and they are emboldened by what Premiers Danielle Smith and Doug Ford are doing.”
Mass action to save healthcare
In the face of this accelerating attack, health coalitions are calling for mass action to save public healthcare. They are promoting campaigns to send petitions and letters to federal and provincial politicians, holding town halls to inform and mobilize people, and holding rallies and other public actions.
All agree that a key demand is for Ottawa to enforce the Canada Health Act. That legislation, passed in 1984, established the five principles of universality, comprehensive coverage, portability, accessibility and public administration, and stipulated that provinces which did not follow them would have their federal healthcare funding reduced.
But in a display of ongoing collusion with the forces of privatization, successive federal governments have declined to use the tools at hand.
“Despite the clear principles and provisions in the Canada Health Act, the current federal government is following in the footsteps of many Liberal and Conservative governments before it, in refusing to enforce the legislation,” says Communist Party leader Drew Garvie. “In the process, Ottawa is giving a green light to provincial governments and corporate profiteers in their attacks on public healthcare.”
Garvie says that the Communist Party places a high priority on building the active defense against privatization and encourages its members and supporters to join healthcare coalitions and help mobilize public opinion to protect and expand fully universal public healthcare.
“More than eighty years ago, Dr. Norman Bethune was a pioneer in the struggle for socialized medicine in Canada. He warned of the dangers of privatization when he said, ‘Let us take the profit, the private economic profit, out of medicine, and purify our profession of rapacious individualism. Let us make it disgraceful to enrich ourselves at the expense of the miseries of our fellow humans.’
“What we need to do now is rise up to defeat these current efforts at privatization and corporate profiteering, and launch a counter offensive to expand Medicare to include long-term care, pharmacare, dental, vision and mental health care.”
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