Only Nixon Can Go to China: Three Cheers for Jack Layton!

This is a bizarre country sometimes. Just a couple of days ago, Steven Harper made it clear that he would not support two-tear healthcare, which is normally interpreted in Cannuckistan as meaning that one does not support private care delivery –even though lots of it exist, and the very Prime Minister of the country hypocritically receives care at a private facility in Montreal.

Then, today, out of the clear blue sky comes Jack Layton –for whom private health delivery may as well have been created by the devil, even though he goes to dentists, eye doctors, and has always supported (private) abortion clinics–and gives us this:

Campaigning in Vancouver’s Chinatown Sunday, NDP Leader Jack Layton said private clinics are a “fundamental aspectâ€? of the health-care system founded by former Saskatchewan premier Tommy Douglas and not much can be done about them.

I first saw the reference at MK Braaten, who himself was wondering if he had misread. Is it some kind of a joke, a misprint, perhaps? but then I found the reference in the Glob.

Just a couple of days ago, when asked to reply to a comment made by Harper, Layton said that he and Olivia (his wife) would rather suffer pain than to access private care. But Layton is not recanting and I don’t think that the move can properly be called a flip-flop. It may be more sophisticated than that. In keeping with the private-is-devil’s-spawn view, Layton is saying that he would like public money to go to public facilities, not to private ones. That appears to be a source of confusion to the reporters at the Glob. Please note the tentative nature of the report’s title: “Layton seems to support private clinics.” And at the very end, the writer remains dumbfounded. Layton’s words are a surprise, but not incomprehensible:

“Our focus is to keep public health-care dollars going to public and non-profit facilities,â€? Mr. Layton told confused reporters. “What happens with people in the privacy of their own relationship financially, that’s up to them.â€?

Layton is probably giving the green light to the creation –and in some cases proliferation– of private delivery clinics and hospitals as long as they are not funded by public dollars. The still baffled reporters pushed, trying to understand the tectonic shift:

When pressed on the issue, he said private clinics have been around from the beginning.

“There is nothing new about that,� he said. “Our focus is on what happens to the public tax dollars that we all contribute to help take care of Canadians.

“We want them going to non-profit and public facilities and services.�

To the thick-skulled Liberal reporters who have not quite been able to make the subtle distinction between privatising services and the privatisation of the entire system:

The position seems to contradict what the party has been saying all week about stopping the privatization of health care.

[...]

But he ended up leaving reporters following his campaign stumped about his position.

Stumped, indeed! But that’s not Layton’s fault if reporters tend to be so blind. While there is a change in Layton’s position, the change is not entirely inconsistent with what he was saying the day before. It’s not a contradiction. He’d rather be in pain than to go to private care, but he is opening a space for others to make the choice, if they want to. Under the current climate, that’s bloody heroic. Layton’s position is an acknowledgement of the reality that exists in Canada at present. It leaves his counterparts in the other parties as ideologues, especially the Liberals (See Dosanjh’s position here). I’d prefer a politician who acknowledges the real, however begrudgingly, than one who ignores reality for the sake of an idea.

Unless Jack takes back his words of today claiming that it was the Hot & Sour soup talking, his new position in this election campaign may prove to be the political equivalent to the Chaouilli case in the judicial arena. In one single remark, Jack Layton jumped over to the right of Paul Martin, Stephen Harper and Gilles Duceppe, opening serious space into which to debate what stale ideologues like Roy Romanow have for years refused to address. Jack is going to shake things up in this campaign and the worst positioned to deal with the fall out of this are the Liberals. Paul martin has cried to the four winds that he will defend healthcare tooth and nail.

What exactly did Jack have to eat before he spoke? Someone please ask Jack what magic potion he took in Chinatown in Vancouver. It should be prescribed to all the other party leaders.

Crossposted from Civitatensis.ca