Mark Carney has effectively killed the “universal national” pharmacare program. The Spring Economic Update allots no new money for the program. This will end the expansion of the program into additional provinces and slowly starve the provinces that have implemented it. Whether stated explicitly or not, Carney is signaling that Canada’s short lived pharmacare program is now over.
This leaves the NDP with egg on their face, since establishing a program for universal pharmacare was a key pillar of the 2022-2024 NDP-Liberal supply-and-confidence agreement. This agreement pledged NDP support to the hated minority Liberal government as it oversaw a cost of living crisis, attacked unions, and supported Israel’s genocide in Gaza, in exchange for a package of shallow promises.
Don Davies, then the NDP health critic, bragged at the time that the promises secured in the supply-and-confidence agreement represented “the single biggest expansion of public healthcare in 60 years”.
But the original pharmacare deal only promised “progress towards a universal national pharmacare” (our emphasis), with language left intentionally vague to allow for this exact type of withdrawal. In reality the program was never universal nor national. At launch, the program was narrowed to only cover a small set of pharmaceuticals (contraception and some diabetes medications), and with its limited adoption by the provinces only ever covered about 17 per cent of Canadians.
Only four provinces or territories have signed-on since the program began. The deals that were signed by P.E.I., Manitoba, the Yukon, and B.C. consumed more than 60 per cent of the $1.5 billion that the federal government allocated to fund the program. Billions more in federal funding are needed to expand the program into massive jurisdictions like Alberta, Ontario and Quebec.
This is a typical move in the Liberal playbook. They dangled the carrot of reforms when they needed to win support, then withdrew their promise as soon as possible.
It was a mistake by the NDP to support the Liberals as they maneuvered to save their skin. We need to build a genuine socialist party which doesn’t base itself on backroom deals with the bosses but on the mobilization of the masses, fighting against the corporate onslaught on every aspect of our lives.
