On Tuesday in Ottawa, Canada's 13 premiers and Prime Minister Justin Trudeau will sit around the same table in person for the first time since COVID-19 hoping to find a path toward a new long-term health-care funding deal.
Both sides are optimistic a deal will emerge but there are some big divides to overcome, including how much more money Ottawa is willing to put on the table, and how much accountability the provinces are willing to put up in return.
Trudeau intends to put an offer on the table Tuesday. It will not be an immediate increase of $26 billion, but Ottawa has been silent on where it will land. In 2004, a new deal was reached between the premiers and Martin, who by then was prime minister, to see the Canada Health Transfer increased six per cent a year for a decade.
The Canada Health Act, passed in 1984, sets out the guiding principles for recipients of the Canada Health Transfer, including that health-care systems must be universally accessible. Failing to abide by the principles can, and has, resulted in Ottawa clawing back some transfers. The Canadian Institute for Health Information was tapped to help collect and publish data. The most recent report in December is still laden with gaps and incomplete data. The reports note it will take time for the reporting to lead to change, and that provinces need to harmonize their data collection in order to better compare statistics across provincial lines.
"It is the foundation for understanding what we're doing, who's receiving services, whether we're making improvements," said Kim McGrail, a professor with the University of British Columbia School of Population and Public Health. "Data informs every part of the way we think about health," McGrail said, which includes the health of individual patients.
It's an expensive problem to fix. Just last week, Nova Scotia government signed a $365-million contract to bring new electronic health-care records to the province, which may or may not be compatible with other provincial systems. Duclos has said helping Canadians "age with dignity" is one of Ottawa's priorities for a new health-care deal, and long-term care plays a major role in that.Long-term care is an entirely different story.
Experts and advocates say the problems long predate the pandemic, and have gone largely ignored until now. The federal government created a $1 billion "safe long-term care fund" during the pandemic to help pay for immediate infection prevention and control measures to stop the spread of the virus. "I think we're stepping into a crisis," said Dr. Joseph Wong, the founder of Yee Hong Centre for Geriatric Care, the largest non-profit nursing home in the country.
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