ADAMS: Canada’s Healthcare Is Not a Business, Stop Treating It Like One
Canadian healthcare is not perfect. Anyone who has sat for twelve hours in an emergency waiting room knows that. Anyone who's called a family doctor's office and been told to try again next month knows that. Anyone who's seen a loved one wait far too long for surgery knows that. But the solution to these problems has never been to hand over our public system to private profiteers, and it is shocking that a paper like the Toronto Star would give space to this kind of propaganda.
The Star has a long history of presenting itself as the conscience of Canadian journalism, a paper of record that defends ordinary Canadians against concentrated power. But publishing corporate healthcare talking points dressed up as policy proposals? That is the same playbook conservatives have used for decades: take a real frustration, like long waits or bloated bureaucracy, and twist it into an argument for siphoning tax dollars into private pockets, all with aim of “guaranteeing care.” Sounds great if you've never looked at the actual evidence.
In reality, it's a roadmap for turning Canadian Medicare into a cash cow for corporations and a nightmare for everyone else.
The “Care Guarantee” Scam
One of the central ideas floated in this propagandist garbage opinion piece is a so-called “care guarantee”: the promise that no one will wait beyond “safe” times for treatment. It sounds lovely. Who wouldn't want a guarantee? But this argument fails to address the core problem. Without enough hospitals, doctors, nurses, and beds, guarantees mean about as much as Mark Carney's Declarations of Intent. (Spoiler alert, they mean absolutely nothing)
We've already seen a version of this play out at Queen's Park, where proposed legislation promised patients a “guarantee” of timely care after someone died due to wait times. But a guarantee is only as good as the resources behind it. And right now, Ontario, like much of Canada, is short thousands of nurses, struggling to keep ERs staffed, and losing healthcare workers faster than they can be replaced.
Even in the best-case scenario, where the wealthy aren't cutting to the front of the line, the real problem remains: medical school is prohibitively expensive, hospitals are burning out staff, and many of the nurses and doctors who once kept our system afloat, walked away from the profession because the “freedom fighters” couldn't handle staying home for two weeks and treated our frontline workers like punching bags during COVID.
You can't legislate a guarantee into existence when the people who actually deliver care are overworked, underpaid, and leaving the profession. All a hollow “guarantee” does is shift the pressure down onto the exhausted remaining frontline staff, lowering the quality of care for everyone.
The Bureaucracy Scapegoat
Another favourite target here is the so-called “health bureaucracy.” This is a classic scapegoat of the right-wing establishment media. Yes, bureaucracy in Canadian healthcare and government is a real issue, but not because it exists. It's an issue because provincial governments, especially conservative ones, deliberately underfund the public system and then point to its cracks as proof it's broken.
Doug Ford has done this in Ontario: cut, squeeze, starve hospitals of resources, then cry that “bureaucracy” is the problem when people criticize him, and not the fact his underfunding of healthcare has left all the money going to those on the sunshine list. The truth is that if you replace a public bureaucracy with a private one, you haven't eliminated paperwork or inefficiency. You've simply made it worse. Private insurance systems are notorious for red tape, billing confusion, lack of accountability, and, most notably, denials of service.
The United States spends more on healthcare administration than on doctors and nurses, Americans also spend far more on health insurance that denies claims than Canadians do on just paying taxes to have public healthcare.
If bureaucracy is a problem, privatization only makes that problem worst.
The Public Sector “Problem”
The piece starts by claiming the “problem” is that hospitals receive block funding. Let's be clear: block funding exists for a reason. It ensures hospitals can operate predictably, pay staff reliably, and plan for long-term care. The alternative would be paying hospitals based on “patients served,” which turns healthcare into a profit-chasing enterprise, where patients are dollars on a spreadsheet.
Incentivizing hospitals to treat patients like revenue streams will not solve overcrowding. It will worsen it. Hospitals will be pressured to prioritize procedures that are profitable over those that are necessary. Chronic illness? Complex cases? Elder care? Those don't pay out.
Once our public dollars are tied to these for-profit models, Canadians are permanently stuck with a system designed to extract profit, not to deliver care.
The False Fix of Private Competition
The argument we hear again and again is that we need “competition.”
Supposedly, competition between public and private healthcare providers will somehow improve services. But competition in healthcare is not the same as competition between coffee shops. You cannot simply switch providers when your health is on the line. And you cannot get rid of private operators once they are entrenched.
And it's worth noting: Canada already allows non-profit providers in many areas, long-term care, for example. What have we learned? For-profit long-term care homes consistently deliver worse outcomes, including higher death rates during the pandemic. Competition didn't save lives. It cost them.
Once private providers set up shop, they lobby governments to keep subsidies flowing, even when service fails. There is no “competition.” There is only dependence. This is the Star's failure here: to platform this as though it is just another policy option, instead of the dangerous restructuring it really is.
