In A Time Of Rationing The Patient Is To Blame

Lawn signs are sprouting like mushrooms. They read: Don’t Pull The Plug On Public Healthcare. Someone must be nervous that events of the past 16 months might have soured Canadians on their beloved single-payer brand of healthcare and on the people who’ve run it. 

Maybe the lawn signs are the inspiration of Gerry Butts, PM Justin Trudeau’s amanuensis. Over a map of #Covid-19 infections from around the world he recently tweeted, “Look at this map the next time a whinging Canadian columnist writes about how badly the country’s public institutions have served you through this calamity. And cringe with embarrassment for them.”

It takes major stones to look back on 25,000-plus deaths, the record of deception in Canadian public institutions since the start of 2020 and see something worth bragging on. But Gerry is not one to hide his political light under a bushel. Where others might see a timeline of incompetence, fear, ineptitude, lies and suspension of civil liberties, Butts sees a petal-strewn path of success and innovation for his favourite prime minister.

As he did after wrecking Ontario’s energy system as consigliere to Kathleen Wynne, Gerry does’t like the facts getting in the way of a good story.

Cringe? Tell that to panicking people waiting till the fall to get a second vaccine that can be readily had in the United States tomorrow if one so desires. Or those suffering the tremendous mental and physical strain of having been locked up for the better part since March 2020.

As journalist Shannon Proudfoot tweeted, “Any parent can tell you how the damage with kids accumulates with every week schools are closed. Mine doesn't sleep properly. She's a different person: every negative aspect is blown up, the sunny and content side muted. There is this constant, low, palpable vibration of misery.”

Don’t get started about drug abuse and delayed treatments for cancer, heart disease and the other major killers. The pandemic narrative in Canada has been a tale of heroic frontline workers, petrified patients and unaccountable healthcare “experts” who grabbed political power from feckless prime ministers and premiers and are still running with it.

Such is the mania of the policy purveyors that, in Ontario, allowing 550 health workers to attend a Maple Leafs playoff game in a 18,819-seat Scotiabank Arena was seen by a supine media as a triumph of compassion and managing the virus. (Opening day in Texas for the Blue Jays saw 55,000 in attendance.) And while schools everywhere in the U.S. are re-opening the hapless Doug Ford can’t risk Ontario students in classes till at least the fall. Or whenever his experts say the Tasmanian or Nepalese variant works through society.

In Canada, this drama hasn’t been about the virus for a long time. Covid-19— whatever its Wuhan origins— has supplied the numbing statistics and victims, but it was  Canada’s vaunted healthcare system that supplied most of the misery. And cast the blame on its citizens.

Comparing Canada’s health system to America’s is a parlour game in Canada, a chance to cite envious American liberals who drool over the concept of “free” healthcare. At various flashpoints in the pandemic the winner of this comparison seemed to be Canada, embracing its citizens in a grip of warmth and protection. 

Deaths were proportionately lower in spite of all the blunders and WHO submissions on travel, border closings and masks. Best of all for Canada’s policy makers, the combined political, culture and media moguls successfully tied the virus in North America to the dread Donald Trump, staining him as the Butcher of the Beltway. Canadians loved that.

But as America speeds toward total open status in a few weeks, Canada remains a captive of its health-expert class, locked up, double-masked, depressed, scolded. The “winner” in this comparison is not so clear anymore. In fact, Trump has emerged from his social-media banishment as something less than the cause of all sorrow. Even as Canadian media warns of new scourges on the liberated Americans.

Imagine a PM rallying private-side companies in Canada  to produce a homegrown vaccine in record time as Trump did. (He was rewarded by a drug industry that delayed its vaccines till after Trump was defeated in November of 2020.) Trudeau rallied his countrymen and women to hide in the basement.

The reality for Canadians is now summed up by the lawn signs that suggest the vaunted healthcare system might be getting too much scrutiny. Canadians waiting endlessly for vaccines are realizing that their system is based on rationing. Not compassion or SJW virtue. 

The bean counters of Canadian health would rather you not use the system. While the profit-oriented American system welcomes customers and expands to meet their needs (see: health ships sent to NYC, LA to take the media’s cherished overloads of cases in 2020), Canada has only so much money, so many staff and so many beds it can service. 

So stay home if you don’t mind. A rationed policy is systemically incompatible with a pandemic— especially one inflated by the same fear-mongering health experts who run the system. Covid-19 saw vast swaths of patients ignored to service virus cases. Hospital practicums— the lifeblood of new staff— were cancelled, further reducing staffing. 

And, crucially, the lack of a Canadian vaccine industry— abandoned long ago by Liberals and promised fruitlessly by the current government— left Canada at the whims of a global market when its purchase of Chinese vaccines failed. 

None of this was laid at the door of the health gurus in Ottawa and the provincial capitals by the media which distorted and mislabelled the real threats of the virus— one that clearly targeted specific age classes and avoided children. No, Gerry Butts saw it as a triumph of the centralized state.

We’ll have to wait decades probably to get a frank analysis of how the exalted health system screwed up its mission. And how media inflated the threat as they’ve always done.

In the end, Canadians are entitled to whatever romantic notion of healthcare is shaped by Bernie Sanders and Michael Moore (who don’t have to wait 10 months for an MRI or die waiting for cancer treatment). They’re not entitled to their own facts, however. The abiding fact of the pandemic is the failure of the unelected, expert class to level with users on the rationing aspect in the system. 

People who saw Trudeau print money thought he could make vaccines and masks with the same thoroughness. Many paid with their health and their lives. Take a bow, Mr. Butts. Your lawn signs look magnificent.

Bruce Dowbiggin @dowbboy is the editor of Not The Public Broadcaster (http://www.notthepublicbroadcaster.com). The best-selling author of Cap In Hand is also a regular contributor to Sirius XM Canada Talks Ch. 167. A two-time winner of the Gemini Award as Canada's top television sports broadcaster, his new book Personal Account with Tony Comper is now available on http://brucedowbigginbooks.ca/book-personalaccount.aspx