[notevenremotely]

Half of those issues are provincial.

Canadian politics is the Spiderman meme with local, provincial and federal governments all pointing their fingers at each other.

If healthcare in your province sucks blame your Premier.

[joshlemer]

It's more complicated than that. Technically healthcare is a provincial responsibility in the constitution but the feds bought their way into healthcare and regulate it through the Canada Health Act. The Feds cannot legally compel provinces to comply with the CHA but if they don't comply with it, they won't receive the federal health transfers which would essentially bankrupt the province. The province would still be getting taxed at the high federal rates, but without getting it back, to the tune of ~12% of total Provincial revenues.

Coming at it from a separate angle, it would be quite a coincidence if it just so happened that every single province in the country, over decades, has had their healthcare systems failing in basically the same way with the same problems for end users, despite having totally different geographies, economies, even languages, run by all kinds of different provincial parties across the extremes of the political spectrum. The parsimonious explanation is that there's a systematic issue in Canadian Healthcare as it's defined or operates across the country.

[danbolt]

> The parsimonious explanation is that there's a systematic issue in Canadian Healthcare as it's defined or operates across the country.

There is! It’s because healthcare is expensive and 20th century social democracy is out of fashion. Your premier can increase expenditures by improving healthcare infrastructure, or simply kick the can down the road for the next government to deal with. Many voters don’t like taxes or debt, so the latter is an easier sell.

Occasionally, the premier can roll a 20 on persuasion and suggest that it’s the Prime Minister’s problem too.

Now, the Prime Minister could look to changing the CHA and increasing services/taxes, but it’s probably too much of a can of worms to attempt to fix in our current political climate.

[notevenremotely]

"Coming at it from a separate angle, it would be quite a coincidence if it just so happened that every single province in the country, over decades, has had their healthcare systems failing in basically the same way with the same problems for end users"

It isn't though. These problems that are now being hard-felt in Toronto and Vancouver have plagued the Atlantic provinces for decades.