Save public healthcare before it’s too late
On Monday, Canadians will decide the fate of the country’s most sacred institution: its public healthcare system. The stakes could not be higher.
What’s unfolding isn’t merely an election — it is a referendum on whether healthcare in Canada remains a public good or is reduced to a market commodity, accessible only to the wealthy.
To understand what is at risk, we must return to the words and warnings of Tommy Douglas — the father of Canadian Medicare. Douglas spent his life fighting to replace a “tin cup” system of humiliating means-tests and sky-high fees with a universal model grounded in dignity and equality.
“I felt that no boy should have to depend either for his leg or his life upon the ability of his parents to raise enough money to bring a first-class surgeon to his bedside.”
Douglas saw clearly that the patchwork, pay-to play system left working and middle-class families vulnerable to catastrophe. His vision was simple and radical: people should be able to get whatever health services they need, irrespective of their ability to pay.
That vision is now under threat.
The Conservative Party has made no secret of its intentions to further privatize healthcare, pointing to Alberta’s recent expansions as a model. But Albertans know firsthand what this means — increased costs, prolonged wait times, and less access.
Privatization doesn’t relieve pressure on public systems, it makes it worse. It siphons public dollars and a severely scarce supply of professionals into for-profit ventures which promise efficiency while delivering only inequity.
To see where this path leads, Canadians need only look south.
“If you want a two-tiered health program, then just continue the way we're going... The people who can't pay, they'll take what's left.”
In the U.S., the commodification of healthcare has produced a dystopia where illness is financially ruinous, care is delayed or denied outright, and the moral compact between medicine and society is broken.
The American Medical Association, the same organization that once helped rally opposition to Douglas’s plan in Saskatchewan, has spent nearly a century opposing universal health coverage in the U.S., smearing it with the language of “socialism” and “tyranny” to protect the financial interests of its most powerful members.
Worse still, the American medical profession has tolerated, if not outright embraced, a campaign of disinformation that claims doctors should have the right to lie, profit from harm, and be shielded from accountability in the name of “free speech.”
This corrosive ideology has not been meaningfully opposed by American medical leadership — and is now being exported, rebranded, and introduced into Canadian discourse by ideologues seeking to dismantle public healthcare under the banner of “choice” and “freedom.”
There is no freedom in a healthcare system where people must choose between paying rent or seeing a doctor. There is no dignity in rationing insulin, skipping surgeries, or in dying young of preventable causes.
There is no justice in allowing profiteers to turn your illness into their opportunity.
What Canadians are witnessing in this election is not a debate over healthcare efficiency — it is an existential threat to the very idea that health is a right of citizenship.
“When we’re talking about medical care, we’re talking about our sense of values. Do we think human life is important? Do we think that the best medical care… is something to which people are entitled by virtue of belonging to a civilized community?”
Douglas answered with a resounding yes. Now we must do the same.
Canadians are rightly concerned about Trump-era tariffs and the threat to national sovereignty. But make no mistake: a Conservative-led plan to privatize Medicare is not just bad policy — it is the Canadian version of American-style decline, where public institutions are hollowed out under the pretense of “innovation,” and disinformation is wielded as a weapon to discredit those who stand up for the public good.
Tommy Douglas once warned that some will call it socialism. Let them. Better to be labeled a socialist than become a nation that lets its sick suffer in silence while the wealthy skip the line.
On Monday, vote like your health depends on it. Because it does.
“Fascism begins the moment a ruling class, fearing the people may use their political democracy to gain economic democracy, begins to destroy political democracy in order to retain its power of exploitation and special privilege.” — Tommy Douglas
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Code Black is a physician now practicing in B.C. after immigrating from the U.S. late last year. He writes under a pseudonym due to fear of further retribution from members of U.S. medical leadership and U.S. government officials. His identity has been verified by Canada Healthwatch.