The emergency room entrance at St. Paul's Hospital in Vancouver.Jesse Winter/The Globe and Mail
NDP Leader David Eby kicked off the election campaign in British Columbia warning that a provincial Conservative government would gut health care spending – a claim his rival dismissed as a bold lie.
Mr. Eby spent the weekend touring swing ridings around the vote-rich Lower Mainland, telling supporters that a change in government will reduce health care services. Meanwhile Conservative Leader John Rustad is making costly health care commitments, and he says this will mean more spending, not less.
B.C.’s Lieutenant-Governor Janet Austin signed the writ on Saturday, with Oct. 19 set as the election date. The campaign began as a tight two-way race between the governing NDP and the Conservatives – a party that has surged in popularity this year but earned less than 2 per cent of the popular vote in the 2020 election.
As the 28-day provincial campaign gets under way, the two main parties will focus on health care as one of the chief concerns of voters. The system is under stress and British Columbians have experienced emergency-room closings, long waiting times for diagnostics and treatment, ambulance delays and a persistent shortage of family doctors.
Wait times in B.C. have declined overall as a result of a surgical renewal plan that has expanded hours for operating rooms since 2020. According to data from the Canadian Institute for Health Information, B.C. does not meet national benchmarks for wait times of priority health procedures – but it still ranks first among the provinces on the time it takes to get cataract surgeries, and for hip and knee replacements, it ranks second.
The New Democrats, after seven years in government, argue that their investments in human resources and infrastructure are starting to turn around a pandemic-exhausted system. The Conservatives’ pledge to balance the budget and cut taxes is a formula for spending cuts, they argue, as health care consumes the largest share of the provincial budget.
“What the Conservatives are putting forward is not going to fix our health care system,” Mr. Eby told a weekend rally. “You don’t fix our health care system, when we have a growing and aging population, where we’re short the health care professionals that we need, where they’re working in hospitals that should have been rebuilt a generation ago – that are only getting rebuilt now by our government – you don’t fix that system by cutting resources, by cutting money out of that system. Now is not the time to fire health care workers. Now is the time to hire health care workers.”
Mr. Rustad said Mr. Eby “is outright lying” by suggesting that his party will slash health funding.
“More money is needed in health care, but the system needs to be changed,” he said in an interview. While he has expressed frustration with the Canada Health Act because it prohibits user-pay health care, he said his vision for improvements revolves around publicly funded care that can be delivered by either public or private agencies.
He has pledged guaranteed wait times for medical services such as surgeries and cancer treatment, and if the province can’t meet those wait times, a Conservative government would send British Columbians out of province or out of the country for faster care.
The Conservatives have not provided a price tag for that commitment, but it is a costly one.
The NDP government sent hundreds of patients to the U.S. for cancer treatment, as it worked to clear the backlog that grew in the first year of the pandemic. The cost of providing that publicly funded care in the U.S. was triple the price of the same treatment in B.C.
During a pre-campaign event in Fort St. John in August, Mr. Rustad told a gathering of supporters that he cannot promise a private care option under the current federal legislation, but he railed against those prohibitions.
“If you want to purchase health care, you can go across the border and purchase it; you can go to Alberta, and Albertans can come to British Columbia and purchase it. But British Columbians can’t purchase it in British Columbia,” he said then. “It’s weird but that’s what the silly Canadian Health Act is all about. Hopefully one day we’ll get some changes there as well.”