Vaughn Palmer: Health care crisis remains Horgan’s biggest unsolved problem

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VICTORIA — Retiring Prime Minister John Horgan called a press conference last week to launch a $125 million bequest to the community he has represented in the legislature for 17 years.

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“This is a very exciting day for the people of Westshore,” Horgan said, and the details announced last Wednesday made it so.

Coastal communities west of the provincial capital, including Colwood, Metchosin and Sooke, will get their own higher education campus on a site in central Horgan’s hometown of Langford.

The provincial government is putting up $98 million for construction and land acquisition in partnership with locally based Camosun College, Royal Roads University and the University of Victoria.

The City of Langford committed to parking, road infrastructure, and an innovation study, all valued at $27.5 million.

In addition, there will be $375,000 in scholarships over five years to encourage local high school graduates to attend what Stew Young, the city’s mayor, already calls Langford University.

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The campus is scheduled to open in two years with 600 students, with expectations of doubling that number by the end of the decade.

“Everything here is ready to go and we can start building tomorrow,” Young boasted. “There is no slowdown here at Langford.”

Langford is one of BC’s fastest growing communities with the youngest demographic.

“We’ll fill this with 1,200 people and then some,” Young stated. “There’s enough (space) on the site that you can have up to 4,000 or 5,000 students here.”

For Horgan, the announcement caps a multi-year effort, first as a member of the opposition and then as prime minister.

“I was talking to my eldest son today and he asked me what I was doing,” the prime minister said.

“I said we were going to announce a university on Goldstream (Avenue), and he said it’s about time, you should have done it 15 years ago.

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“So, I get it at home, I get it at my (election office) window, I get it from people here.”

Even more important for Horgan to have secured the Langford campus, given that he was forced to dig six deep into what was supposed to be his other legacy project for the capital region: the replacement for the Royal British Columbia Museum.

Horgan steps down as prime minister once the party chooses a successor, perhaps in October if David Eby is the sole candidate, possibly in December if others enter the race.

But even as he contemplates leaving the post he held for five years, last week’s news conference also touched on the darker side of Horgan’s legacy.

Reporters asked many questions about the troubled health care sector, where long wait times, understaffing and inability to access a family doctor are increasingly the norm.

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The prime minister was wrong to answer a question about the Victoria couple who put an ad in the newspaper, looking for a family doctor, any doctor, to help renew prescriptions.

He began, as he often does when discussing the health care crisis, by calling on the federal government to increase its share of the funding.

“I hosted prime ministers from across the country here just a few weeks ago and our No. 1 question to the federal government was that we need an equal partner to make sure we have sustainable funding,” Horgan said.

“It is a matter of necessity. Examples of having to post an ad to fill a prescription or other families concerned about being able to access primary care is a real and pressing issue and we are doing everything we can to address it, but it needs to be cross-cutting. country.

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“I’m sure the prime minister understands. I hope we make progress before the summer is over.”

If you don’t hear from the prime minister?

“Maybe I’ll get an ad in the paper,” Horgan replied.

That is, as he quickly clarified, in concert with the other provincial premiers.

Still, it was the kind of flippant, dismissive comment Horgan has delivered too often.

Say “deaths are a part of life” as people died during the heat dome.

Telling people to take advantage of “our sophisticated public transportation systems” if gas prices are unaffordable.

He has been forgiven for those and other mistakes by an admiring public, judging by opinion polls.

But in this case, he seemed to be making light of a problem that he will soon leave behind.

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The health care crisis doesn’t lend itself to the kind of big publicity Horgan mounted on the Langford postsecondary campus site.

The crisis, which has been brewing for years, resists easy solutions.

Health Minister Adrian Dix found this out when there were no takers in the incentives he offered this year’s medical school graduates to pursue family medicine.

Horgan acknowledged the challenges facing his successor when asked about the related shortage of nurses, health care technicians, never mind all the other fields with shortages of skilled and skilled workers.

“It’s not just in health care,” he replied.

“It’s in engineering. It is in science and in many other areas as well.

“So, we have a lot of work to do there.”

In fact, they do, and Horgan, who is retiring for health reasons, will not be overseeing the solutions.

Instead, it will fall to his successor. And in healthcare alone, the challenges are enormous.

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