Ottawa shirks health funding: Oswald

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This article was published 21/12/2011 (5227 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

THE Selinger government is worried it will shoulder a greater share of health care-funding in the future — and angry Ottawa is imposing this on Manitoba and other provinces unilaterally.

Health Minister Theresa Oswald also took exception Tuesday to a statement from her federal counterpart that she and other provincial health ministers had agreed recently to leave the thorny issue of health funding to the country’s finance ministers to sort out.

Oswald said medicare was created as an equal partnership between Ottawa and the provinces.

“Today, the feds fund roughly 20 per cent of Manitoba’s health services,” she said. “What they’re saying this week is they’re going to be contributing even less than that, and I view that to be very concerning for all citizens of Manitoba.”

A long-term agreement that provided provinces with annual six per cent health funding increases is close to an end. Federal Finance Minister Jim Flaherty surprised his provincial counterparts Monday by unilaterally deciding the six per cent increases will continue for another six years followed by increases tied to the growth in the economy. He vowed that annual increases would not fall below three per cent.

On Tuesday, federal Health Minister Leona Aglukkaq asserted in a letter to provincial health ministers that they all had agreed to let finance ministers do the deciding on federal health transfers at a recent conference in Halifax.

Oswald called the statement “revisionist history” on Aglukkaq’s part, adding it would be a “gross assumption” the provinces are content with the “unilateral nature of this decision-making.”

Manitoba spends 38 per cent of its annual budget on health care. It was looking for a 10-year funding commitment from Ottawa with six per cent annual increases as a negotiating starting point. It has also argued health transfers should not be discussed in isolation from equalization and other social transfers. The worry is that one sector will benefit at another’s expense, which has occurred in the past.

Oswald said health ministers wanted to discuss funding at their meeting last month but Aglukkaq refused. She said that in the past when Ottawa worked constructively with the provinces — such as on reducing health-care wait times — the results were positive. She said it’s critically important such co-operation continue in the future.

Meanwhile, late Tuesday, the Harper government issued a statement boasting that no federal administration had ever committed so much cash for health care. The Conservative government will invest more than $178 billion in the nation’s health system between 2013-14 and 2018-19 — an all-time record, said St. Boniface MP Shelly Glover, Flaherty’s parliamentary secretary.

She said health transfers were “dramatically slashed” under the previous federal Liberal government, but the Conservatives have refused to reduce them. She said federal health transfers have risen to $27 billion this year from $19 billion when her party formed government in 2006.

larry.kusch@freepress.mb.ca