SARS and gutting of public health care

Catholic New Times, June 1, 2003

The optics said it all. In this case it was a dedicated public health official, under pressure but calm and collected, who rallied other public servants and communicated directly and honestly with the public.

SARS was a word we had never heard before, a new disease with the potential to become a pandemic, shattering lives and spreading panic among the population. Up stepped Dr Sheela Basrur, Toronto's Chief Medical Officer of Health. Then, up stepped nurses, downsized, dispirited and denigrated by ex-premier Mike Harris, who had once called them as obsolete as hula hoops. Mr. Harris of course was nowhere to be seen, having graduated to lucrative board memberships and the right wing Fraser Institute, where his values are roundly hailed. His successor, Premier Ernie Eves, was on a golf course in Arizona, the keeper of the neo-conservative flame in Ontario, a member of a government which has wreaked havoc in one of the most impressive public institutions in North America, the health care system. One thinks of the tainted water debacle of Walkerton, Ont., three years ago, where consumers, formerly called citizens, with "more money in their pocket", finally "rid of unnecessary red tape" in government regulations, could not safely drink water from public sources. Their government had failed to protect them. When asked to assume the primary duty of the state to ensure the well being of its citizens, officials had pointed elsewhere. "We're not the government, we're the ones who have replaced government."

Such is the twisted and stunning logic which has passed for wisdom during the past 23 years of reactionary right-wing administrations in western countries. Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher are generally regarded as the spear carriers for this lengthy ideological assault on "big government". Privatization and deregulation have been the way to go, literally--the public interest be damned. Anything that has seemed to suggest altruism and any higher calling has been denigrated. The proud public sector, once led by idealists able to see beyond the bottom line to something called the common good, was now sneered at and referred to as "the bureaucracy". Think tanks, paid for by the corporate sponsors, cranked out op-ed pieces to shape public opinion and had no trouble placing them in corporate-owned newspapers. The message has been simple: Public--bad, private--good. But slowly and inevitably the wheels have started coming off. In the U.S., the freshly deregulated financial sector imploded in the Savings and Loans scandal under Bush I. A trillion dollar boondoggle resulted in the worst financial scandal ever in U.S. history, that is, until the Enron and World Com meltdowns, presided over by Bush II.

Canadians, used to a kind of extraordinary society created by social gospellers and red Tories, accustomed to hard-fought social benefits which helped guarantee people's dignity, began to realize just what they were losing. They began to connect the dots. The tax-cut mania of right wing governments was now seen as an assault on public health, public education and the environment.

Public interest was being replaced by private greed. The consumer society had replaced the caring society. Sadly, many of the children of post- WW II Catholics, increasingly raised and evangelized by the individualist values of the television age, began to vote for right wing parties which gave them more money for swimming pools but less for public libraries.

Then Walkerton happened. And now SARS. Ontarians watched in astonishment recently as the Minister of Health, "Two-Tier" Tony Clement, stated that he had not realized so many nurses were casualized, running from hospital to hospital. The Harris government he served had hollowed out the nursing profession, and then scrambled to hire nurses back. The result--a catastrophic nursing shortage. As SARS advanced and nurses became ill and were quarantined, the system became almost paralyzed. Surgeries were cancelled, resulting in premature deaths. Suddenly public health was back on people's radar. The privatizing provincial government seemingly had learned little from Walkerton. "SARS was an accident waiting to happen because of the priorities of the government. The cost-cutting measures created conditions apt for SARS to take hold," said Dr. William Bowie, the infectious disease specialist who came from B.C. to Toronto to help stem the SARS tide.

As the old Pete Seeger song said, "when will we ever learn?"