We’ve got Jane Philpott back on the pod this week. Since she came on in April to talk about her book, she’s been busy. And she’s about to get busier.
The former health minister in Justin Trudeau’s first government has been named chair of a new “primary care action team” for the Ontario government. Her goal is to “connect every person in Ontario to primary health care within the next five years.” Since every government from Confederation to now has not gotten that done, it’ll be interesting to see whether Philpott — and whichever government Ontario has in five years — can do better.
Since Philpott was a Liberal nine years ago, and spoke to an Ontario Liberal policy convention only a month before her new appointment — and since that appointment came from the Conservative government of Ontario Premier Doug Ford — her appointment has generated industrial quantities of buzz at Queen’s Park and on Parliament Hill. She intended none of that, and she points out that her appointment is non-partisan. Ontario’s new provincial Liberal leader Bonnie Crombie — who, it can be assumed, would have liked Philpott in her corner rather than on the provincial payroll — suggested she might be likelier to implement Philpott’s work than Ford would, which is definitely a case of attempting to make lemonade from lemons, but it had the effect of reinforcing Philpott’s non-partisan stance.
Philpott’s going to try to implement ideas she discussed in her book Health For All, which said everybody in Canada should have access to a local interdisciplinary health team. It’s ambitious, and one of my concerns when we talked in the spring was that a federal government would be terribly positioned to make it happen, because all the organizational challenges and the jurisdictional primacy would be in the provinces. Well, there’s that problem solved, with Philpott’s provincial-level appointment. We’ll see about all the other problems.
I’ve seen stacks of polls suggesting Canadians take health care very seriously but that it doesn’t often become an election issue because, in a lot of provinces at various times, Canadians haven’t always been sure a change in party would improve governments’ performance. Can fresh thinking produce fresh results? One can always hope. Good on Philpott for trying. I suspect I’ll be checking in with her before her work is done.
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Can Jane Philpott fix Ontario health care?