In just the past month, news stories have broken across the country detailing the harsh realities of Canadian healthcare. In Alberta, a woman needing spine imaging must wait 17 months—or pay upwards of $700 for a private scan. In PEI, patients lined up at 4 AM for a walk-in clinic. In BC, an emergency department closed for the 19th time this year.
Things are particularly severe in Quebec. The new public-health agency, Santé Québec, has recently announced its demand for $1.5 billion in cuts. A few weeks earlier, the Ministry of Health went as far as suggesting that healthy Quebecers lose their registration with a family doctor.
This is all the result of decades of cuts, stretching public health services to their limits, and creating a pretext to justify privatization.
A 2024 poll by Navigator shows that 90 per cent of Canadians believe the government has neglected healthcare for too long. Forty-nine per cent said that healthcare access has worsened over the past few years, and two-thirds have experienced unreasonable wait times. There is no denying the crisis, and workers desperately need solutions.
The resulting anxiety over the state of healthcare has created a historic shift in public opinion. While in 2019, 77 per cent of Canadians were staunchly proud (and protective) of the public system, that number has dropped to 48 per cent. The same Navigator poll showed that now, eight in ten support private sector surgeries if paid for publicly. And in 2023, nearly 6 in 10 people supported the private delivery of healthcare, the highest support ever recorded in the country.
When faced with a crumbling system, long wait times, labyrinthine bureaucracy, and burnt-out providers, it’s little wonder that workers will back any proposed alternative, with their health and lives on the line.
That’s exactly the kind of thinking that the capitalists are counting on. They run public healthcare into the ground, and then act as if they have no choice but to hand cash to their private sector friends.
In Ontario, Doug Ford has been expanding the number of services that can be offered by private clinics. Alberta premier Danielle Smith has announced plans to lease hospitals to private providers. Quebec’s new health agency (mentioned above) was set up to run health care like a corporation, with a board of directors and a CEO.
The problem is, using public money to pay for private services is not the same as funding a public system—in fact, it ends up costing more. The money isn’t just paying for services, it’s also paying for the profits of private owners. Privatization means profits over patients.
The private sector is not immune to the staff shortages and surgical backlogs either. A recent report on the privatization push in Saskatchewan commented:
“Of all the strategies that they had undertaken to reduce wait-times, it is investment in the expansion and capacity of the public system that shows the most success in actually reducing wait times.”
The crisis in healthcare flows from the same problem the entire capitalist system is facing. Declining productivity and an ailing economy mean that the capitalists and their politicians are looking to make cuts, especially in social programs.
Privatization will only accelerate the collapse of healthcare. Its effects will become more apparent in the years and decades to come. People will get sicker, and their chronic medical issues worsen. There is no way out under capitalism, only a choice between austerity or privatization. Either way, workers lose: our health and our lives.
