John Robson: More Government Bungling on the Daycare and Pharmacare Files

A child plays on a play structure as Prime Minister Justin Trudeau talks to parents at the YMWCA daycare in Winnipeg about the federal $10-a-day child care plan for Manitoba, on March 3, 2023. (The Canadian Press/John Woods)

Commentary

It would take exceptional mental gymnastics to declare that what the under-stretched, over-funded Canadian government really needs now is expensive new social-engineering projects. So here we go. First, universal cheap daycare and, when it proves “a highly expensive and predictable” disaster, as the National Post just editorialized, you move on to pharmacare.

Well, they do. Anyone seriously interested in “evidence-based decision-making” would instead ponder that Britain has a health-care system similar in principle to our own, and similar waiting-list problems. But their system includes dental care, unlike ours… and they also have a dental waiting-list problem, unlike us.

Conclusion? Here’s where things get weird. Supposedly it proves the free-money system works and we should expand it. As with “$10-a-day” daycare. Even though no sane person believes you can look after a kid properly for that amount.

Someone find me a sane person, quick. Because the delusion is widespread in Canada that government is not just more efficient than the private sector thanks to freedom from the pesky need to satisfy clients, it can magically generate wealth in unlimited amounts through sheer benevolence with a veneer of plausibility. Hence the Liberals had no actual incentives-matter plan for making quality daycare cheaper to provide.

They didn’t think they needed one. Instead, their recent retreat to “Putting people first,” the terminally vacuous equivalent of “[insert slogan here]” also reflects the pervasive mentality that what matters is not knowing how to do things well, it’s really wanting to do them. (As in the familiar “Peace through strength”/“Visualize world peace” contrast.)

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As the Post noted, in the daycare case the feds send the provinces “money to pass along to care providers in exchange for reduced fees.” But not necessarily to $10 per day as advertised, “as the program is geared at lowering the average fee. The intent is to free mothers up for work, and income up for tax collection.”

Details shmetails. The governmental Midas touch automatically increases productivity so much that (drum roll please) we can’t afford not to do it. And if the actual result is that daycare waiting lists grow while providers struggle to stay afloat, well, if at first you don’t succeed… plunge into pharmacare.

Jagmeet Singh, who alternates blasting the Liberals as plutocrats’ puppets with propping them up, recently said “millions of people in this country have to go without the medication they desperately need because they can’t afford it.”

It’s clearly untrue. If millions were going without desperately needed medicine they’d die. But never mind. His point is: “In a country as wealthy as Canada, this shouldn’t be the case.” Why not? Is medicine not inherently expensive, and more so in a wealthy country where we can try more of it?

Well, sure. Unless government intervenes. Then it becomes… unavailable.

Rationing is a feature not a bug when governments have promised more than there is and must avoid insolvency or the admission of error. Including in our health-care system, where central planning allocates resources inefficiently, but reform is taboo.

Indeed, speaking of mental gymnastics, it is extraordinary the extent to which the evident collapse of that system has not dented elite confidence in it. In a heart-wrenching piece by my former Ottawa Citizen colleague Liz Payne about her father’s experiences, she confessed that as “a health reporter … I have written hundreds of stories about the health-care system … and read plenty of evidence about long waits, worsening health outcomes and diminishing faith in the system. I thought I understood the health system. But I really didn’t until my father fell.”

Still, if you ask anyone in the Laurentian elite, or working hard to join it, whether to repeal the Canada Health Act they will duck, weave, and then say “No.” As they would if pressed on dramatically increasing funding for our Armed Forces. Clarity on the existence and intractability of problems including arrogant political bungling is not an attribute they look for when you apply for admission to polite society.

Part of the reason is that instead of “putting people first” you have to think about economics, specifically incentives. Which they generally don’t teach in schools these days as it’s part of the apparatus of patriarchal colonial oppression or something. So nobody who’s anybody can see that adding pharmacare will create the same problem with drugs we already have with surgery, hospital beds, and GPs.

Jagmeet Singh has no plan to make drugs cheaper to create, just to act as if they were cheaper. Which if implemented actually will cause millions of people in Canada to go without medication they desperately need because they can’t get it. Oh sure, they’ll be able to afford it. Just like the family doctor they also can’t find.

Weirdly, it’s happening with childcare too. So what visionary scheme shall we embrace next?

Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.