The British Columbia government has reached an agreement in principle on health-care funding with the federal government that will deliver $3.3 billion in new money over the next decade.
The new money is included in an overall funding package of $27.47 billion in federal health transfers to the province.
The agreement also includes a one-time $273 million Canada Health Transfer top-up to address urgent needs in emergency rooms, pediatric hospitals and surgery wait times, according to the B.C. government.
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and B.C. Premier David Eby made the announcement at Kwantlen Polytechnic University in Langley on Wednesday.
“Some people out there say the answer to our problems lies in privatized health care, that if people could buy their way to the front of the line somehow the line would go away, or if we pulled doctors and nurses and health professionals out of our public system into a parallel private system, somehow that would improve care for everybody,” Eby said.
“It doesn’t shorten the line, it just changes who is at the front. And it puts added strain on our public health-care system and that’s not the direction we are going.”
Eby said the agreement in principle supports health-care priorities shared with the federal government, including expanding access to primary health care including in rural, remote, and Indigenous communities, reducing waitlists, supporting health-care workers and improving access to mental health and substance use services.
The agreement is the first step to completing a $196-billion, 10-year health-care funding proposal that Prime Minister Justin Trudeau made with Canada’s premiers last month.
“We know money alone won’t fix everything, so we also want to work with provinces and territories on bilateral deals that will deliver real improvements people can see and feel,” Trudeau said.
“Each agreement will be tailored and flexible to the needs of each province and territory, but consistent among all is the joint responsibility to collect information that monitors how the healthcare system is performing so we know it is delivering the improvements that Canadians deserve.”
Trudeau said the three-year provincial action plans will require provinces to track things like Canadians’ access to doctors or nurse practitioners and wait times for surgeries and appointments.
They also push the provinces to improve the recognition of foreign credentials, increase access to mental health and addictions treatment and towards modernizing their systems to allow individuals health files to be securely shared with their entire healthcare team.
B.C. was one of the last provinces that has yet to sign a new health-care funding deal with the federal government.
Earlier in the day, Saskatchewan became the latest province to sign a new funding deal with Ottawa to accelerate new measures aiming to improve primary health care, surgeries and mental health and addictions services.
On Tuesday, B.C.’s NDP government released its 2023-24 budget which contained, among other health-care measures, $1 billion in new spending for mental health and addiction services.
– with files from The Canadian Press
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