Trudeau says Ottawa wants to make sure health spending delivers ‘tangible results’
Global News
Ottawa wants to ensure dollars transferred to provinces and territories for health care will deliver "tangible results for Canadians," Prime Minister Justin Trudeau says.
The federal government wants to make sure billions of dollars transferred to the provinces and territories for health care will “deliver real, tangible results for Canadians” with shorter wait times and better services, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau says.
In the past, “huge investments” by provincial and federal governments haven’t always delivered the necessary improvements, Trudeau said Wednesday.
His remarks came a day after the 13 premiers wrapped up two days of talks in Victoria, united in frustration that Trudeau hadn’t set a date to meet with them to renegotiate funding for what they say is a “crumbling” health-care system.
Ottawa needs to stop “quibbling” over health care and meet with the premiers to address their request for stable, long-term health funding, B.C. Premier John Horgan told a news conference during the Council of the Federation gathering.
READ MORE: Canadian premiers fail to obtain meeting with federal government on health care
Andrew Longhurst, a health policy researcher at Simon Fraser University in Burnaby, B.C., said Ottawa is right to be concerned about how the provinces and territories spend health transfer money because it has historically flowed into their general accounts, and in some cases, they have gone on to cut taxes and run surpluses in their budgets.
The provinces are also engaging in “blame shifting” around how the system has reached a crisis point by ignoring their own roles in failing to take on the difficult, years-long work of modernizing health care, he said in an interview.
There are some promising evidence-based initiatives, “but what we don’t see in most provinces is a systematic scaling-up” of those practices, said Longhurst, who is also a research associate with the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives.
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