When It Comes to Healthcare, Doug Ford Thinks You're Stupid

Vote for someone else. Your life might depend on it.

Patient requests an x-ray and a six pack of Coors Light. Photo by National Cancer Institute on Unsplash

Reading the news yesterday, I came as close as I ever have to a literal spit-take. Ontario premier Doug Ford tends to, let’s say, riff. In those moments, he shows his true self: ignorant, small-minded, and hopeless, but ignorant above all. Speaking on about the province’s healthcare crisis, for which he’s as responsible as anybody, Ford complained that record-setting emergency room wait times were caused by patients putting themselves through the torture of waiting for hours because of “a little scrape on the knee or whatever.”

At the campaign stop where Ford went off on wait times, the premier cited a conversation he’d had with a doctor who said half of those in the emergency room shouldn’t be there, but, rather, “should be at a clinic down the street.”

Writing on Twitter, CBC journalist Mike Crawley noted that in his years of covering healthcare in Ontario, “no one working in the system has ever told me that people coming to ERs with minor ailments is actually a root cause of the problem.” Crawley’s work has documented the structural problems plaguing Ontario’s healthcare system, problems that the Ford government hasn’t successfully tackled.

Those challenges include decades of under-investment in healthcare, not just by the Tories but the Liberals, too. The long-term failure to invest in the healthcare system as a whole — family doctors and clinics, long-term care, doctors and nurses, and so forth — shows itself in backlogged ERs, at least the ones that aren’t closed due to provincial mismanagement of the policy file. Moreover, to the extent anyone is visiting an ER for a sore throat (which can, in fact, be a pressing concern) or a scraped knee, they are likely there because they don’t have a family doctor or can’t find a clinic to visit.

Data from the Canadian Institute for Health Information found that 1-in-7 ER visits in Canada last year were for issues that could have been treated in primary care — but that, of course, assumes one has access to a primary care physician. In Ontario? Good luck.

The pandemic certainly didn’t help, either.

The structural problems within Ontario’s healthcare system have been discussed for years. They’ve been laid out time and time again, easily accessible for anybody who wishes to give them a quick online search. You can read accounts from journalists, medical professionals, and civil society researchers who’ll tell you time and time again that ER backlogs have little to nothing inherent to do with people in waiting rooms with scraped knees and sore throats, as Ford claims. The problem is Ford acts as if expert data at scale doesn’t exist and instead relies on the last conversation he had with someone whose narrative fits his own.

If you’re selfish or lazy, it’s tempting to believe that ERs are clogged up because patients are selfish or lazy. If that were true, Ford could simply blame the moral failings of Ontarians rather than the incompetence and malignancies of his own government and its failed policies. After seven years in power, the province’s healthcare crisis is worse than when Ford took office. Even controlling for the pandemic and the unexpected chaos and damage it did to the system (threats for which we were not prepared), Ford and the Tories have botched the healthcare file big time — and related files.

Ford’s nonsense about ER visits came just before his party released its platform, which includes a promise to remove the minimum price on alcohol sold by the province’s liquor stores. This would be the latest move in his party’s program to dismantle alcohol controls, which started with buck-a-beer. Anyone with the least bit of common sense knows what cheaper alcohol entails, which is a rise in negative health outcomes including illness, hospitalizations, and visits to the ER.

The Ford government is letting our healthcare system crumble while simultaneously making booze cheaper and more readily available, which will increase demand for healthcare and contribute to backlogs, not to mention those illnesses and deaths. If you want to drink, then drink. I don’t think we should ban alcohol. But you’d think a competent provincial government would think twice about turbo-charging problematic drinking and the negative health outcomes it produces while the healthcare system was collapsing.

What else can Ford be thinking, then, other than voters are stupid and prone to let him get away with anything he damn well pleases? It takes a tremendous amount of audacity for a premier to stand up as millions of Ontarians struggle to navigate a failing healthcare system and spout off about an issue that is quite literally a matter of life or death, passing it off as someone else’s fault — namely, yours.

Come to think of it, there must be more to it. It’s not just that Ford thinks you’re stupid. He must also think you’re complacent. Because what are you going to do in the face of his government’s deadly failures? Vote for someone else? Well, that’s precisely what you should do. Because your life might depend on it.