The Sixth Estate

In recent months the Canadian airline industry has been pushing, hard, for lower costs. Not content with having the Harper regime order its employees to work under threat of legal sanction (so much for small government, eh?), Air Canada apparently wants to have that same government give it a variety of other under-the-table handouts, too. This lobbying has resulted in several reports in recent months, including from the Senate and, this week, from the Conference Board of Canada.

In light of the ongoing Margaret Wente plagiarism scandal, it seems only fair to point out that the Conference Board of Canada has a plagiarism problem, too. Unlike the Globe & Mail, though, they more or less dealt with it. I’m not condoning what happened. Some disturbing evidence emerged about corporate influence over report-writing. But on the whole, they did the right thing with regard to plagiarism: they recalled the reports, acknowledged plagiarism occurred, admitted “undue reliance on… a funder,” and contracted an Osgoode law professor to prepare new reports. Bonus points for all that.

Both the Senate report and the Conference Board report have received entirely favourable and uncritical news coverage, of course, which is less a comment on the quality of the reports, than on the negligence of journalists. Even more extraordinary, though, are the ways in which some of the findings contradict one another. There’s really no other way to put this than as follows: the Conference Board is better at producing sound, independent analysis under industry pressure than our own government is. Whether you agree with the conclusions or not, it’s not hard to tell who the more competent research organization is. The Senate report is 21 pages long; the Conference Board report is 43 pages long.

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As I have been predicting for some while now, pressure on the Canadian government — which is more prepared to embrace private healthcare now that is has been since the 1960s, in any event — continues to build, with the plagiarists at the Conference Board of Canada leading the charge. The National Post is the latest paper to endorse the Board’s vision for the future of healthcare, which can be summarized as “more private spending good, more public spending bad.” No evidence is introduced to support this claim, except for vague suggestions that it will improve competition and choice.

Oddly central to the Conference Board’s presentation on Health Spending is a chart that clearly reveals that the attack on public healthcare is a farce — but before I get to that, it’s worth pointing out that the Post’s editors are surprisingly ignorant about how Canadian healthcare works. For instance, they say that we have banned private insurance for private clinics here, which is clearly not the case. You can go to a private clinic all you like. And you can pay cash, too. When it comes to family doctors, Canada doesn’t have a monopoly on anything: we have a single payer insurance company (the government), which has persuaded — not required — the majority of doctors to work only with publicly insured patients. We also don’t have universal drug coverage. The only publicly paid, publicly provided healthcare happens in hospitals. So much for monopolies.

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The Conference Board of Canada, a corporate front group already known for plagiarizing American propaganda reports, is now promoting its newly established health care think tank, the Canadian Alliance for Sustainable Health Care, in the Toronto Star. (The fact that the Star, unabashedly the most leftist of the major papers, is promoting a private healthcare think tank should be all the indication you need that the mainstream media in this country is not actually leftist at all.)

The lead author of the op-ed is Anne Golden, who was also in charge in 2009 during the plagiarism fiasco. Golden says that Canadians must learn to accept that healthcare is not “an essential public service.” She says we need to rethink healthcare from the perspective of “empowerment” rather than “entitlement.” As even a quick intelligent skimming of the article will reveal, this is meaningless sophistry, simply intended to stoke up conservative contempt of “entitlement” and appeal to the modern mantra of freedom of choice. She neglects to mention that CASH — note the acronym — has a list of “investors” (not donors) dominated by insurance companies, banks, and other major companies, along with the pro-privatization Ontario government.

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There is a new think tank in Canada, and this one is specifically devoted to the privatization of healthcare. I can’t emphasize that enough: we have a new National Citizens Coalition. Unsurprisingly, this one is funded by big business and backed by the Conference Board of Canada, also known as Plagiarizers R Us. It will be called the Canadian Alliance for Sustainable Healthcare — a contrived name with the acronym CASH. The new group is billed as a vital new deep thinker at a time when healthcare costs are spiralling out of control. This is a nefarious myth. Yes, healthcare costs are rising faster than inflation. But they’re rising at the same rate in America, and the Americans already spend about twice as much on healthcare per person as we do. So sooner or later we will need to worry about it, but it’s not urgent yet. What is urgent is the shortage of doctors and the rising costs of drugs. Those we need leadership on.

Not from our government, though. During this election campaign, finance minister Jim Flaherty was booked making the following appalling statement about healthcare: “realistically there will be no serious discussion this year anyway… I’m not sure if any of the provincial politicians are going to raise this… At some point, somebody will take the lead on this.” Way to seize the initiative, Jimmy.

I don’t know yet what CASH will put forward as a solution to the healthcare problem, but from the acronym and from its wealthy backers, I can guess. In the meantime, the Conference Board is soliciting job applicants for the new think tank. New CASH economists will apparently be doing quantitative analysis of healthcare sustainability. Hmm. Sounds like the Fraser Institute. Maybe that Institute’s credibility is finally so tainted that the masters of Canada are going to try and trick us with a new brand name.