The Myth of Universal Health Care

Two physicians on what it would take for Canada’s health care system to deliver on its promises

- NADINE CARON AND DANIELLE MARTIN

ERYN DIXON had enough to manage as it was. At the age of forty-five, with profound disabilities related to multiple sclerosis, Dixon was living in Almonte Country Haven, a long-term care facility on a grassy hill in eastern Ontario. Then, in March, she contracted coviD-19. As she lay unconscious and unresponsive, struggling on oxygen, her father, Rick, was told to say his final goodbyes. Against the odds, Dixon pulled through, but more than a third of her facility’s residents weren’t so lucky.

Hers is just one of so many stories that we have been reading and watching and hearing for months — a catalog of media reports every day, documenting coviD-19’s progression through our communities and the various ways it takes its toll.

On May 4, Karam Singh Punian, age fifty-nine, did die of coviD-19. He was one of an estimated twenty Toronto airport taxi drivers who contracted the virus that month alone. Most of the 1,500 people who make their living driving passengers to and from Toronto Pearson International Airport are self-employed men who are newcomers to Canada. They work long hours in sedentary jobs and eat on the go, without access to health benefits or paid sick days.

In early August, Patrice Bernadel, a much-loved Montreal pastry chef, suffered from coviD-19 in a different way. Like so many people in the restaurant industry, Bernadel had seen his business devastated by the pandemic. And, like so many self-employed Canadians, he had no guaranteed access to mental health services outside his doctor’s office or the emergency department.