Comment Re:Good, but what about inflation? (Score 1) 23
Constitutionally yes health care belongs to the provinces. I'm sure you are aware that in reality that is not the case. The Canada Health Act firmly inserts the feds into the system and has for most of my life.
Running the health systems is completely the purview of the Provinces. The major requirements of the Canada Health Act are mostly in terms of what services are offered (so that we don’t have a nationally fractured system where basic procedures aren’t universal).
Other than that, there is the health transfer from the Federal Government down to the Provinces — but the Provinces aren’t supposed to rely solely on that transfer to fund their health care systems. And that money typically doesn’t come with any strings attached (other than it be used for healthcare).
Crumbling systems are entirely the fault of the Provinces. The licensing of Doctors happens at the Provincial level (albeit by the various Provincial colleges), training and education happens at the Provincial level, hiring of Doctors and Nurses happens at the Provincial level, and the construction of hospitals happens at the Provincial level. And those are the parts of the system that have been failing, and mostly because successive Conservative Provincial governments have been starving the system.
Yaz