John,

Like me, you are probably anxious about getting sick and having to use our health care system.

You don’t want to wait 15 hours in an emergency room. You don’t want to wait six months to see a specialist.

Our health care system has been dysfunctional for decades. Things got even worse during covid, as unvaccinated health care workers were fired and surgeries were postponed.

This week, Justin Trudeau offered to send provinces a few billion dollars more as part of the Canada Health Transfer to help solve these problems.

It’s all a sham. It won’t solve anything.

First, there is no guarantee provinces will use that money to spend more on health care. They determine their overall health care budget, and federal money is only a relatively small part of it.

In any case, whether federal or provincial, the money comes out of the same pocket: YOURS!

If provinces believe they need to spend more on health care, they can increase taxes or spend less on corporate subsidies or on silly programs to promote wokism, just like Ottawa. In the end, it makes no difference where the money comes from.

But more importantly, lack of money is not the main problem.

Canada is among the developed countries that spend the most on health care. And yet, we are also among those that have the worst performance.

The fundamental problem is that we are the only developed country where the government has a monopoly on hospital care.

All other OECD countries have mixed private-public systems and (with the exception of the United States) universal systems that guarantee citizens equal access.

Patients in these countries have a lot more choice than Canadians. They can be treated in public or private hospitals, with the government or their private insurance paying for the treatment.

Wait times are non-existent or very short, and nobody is denied care because of low income.

What we need is for Ottawa to stop meddling in this exclusive provincial jurisdiction, and for provinces to implement reforms in line with those of all other developed countries.

Promising more federal money while pretending to fix the system when they actually have no power to do so, as all the other parties are proposing, is not the right approach. On the contrary, it’s part of the problem.

Provincial governments will never make the tough decisions if they can always blame Ottawa for not sending enough money. We must end the current confusion over who does what and who is responsible for the problem.

John, in our Platform, the PPC is proposing to replace federal cash payments with a permanent transfer of tax points of equivalent value to the provinces and territories, to give them a stable source of revenue and put an end to the charade of federal contribution to health care.

This would create the conditions for provincial and territorial governments to innovate. They would be fully responsible for health care funding and management, and fully accountable to their citizens for the results.

This week, both The Globe and Mail and the National Post published editorials in which they made the exact same common sense proposal.

The Globe and Mail: “A better approach would be for Ottawa to reduce its taxes... to allow the provinces to raise theirs. Ceding federal tax points would at once give the provinces additional health care dollars – while making them clearly accountable to their own voters for how those dollars were spend. Such a move would be far more ambitious than the modest measures rolled out this week.”

National Post: “One of the major problems with Canada’s current health-care funding model is it allows the provinces, which are constitutionally responsible for health care, to blame federal funding levels for their own failures. One way to address that problem would be for Ottawa to replace the CHT (Canada Health Transfer) with a transfer of tax points to the provinces, as a recent report written by Peter Nicholson, a former adviser to Paul Martin, for the University of Saskatchewan’s Graduate School of Public Policy recommends. This would entail reducing federal taxes by a certain amount and allowing the provinces to raise them without increasing Canadians’ overall tax burden.”

John, health care is the biggest preoccupation of Canadians. It MUST be fixed. Please, help us promote this crucial reform with a $10 donation today!

Thank you,
-Max

P.S. If you have trouble finding where you can donate, you can just click this link! https://www.peoplespartyofcanada.ca/donate