Chris Selley: On privatization and ‘two-tier’ health care, NDP threatens Ontarians with the status quo

When your talking points about Premier Doug Ford are literally indistinguishable from your talking points about Kathleen Wynne, you have a credibility problem

Chris Selley
February 5, 2019
8:56 PM EST

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In recent days, Ontario’s NDP opposition has unearthed evidence suggesting the Progressive Conservative government is contemplating a major shakeup of health-care delivery. Documents leaked by a since-fired civil servant suggest Local Health Integration Networks (LHINs) will be abolished in favour of a “super agency.” (It won’t actually be called that.) It would create so-called “MyCare” or “integrated care delivery” systems, which would “provide patients with seamless, co-ordinated care and a single team of providers for all their care needs.” Various types of health-care providers could bid to manage those systems.

Health Minister Christine Elliott insists these draft documents are simply that. Nothing, she says, is set in stone. If that’s true, then stakeholders will have a chance to be heard on any number of potential problems: for example, that MyCare groups, unlike LHINs, would not be Crown agencies and thus would not be subject to the same oversight; and that high-performing agencies like Cancer Care Ontario might get swallowed whole in the name of unneeded efficiencies.

All that being rather complex, however, the NDP and its core supporters seem determined to talk about only two things: the twin spectres of health-care privatization and “two-tier health care.”

“Doug Ford’s calculating plan to cut, add bureaucracy and turn our health-care system into a cash show (sic) for private corporations is wrong, and I’m not letting it happen without a fight,” leader Andrea Horwath vowed in a press release last wee