Remember as kids, a group of us would be walking to school. If one of us saw a can on top of someone’s garbage they would knock it to the pavement. We would take turns kicking it until we left it in the school yard for a custodian to pick up and send it on in its journey to some landfill.
It seems to be the way our federal and provincial governments are handling healthcare. It is a quasi-adult form of kick the can.
It’s wrong. It’s stupid. It is simple fodder for the journalists, and commentators who are not helping clear the air. They are unaware of the rules of this game of kick the can. Maybe they always rode a school bus and never got to kick the can.
Recently the feds and provinces had a meeting that enabled everyone to vent their feelings about the cost of healthcare. And it is hard to blame them when we have only recently come out of the worst of a pandemic. Pandemics and climate change seem to be nature’s way of leveling off the human population of this desperate planet of ours.
The basic problem the prime minister and provincial premiers were facing was that healthcare is a provincial responsibility and the feds pay a healthy percentage of the cost to help keep the system working across Canada. It only cost the federal government $46.2 billion to cover off about a third of the healthcare bill for the next ten years. There are a lot of side deals yet to be made.
What is very wrong with this is that nobody admits they are raising taxes to pay the bills. They are kicking the can, in the form of debt, down the road to be paid by our great grand children. It is the difference between an ongoing expense and a long-term investment. Only conservatives are stupid enough to go around saying governments need to balance the budget. Yes, they do with expense items. Long-term debt needs to be saved for infrastructure that will still be of value 20 or 40 years later.
There is supposed to be a plan in place in Ontario to electrify the commuter lines. The value of this is not so much to reduce carbon dispersal but to increase the speed of the lines and provide better service. The first step is to eliminate level crossings. We will never get that done if the province tries to hide the costs of healthcare in long-term debt.
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Copyright 2023 © Peter Lowry
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