Earlier this year, the federal government gave the provinces and territories an immediate, unconditional $2-billion Canada Health Transfer on top of a record $198.6 billion to address immediate pressures on the health care system. But there were no strings attached on how it would be used.
“As a health-care team, we are disheartened, dispirited and have lost all hope that our leaders even understand the magnitude of the issues that face us. God help us all,” said veteran ER doctor Alan Drummond, the past president of the Canadian Association of Emergency Physicians. His group is calling for a national forum to come up with a cross-country plan to fix the problem fast.
But there were no strings attached on how it would be used.
None of Canada’s premiers were willing to sign a document that locked those funds into healthcare spending alone. So essentially they can be used for anything a provincial gov’t wants to spend money on … like Ontario’s greenbelt, BC’s fires, or even just to give themselves raises.
Only we can hold ALL of them accountable on this.
Do we know it was all of them? As I recall they collectively put out a statement put out by the premiers, but not necessarily unanimously.
Conservative government is trying to break health care.
This allows their cronies to set up private health care for crazy profits.
You know? The American model?
Who knew that severely underfunding healthcare would cause bad healthcare
Now let’s finish the paperwork to create private healthcare companies. Start building some clinics, making sure our friends get all of those sweet government construction contracts. We can even use taxpayer money to fund all of this.
I won’t why the massive amounts of money that was aimed towards healthcare but was essentially a blank check didn’t end up going to healthcare?
Because the conservative premiers insisted that it be no strings attached so they could either sit on it, make tax cuts with it, or implement greed based health care.
Thanks, but the article doesn’t mention that it was Alberta, Quebec, Ontario, Manitoba and Sask that were the primary forces behind the no strings. BC, unlike them, *actually used the covid funding for its intended purpose. *
