{"id":87116,"date":"2025-08-21T21:07:07","date_gmt":"2025-08-21T21:07:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/87116\/"},"modified":"2025-08-21T21:07:07","modified_gmt":"2025-08-21T21:07:07","slug":"memo-to-mark-carney-canadas-existential-crisis-is-in-health-care","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/87116\/","title":{"rendered":"Memo to Mark Carney: Canada\u2019s existential crisis is in health care"},"content":{"rendered":"

Open this photo in gallery:<\/a><\/p>\n

Most inquests, inquiries and reports into Canada\u2019s health care dysfunction recommend investing more money into our existing system, but Canada already spends more per capita than many of our peer countries, and yet has poorer metrics and outcomes.Ian Willms\/The Globe and Mail<\/p>\n

Months ago, Canadians were told we were in an emergency. U.S. President Donald Trump<\/a> \u201cwants to break us, so America can own us,\u201d said then-candidate Mark Carney<\/a>, who would successfully sell Canadians on his readiness for real change. \u201cWe will not let that happen.\u201d Mr. Carney made the case that the tariffs<\/a> being threatened by Mr. Trump constituted \u201cthe most significant crisis of our lifetimes.\u201d <\/p>\n

\u201cThey want our land, our resources, they want our water, they want our country,\u201d he said. The old ways of doing things, Mr. Carney said, were over. <\/p>\n

His first few months as Prime Minister, however, have demonstrated that the old ways of doing things are very much still in play, with aspirations for change. Yet Canada\u2019s economy survives (thanks largely to trade-agreement exemptions to Mr. Trump\u2019s tariffs), and our country remains intact. If this is indeed the most \u201csignificant crisis of our lifetimes,\u201d we should consider ourselves lucky. <\/p>\n

I\u2019d posit, however, that Canada\u2019s actual existential crisis is in another arena entirely: in health care<\/a>, where access is routinely delayed or denied, where wait times have grown excruciatingly long, where millions of Canadians don\u2019t have access to primary care, and where the suffering \u2013 and in some cases, the deaths \u2013 of individuals, can be directly linked to our broken system. Everyone has a Canadian health care horror story, and if they don\u2019t yet, they will.<\/p>\n

The van der Werken family\u2019s horror story is of taking their 16-year-old son, Finlay, to Oakville Trafalgar Memorial Hospital in February, where he suffered from extreme abdominal pain for more than eight hours before seeing a doctor. Though he was triaged at a \u201cLevel 2\u201d on the Canadian Triage and Acuity Scale, meaning he should have ideally been seen by a doctor within 15 minutes, Finlay deteriorated in the emergency room overnight, despite his mother repeatedly alerting the nurses. He was diagnosed with pneumonia, sepsis and hypoxia the next day, and after suffering a cardiac arrest, was eventually taken off life support. His family has since launched a lawsuit and is pushing for an inquiry into his death. <\/p>\n

An Ontario teen died after waiting in agony for hours at an ER. Now, his family wants an inquest<\/a><\/p>\n

It is entirely understandable why Finlay\u2019s family would want a formal investigation into his death to prevent something like this from happening again. But we already know what an inquiry would reveal, and we already know that our system doesn\u2019t have the capacity to implement the recommendations. <\/p>\n

More than 20 years ago (20 years!) the family of 23-year-old Vince Motta demanded an inquiry into his death following surgery for appendicitis (an autopsy would later find he suffered an asthma attack under anesthesia), which he underwent after trying to get treatment at two Alberta hospitals, but left due to long wait times. The report<\/a> into his death made 25 recommendations, including that Alberta Health undertake a study on patients who leave ERs without being seen. Two decades later, nearly one in five patients are leaving without being seen, according to a recent report by the Alberta Medical Association<\/a>. <\/p>\n

There was a coroner\u2019s inquest into the death of 78-year-old Darrell Mesheau, who died in a Fredericton emergency room in 2022 after waiting about seven hours. The jury recommended that health care workers and administrators \u201ccollaborate and show ownership\u201d to tackle overcapacity issues. There was an inquest into the emergency room death of Brian Sinclair<\/a> in Winnipeg in 2008, which chronicled emergency-room understaffing, racism and systemic bias in health care. There was a report following the death of 29-year-old Natasha Forry, who visited a North Vancouver hospital four times in 2020 before finally receiving treatment, though it was too late. <\/p>\n

Canada\u2019s health care crisis is not just in emergency-room access: it is in wait times<\/a> for specialist care, in surgical<\/a> wait times, in access to primary care<\/a>, and in lack of mental health and preventative care. Canadians with means are paying for surgeries outside of their home provinces or abroad<\/a>, while those without means are suffering on ever-worsening public waitlists. Indeed, our problems are getting worse \u2013 not better \u2013 exacerbated by a population that is both growing and aging. Most inquests, inquiries and reports into Canada\u2019s health care dysfunction recommend investing more money into our existing system, but Canada already spends more per capita than many of our peer countries, and yet has poorer<\/a> metrics and outcomes. We need to fix the system; not spend more on one that isn\u2019t working.<\/p>\n

This is the emergency. This is Canada\u2019s existential crisis. And as the report into Mr. Motta\u2019s death noted more than 20 years ago: \u201cA system under siege or in crisis requires dramatic change, not incremental change.\u201d <\/p>\n

Mr. Carney can see to that dramatic change if he is indeed the Prime Minister he promised he would be: the one who will see to the radical, perhaps ephemerally unpopular, changes for this country\u2019s long-term stability. In one way or another, our economy will survive Mr. Trump, but more and more people simply will not survive our health care system. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Open this photo in gallery: Most inquests, inquiries and reports into Canada\u2019s health care dysfunction recommend investing more…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":87117,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[49,48,20754,5152,44,927],"class_list":["post-87116","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-canada","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-column","tag-dei","tag-news","tag-opinion"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/87116","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=87116"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/87116\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/87117"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=87116"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=87116"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=87116"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}