3 weeks Ago By Mohammed Adam
For an issue that has long dominated public discourse, it is disappointing that the health-care crisis that has left millions without a family doctor has been ignored on the campaign trail. Until now, three weeks out. We know that across the country, health care has not been living up to its name.
An alarming shortage of doctors and nurses; long waits to see specialists or have surgery; overwhelmed emergency departments and many other ills; have combined to turn health care into a horror story. Today, more than six million Canadians have no family doctor or access to primary care, and it is getting worse by the day. The word “crisis” has even become an understatement to describe what’s happening in Canada’s health care.
A February Nanos poll found that 81 per cent of Canadians say having a family doctor would be “important or somewhat important” in their decision to vote in the election. But it is only now, three weeks into the campaign, that NDP leader Jagmeet Singh has raised the issue, promising a family doctor for every Canadian by 2030, vowing to hire more nurses and increase federal health transfers by one per cent. So far, he is the only one to recognize the problem and offer a solution.
Good on him. The problem is that Singh, with all due respect, won’t be prime minister to implement his policies. But the two who could be – Pierre Poilievre and Mark Carney – have offered precious little on the issue.
Both Poilievre and Carney have pledged to cut spending and said they won’t touch health transfers. The two leaders have also promised to keep pharmacare . Beyond that, they haven’t offered any solutions to a broken system that has left many Canadians in despair.
Of course, we know that Donald Trump’s tariffs, which pose an existential threat to Canada, have taken over the campaign, drowning all other issues. If you fear that you may not have a country, or much of one anyway after Trump is done with it, your immediate concern is not health care or any other issue, however important it might be. Your first and last priority is safeguarding your country’s survival.
And that may be why the candidates are laser-focused on the Trump threats. Ottawa family doctor Alykhan Abdulla thinks so. He says even though Trump’s tariffs and attacks on Canada’s sovereignty were the number one issue in the provincial election, many of his patients still talked about health care.
But now, it’s different. Part of it is because most people believe health care to be a provincial issue, with only a limited role for the federal government; they are not likely to make it a big issue in a federal election. More importantly, Trump’s threats have totally changed the conversation.
“When people are losing their jobs and worried about the future, they want a government that is going to defend them,” Abdulla says. “They feel there are more important issues to deal with than health care.” Dr.
David Barber, chair of the Ontario Medical Association’s section on family and general practice, agrees. He says concern about the impact of tariffs has overshadowed all other issues, including health care. “There should be room for health care in the campaign because it is getting worse,” he says.
“But I am not hearing people raise it because of the tariffs, and the press is not talking about it.” And because responsibility is at the provincial level, his group, for instance, is focused on the work of former federal health minister Jane Philpott, who has been charged by Ontario Premier Doug Ford with helping fix the problem. That’s all well and good.
But if, in spite of the urgency of the Trump tariffs, Carney and Poilievre can talk about housing, affordability, crime and free passes for parks and museums, they should be able to talk more about health care. We can’t have an election without knowing how the federal government will tackle the crisis. Mohammed Adam is an Ottawa journalist and commentator.
Reach him at [email protected] RelatedEgli: Two nights in hospital showed me we need to do better for our health-care systemU.S.
health cuts an opportunity for Canada to do more.
