Canadians across the country united in a collective, eye-rolling groan last week as the House of Commons voted down yet another attempt at implementing universal pharmacare. The proposal, put forward by the NDP through a private members bill, was voted down 295-32 with the Liberals claiming the bill wasn’t feasible constitutionally and encroached too much on the jurisdiction of the provinces.
This is despite five national commissions over 60 years recommending the policy, public polling showing the support of roughly 9 in 10 Canadians, and the Liberals, Greens and NDP all pledging to implement pharmacare last election.
The quest for universal pharmacare has become something of a running joke in Canadian politics, yet, is no laughing matter. Our country’s fragmented drug plans have led to some of the highest drug prices in the world. This creates a major contradiction in our supposedly “universal” healthcare system: people will receive initial treatment for free only to find themselves on the hook for thousands of dollars in ongoing drug costs.
The situation has only worsened under Covid-19 with many unemployed Canadians finding themselves no longer covered by their employer’s healthcare plans and having to come up with the money themselves.
Regardless of concerns about the feasibility of the proposal, the bill was undoubtedly doomed from the start. Since electoral success under First Past the Post often hangs on just a few percentage points, letting the NDP take credit for universal pharmacare would eat into the Liberal’s support and obliterate Trudeau’s dreams of another 39% false majority.
The truth is the adversarial nature of our voting system makes it politically dangerous for parties to cooperate on issues, even ones a majority of Canadians agree on. This made pharmacare the latest casualty of zero-sum politics.
Under a PR system, the threshold for a majority becomes much higher and virtually out of reach for most parties. This incentivizes them to work together on common goals instead of creating competing proposals to attack and vote down. Imagine if the NDP and Liberals joined forces and actually worked out a path forward on pharmacare that pleases both parties instead of just hurling insults at each other from across the aisle.
Simply put, if Canada used proportional representation, we would already have universal pharmacare, perhaps even for decades at this point.
Yet again, pharmacare has been kicked down the road despite the proposal being more important and popular now than it ever has. Whether the government eventually keeps its promise doesn’t change the fact that thanks to our antiquated First Past the Post system, any implementation will come decades too late.
‘What Went Wrong’ Webinar Now on YouTube
Our February webinar covered a lot of ground. Joined by Professor Laura Stephenson and political commentator David Moscrop, we learned about what prevented recent provincial- and federal-level attempts at electoral reform from succeeding. In the view of our panelists, we’re facing numerous obstacles: in Ontario, we faced a public without enthusiasm for electoral reform and insufficient communication of citizen assembly recommendations; federally, we faced politicians who have an optimal outcome in mind before the process even starts, and a special committee process that lacked a clear objective at the outset.
The devil’s in the details, our panelists agreed: when designing any deliberative or participatory decision-making process for electoral reform, it’s crucial that the government crafts the process well. Objectives and expectations must be clear from the outset.
The major challenge electoral reform faces, though, may be the lack of popular support: after all, it’s difficult to mobilize the public on an issue they don’t feel they connect with. To organize support for electoral reform, then, our best bet may be to connect it to how it can benefit the issues that people do feel strongly for: healthcare and the environment, for example.
Watch the webinar by clicking here.
Toronto was home to Canada’s first women’s suffrage organization, The Toronto Women’s Literary Club (TWLC). Founded in 1876 by Dr. Emily Stowe, a noted women’s rights activist and one of Canada’s first female doctors, the TWLC believed that extending the vote to women would help to improve women’s safety as well as their chances of employment and education. It took 50 years of nationwide campaigning, protesting, and demonstrating before women finally attained federal voting rights on May 24, 1918.