A disastrous day

It was the early nineteen thirties. A hospital administrator who had a cottage at an Indian reserve on Carlysle lake (near Weyburn, Saskatchewan) befriended a fiery baptist minister, a tireless advocate for the poor and critic of the rich. These two men and their wives formed a lifelong friendship. Irma and Eva would get together years after the hospital administrator passed away, catching up on old times everytime Eva went to Ottawa. The two families left descendants to remember them of course. I remember my grandfather very fondly. That other grandfather's grandson stars in an action TV show called "24." He is very proud of his grandfather, too, and he has every right to be.

His grandfather, you see, was a tireless advocate of the idea that medical care is not a commodity. And it is more than a utility. It is a fundamental right; he believed passionately that every person, no matter how poor or rich, was entitled just as equally to medical care. My grandfather, a conservative man by nature, supported his friend's views, and voted for him in every election he ran in. You see the baptist minister in Weyburn, Tommy Douglas, would come to lead a new political party called the CCF, and become premier of Saskatchewan. As premier, the greatest Canadian would institute public health care, a system that eventually became our greatest national project since the coast to coast railway that created Canada, a partnership between the provinces and the federal government; one that would ensure everybody was equal - the poorest man would be entitled to the same level of care as Conrad Black.

That dream may have ended yesterday. The Supreme Court ruled that the province of Quebec cannot prevent private health care insurance from existing. When you hear the details of the case, you cannot blame the justices for being sympathetic to the complainant. He was a man who waited a year to get a hip replacement, and knew a doctor willing to establish a private clinic to get him that replacement far faster than the publicly funded system was willing to. But the arrival of a second tier of health care does mean an eventual switch to the thinking that prevails in Britain and France, where the public/private combination already exists. There, public health care is seen as sort of benevolent government benefaction, a service kindly provided by government to those who can't afford private care. The most Schweitzerian doctors will work in that system of course, but many doctors who are more ambitious prefer to work privately.

Canada does not have that view. Health care isn't a charity performed by beneficent government. We see it as a right, as critical as the right to speak freely, associate, or be free from discrimination. However this supreme court decision may be the beginning of that unravelling.