'Where'd the love go?': Premiers claim Ottawa is turning its back on a health system in crisis

It's hardly the first relationship to struggle under the pandemic's health and financial pressures, but Canada's dysfunction-prone federation appeared to be in need of a skilled mediator or two this week.

Like aggrieved partners now speaking only through lawyers, premiers gathered in Victoria, B.C. on July 11-12 to reprise their call for an urgent First Ministers meeting to negotiate an increase to the Canada Health Transfer (CHT). As premiers made their pitch to assembled journalists, senior federal ministers popped up in the media to blow off their demands.

"Where'd the love go?" soon-to-retire B.C. Premier John Horgan said in his final press conference as chair of the Council of the Federation. "Everything was so fine. And then it wasn't."

To reporters who covered the several dozen first ministers' meetings held during the COVID scramble, it seems a bit revisionist to say the relationship was "fine" during the pandemic.

Sure, the first ministers talked a lot (virtually). But it took a lot of talking to hold together all that was coming apart in that emergency, and to pursue border restrictions and vaccination policies.

Patience is frayed now because Prime Minister Justin Trudeau hasn't been meeting with the premiers in person. One-time funding for specific things like surgical backlogs was announced by Health Minister Jean-Yves Duclos in March but Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland's spring budget offered nothing longer-term.

"Ghosted," is how Horgan described — "with sadness, not anger" — what he sees as a lack of federal engagement.

Horgan said federal Intergovernmental Affairs Minister Dominic LeBlanc only got around to calling him to check in prior to the meeting last Sunday morning, as premiers were already winging their way to Victoria.

"Is there anything else on his docket beyond the 13 of us?" the premier said. "I wouldn't think so, but here we are."

The day after the premiers went home, Freeland's office issued a press release confirming she'd just transferred the $2 billion top-up to the CHT Duclos promised. It gave reporters a chart describing how transfers break down by jurisdiction. And then Freeland left for the G20 finance ministers meeting in Bali, Indonesia.

Practitioners and patients agree — the health care system is breaking down. But the governments responsible appear to be in a stalemate, counting on each other's inaction to distract from their own ineffectiveness.

The shots fired this week were aimed at two things: math and accountability measures.

LeBlanc called the premiers' figures on the federal contribution to health care "fake."

The premiers are still using the same favourable-to-them calculation they've put out for months to make the case that Ottawa is no longer paying its share.