Leaders spar over health care as advance voters set new record
CBC
All three leaders of British Columbia's main political parties converged on Vancouver Island on Wednesday, three days out from election day.
Record numbers of voters have already cast their ballots in advance polling.
Elections B.C. said more than 181,000 people voted on Tuesday, breaking a record set on the first day of voting last week. The agency says 778,000 people had already cast their ballots ahead of Wednesday's final day of advance voting.
The NDP has long regarded Vancouver Island as a stronghold, but Conservative Party of B.C. Leader John Rustad has said he sees it as winnable territory, while both of the Greens' two current seats are on the island.
Rustad says he has no plan for user-pay health care in B.C., after the rival NDP released a recording of him calling the Canada Health Act "silly" for not allowing such a system.
Rustad told a news conference in Nanaimo, B.C., that the NDP's claim was "just another lie."
"We have never said that is what we're going to be doing," Rustad said. "That would be contrary to the Canadian health act. We have not talked about that one little iota."
NDP Leader David Eby had earlier said Rustad was planning an "American style" user-pay model, saying he would let people "buy their way to the front of the line."
In the recording of an event that the NDP said happened in August, Rustad can be heard criticizing the Canada Health Act for not allowing a user-pay model and saying that "hopefully, one day we'll get some changes there."
Eby told a campaign event, also in Nanaimo, that Rustad presented a risk to the health-care system at a time when the province had a shortage of health-care workers.
"Taking some of those health-care workers and putting them behind a paywall doesn't help," Eby said. "It just means that some people are able to buy their way to the front of the line while you and your family are stuck with less care. It's not a solution."
Rustad released his party's costings on Tuesday for a platform that makes no mention of a user-pay health-care model and instead promises a single-payer system delivering care through public and non-governmental facilities.
He said Wednesday that the system proposed by the B.C. Conservatives was based on European models where the government remains the only payer for health care.
"It's universal health care, but it's delivered by both government and non-government agencies," Rustad said. "And by doing that, we're going to be far more efficient in terms of the services we can deliver, in terms of attracting and retaining the professionals that we need."
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