Premiers to meet with Trudeau over health-care money

Premiers from across the country are expected to meet Tuesday afternoon with Prime Minister Justin Trudeau to push for more money to deal with widespread health-care woes.

Ahead of the meeting, Trudeau said that while Canadians are proud of the public health-care system, it needs work. He said the federal government will provide more funding, listing things like family doctors, shorter wait lists, and mental health care as areas that could be addressed.

At a Council of the Federation meeting in early December, the premiers all signed a letter demanding a meeting with the prime minister. Just about two weeks ago, Trudeau announced that meeting would happen.

Before leaving for the meeting, Moe said he expects any new money would be split between an increase to health-care transfers and other money put into targeted envelopes.

“In order to address the challenges that are similar but often different as well across the nation, we are going to need some flexibility across Canada in how we’re going to invest those dollars,” Moe said Sunday. “More in the Canada Health Transfer is, I think, ideal from the premiers’ perspective.”

Moe has said many times before that he believes the federal government needs to return to paying for 35 per cent of province’s health-care expenses, which would represent an increase of billions of dollars at this point.

“I think the expectations the public can have is that the investments being made today in province after province be sustainable well into the future to ensure that we’re not going to take a step back,” Moe said.

Moe said he’d been looking to use more federal money to make headway on Saskatchewan’s surgical wait times initiative.

Less ‘American-style’ health care

Before Tuesday’s meeting began, Saskatchewan NDP leader Carla Beck sent out a statement on what she’d like to see, saying that any proposal from the federal government would need to respect provincial control over health care and be flexible so it could meet Saskatchewan’s needs.

“After over a decade of Sask. Party damage to our health system, we need to ensure new funding needs will be directed to the front lines in consultation with the experts and won’t be used to expand American-style for-profit health care which has doubled wait times for MRIs and has added more than 7,000 people to the surgery wait list,” Beck wrote in the statement.

— With files from The Canadian Press