Opinion: BC’s premier thought he had made progress with Ottawa on health care funding. Until the federal liberals went on the attack this week
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VICTORIA — This was the week that Prime Minister John Horgan discovered the true nature of his relationship with Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.
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The revealing process began with a Sunday morning phone call to Horgan from federal Minister for Intergovernmental Relations Dominic LeBlanc.
LeBlanc wanted an update on the pending meeting of Canadian prime ministers in Victoria.
Horgan, the president of the federation council, was taken aback.
The main issue for the prime ministers was the need for the federal government to increase its share of health care funding.
Prime ministers, under Horgan’s leadership, had been trying for months to persuade Ottawa to convene a federal-provincial conference on the very issue.
Now, at the last minute, the federal minister was asking for an update on something his government had refused to address.
Horgan gave what he later described as a “frank” response to a “bogus” scope on the eve of the conference.
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“What could be more important to the minister of intergovernmental relations than engaging with the other governments of Canada?” the prime minister scoffed. “Is there anything else on his agenda besides the 13 of us? I do not believe it.”
The phone call was the first step in a federal strategy to undermine Horgan and the prime ministers.
On Monday, the minister for intergovernmental relations took to CBC Newsworld to criticize the prime ministers for claiming that the federal government was funding only 22 per cent of health care.
“They use this bogus figure of 22 percent,” raged LeBlanc, whose ministerial specialty is clearly not intergovernmental diplomacy. “Federal spending to support public health care is about a third.”
It’s not much of a comeback: Even if you accept his calculations, it still means the provinces are putting up two dollars for every one Ottawa contributes.
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Trudeau’s cabinet was heating up.
On Tuesday, the federal Minister of Health, Jean-Yves Duclos, went to the national broadcaster to further challenge the provinces.
Beating LeBlanc, he said the federal contribution was more than 40 percent, counting the value of the taxing power that Ottawa transferred to the provinces in the 1970s.
That is higher than the 35 percent that the provinces are asking for today, said Duclos, underlining the irony.
But the debate over the percentages was “sterile” and not one the federal government wanted to engage in, Duclos said.
As for a federal provincial summit on health care, Duclos had some preconditions.
The first meeting should be between the federal and provincial health ministers. It would be up to them to agree “on what kind of results we want to achieve together before we talk about the dollars needed to achieve those results.”
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Only then, he suggested, would the way be clear for the prime minister to sit down with prime ministers.
As it all sank in (the perfunctory phone call, the one-two punch from federal ministers delivered on national television), John Horgan’s generally upbeat demeanor gave way to a mixture of anger and frustration.
The federal government refused to meet. It haggled through the media. It was to treat the provinces as “servants”.
“The federal government is not a higher order of government,” said the BC premier. “It is an equitable order of government, and we will not take lessons from the federal government in fiscal probity.”
Look, Horgan thought he’d gotten somewhere with the prime minister.
Almost never during his five years as prime minister has he criticized the Trudeau government.
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In return, he thought he had developed a healthy relationship based on mutual benefit for the province and the country.
This time last year, he and Trudeau sat down at the White Spot in Coquitlam for a sack lunch photo shoot that went national.
But it was more than a photo op: That week the two governments announced a deal on $350 million in federal funding for childcare and $1.3 billion for the Surrey-Langley SkyTrain extension.
Both announcements were key in shoring up support for Trudeau’s party ahead of the fall federal election.
After the election, Horgan thought he had also made progress in seeking more funding for health care.
“I sat down with the prime minister last November and he had just come out of surgery,” Horgan recounted.
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“I was facing 35 rounds of radiation treatment for throat cancer and I was vulnerable as a human being and as a prime minister.
“The Prime Minister and I had a candid and candid conversation about the importance of ensuring that as we move forward we are working together to address the challenges of patients and those accessing our healthcare system.
“The prime minister made a commitment to me that he would task his ministers to meet with us and we as a group agreed that we would look for a diverse group of prime ministers.”
The prime ministers sent a list of proposals to Ottawa that they hoped to pursue jointly. The exercise faltered.
“We got zero back,” Horgan told reporters. “We cannot negotiate with ourselves.”
Yet that is where the prime ministers met, in Horgan’s final turn as president of the prime ministers’ conference.
Looking back on Tuesday, he reflected on happier days when prime ministers and the prime minister worked together during the pandemic.
“Where did the love go?” Horgan asked in a moment of pathos, echoing a familiar pop song from the 1960s.
But it was never love, just political interest and, at the moment, there is nothing for Ottawa.
