Once unthinkable positions like deregulating private health care or defunding the CBC are now mainstream
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It’s been among the most volatile and untouchable third rails in Canadian politics: The adoption, at any level, of a private health-care system.
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In the last federal election, a Conservative statement about “public-private synergies” was all it took for Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland to brand it as a right-wing assault on the “public, universal health-care system.”
But a new Ipsos report shows that “two tier health care” is not the threat it once was.
Among respondents, 52 per cent wanted “increased access to health care provided by independent health entrepreneurs,” against just 29 per cent who didn’t.
Perhaps most shocking of all, almost everyone agreed that private health care would be more efficient. Seven in 10 respondents agreed that “private entrepreneurs can deliver health care services faster than hospitals managed by the government” – against a mere 15 per cent who disagreed.
“People understand that the endless waiting lists that characterize our government-run health systems will not be solved by yet another bureaucratic reform,” was the conclusion of the Montreal Economic Institute, which commissioned the poll.
As Canada reels from simultaneous crises of crime, affordability, productivity, health-care access and others, it’s prompting a political realignment unlike anything seen in a generation. But it’s not just a trend that can be seen in the millions of disaffected voters stampeding to a new party. As Canadians shift rightwards, they are freely discarding sacred cows that have held for decades.
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If Canadians are suddenly open to health-care reform, it helps that they’ve never been more dissatisfied with the status quo. The past calendar year even brought the once-unthinkable sight of the U.S. being officially called in to bail out failures in the Canadian system.
Last May, B.C. began outsourcing radiation treatment to hospitals in Washington State, arguing it was the only way to reduce skyrocketing wait times for the procedure.
Last August, an Angus Reid Institute survey found an incredible 66 per cent saying the health system’s problems were well beyond a lack of funding. There were “bigger challenges in the health-care system that money can’t fix.”
And while Angus Reid didn’t quite find respondents clamouring for private health care, they found that entrenched fears of a two-tier system were rapidly dissipating. In the course of a single year, the number of respondents who thought private care would “worsen” the system dropped from 50 per cent to 44 per cent.
Similar forces are in motion when it comes to the CBC. Conservatives used to promise reform and austerity for the national broadcaster, but they always deferred to the notion that the CBC is a positive force that deserves taxpayer funding. “We believe in the national public broadcaster. We have said that we will maintain or increase support for the CBC,” Conservative Heritage Minister James Moore said in 2011.
Now, Tory Leader Pierre Poilievre is routinely making flamboyant promises to gut CBC headquarters and turn it into affordable housing – and the public generally seems to be fine with it. Earlier this year a poll by Spark Insights found that at least half of Canadians either wanted CBC defunded or retooled; 24 per cent said it was “no longer needed or useful,” with another 35 per cent saying it could stay only with “a lot of changes.”
Canada’s famous openness to immigration is following much the same route. Amid record-high migrant intake, a poll last month by Leger found that 50 per cent of Canadians now thought immigration was too high. Just one year prior, not even a quarter of respondents were worried about immigration rates.
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau came to power in 2015 at a time when climate change was regularly topping surveys of Canadians’ top political concern. Nine years later, a clear majority of respondents to an Angus Reid Institute poll said that they believed their government needed to cool it on the environmental policy, particularly the carbon tax. Sixty-three per cent agreed with the statement “cost of living concerns should come first, even if it damages policies to fight climate change.”
The needle may even be moving on a political inclination that has proved remarkably resilient among both Liberal and Conservative camps going back to the early 1990s: Underfunding the military.
The end of the Cold War just happened to coincide with Canada’s 1990s sovereign debt crisis. As a result, Ottawa took an axe to its armed forces and never looked back.
The last time Canada ever met the current NATO standard of spending two per cent of GDP on defence was in 1990. Over the last 20 years, that figure was lucky to hit 1.4 per cent.
And voters, for the most part, didn’t seem to care. “Both Canadian leaders and the voting public have been happy to coast on the military reputation that the country earned more than 70 years ago,” read a recent analysis in the publication War on the Rocks.
But probably for the first time since the 1960s, Canadians are suddenly seeing the virtues of more helicopters, ships and soldiers.
Last month, the Angus Reid Institute found 53 per cent favouring a massive surge in defence spending to get Canada to the NATO target of two per cent. That’s the equivalent of an extra $16 billion in military spending each year.
Even more telling was when pollsters asked Canadians what their country’s top priority should be in terms of foreign affairs. The usual winner, “building better trade ties,” had plummeted from 57 per cent in 2015 to just 43 per cent today.
The Canadians who wanted to prioritize “military preparedness,” meanwhile, had risen from a fringe 12 per cent to a potentially election-deciding 29 per cent.
IN OTHER NEWS
It’s common for federal governments to steamroll provincial jurisdiction wherever they can, but the Trudeau government has turned provincial encroachment into an art. Virtually all of their signature policies – from the carbon tax to childcare to housing to even their proposed school lunch program – have involved some form of federal imposition on provincial matters. So it’s perhaps to be expected that Trudeau on Friday issued one of the more “screw the provinces” statements ever uttered by a Canadian prime minister. “I’d always rather work with provinces, but if we have to I will go around them and be there for Canadians,” he said at a press availability.
If you’re gay or bisexual, you can now donate sperm for the first time in 30 years. The Health Canada ban on gay sperm donation was never premised on any notion that homosexual sperm was inferior. Rather, it was to prevent the transmission of HIV. Just as was the case with Canadian Blood Services until 2022, gay men (or in the official parlance: “men who have sex with men”) were among the demographics barred from donation due to their statistically having outsized rates of HIV. The new regulations haven’t been released, but it sounds like they’re going to be based more specifically on promiscuity and the relative risk of an individual’s sexual pursuits.
The Ontario legislature has banned the wearing of keffiyeh, an Arabic scarf that is extremely useful in desert climates, but in Canada is mostly worn as a statement of Palestinian sympathies. In particular, the fishnet-pattern keffiyeh ubiquitous at Canadian anti-Israel demonstrations were all popularized by Palestinian extremists such as Yasser Arafat or sky pirate Leila Khaled. For these reasons, Ontario legislative speaker Ted Arnott deemed its wearing a political statement, and subjected them to the same ban already in place for clothing bearing written political slogans. This prompted outrage from federal justice minister Arif Virani, who said “the keffiyah is an important cultural symbol that should be welcomed in all Canadian institutions.”
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