(December 12, 2022)<\/p>\n
By: Susan Delacourt, Toronto Star<\/p>\n
Doug Ford has clearly had a change of heart in 2022 about the value of federal-provincial meetings.<\/p>\n
Last February, the Ontario premier expressed the view that the so-called \u201cFreedom Convoy\u201d protest paralyzing Canada\u2019s capital and major border points would not be resolved by \u201ca bunch of people sitting around a table talking.\u201d<\/p>\n
Jim Watson, then the mayor of Ottawa, told a public inquiry this fall that when Ford dismissed the idea this way, Watson quipped that \u201ca bunch of people talking\u201d sounded a lot like a cabinet meeting.<\/p>\n
Still, there was no moving the premier. Ford\u2019s government simply boycotted the proposed \u201ctripartite\u201d meetings between the federal, provincial and municipal governments to co-ordinate a response to the convoy blockades.<\/p>\n
Yet here we are at the end of 2022, in the midst of what is clearly a health-care emergency in this country, and there was Ford last Friday, asking for \u2014 yes \u2014 a federal-provincial meeting. Or, as he might have put it, a bunch of people sitting around a table talking.<\/p>\n
\u201cNothing should be more important to the prime minister than meeting with the 13 premiers. That\u2019s the bottom line,\u201d Ford told a news conference convened by all the premiers to demand a face-to-face meeting on health care with Justin Trudeau.<\/p>\n
OK then. But what if Ford was correct last winter? What if a seriously urgent situation required more than a bunch of first ministers sitting around a table talking? And make no mistake, the health-care crisis in this country is urgent \u2014 probably more urgent and life-endangering than the convoy protest was.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s doubtful that anyone currently sitting in a Canadian hospital emergency room, waiting perhaps for one or two days now, is thinking, \u201cYou know what we need? A first ministers\u2019 meeting.\u201d An exhausted nurse, heading into her second, back-to-back shift of the week, knows her dismal working conditions won\u2019t be fixed simply by the prime minister staring across the table at the premiers.<\/p>\n
Similarly, the beleaguered health-care system may deserve an emergency debate in the House of Commons \u2014 as New Democratic Party Leader Jagmeet Singh demanded on Monday \u2014 but a talking cure seems inadequate to the magnitude of the current breakdown.<\/p>\n
I don\u2019t want to mock the idea of meetings. \u201cA bunch of people sitting around a table talking\u201d does pretty accurately sum up 90 per cent of what a political job involves.<\/p>\n
In interviews on Monday, the president of the Canadian Medical Association was asked whether a first ministers\u2019 meeting was at the top of his list for getting health care fixed in the short term. Not really, Dr. Alika Lafontaine said.<\/p>\n
\u201cOne of the things for Canadians to remember is that these things don\u2019t have to happen sequentially,\u201d Lafontaine told CBC TV.<\/p>\n
\u201cYou know, the funding needs to come, but there are a lot of things that we can do in the meantime. And if these meetings are mainly focused on just a discussion on amounts, I don\u2019t think they\u2019re going to lead to the solutions that we\u2019re looking for.\u201d<\/p>\n
What he was saying, essentially, is that politicians have to stop talking about talking. \u201cWe have to move past this conversation that somehow we can\u2019t do anything about funding in place, because people are suffering right now,\u201d Lafontaine said.<\/p>\n
At Queen\u2019s Park on Monday, the Ontario Health Coalition was rattling off all the things governments could do right now without waiting for some mythical meeting or sum of money. They could recall retired health-care workers back to duty, pay them well and pay their licence fees, suggested coalition executive director Natalie Mehra. Money is definitely necessary, she said, but right now she\u2019d take \u201cboots on the ground\u201d over more squabbling over money.<\/p>\n
\u201cThis is beyond emergency,\u201d Mehra said. \u201cThis is like nothing we\u2019ve ever seen before.\u201d<\/p>\n
One of the things we learned during Justice Paul Rouleau\u2019s inquiry into the convoy protest is that Canada\u2019s first ministers talk very differently to each other behind the scenes than they do in public. Their language is more coarse, but they do a lot less posturing for the cameras.<\/p>\n