At the time, when I was first reading about Prashant Sreekumar dying in an Alberta hospital's hallway after having waited eight hours to see a doctor, somewhere in a comments section (I forget where) idiots were blaming Justin Trudeau.
Hospitals and healthcare are provincial jurisdictions of course. There used to be a viable national healthcare system before Jean Chretíen and Paul Martin began systematically dismantling it in the 1990's. From the late-1960's until the early-nineties the federal government was able to dictate certain standards and structures to provincial healthcare systems in return for giving the provinces the money to achieve those prerequisites. With the 1990's, the deficit-battling Liberals gave the provinces much smaller contributions but greater freedom to spend it however they wanted, with little concern as to whether they were paying private-sector, for-profit service providers. And, in Alberta and Ontario, corrupt, right-wing asshole premiers took this opportunity to reward the private sector and ran with it.
[That whole article is interesting for the buck-passing of all these neo-liberal scumbags. Alberta and Ontario did give massive tax-cuts to the wealthy while crying poor when it came to providing services. But Paul Martin did the same thing when he was finance minister under Chretíen; slashing services and raising unemployment insurance premiums to fight a deficit while giving his own huge tax-cuts to corporations and the wealthy.]
Alberta's current premier is a brazen sycophant to that province's US-American dominated oil industry. She's a long-time swamp creature, having been mentored by racist idiot Tom Flanagan, interning at the whackjob Fraser Institute, and associating with far-right ignorance and delusion merchants like Charles Adler and SUN Media.
OF COURSE such a creature would want to destroy public healthcare and transfer the profit-making opportunities of fleecing sick and desperate people to the private sector vermin who donate to her party and her campaigns and subsidize the whole right-wing shit-head eco-system.
She's the same as that bloated, stinking mound of corruption and stupidity, Doug Ford. He promised to END "hallway medicine" in 2018. By February 2025 it had increased by 125%.
At the same time, Ontario is also experiencing a health care worker shortage, and 2.5 million Ontarians do not have a family doctor.
In 2016, before the Ford government was elected, this number was closer to 1.3 million. Experts say that the crisis could only get worse if the government does not take decisive action.
According to the Ontario Health Coalition, by 2024, “one in five local emergency departments have experienced closures.”
Shortage of nurses and investment in private healthcare
In addition, the province is also “25,000 nurses short,” meaning health care workers who are still working in the system are overworked and under resourced.
Erin Ariss, provincial president of the Ontario Nurse’s Association, says the Ford government’s under-spending on public health care and simultaneous investment in private services has further contributed to the crisis.
“It is not in the best interest of Ontarians to privatize our system. It’s in the best interest to spend the money that this government has budgeted and invest in the system that we have,” Ariss told PressProgress.
Chronic underfunding and misleading Ontarians
During the final leaders’ debate last week, Ford made big claims about investments in healthcare, stating that he’s made “the biggest investments in healthcare in the history of the country.”
However, Ontario’s financial accountability office notes the province had the lowest health spending in Canada in 2022-2023—to the tune of over $1 billion.
According to the Ontario Health Coalition, per capita, “Ontario funds public health care at the lowest rate in Canada.”
Ford also made claims that his government has helped hire more nurses, but more nurses are also leaving the profession due to unmanageable working conditions.
The shit-stains who vote for this morbidly obese grifter reflexively blame the Liberals for all of this. The FEDERAL Liberals, and, especially, Justin Trudeau. I despise Trudeau as a war-criminal, a fraud on the environment, and a contemptible airhead. But right-wingers hate him because he's handsome and he doesn't appear to eat donughts with soda pop while watching "The Masked Singer" or whatever garbage these fuck-faces choose to entertain themselves. That's why they like Doug Ford. He looks like a lazy and stupid whining cry-baby who can't stop shovelling comfort food down his gullet. IOW he reminds them of them.
These shameless hypocrites shriek constantly about Liberal corruption, but they completely undermine their credibility when they then turn to the super-corrupt conservative parties as Canada's saviours. Doug Ford (already under fire for the Greenbelt land giveaway scandals and the destruction of public resources like Ontario Place and the Ontario Science Centre and his abuse of the Ontario Skills Development fund is now fighting to keep his private phone records from being exposed. Because he's conducting public business on them the courts are telling him they're no longer private.
Don't get me wrong. The Liberals are garbage. But when it comes to shrieking about "CORRUPTION!!!" right-wingers are hysterical. They pretend that incompetents like stephen harper and Joe Flaherty and Tony Clement and Paul Calandra and Doug Ford are worthy defenders of public funds. But just like Mike Harris's brain-dead selling off of Highway 407 that has been a disaster for Ontario, so too has been the bipartisan selling off of Ontario power creation and distribution.
Ontario Hydro was part of the social commons that Premier Kathleen promised, on record, to never sell. That is, until 2015 when her government privatized 60 per cent of Hydro One.
Prior to the sale, Wynne also promised to keep all regulations in place in order to protect consumers from rate hikes. Then, Wynne passed Bill 91, Public Sector and MPP Accountability and Transparency Act, eliminating all consumer protection regulations and watchdogs. That was done to streamline the sale of Hydro One.
That sale generated a one-time windfall of $9 billion, however $5 billion was used to cover some of Hydro One’s $8.5 billion debt. The remaining $4 billion allowed the Wynne government to meet its budget that year. Yet, one has to ask whether that sale was prudent since it meant forgoing $750 million (2014) in profits annually.
Again, this was bipartisan. Wynne (like McGuinty before her) was just adding to the disastrous, deadly legacy of the vile Mike Harris. Doug Ford has been disguising this rip-off by subsidizing private profits with public monies, so that the gougings by these parasites is hidden. He's spending $6 billion a year to do this.
These politicians and their oligarchic masters have been wallowing in the rewards of consequence-free corruption for decades. As they grow complacent, the corruption becomes more brazen. As a people, Canadians are too deluded, confused, apathetic to do anything about it. And more people are going to die.
How democracy was subverted to steal Ontario's public power system
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