September 21, 2004

People Will Only Wait Longer, Mr. McGuinty
By Norm Sterling, MPP, Lanark-Carleton

One of Dalton McGuinty’s key promises was to reduce waiting times for medical treatments across Ontario. On his present course, the Premier will only accomplish this by fudging the numbers.

The Premier and his Health Minister have been promoting the idea of shifting health care services into the community. Unfortunately, in many cases these community services aren’t in place. Nevertheless, they are recklessly using this mantra as cover while they starve our hospitals of needed funding.

Easing demand on hospitals by increasing services in the community is a concept supported and implemented in many areas by previous governments. If there’s one thing we’ve learned from these earlier efforts, it’s that you must have the community services in place before you start cutting back funding to existing care providers. Mr. McGuinty is ignoring this lesson and the result will be longer waiting times.

The McGuinty government has effectively declared war on our hospitals. The casualty list is especially long in Eastern Ontario, where the government seems to have taken special care to short-change facilities in Ottawa and up the Valley.

Notwithstanding all the talk about reducing waiting times at the recent First Minister’s Conference on health care, Mr. McGuinty has provided a 4.3 percent increase in hospital funding this year. This represents half of what the hospitals need to maintain current service levels.

As a result, the province’s hospitals face a collective $600 million deficit this year. They must submit balanced budget plans to the Ministry of Health by the end of September. In order to do this, services will be cut and wait times will increase.

Eastern Ontario hospitals are in an especially dire situation.

Queensway-Carleton Hospital received an increase in funding of just 0.6 percent this year. Ottawa Hospital got a 1.8 percent increase. These minor increases are nowhere near what is needed to cover rising costs.

As one local hospital administrator recently pointed out in the pages of the Citizen, a provincially negotiated seven-percent pay increase this year with OPSEU is a sign of things to come. The union, whose members include physiotherapists, social workers and lab technicians, account for about 20 percent of the hospitals’ workforce. CUPE and the nurses union are currently in negotiations.

And this funding shortfall isn’t confined to city hospitals.
The hospitals in Perth and Smiths Falls received a 1.4 percent increase. Hospital officials there contrast this $365,000 increase with the 7.2 percent increase in wages they face this year.

In Carleton Place, the hospital saw a 2.8 percent hike ($178,000) but is faced with an estimated five percent hike in wages.

The only hospital in our part of the province that seems to have secured adequate funding from the government is Montfort, which is getting an increase of nearly 15 percent over last year.

Faced with this year’s token funding increase and rising labour costs, there is no way our hospitals will be able to shorten waiting times. On the contrary, they are bound to only get longer.

There are many steps we can take to relieve existing pressures on the province’s hospitals. One shining example here in our community is a proposal for a Community Health Centre in Kanata, developed by the Western Ottawa Community Resource Centre. This innovative idea would increase access to front-line care in Kanata, West Carleton and Goulbourn, easing pressure on nearby hospitals.

Unfortunately, the province has unilaterally implemented a senseless strategy to starve hospitals of needed funds before it has established sufficient supports in the community, like the one proposed for Western Ottawa. Instead this local project, and presumably many others like it, continues to gather dust on Health Minister George Smitherman’s desk.

As it stands now, the government’s funding decisions seem rooted more in a desire to cut costs on the back of our hospitals. Unless Mr. McGuinty and his Health Minister change course now, wait times will only grow . . . no matter how much money they receive from the federal government.

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Norm Sterling, MPP
(613) 253-1171
(416) 314-7900