How Harper Killed Medicare — and Got Away With It

[Oscar]

How Harper Killed Medicare — and Got Away With It

[ http://www.comer.org/archives/2015/COMER_MarApr2015.pdf ]

By Linda McQuaig, http://www.ipolitics.ca, January 7, 2015

EXCERPT:

Under Harper, taxes as a percentage of the economy are at their lowest level in 70 years. But 70 years ago, governments weren’t providing the extensive public benefits and services – in areas like health care, education, pensions, public transit – that we want and expect today.

As a result of Harper’s cuts to the GST, personal and corporate taxes, Ottawa now collects about $45 billion less revenue per year. No wonder we’re told we can’t afford anything but austerity.

So Harper has accomplished his deeper agenda: to destroy our sense that we can do things collectively as a nation…besides fight wars, patrol the Arctic, punish criminals and watch hockey.

Take public health care, typically at the top of the list of public programs that Canadians deeply value. All seems pretty quiet on the health care front, currently presided over by Rona Ambrose, who previously held other portfolios of little interest to the Harper Conservatives, like the environment, labour and women.

We don’t see much in the way of fireworks over health care these days – no big blow-outs with the premiers, no loud accusations that Stockwell Day and his Canadian Alliance would bring in two-tier medicine.

So things must be OK now, right? Well, no.

True, there are no theatrics over Medicare these days. But that’s because Stephen Harper is craftier than Stockwell Day. In reality, two-tier medicine is a virtual certainty if the Conservatives are re-elected.

Harper has quietly put in place the mechanism for deep cuts to federal support for public health care. There was, of course, no proclamation pointing that out. His government simply announced, just before Christmas in 2011, that there would be no negotiations to renew the expiring health accord with the provinces.

Instead, it unilaterally imposed a new formula – which will cut federal support for health care by an estimated $36 billion over the next decade, leaving the cash-strapped provinces scrambling to cover costs, with private, profit-seeking health entrepreneurs buzzing at their doorsteps.

Yet the media treated this hugely significant change as a dull story about federalprovincial spending formulas, and largely buried it in the rush of year-end media trivia. It has received little attention since.

As a result, few Canadians seem to realize that, as things stand, our Medicare system – an institution cherished by millions – faces serious spending cuts starting in 2017.

At that point, we’ll be told we can no longer afford a public health care system. What we won’t be told is that the revenue to pay for a public health care system has been spent already – in tax cuts.

Harper appears to have figured out how to discreetly undermine and eventually end Medicare. This shouldn’t surprise us, since he once headed up the National Citizens Coalition – an organization established in the 1960s with the goal of killing Medicare.

Harper’s anti-democratic tendencies are only part of the story about him. Beneath his autocratic tendencies beats a heart bent on stripping the national cupboard bare and forcing Canadians to fend for themselves in the harsh world of the private marketplace.

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Winner of a National Newspaper Award, Linda McQuaig has been a reporter for The Globe and Mail, a columnist for the National Post and the Toronto Star. She was the New Democrat candidate in Toronto Centre in 2013. she is the author of seven controversial best-sellers, including Shooting the Hippo: Death by Deficit and other Canadian Myths and It’s the Crude, Dude: War, Big Oil and the Fight for the Planet. Her most recent book (cowritten by Neil Brooks) is The Trouble with Billionaires: How the Super-Rich Hijacked the World, and How We Can Take it Back.