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Thursday February 9, 2012
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Be Bold Ontario: Shift dollars from healthcare to education
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Be Bold Ontario: Shift dollars from healthcare to education Preston Manning, Globe and Mail – June 2, 2009 The most worrisome feature of Ontario's budget is its continuation of the drastic imbalance between health care and education spending. Out of $109billion in proposed program spending, almost 40 per cent is committed to health care and only 13 per cent to education. Why is this worrisome? Because, in a recession, the highest spending priority for provincial governments ought to be the retraining of the current work force and the education of the future work force, so Canada emerges from this recession with the most productive, competitive and highly skilled work force in the world. This is especially important for Ontario - the province with the largest work force (more than seven million people) in the country - at a time when its work force is being most severely hit by the current economic downturn. According to Statistics Canada, "employment in Ontario fell by 35,000 in February ... pushing the unemployment rate up to 8.7 per cent ... (more than 600,000 people out of work). ... Since last October, just over half of the country's total employment losses have occurred in Ontario, well beyond the province's 39 per cent share of the total working-age population. Employment fell by 160,000 during this period, with the largest decreases in manufacturing; business, building and other support services; and construction." As Ontario's economy contracts, should not the province be doing everything in its power to facilitate as much as 10 per cent of its work force moving from full-time and part-time employment to full-time and part-time education and training? As young people graduate from Ontario's educational and training institutions - and experience increasing difficulties in securing employment should not the province be doing everything in its power to provide them with expanded opportunities for continued education and training leading to more productive full-time employment down the road? Such an education-based workplace revolution will require the co-operation of businesses, unions, educational institutions and governments. In the case of management and labour, this means making worker retraining and education a much higher priority in collective bargaining agreements. But, most important, provincial governments to whom our Constitution grants primary jurisdiction over education must decide to make education and training spending an even higher priority during recessionary times than health-care spending.
Health care currently consumes about 40 per cent or more of the total budgets of Nova Scotia, Quebec, Ontario, Saskatchewan and British Columbia, with educational expenditures accounting for less than 15 per cent of the total budgets of Prince Edward Island, New Brunswick, Ontario (yes, Ontario), Saskatchewan and Alberta. Spiralling health-care spending is progressively eating up provincial budgets to the point where other vitally important social-service functions such as education and training are starved for funding. We simply cannot allow this trend to continue. Of course, a shift in billions of dollars from health care to education and training raises an obvious question: How will we achieve and maintain highquality health care? The answer for Canada lies in finally biting the bullet and doing what most of the world's other industrialized countries (with the exception of the U.S.) have done, and that is establish a well-balanced two-track health-care system, providing for both public and private health-care insurance, delivery and financing. Comparative studies by Canadian think tanks and the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development have shown that health-care systems offering universal health care to all citizens regardless of ability to pay (just like Canada) but with two-track (public and private) insurance, financing and delivery capacity outperform the Canadian health-care system in virtually every category of health-care outcomes. And while there is room for legitimate debate as to what the relationship should be between public and private health-care tracks and what must be done to maintain high standards of care in both, these are the questions we should be debating - not whether private health-care insurance, delivery and financing should be permitted and encouraged. To offer hundreds of thousands of Canadians productive educational and training opportunities as an alternative to unproductive unemployment requires provincial governments to make education and training their spending priority. To do that requires major reforms in health-care financing and spending. Will Ontario take the lead in making this necessary transition?
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