Health care is not government property

The recent spate of news stories raising alarm over Canada’s health-care system comes at a strange time.

For two years the narrative has been changing from “flatten the curve” to “pandemic of the unvaccinated” to “long COVID” to “tax the unvaxed.” It’s been hard to keep up with the latest media and government spin, because governments themselves didn’t seem to know what they’d be doing next as health officials haphazardly changed course after repeated failures.

Journalists crossed swords with politicians or health officials only when they felt governments weren’t being tough enough. Since Day 1, media have responded to restrictions not by questioning their need or justification, but by asking why officials weren’t taking even stricter measures.

Last fall we were peppered with alarming headlines warning that hospitals were at capacity, with emergency rooms and ICUs overflowing because of COVID-19 patients — most of them unvaccinated.

The unvaccinated became pariahs, turned into less than second-class citizens, removed from their jobs, denounced publicly, and even denied medical services. They became the latest acceptable prejudice.

Interviews with medical staff told of their burnout and their frustration with the unvaccinated. Journalists on their Twitter feeds crusaded against the unvaccinated and campaigned for the government’s vax mandates as though they were promoting war bonds.

It served the cause well. Public anger against the unvaccinated now resembles war-time suspicion of neighbours with Japanese or German descent.

Then came Omicron, and suddenly your neighbour with COVID might equally be vaccinated or unvaccinated. With contradictory data emanating from health officials, the media continue regurgitating government talking points. Where officials used to focus on positive test results and journalists would obligingly write about positive test results, now officials are talking about our overwhelmed health-care system and taxing the unvaccinated, and so reporters write about our overwhelmed health-care system and taxing the unvaccinated.

National Post writer Kelly McParland had this wonderful quip: “A memo must have circulated within the Ottawa pundit club, as suddenly there’s a rash of articles noticing that things aren’t as they should be in the venerated Canadian health-care system, which, until recently, we insistently assured ourselves was admired around the world.”

Suddenly the media are lurching away from the stories about case counts that served them so well for two years and toward analyses of the health-care system while politicians promise tormenting the unvaccinated is the latest measure that will end COVID.

Terry O’Neill’s report this week on Canada’s health-care crisis and the appropriate Catholic response to it makes two things clear:

• The crisis is not new, and shortages of everything from staff to resources predate COVID by decades.
• And allowing the government to control the narrative and the manner in which health-care reform is managed would be an irresponsible dismissal of the history of health care in Canada.

Catholics were providing health care in Canada before there was a Canada, beginning with religious congregations who dedicated their lives to caring for the sick and dying. Many remain today. In B.C. there are more than 40 health-care facilities operated by 12 different religious denominations – Catholic, Baptist, Salvation Army, Jewish, and more.

Throughout the country’s history, faith communities have provided superior and compassionate care for the sick and dying. They led the way in the treatment of AIDS patients when other hospitals were turning them away, and today they are leaders in tackling the opioid crisis.

Faith communities have resisted efforts by government to impose procedures that violate their beliefs and have similarly made up for the dereliction by government to provide services like hospice and palliative care. In response, government has been only too eager to seize non-compliant facilities, witness the Delta Hospice scandal.

If there’s going to be a national conversation about the future of health care in Canada, our federal and provincial governments are the last ones who should be leading it. For more than 150 years they’ve acquired more and more responsibility for health care, taxed more and more to fund it, but shown themselves incapable of doing either responsibly. It’s time to listen to other voices.

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Twitter: @Paulschratz