'Health care is a disaster. Anything to the contrary is inaccurate ... We are in trouble. This IS collapse.' — Saskatchewan Union of Nurses.
One should take most everything politicians say with a grain of salt, and that should surely apply to NDP Leader Carla Beck’s repeated suggestions that an aging Saskatchewan Party is losing focus.
After all, not much is said in politics without an agenda.
So it was something less than startling to hear the Opposition leader in Tuesday’s question period hammering away about how a “tired and out-of-touch Sask. Party government is failing to deliver on health care” and not listening to local health-care providers or other voices in communities.
As political rhetoric goes, it may not even have been all that effective … or at least not as effective as Premier Scott Moe’s response: “We don’t go out just visiting rural communities. We actually live in those communities right across the province,” Moe said.
The premier’s response especially resonated in the week when the Saskatchewan Association of Rural Municipalities (SARM) is holding its annual convention that’s not only a schmoozefest for Saskatchewan Party MLAs and cabinet ministers, but also an excellent forum to drop off a bit of good pre-budget news like the whopping 13 per cent increase in the municipal revenue sharing pool to a record $297 million in 2023-24.
The government also announced at SARM on Wednesday improvements to the Rural Physician Incentive Program (RPIP) that will offer doctors as much as $200,000 over five years — a four-fold increase — to attract more family physicians to rural and northern communities.
Yet there is something that resonates in Beck’s post-question period scrum on Tuesday, in which she talked about this government’s misplaced priorities at a time when the people she’s been talking to are worried about not keeping up with inflation, keeping their good-paying jobs and having adequate health care when they most need it.
We have a piece of legislation that thumps its chest about Saskatchewan autonomy, yet the federal government has found no cause to say anything about it. Isn’t that rather telling?
The series of tweets noted a week ago that the Regina General Hospital emergency room had 100 waiting for care and another 50 admitted and waiting for beds.
So bad was the situation that RUH went on “bypass,” meaning it was only accepting traumas, strokes, paediatrics, labour delivery and heart attacks and everything else was diverted to the Pasqua Hospital.
“We are in trouble,” SUN tweeted. “This IS collapse.”
Now, one might think the urgency in this language would have got the government’s undivided attention. The response from Health Minister Paul Merriman certainly didn’t suggest so.
“There’s always ebbs and flows in our health-care system,” Merriman said the next day in Wednesday’s question period.
Ebbs and flows?
In a later scrum on Wednesday, Merriman denied he was downplaying the ER situation this week and added: “I think I am accepting it for what it is.”
What it mostly seems to suggest is a massive disconnection between the urgency that SUN — now demanding a special task force to fix the issue — says the situation merits and Merriman’s response.
But it is also getting tougher to completely ignore Beck’s take: The Sask. Party government may be losing sight of what most matters to people.
Mandryk is the political columnist for the Regina Leader-Post and the Saskatoon StarPhoenix.
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