Canada's worst year ever? For health care and human rights, quite possibly
National Post, 31 December 2021
The Canadian identity suffered lethal assaults on three fronts in 2021
Was 2021 Canada’s worst year ever? Unlikely. While history has been kind to Canada, history never fully escapes the vale of tears.
The idea of Canada is another matter. That was battered badly in 2021. It’s hard to think of any year worse.
Canada, unlike Italy or Japan, is not a country knitted together by shared national traits — ethnic, linguistic, cultural. Like the United States, Canada is united by ideas about what our country is, or ought to be. Those ideas can be nebulous, as the never-ending search for Canadian identity demonstrates, spawning numerous royal commissions and countless graduate school dissertations.
Two things have, for several decades, dominated surveys about what Canadians think is important in making Canada what it is: health care and the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. Both were in the intensive care unit by January 2021. By December, palliative care was beckoning.
More fundamentally, the very legitimacy of the country was called into question. The successful efforts to declare Sir John A. Macdonald persona non grata, including in his hometown of Kingston, Ont., demonstrated that a great many of our leaders are open to the view that Canada ab initio was a criminal enterprise aimed at the brutalization of Indigenous peoples. That view may not carry the day — yet — amongst the generations of immigrants who found Canada a desirable choice, but an energetic propagandizing in our schools will see to that before long.
For serious students of health-care policy, it has been evident on a nonpartisan basis for at least 20 years that Canada’s medical system does not deliver the outcomes that merit the nation-defining esteem which many Canadians grant it. Leave aside the bogeyman of American health care; many European countries deliver better outcomes at much lower cost without banning private provision.
The one-line summary of Canadian health care is that, at stratospheric cost (only the Americans spend more), it provides high-quality care to those who get access to it. Access is the key problem, both for those who wait a long time for tests or surgery and for those whose health declines due to the lack of preventive measures.
Pandemic policy in Canada was driven by preserving that already limited access to those in need of emergency care. Most Canadians were surprised to discover that our ICU capacity was much lower than that of many countries, not only the United States. Policy experts had known that for a long time.
That our hospitals routinely run at “over” 100 per cent capacity was already well known. Herewith a CBC news story from January 2020, before the pandemic: “Overcrowding has become so common in Ontario hospitals that patient beds are now placed in hallways and conference rooms not only at times of peak demand, but routinely day after day.”
The pandemic revealed that the only way to keep patients out of corridors was to keep patients out of hospitals altogether by banning “elective” surgeries. The very term “elective surgery” was illuminating. The health-care system elects to operate on those it can. When it can’t, it doesn’t. The pandemic made manifest that our health-care system systemically denies health care to millions.
Canada may recover from COVID. The Canadian model of health — unique in the world — will not.
Continue reading at the National Post.