Should Ontario privatize its healthcare system?

ELENI KOPSAFTIS

Every day since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, the Ontario health care system has been pushed closer and closer towards the brink of what it can take.

Emergency room wait times are averaging at about 20.7 hours per patient, and hospital staff shortages have health departments calling on volunteers to fill nursing shifts, according to CTV News. To mitigate the effects of this healthcare crisis, the Ford government is leaning into privatizing the public system, but is this really the right call?

As it is now, Ontario’s healthcare system is covered by Ontario’s health care plan–known better as OHIP–which is paid for by yearly taxes. On the provincial website, you’ll find that OHIP will pay for a number of programs and services such as doctor’s visits, surgeries, ambulance services, and much more.

Although OHIP doesn’t seem to be going away soon, one of Premier Doug Ford’s solutions to the healthcare crisis so far has been to open private clinic surgeries.

This move has representatives from the Ontario Health Coalition concerned. In an August statement, Executive Director Natalie Mehra called for a public process into any further privatization.

“Taking staff out of our public hospitals to serve private clinics that have a business model that is about cherry picking the profitable patients and leaving the expensive patients behind with less staff and less resources to serve them is an absolutely reckless and asinine idea,” said Mehra in the statement. “We will not, under our watch, allow them to privatize the public hospital system in Ontario.”

ICON BY FLATICON

Mike Schreiner, Canadian MPP and Guelph representative, has also spoken against privatization in Ontario.

In an interview with The Ontarion, Schreiner noted that for-profit long-term care homes were hit much harder by the pandemic than public homes. In fact, a 2020 study by the Canadian Medical Association Journal found that the death rate in private homes was over four times the rate of public ones.

“When it comes to the caring professions, we should put care before profit and make sure that all the money, all our tax dollars, go into our healthcare system and are targeted to care for people and to ensure that the people who are providing that care are taken care of as well,” said Schreiner.

So if not privatization, what measures should Ontario be taking to stop the healthcare crisis instead? First of all, Schreiner says that much of the crisis is driven by Bill 124.

Ontario’s Bill 124 was introduced by the Ford government in 2019 and caps annual salary increases for nurses and other public sector workers at one per cent, according to Toronto City News. The bill has been criticized by nurse associations, saying it “demoralizes and undermines our profession” and has contributed to nursing professionals leaving their positions. The CBC also reports that the bill does not apply to First Nations and Indigenous communities or for-profit companies.

Public-sector workers are currently challenging the constitutionality of the bill, saying that it has “taken away meaningful collective bargaining, thereby violating the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms.” However, the province argues that the charter only protects the process of bargaining and not the outcome, and that the bill does not prevent workers from “joining together to bargain” through strike or arbitration.

“What I would [suggest] would be to repeal Bill 124 and allow nurses and family healthcare workers to negotiate fair wages, fair benefits, and better working conditions,” said Schreiner.

“And I think we need to have some targeted and strategic investments that in the short-term would increase funding to the healthcare system and in the long-term would help us save on money and improve care, and in particular, investing more in home and community care.”

In the meantime, no further

Ontario’s Bill 124 was introduced by the Ford government in 2019 and caps annual salary increases for nurses and other public sector workers at one per cent. CREDIT: PEXELS

measures to privatize healthcare in Ontario have been announced, but should that change, the Ontario Health Coalition warns that it will only cause further staff shortages in the public sector.

“We want a list, we want to know who they are meeting with, it’s in the public [interest] that there be full disclosure about this,” said Mehra, demanding there be a public process to any further privatization. “We want to force the process out into the open so that it doesn’t happen behind closed doors before anyone can stop it.”

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