Vancouver & Burnaby Chapter

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Health Care

Health Care 101

Canada’s public health care system is the jewel of Canada’s social welfare programs. It was born out of a real need to provide quality health care regardless of ability to pay. Canadians regularly rank public health care as our most important social program and even as one of the things that most defines us as a nation. One of the founders of the Canadian public health care system was Tommy Douglas, who was voted the “Greatest Canadian”. Since the late 1960s, Canada’s public health care system has been providing Canadians with high quality public health care. Canada’s public system replaced a private system in which serious illness was often a financial catastrophe for families. It is also in stark contrast to the largely private U.S. health care model, where wealthy people have access to cutting edge health care but tens of millions of people have no health insurance whatsoever, and a huge portion of the public is underinsured.

Unfortunately, since the early 1990s, the federal and provincial governments have made substantial cuts to public health care funding. They have also mismanaged the education of health care professionals. The result has been a steady decline in the capacity of the system to provide quality care in as timely a way as Canadians expect.

This naturally created a demand for private options, which have crept in along the margins of the system: private clinics for various procedures and private insurance for non-medically necessary procedures. Unfortunately, both levels of government have largely turned a blind eye to this creeping privatization, and private health care providers have responded by pushing the limits. Many have started to provide medically necessary services. Provinces such as B.C. are actively promoting public-private partnerships as the future of health care. But this is obviously a slippery slope towards a system of privatized, or at least two tier health care, where the very wealthy can buy excellent care, but everyone else will have to make do with a gutted public system. This is simply unacceptable to the vast majority of Canadians.

The Council vigorously opposes the undermining of our public health care system, and is actively working with partners such as the Canada Health Coalition (and its provincial counterparts) to preserve and improve our precious public health care system.