Our campaigner Nik Barry-Shaw was recently interviewed on the community radio program Free City Radio about the Council of Canadians’ campaign for universal, single-payer pharmacare.
Below is an abridged transcript of that conversation. You can listen to the full interview here.
Stefan Christoff, Free City Radio: The Council of Canadians has been campaigning at a grassroots level on a variety of issues for decades, from anti-neoliberal free trade agreements to environmental and social justice issues. In recent years the Council has been campaigning on a very important issue: a national pharmacare plan. I think that this campaign was a very important example of tangible community organizing that was putting forward demands that would really lead to the betterment of thousands and thousands of lives [and] I thought it would be interesting to hear about the more grassroots side of this policy change.
Nik Barry-Shaw: For the last two years or so, we’ve been campaigning pretty intensively around a national public drug plan that would cover all Canadians and ensure that prescription drugs became part of our public health care system. And just to say a word about the Council of Canadians: we’re a membership-based, grassroots organization. We’ve been around since 1985 and our remit has been to fight against corporate capture at the federal level and at all levels of society. And part of that has been fighting back against efforts to privatize health care and fighting back against corporate-led free trade agreements. I see the pharmacare campaign as meeting those two areas.
In terms of corporate capture, in Canada we have some of the highest drug prices in the world, second highest after the US, where they’re completely out of control, but much higher than in countries in Europe, in the UK, in Australia, New Zealand. All these countries have way lower drug costs, and the reason is because they have public drug plans that are able to negotiate lower prices with the big multinationals.
From the outset, when public health care was introduced in Canada, first in Saskatchewan and then federally in the 1960s, there was always the intention to include prescription drugs in the coverage that people would have access to. So not just hospitals, not just doctor visits, but also medicines that people need. And it didn’t happen for a number of historic reasons that we’ll get into here, but it’s something that has come up more and more over the last decade. And I think that has to do with the fact that the prices for drugs have just been rising really, really quickly. Faster than inflation, faster than other health care costs, faster than in other countries. And it’s putting a squeeze on people that has become hard to ignore.
When people fall sick and get prescribed medications, whether it’s insulin or oncology drugs, if they don’t have a good job with a good benefits plan, if they don’t happen to qualify for one of the provincial programs, they often have to pay a tremendous amount out of pocket to get access to those medications. And so it’s a real incoherence in the public health care system where we’ll pay for you to go see the doctor, we’ll pay for that doctor to write you a prescription, and then once you step out the doors of the doctor’s office, you’re on your own.
And the result of that is many people, even though they know what they need to do to get healthy, are not able to afford their medication and end up back in the hospital. This is the piece of unfinished business in the public health care system that we’re fighting to change.
Christoff: There’s been a community-based organizing process that led towards this happening. And right now we hear the Prime Minister talking about pharmacare, and that kind of invisiblizes the grassroots push that is required for this change to happen.
Barry-Shaw: Pharmacare kind of got back on the agenda politically with the deal between the Liberals and the NDP back in March 2022. One of the key elements of that deal was passing legislation around pharmacare. But for us at the Council of Canadians, we recognized that if we didn’t push, if we didn’t organize, it would be very likely that this would just become another kind of empty promise that had been made.
And so we felt, especially coming out of the pandemic, that it was important to get back to doing local community organizing, to highlighting the voices of people who are at the receiving end of this patchwork system.
One of the things we did was organize 18 pharmacare town halls across the country, with Avi Lewis speaking at many of them. And those events went really well, and they were an opportunity to highlight the human side of this. And I think that was a really key part of mobilizing support for the program. When the legislation was finally being drafted, in the second half of 2023, we organized phone zaps where we would get people to call their MPs, to call the health minister, to call the various other decision makers, and really press them to pass a program that would include everyone, that would be universal and single-payer.
We knew that the pharmaceutical companies and the insurance companies were lobbying hard against this, these aspects of the plan, and so we made about 5,000 phone calls over the course of a couple of months in the lead-up to the bill being unveiled. And we heard back from politicians afterwards, when we were involved in those negotiations, that this was really an important factor in getting the bill into the shape that it is, which is, as we wanted, a kind of public, single-payer, universal plan. And so now we’re at the stage where the bill is about to be adopted and it’s going to start rolling out across the country. And we’re very excited to see that happen, and to see people finally be able to access medications using their health cards rather than their credit cards.
Christoff: I think it might be interesting for people to hear, as somebody who has a structural, intersectional critique, why you felt campaigning for a very specific policy shift was important, given the state of injustice in the world and the feeling many people have that the system is “broken.”
Barry-Shaw: I think Tommy Douglas deserves a lot of credit for Medicare. But it’s important not to forget the labour unions, the farmers’ cooperatives, the health care workers’ groups that were instrumental to pushing that forward.
One of the things we did at the outset was analyze the situation. You have to look at the balance of forces and ask, “is there an opportunity? Is there an opening here to push things in the direction that we want them to go?” And we definitely felt that there was. I think pharmacare is a good example of how we can build the public health care system and address the health care crisis at the same time. Because one of the reasons that we are in this crisis is because we don’t have a public drug plan, and we have so many people ending up needlessly in the ER.
Giving people access to insulin, to other diabetes drugs and contraceptives is going to make an important contribution right now so that we can start dealing with the other problems in the health care system. The key thing is remembering that we always have to fight for these things. These things aren’t handed down to us. In this case, it’s been really interesting to see the legislation as it’s about to come into force, and the reactions in the insurance industry and Big Pharma, and they’re just absolutely livid with the shape of this bill, because they can see that if it goes forward and if it expands, if we end up with a program that covers everybody and is single-payer, it will impact their profits and it will hurt their interests. I think that’s sort of the clearest indication to me that we’ve done something that’s good, that’s valuable, and that we need to fight to expand.
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