Manitoba Premier Heather Stefanson, president of the Council of the Federation of premiers, says the country’s premiers have agreed to accept the federal government’s offer for a 10-year deal on health care funding, despite the offer being considerably less than the provinces and territories requested.
The provinces are now reportedly working on finalizing their respective individual agreements with the government, and the premiers have said they plan to push some aspects of funding in the bilateral agreements.
“We are very much united in our front that we will be accepting the money from the federal government, recognizing this does not represent what is a long-term funding need,” Stefanson said on CBC’s Power & Politics program on Feb. 13.
“We’ve accepted this for now, and we will move on to the bilateral agreements.”
The acceptance of the deal, which provides federal money to the provinces and territories for health spending in the form of the Canada Health Transfer (CHT), follows comments made on Feb. 12 by Intergovernmental Affairs Minister Dominic LeBlanc that the final amount was not up for negotiation.
“We’re not negotiating to buy a residential property here, where you make a counteroffer, and then make a counter counteroffer,” LeBlanc said during an interview with CTV’s Question Period.
“What we’ve said is that is the financial commitment that we believe the Government of Canada is able to make,” he said. “It’s a significant commitment, it’s a long-term commitment, and we’ve invited the provinces to discuss with us to negotiate the best agreement within those financial parameters for their jurisdiction.”
The Liberal government offered a total of $196 billion in health care transfers to the provinces on Feb. 7, of which $46 billion would be new money. The government has also defined a set of conditions to access the funding.
“To access their share of the federal funding, including the five percent CHT guarantee, provincial and territorial governments are asked to commit to improving how health information is collected, shared, used, and reported … to promote greater transparency on results, and to help manage public health emergencies,” said a statement issued by the prime minister on Feb. 7.
The provinces budgeted $204 billion for health care in the current fiscal year and wanted the federal share to increase to 35 percent—about $28 billion annually. Instead, the CHT was set at $45 billion, or about 22 percent, which works out to, on average, less than $5 billion in new funding a year. The federal government says that its bilateral deals with provinces already bring its share of the costs closer to 38 percent.
Each province or territory will negotiate details under a bilateral agreement to identify specific priorities in each jurisdiction, and must develop “action plans” describing how they will use the funding to improve their health care around four “shared health priorities.”
These include “family health care; health workforce and backlogs; mental health and substance use; and modernizing the health care system with standardized information and digital tools.”
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Marnie Cathcart