Ottawa ‘not looking for placebo policy’ to fix health care, minister says

Provincial leaders were frantic about the ailing state of their health care systems last year when Prime Minister Justin Trudeau sat them down and offered $46.2-billion worth of urgent treatment.

It wasn’t enough, but most of the provinces grudgingly accepted the broad terms of the deal and returned home to negotiate the finer points behind closed doors.

Since then, Ottawa and the provinces have continued to broker a collective long-term vision for health-care improvements. But doctors, nurses and other health advocates say the crisis is only getting worse.

Health workers want to see governments move faster to treat the crisis. But a real fix will take time, Health Minister Mark Holland acknowledged in an interview.

“We’re not looking for placebo policy here,” Holland said.

That’s why the federal government has pushed for specific promises from provinces about how they will spend the money, “which is why it takes time to then negotiate these deals,” he added.

The scenes that have played out over the last 12 months have been jarring: people turned away from emergency rooms, seniors languishing for days in hospital hallways, family doctors abandoning their practices, burned-out nurses leaving the profession they once loved.

The state of Canada’s health systems has already cost people their lives, said Dr. Alan Drummond, an emergency physician in Perth, Ont., and spokesperson for the Canadian Association of Emergency Physicians.

“It’s only by the grace of whoever’s God it is that more have not died,” said Drummond, who has been practising medicine for 45 years.

“Something is really wrong here and it really does feel to me like a crisis.”

So far, Ottawa has signed four one-on-one deals with provinces for targeted funding — provided