Canada's Boston Cream Approach to Health Care

It looks good from the outside, but inside it's a huge mess.

The Globe and Mail’s Gary Mason writes that a B.C. hospital’s decision to turn its Tim Hortons into a temporary emergency room is proof warning signs about the province’s aging population have been ignored, and a “grey tsunami” of elderly patients is fast approaching. “Governments are trying to spend their way out of the problem rather than make tough, but necessary, decisions that might help fix it,” Mason says. “Why? Because of the possible repercussions at the polls … Taxpayers, meantime, demand better health care but don’t want their taxes raised and don’t want governments to cut spending in other areas.” As long as this pattern continues, Mason predicts a bleak future for Canadian health care and suggests it’s high time we had an “honest conversation” about taking steps like delisting some of the services that the government currently pays for. “Think putting patients inside a Tim Hortons is a problem?” he asks. “Wait until hospitals start sending them to the drive-thru.”

The National Post’s Matt Gurney calls the brief marriage between Tim Hortons and the health care system “a rare convergence of two strands of the Canadian national identity,” which is pretty funny. But the chuckles end there as Gurney speculates on what would happen if there were ever a major health emergency in B.C. considering hospitals there apparently can’t cope an unusually busy day. “Every health-care system has some surge capacity, in place to deal with unexpected catastrophes such as major accidents, natural disasters, terrorist attack, industrial emergencies (chemical leak, for example) or an outbreak of infectious disease,” he writes “Entire field hospitals can be made available when need be. But this wasn’t a major emergency, just a statistical blip.” He declares that the “system is broken” and, like legions of commentators before him, says it’s time to privatize at least part of Canadian health care.

We in the Newsroom would point out that one incident, however ridiculously bad in terms of optics, is not necessarily an indication of nationwide decay in our health system. But we also suspect evidence of that isn’t too hard to find.