Liberal Insistence on Peddling Fraudulent Solutions to Serious Problems Facing Society
Dr. Danielle Martin, the Liberal candidate in University--Rosedale, is promoted as an experienced and trustworthy advocate for the need for all Canadians to have access to a family doctor and good primary health care. She has a history of advocacy, and the media have helped the Liberals present her as a worthy star candidate who will be a great asset to a Liberal majority government. What precisely she is advocating for is at times repeated but not questioned, not discussed, not put under public scrutiny.
Dr. Martin, in a 2025 interview for a Canadian Health Care Coalition podcast, was asked her opinions about the plans of the Ford government to increase access to family physicians. She replied that she was very hopeful about this development. She also stressed the need for better administration of family medicine practices, pointing out that family doctors spend some 19 hours a week doing "administrative work." She had nothing to say about the rampant privatization that the Ford government's plan entails or the often negative consequences of which there is ample proof.
Even
as repeated Liberal, Conservative and social democratic governments at
both the federal and provincial levels have stopped providing the
system of public health care with the funding it requires, they present
themselves as great defenders of what they call medicare. They ignore
the advice of
medical professionals, from surgeons, to family doctors, to nurses,
nursing assistants, orderlies, ambulance drivers, maintenance staff,
engineers and Canadians themselves who have provided plans which address
the need to renew the public health care system on a modern basis. They
only see fit to
promote advocates of some form or another of privatization. Everyone
knows this. In Canada, health care is not a right with governments
duty-bound to provide it with a guarantee. Dr. Martin herself touts the
view that providing health care is a "Canadian value" which
distinguishes Canada from the
U.S.-style health care which depends on an individual or family's
ability to access a very corrupt insurance system.
No amount of smooth talk about how public health care is a core value of Canadians and Quebeckers changes the reality that people are waiting years for surgery and that people are dying waiting to be seen in emergency departments. Nor does it change the fact that rampant privatization of what has never been more than a semi-public system is taking more and more funding out of the system and turning it into pay-the-rich schemes. It is instructive to note that the Ford government has used former Liberal MP and Minister of Health Dr. Jane Philpott as a "non-partisan" adviser for the plan to add family doctors in Ontario and to Chair Ontario's Primary Care Action Team (PCAT).
According to government propaganda, the "Primary Care Action Plan," is supposed to provide everyone in Ontario with a family physician but the "Action Plan" is vigorously opposed by health care unions, community organizations and health care advocates including the Ontario Health Coalition because it is based on privatization of services through a shift of public funding to private clinics, redirecting over a billion dollars a year from public hospitals. It is not only a matter of diverting public funds into private hands for private profit, but a fundamental problem of who is taking the decisions which make it so.
The
first requirement in guaranteeing the right to health care is to ensure
that the human resources needed – health professionals and workers -- are
educated and trained, provided secure employment and that they are
properly appreciated and cared for. The wages they receive and their
working
conditions are concrete evidence of the kind of society Canada is, of
the values it espouses. It is not a mystery. Hospitals,
seniors' care facilities and home care systems which do not have the
aim of providing highest quality care on time on a modern
people-centred basis do not pass
muster. Privatization of health care and seniors' care where human
beings are reduced to the status of "clients" must be banned. Starving
the system of the funds and modern means it requires in order to pay
the rich, must be banned.
A model based on starving the health care system of funds cannot improve care. There is long experience that "efficiencies" in health care under neo-liberal governments are based on depriving people of services, not improving them. These private clinics look like U.S. "health management organization" (HMO) models of integrated corporate "care." These take decision-making out of the hands of the doctors, nurses and other health care professionals together with that of their patients and put it into the hands of corporate entities.
Far from being a fantasy, health care is already rationed in many ways, including by long wait times for care, and by decisions which are not even discussed or known to the public. Wait times are reduced by putting people on lists to be put on waiting lists. It is cynical, open to corruption and discrimination in the name of high ideals. It is known that, all too often, the severe shortage of oncologists means that in many places patients are triaged on the basis that those with a lower chance of a positive outcome go to the end of queue, or are simply given no attention whatsoever. It is common practice and families cannot hold anyone to account because they exercise no control over those who establish this way of doing things in the name of high ideals.
The Liberal government's share of health care spending has dwindled to around 20 per cent of public funding, while all public funding covers only about 70 per cent of health care costs. Liberal illusions that the federal government has plans to provide the health care system with the funding and resources required to guarantee the right to health care are just that – liberal illusions that they can get away with it. It is up to the people to show them that they cannot.
This article was published in
Volume 56 Number 18 - April 13, 2026
Article Link:
https://cpcml.ca/TML2026/Articles/T560183.HTM
Website: www.cpcml.ca Email: editor@cpcml.ca