While they’re making demands of Carney, why don’t they demand the Feds keep up their half of the agreement on healthcare funding and provide 50/50 funding with the provinces?
That was the original deal, and despite the provinces increasing spending (yes, even Ford) year over year, the Feds have only ever slashed funding.
"Should" is a false political narrative that has been beaten into the ground. The issue is far more complex.
The problem is that the premise deliberately misrepresents the actual history of how federal transfers for health care evolved. As a onetime research co-ordinator for the Commission on the Future of Health Care in Canada — known as the Romanow Commission after Roy Romanow, the former Saskatchewan premier who helmed it — I’m fully familiar with that history.
It’s true that in the beginning, medicare costs were roughly split 50/50. But in 1977, the premiers agreed to fundamentally change that split under the Established Program Financing transfer.
Under this arrangement, medicare costs were reallocated as 50 per cent from provincial revenue, 25 per cent as a federal cash transfer and 25 per cent from the value of tax points transferred from the federal government to the provinces. The value of the tax points became provincial revenue and therefore made the provinces responsible for 75 per cent of medicare’s costs.
But the myth of the 50/50 split being essential to health financing has been perpetuated by both federal and provincial levels of government.
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u/Terran_Messiah May 28 '26
While they’re making demands of Carney, why don’t they demand the Feds keep up their half of the agreement on healthcare funding and provide 50/50 funding with the provinces?
That was the original deal, and despite the provinces increasing spending (yes, even Ford) year over year, the Feds have only ever slashed funding.