Statistics Canada Reports II

[Innsertnamehere]

US healthcare problems are very different than Canada's - there it's access, here it's quality of care. It's a massively different kind of problem.

I think it's disingenuous to say that public policy hasn't had any successes in 30 years. Lots of programs have been quite successful. Trudeau's best policy for example was the Canada Child Benefit - it led to massive reductions in child poverty and simplified a complex program of childrens benefits into a simple, monthly cheque which goes much further to helping parents with the costs of raising children.

Similarly I think programs like all-day kindergarden in Ontario, $10 a day daycare, etc. have been generally successful programs which help younger families with costs. Other issues like high secondary education costs have quietly disappeared from the media as they have been addressed.

the wider issue is that certian problems are too challenging to fix on one single program - housing is one of them. We made a mistake when we killed public housing construction in the 1980's and 1990's - which is coming to roost now. Then we decided to double down on NIMBYISM in the 2000's and restricted supply of homes in the largest Canadian markets.. and surprise, surprise, housing affordability became an issue. For a while it was focused only to the supply restricted form of housing (ground related housing), but then Trudeau decided to ramp up immigration to levels supply couldn't keep up with.. and we got where we are.

Housing could be fixed with two relatively simple strokes:
1. reduce immigration to allow the construction industry to keep up with demand, or find a way to increase supply. One is likely far easier than the other..
2. remove restrictions on supply which force the market to build the kind of supply that the market doesn't want. Ford took a stab at this last year for the GTA and that went just swimmingly for him.. so good luck on that front.

For Healthcare, the crunch here has been known to be coming for a long, long time. Boomers are hitting their high healthcare cost years and nobody should be surprised that it's straining the system to it's limits. Throw on a pandemic and additional long-term demands on the system resulting from it, and well..

The only fix to healthcare is massive investment in the system. South of the border, the private sector has done that, with health sciences being a completely booming industry for the last 2 decades, but access remains an issue.. North of the border, The government doesn't have the access to the capital needed.

No easy fix there. I suspect a partial privatization of healthcare by allowing people to switch to private providers through insurance would be warranted to take a bit of pressure off the public system, if even for things like routine procedures. Allowing people to do private MRIs, etc. would improve care standards a lot, and it's not without precedence in Canada already. It would also have to be coupled by continued extensive investment in the public system to allow quality services for those accessing public healthcare, which would remain the vast majority of users.

The problem here is that often the solutions to the problems are politically untenable (massive upzoning and permitting sprawl again, partial privitization of healthcare or massive tax increases).. so politicians dither. it's the way of the world.