Ontario Liberals stalked by the ghost of Kathleen Wynne

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Wednesday, in Toronto, Ontario Liberal Leader Bonnie Crombie held yet another announcement about the importance of choosing her party to end hallway health care in the province. Once again, no full platform or detailed plan with costs was provided. Crombie spoke minimally, relying on attacks on Doug Ford and what she called a “tour” of personal anecdotes. Unfortunately for Crombie, the smooth functioning of this play on emotions relied on pesky reporters not asking any questions about her party’s not-so-wonderful health care record and comments Crombie made about her party’s former leader’s plan being “too costly.”

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This announcement was different than Crombie’s last. Her campaign has shifted from using statistics about waiting lists to mining personal stories, laden with pathos, from individuals and an emergency room doctor.

Dr. Raghu Venugopal passionately took the stage before Crombie spoke. He shared personal anecdotes from Ontario ER doctors’ patients, noting that things have deteriorated since 2018. He described the situation as degrading from “hallway health care” to “standing at the station health care” to “chair health care.”

Venugopal told the crowd about a mother actively having a miscarriage, an elderly patient with a painful bowel obstruction, a patient with a new brain cancer who couldn’t walk without assistance, and many, many others, all treated in an ER chair due to overcrowded emergency rooms. One of his own patients waited in an emergency room for 40 hours.

No one would argue that overcrowding in Ontario emergency rooms isn’t an issue. The real questions are, how did we really get here, and who has the best plan to fix it?

Unfortunately, these stories, even though provided by an ER doctor, do not give us any sense of what is fuelling the crisis. They only show us its effects. Are these issues mainly rural or urban? How do the retirements of doctors and nurses play a part? How about an aging population? How does a lack of beds and specialized equipment play a role? Are hospitals shouldering a mental health crisis that should be handled by institutions instead? Is this overcrowding partially fuelled by an increase in immigration? If so, we should probably also try to stem that input.

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A health-care crisis needs to be examined comprehensively and with precision. While Crombie hasn’t yet shown us the in-depth analysis that took place before she came up with her plan solutions to get everyone a family doctor in four years, we do know that she thinks fax machines are an important part of this crisis.

Things got a little tense when a reporter from The Trillium — a news outlet that focusing on covering Queen’s Park — suggested that the Ontario Liberals, in power until 2018, may have been part of the problem.

The reporter told Crombie that she recalled, “four years when a previous Liberal government froze hospital spending,” and asked, “Was that a mistake?”

Crombie first responded by defending former premier Kathleen Wynne’s Liberal government, saying that, as far as she recalled, “Twenty-three hospitals were built in that time.” She then quickly pivoted to claiming that she’s a “different kind of leader,” anyway.

The reporter followed up, asking Crombie about a comment Crombie made about Wynne’s government having spent too much on health care. “Do you regret those comments now?,” the reporter asked.

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Crombie claimed these comments were “taken out of context.” But were they?

When running for the Liberal leadership back in May 2023, Crombie did, in fact, tell TVO of Wynne’s spending choices, “I think some of the decisions were too costly for Ontarians… the health care, the child care, the dental benefits.”

It seems like Crombie thought the previous Liberal government spent too much on health care. Has that suddenly changed?

The Ontario NDP goes as far as to blame the Liberals for inventing hallway health care. According to the NDP, by the end of their term, Wynne’s Liberals left 1.8 million Ontarians without a family doctor. They cut $27 million from Hamilton Health Sciences when they were operating at 110 per cent capacity. They also cut 5,500 nurses over the period of 2013-2016.

During her news conference, Crombie also launched into a tirade against Doug Ford’s “fantasy tunnel,” “Ontario Place,” and his “sending out cheques” before finally getting to her big announcement about what her party would do differently. But nothing new was announced Wednesday. Again, she mentioned investing in family doctors, nurses and hospitals. Neither details of how this would be accomplished nor costs were given.

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Crombie’s campaign team recently made the mistake of affixing an incorrect statistic to the side of one of their massive red campaign buses. The sign read, “11,000 people died waiting for surgery last year. This is Doug Ford’s Ontario.” In fact, the number of patients who died while waiting for surgery is much less, between 1,600 and 1,900. However, the quote also makes it sound like patients died from the surgeries they were waiting for, when in actuality, they could have been waiting for non life-threatening surgery or scans and could have been hit by a car. Can Ontarians trust a political party that doesn’t even understand the figures before drafting a plan?

The most glaring question the Ontario Liberals have yet to answer is how their party is better suited to solving the health-care crisis than Doug Ford’s Conservatives, who recently appointed Dr. Jane Philpott as the chair of the Ontario PC’s new primary health-care team. Philpott is a former federal Liberal health minister. She’s made a slightly more conservative promise, to connect everyone in Ontario to a family doctor within five instead of Crombie’s promised four years. Philpott is likely more adept at interpreting waiting list and other statistics to accurately diagnose the problems Ontarians face. Crombie, on the other hand, hasn’t come to terms with the fact that her party may have been part of the problem.

National Post

tnewman@postmedia.com

X: @TLNewmanMTL

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