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OUR VIEW: Health is not partisan

Is there a realization that there’s no room for politics in a healthy system?
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Premier David Eby during an announcement for local government infrastructure in Surrey last month. (Anna Burns/Black Press Media)

Last weekend, Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre put out a statement calling for a fast, simple system to get foreign-trained doctors and nurses certified to practise in Canada, and to allow health professionals to move from province to province.

Meanwhile, B.C.’s NDP Premier David Eby has been rolling out programs to do something very similar, attempting to slash the time it takes for nurses educated outside Canada to have their skills recognized here.

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When an arch-conservative and a social democratic premier are singing from the same songbook, something is up.

Reforms within our universal health-care system aren’t really a partisan issue.

Too often we get bogged down in fighting about whether or not a proposal will lead to privatized care and a two-tier system – something very few Canadians want – or whether simply pumping more money in will do enough.

But the real problem seems to be that existing systems and ways of doing things, from educating care providers, to certification, to systems of compensating doctors, had become deeply entrenched. Our political leaders, of all parties, have spent the last two decades fiddling with the system like it was a tower of Jenga blocks, reluctant to move more than one or two, lest the whole tower come crashing down.

And then, when their tiny tweaks failed to improve things, they withdrew behind the shield of partisan politics, proclaiming that the other guys would really break the system!

Finally, it looks like we’re getting sincere efforts at useful reform and sustainable, systemic change, without gutting anything or charging patients money.

It isn’t a partisan issue, and it never was. It’s nice to see those in charge realizing that at last.

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