When Canadians heard Monday there was to be a big announcement on pharmacare yesterday, many of us concluded Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s shell-shocked strategic brain trust was finally ready to start acting like a Natural Governing Party again, instead of like lemmings racing for a cliff.
It would have been a brilliant strategy to announce a full pharmacare program – the full-meal deal with no bones tossed to Big Pharma or Big Insurance, which have been begging for a fill-in-the-gaps approach that would keep their expensive and unfair but highly profitable stopgaps in place.
It would have shifted the nation’s attention immediately away from the hostile media frenzy the protracted gong show before the House of Commons Justice Committee has become and turned it toward a popular and much needed national program on which a party and a prime minister could easily peg a successful re-election campaign.
It would have reminded voters that for all their flaws the Liberals were still basically a progressive political party willing occasionally to do things that are actually in the interests of Canadians, such as creating a national prescription drug plan that would save lives, ensure no one had to choose between life-saving medicine or feeding their kids, and stop the waste of multi-billions of tax dollars to boot.
It would have forced the Conservatives led by the increasingly screechy Andrew Scheer and in thrall to their cruel utopian market ideology to attack a program that plainly would benefit every single one of us unless we happened to be a Big Pharma or Big Insurance executive. Yes, even screwball market perfectionists would benefit if they had the misfortune to get sick and needed to set aside their nutty ideological pipe dreams to survive.
Instead, we got … recommendations.
Which means, of course, more time for Big Business, their ideological think tanks and the Conservatives to cook up ways to sabotage this still unrealized national good.
Progressive groups did their best with the interim report of the Advisory Council on the Implementation of National Pharmacare, which recommended creation of a national pharmaceutical drug agency, a comprehensive evidence-based formulary, and suggested core principles for national pharmacare. Several good-hearted organizations put out news releases calling the development “promising.”
But Canadians don’t need promises. They need pharmacare. And they need it now.
And so do the Liberals, oddly enough. Desperately so, right now, one would think.
But I guess the party of Justin Trudeau has discovered, as the old stories go, that once you’ve sold your soul, it’s very hard to get it back.
It doesn’t have to be too late for Canadians to get a national pharmacare program. The Conservatives will do everything in their power to stop it, of course. The New Democrats are unlikely to get a chance to implement it this time around. But the Liberals still have the power to make it happen.
But the only way to make it happen is to make it happen.
For the moment, however, the race to the cliff apparently continues.
I have mixed feelings about Liberals pharmacare idea. On the one hand it could be exactly what the country and they need. I think timing wise, it would probably be best to let the current bruhaha die down a bit before announcing it so it is not eclipsed by that. I think soon people will start to tire about talking about SNC Lavalin non stop and realize there are other important issue we need to get on with, so in the budget or shortly after that would probably be best.
On the other hand, we can remember all the Liberals promises on day care and what happened. I suppose we need to start somewhere, but they also need to start with something that is not too watered down or too ambitious to appeal to as many voters as possible. If it is not well thought out or too ambitious, it will just become another target for Conservatives and I don’t think the Liberals want that right now.
It never fails to boggle the mind how the Canadian electorate will vote for NDP-Lite, with promises of all these popular, helpful, progressive new programmes and policies, even though they’ll just get sunny ways conservatives instead of the humourless ScheerCon Conservatives, and not much will change for most ordinary Canadian families… when all they needed to do instead, was just vote for the genuine NDP and actually get those self-same progressive programmes & policies, but straight up instead of watered down to homeopathic proportions.
The extent to which the average Canadian border will inevitably vote against his or her own best interests remains to be plumbed to its fullest depths.
There are already enough studies about Pharmacare. Let’s do it now – we have the 3rd highest drug prices in the developed world.