Malign neglect.

According to a Nov. 2, 2022, Vancouver Sun article titled "B.C. will spend $8,800 per person on health care in 2022": "Nationally, total health care spending is expected to reach $331 billion in 2022, representing 12.2 per cent of GDP following a high of nearly 14 per cent of GDP in 2020."

So per capita healthcare spending in BC in 2022 was expected to reach $8,800, and 12.2% of GDP was expected to be spent nationally on healthcare. Let us normalize these numbers.

In 2022, the population of BC was about about 5.32 million people. BC's GDP the same year was $299.25 billion. Total healthcare spending in BC in 2022, then, was expected to be: 5.32 million people x $8,800 per person, or $46.82 billion. Divide $46.82 billion by $299.25 billion, BC's GDP in 2022, and we arrive at 15.6% of GDP expected to be spent on healthcare in 2022 in BC.

There is a problem with these numbers.

According to the BC Ministry of Finance publication 2023 British Columbia Financial and Economic Review 83rd Edition (September 2023), the actual percentage of BC's GDP spent on healthcare and social assistance in 2022 was 7.5% (page 15). This translates to $20.4 billion, which is less than half the sum the Vancouver Sun reported that CIHI expected.

In 2022, according to the same BC Ministry of Finance publication quoted above, the RERL (Real Estate Rental and Leasing) sector's share of BC's GDP was 17.7% (page 15).

British Columbians are spending more on rent, then, than we are on healthcare. Meanwhile, "Economics 101: Supply and Demand" is rubbed in our faces to justify price-gouging in the real estate sector. Bear in mind that rents in Victoria increased 27% from July, 2020 to July, 2021 after increasing 15% from July, 2019 to July, 2020, a compound rate of growth over that 2-year period of 46%.

Tommy Douglas and Lester B. Pearson served the Canadian public when memories of the shared sacrifices of WWII were still fresh in people's minds and government was understood as a vehicle to improve people's lives: everybody works, we pool a good bit of our earnings in the public kitty, and we all enjoy the benefit of public services that are far too expensive for any of us to afford individually.

But since the late 1970s, especially after Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher assumed power in 1979-1980, all this changed. Taxes on corporations and marginal tax rates for extremely wealthy people were slashed. As were regulations that hitherto had constrained profiteering, and federal dollars for provincial and territorial healthcare spending were replaced with accounting gimmicks. Public financing for purpose-built affordable workforce rental housing ground almost to a halt by 1993.

This chart, from a Feb.23, 2017, Institute for Research on Public Policy (IRPP) paper by David A. Green, W. Craig Riddell and France St-Hilaire, "Income Inequality in Canada: Driving Forces, Outcomes and Policy", illustrates how much money wound up in how few hands.

Excerpt:

Although the surge in earnings of the top 1 percent appears to have been much larger in the United States than in Canada, this might be due in part to differences in how income is reported for tax purposes in the two countries. Once these differences are taken into account, however, the rise in the income share of the top 1 percent in Canada is much greater than that shown in figure 3, and closer to the increase in the United States (Wolfson, Veall and Brooks, forthcoming).

The steep rise in earnings of Canadians at the very top of the income distribution has far outpaced that of other income earners over the past three decades.

You do not have to be a genius to plan in 1980 for the human and capital resources that will be necessary in 2000 or 2023 to provide a family doctor for every Canadian and sufficient hospital and ER staff to serve the needs of the Canadian public.

But you do have to be a money-obsessed lunatic to sacrifice the health and financial security of an entire nation of 40 million people for a few more zeroes on an account balance no human being could spend in a thousand years.

The problem with the Canadian economy is psychological and cultural: Me! Me! Me!

Organize an economy on that basis, and it is guaranteed to fail.