Roundup: Blaming the wrong government for the shortage of doctors—again

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Because this is sometimes a media criticism blog, I turn to the big piece on the weekend the CBC ran about family doctors, and which its author, JP Tasker, pursued while in the fill-in host’s chair on Power & Politics yesterday. This is something Tasker has been on for a while now, and he seems to think he’s on a righteous crusade about the shortage of doctors in Canada, and yet his article misses almost all of the important parts of the discussion, while he kept trying to set up this dichotomy on P&P between more doctors and pharmacare, getting that wrong as well, as it too will rely on provincial governments.

Reading the story, you wouldn’t know that healthcare is a provincial responsibility. There are mentions of the deals that the federal government has been making with provinces, but the focus remains on this somehow being a federal issue when its not. And the main cause of the shortage of doctors traces back to the cuts in the 1990s, when provinces cut the number of medical school and residency spaces as part of their cost-saving measures after the federal transfer cuts. While this isn’t mentioned, what is also not mentioned is that when the Martin government re-invested in health transfers, the provinces didn’t similarly reinvest. They didn’t significantly re-open training or residency spaces like before. And as the health transfers were rising at six percent per year, health spending by the provinces were certainly not, and a lot of that money that was supposed to go to healthcare went to other things (often lowering taxes or reducing provincial deficits). And now here we are reaping what has been sown, but are the provinces being blamed for the problems they created? Of course not.

These were their choices. It’s their jurisdiction. They should be the ones who shoulder the blame here, but in this country, legacy media is allergic to holding premiers accountable for pretty much anything (except maybe education), and once again, they get to skate after shitting the bed, while the federal government is being given all the blame. If there’s a chef’s kiss of just how terrible Tasker’s article is, he got a quote from someone who said the ArriveCan money should have been spent on hiring doctors, as though that was something the federal government could do. Slow clap.

Ukraine Dispatch:

Russian forces say that they have crushed the last pockets of resistance in Avdiivka now that the Ukrainians have pulled back. Those Ukrainian forces are now digging in to new positions just outside of Avdiivka to repel further advances. President Volodymyr Zelenskyy visited the front lines in the north-eastern part of the country.

https://twitter.com/zelenskyyua/status/1759625711353053426

Good reads:

  • Justin Trudeau says that Italian prime minister Giorgia Meloni will visit Toronto on March 2nd; no word if he’s going to criticise her record on LGBTQ rights again.
  • Bill Blair announced that Canada will send 800 Canadian-made drones to Ukraine, mostly to be used for surveillance but can also drop ordnance.
  • Federal funding for HIV self-test kits is set to expire, with no word if it will be renewed or not.
  • Tens of thousands of permanent residents have applied to join the military, but it takes 18 to 24 months to process their applications and many lose interest.
  • The Canadian owners of PornHub say they will block the site in Canada if the (egregiously bad) age verification legislation goes through.
  • If you ignore the cheap outrage framing, here’s a bit of a look at the forthcoming challenge around renovating the Supreme Court of Canada’s building.
  • Yesterday saw the official swearing-in of Supreme Court Justice Mary Moreau (about three months after her actual swearing-in and taking her place on the bench).
  • Kevin Carmichael muses about housing corrections in Canada, and how it is too politically unpalatable as a way of restoring housing affordability.
  • Emmett Macfarlane suggests one way that the federal government could thwart provinces’ plans when it comes to their policies around gender diverse youth.

Odds and Ends:

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One thought on “Roundup: Blaming the wrong government for the shortage of doctors—again”

  1. I was 40ish and living in Ontario when Premier Mike Harris of COMMON SENSE! fame (made me eat my dog!) explained that healthcare was too expensive and that doctors and nurses were directly responsible for the outrageous costs. So he “fixed” it.
    I wandered around mumbling about the pig in the python, boomer retirement, but no one listened. Now I live in the Maritime backwoods and my family doctor has twenty years as a trauma surgeon and google scholar citations to prove it. But he’s from Africa and isn’t allowed to do that stuff here. Who coulda knowed?!!!

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