Expanding Training vs. Undermining Public Trust
To be fair, there are elements in these proposals that make sense: expanding medical schools, incentivizing nurses, making hospitals better places to work. These are real solutions. But they are not unique to private healthcare advocates. They are exactly the kinds of measures public healthcare defenders have been calling for for decades.
The problem is that these legitimate fixes are being packaged alongside a Trojan horse. “Expand training” is the sugar-coating. The core of the proposal is a push for privatization.
And by platforming it without scrutiny, the Toronto Star has helped smuggle dangerous ideas into the public discourse.
What Real Solutions Look Like
And this is the ultimate failure of the Star's propaganda: not only does it promote a dangerous path toward privatization, it fails to properly highlight the real solutions that would fix our healthcare system while keeping it public.
Take so-called Christian hospitals. These institutions are publicly funded, yet many have demanded the “right” to deny legally available medical care to their patients on ideological grounds. That is unacceptable. Doctors need to believe in medicine, not ideology, not politics, not religion. If you take so much as a dime in public money, you must take a public oath: public interest before anything else.
Or look at the state of our hospitals themselves. Across provinces, too many are run down, under-equipped, and unable to provide essential services like maternity wards. Canadians should not have to drive for hours just to deliver a baby. If governments invested in upgrading existing hospitals instead of starving them, our system could meet modern needs without corporate profiteers taking their cut.
Then there's the shortage of doctors and nurses. The lazy answer is to import workers and slap them with a blue-seal test. But that's a Band-Aid, not a solution. A real, sustainable fix is domestic: full scholarships and grants for Canadians to study medicine, paired with incentives to serve where they're needed most.
If someone at Ryerson or UBC or McGill wants to become a doctor, we should be offering to pay their way, with signing bonuses if they commit to work in a town or city facing shortages. That is how you build a resilient healthcare system.
And for the conservatives who like their “tough on crime” angle, here it is: crack down on fraudulent degree mills. No Canadian should ever have to wonder whether the doctor treating them is qualified or just bought a piece of paper online. Strengthen oversight, use police resources where they actually protect public safety, and make sure every degree in this country stands for real training.
These are the kinds of solutions Canadians deserve to hear. Solutions that keep our system public. Solutions that strengthen it, instead of hollowing it out. And solutions that show fixing healthcare is not about giving corporate players a bigger slice of the pie, but about ensuring every Canadian has access to quality care, no matter where they live, what they earn, or what they believe.
Who Benefits?
This is the question the Star should have asked: who benefits? Because ordinary Canadians don't. We already pay for our healthcare with taxes. Shifting to a system where private operators extract profits from those same taxes just means less money for actual care. Less for nurses, less for doctors, less for patients.
The only winners are private insurance companies, private clinics, and the executives who profit when healthcare becomes a marketplace instead of a public service. And make no mistake: once entrenched, they will fight tooth and nail to stay, even if service is poor, even if outcomes are worse, even if Canadians are outraged. Give a metre, they'll take a nation.
Journalism or Propaganda?
This brings me back to the Star itself. Journalists have a responsibility: to interrogate power, not parrot its talking points. Publishing arguments for privatization without dismantling them is not journalism. It is propaganda.
The Toronto Star is not obligated to agree with me or with defenders of public healthcare. But it is obligated to tell the truth: that privatization in healthcare has consistently failed patients wherever it has been tried, that bureaucracy is not solved by adding profit-seeking layers, and that “care guarantees” are little more than branding for queue-jumping or overloading already stretched workers.
Instead, the Star has lent its pages to the very forces that threaten to dismantle the system Canadians overwhelmingly support. That is not just disappointing. It is shameful. It is un-Canadian.
The Canadian Choice
Canadians face a choice. We can keep our healthcare public, invest in it properly, and fix the inefficiencies that exist. Or we can swallow corporate spin, allow private profiteers into our system, and watch as fairness is replaced with financial privilege. Even if the wealthy aren’t paying to cut the line, guarantees without real investment mean care quality drops for everyone.
You cannot paper over a shortage of hospitals, doctors, nurses, and beds with a law. You cannot legislate dignity and fairness without funding them. Until governments properly support healthcare workers, guarantee bills are empty slogans that only make the problem worse.
The Toronto Star has chosen a side by publishing this garbage. But ordinary Canadians still have a say. We can demand that our tax dollars go to nurses, doctors, and better public services, not corporate shareholders.
Because healthcare in this country is supposed to be about people. If we allow that principle to be undermined, even once, we will regret it for generations. Healthcare is not a business. It's a right. And it's about time we started acting like it.
This piece was written by an individual contributor and reflects the editorial position of The Provincial Times and Left Lane Media Group. Read our Content Policy here.
