Defend Public Healthcare

It is mildly heartening to see that the media is (finally) beginning to recognize that there is going to be a health care funding squeeze after the election.  Thomas Walkom  laid it out quite clearly last week in the Toronto Star and Pauline Tam at the Ottawa Citizen had a story Sunday which edged towards this territory as well ( McGuinty set to squeeze health care ). The parties and the media have mostly carried on as if this was not about to happen.   These two stories are only a small step in giving a better appreciation of what will happen unless the funding plans change.

Conservatives in the United States like Republican presidential candidate Ron Paul have long attacked almost any tiny bit of public health care. Mr. Paul believes churches, not governments should take care of  the sick and dying who have no insurance. PublicValues.ca now reports that Mr Paul's election campaign did not provide workers with medical insurance. Tragically, Paul's former campaign manager, Kent Snyder, died in 2008 from pneumonia and without insurance. As he had no medical insurance, the $400,000 hospital bill was sent to his mother, who was unable to pay. A website was set up by friends to secure charity donations. The details surrounding the death of Mr. Snyder were revealed after the Tea Party candidate indicated he did not agree with free state health care for the poor. Reportedly , census data released last week showed that the number of people without medical insurance in the U.S. went up to almost 50 million in 2010. More and more for-profit healt

If we needed any more evidence that Don Drummond's Commission on public services (scheduled by the McGuinty government to report after the provincial election) will be used to bash rather than build public services, it was provided by John Ivison, a columnist for the always conservative National Post .  Ivison   turns to Drummond to bolster his attack on the provincial NDP and their policy to reverse some corporate tax cuts: The overwhelming consensus is that cutting corporate taxes is good public policy and encourages investment. Capital is mobile and responds to falling or rising rates. As former TD Bank economist Don Drummond put it: "Theory and considerable evidence suggest corporate tax cuts deliver strong benefits to all Canadians." In fact there is a lot of debate among economists over the value of spending on corporate tax cuts.  Drummond's position simply represents one end of the spectrum, a rather ideological one at that.    Without undoing som

The New York Times reports that a study conducted by the Project on Government Oversigh t (a nonprofit Washington group) found that in 33 of 35 occupations, the U.S. government actually paid billions of dollars more to hire contractors than it would have cost government employees to perform comparable services. On average, the study found that contractors charged the federal government more than twice the amount it pays federal workers. A policy analyst with the conservative Heritage Foundation responded that “It’s not a real apples to apples comparison. When the federal government hires contractors, it’s for the short-term. When they hire for the public sector, they are on the hook for the salaries and compensation for years.” The Project on Government Oversight counters that the government usually pays contractors for multiple-year jobs, not just short term.

Elections often make the concerns of working people rise a little bit in the sights of the major business parties.  And this election has seen some of that as well. Notably, the Liberals are now beginning to make some noise about job creation. That's perhaps a bit better than the Progressive Conservatives, whose job creation strategy is little more than some wishful thinking about tax breaks and the magic of the market. In the last couple of days, the Liberals have begun to loudly  tout  their spending on public transit infrastructure, claiming it will create tens thousands of construction jobs. But are these really new jobs? There was a lot of cash spent (and a lot of media releases from Liberal politicians) on public infrastructure projects during the last four years.  Those constructions jobs came and went as the construction projects were completed.   That's the nature of the construction business.  So this announcement sounds more like the government is really just

Based on a survey of 542 Canadian employers with 800,000 salaried employees, a new report from AON says increases for salaried employees increased 2.9% in 2011 and will increase a further 3.1% in 2012.  For Ontario the increases are 2.7% in 2011 and 3.0% in 2012. Salaried employees are usually non-unionized managers or professionals. In contrast, Ontario unionized public sector wage settlements in 2011 have average annual increases of 1.5%, according to the Ministry of Labour -- a little more than half what salaried employees are getting.  Private sector union settlements are averaging 1.8% in 2011. Despite this discrepancy, Tim Hudak and the Progressive Conservatives have singled out public sector workers for so-called " fat raises ," threatening to attack trade unions, interest arbitration, and  public sector union settlements if elected. This as the Conference Board of Canada came to the (hardly surprising) conclusion that income inequality in Canada has been ris

An important part of the Progressive Conservative platform is privatization .  So it's worth looking at the results of the privatization initiatives they took the last time they were in government.  One notable PC initiative was "patient transfers". The Ontario Progressive Conservative government introduced legislation in 2000 allowing hospitals to use for-profit "patient transfer" companies rather than ambulances to move patients between hospitals or long-term care facilities if the patient was in stable condition. This led to a drastic increase in the number of patients transferred by for-profit companies. Despite assurances prior to the legislative changes from then Minister of Health Elizabeth Witmer and her parliamentary secretary Tim Hudak, now the leader of the Ontario Progressive Conservative Party, minimum standards for staff or equipment were never developed by the ministries of health or transportation (nor have they been developed under the l