A long, long time ago, when the Earth was still young, and dinosaurs like me roamed Parliament Hill, I cornered my boss, The Rt. Hon. Jean Chretien.

He was the leader of the Opposition, back then, and I was his special assistant. I’m not sure why he kept me around, but I think I amused him.

Anyway, I was excited about something in the news, and saw it as a great opportunity for Chretien to get some media coverage. Others in the office agreed with me, as I recall.

Chretien listened to me, grinning, then shook his head.

“Young man,” he said, which is what he always said to me (and still does) when he was about to disagree with me, “I don’t need to be in the newspaper every day. I shouldn’t be. Mr. Mulroney is in the paper every day, and what has it done for him?”

It was true. With constitutional machinations, with battles about the GST, with windy pronouncements about everything and nothing, 24/7, Prime Minister Brian Mulroney was then supported by 12% of Canadian voters. Twelve per cent!

Chretien was a big believer in less is more — undersell and overperform. So, after the election, he made me chief of staff at Public Works and Government Services, and instructed me to cut the living you-know-what out of the federal advertising budget, which I did.

Chretien: “The Tories polled and advertised all the time. It got them two seats. Cut.”

The moral of the tale, generally, is that Jean Chretien is always right. More specifically, the moral this: If you are in politics, and people are seeing and hearing you too much, they’ll get sick of your face.

Which brings us to another Right Honourable, Justin Trudeau. Seen him around, lately? Trust me: You haven’t.

He had one press conference in the first week of January, billed as a COVID-19 update, and let his assembled ministers do much of the talking. Same thing a week later. COVID talk, ministers present. Yawn.

Over on his web site, it’s the same. Two (2) press releases so far this year — one about Nova Scotia, one about changes in the federal bureaucracy. His office has issued statements on various things, like the sad passing of former NDP leader Alexa McDonough. But precious little else.

What does it mean? It means Justin Trudeau has rendered himself less visible, Virginia. And it’s paying dividends — because, nowadays, the federal Liberal leader is more popular than not. And his principal opponent, Erin O’Toole, is doing very badly, indeed.

Elsewhere, leaders who are too public aren’t too popular: U.S. President Joe Biden and British Prime Minister Boris Johnson, to cite just two examples, are all over the front pages these days. And their approval numbers are basement-level.

It may be that there is no smart strategy at work here. It may simply be that Trudeau has been chastened by the election result, and is off at Harrington Lake, licking his wounds.

But it’s more likely that Trudeau’s brain trust has finally (thankfully) embraced the Chretien approach to visibility, and it’s decidedly working. And, given how Trudeau used to be, that’s a big, big change.

Because, back in the early days of his regime, Trudeau was the Kardashian of Canadian politics: He was everywhere, like a computer virus. Cover of Rolling Stone, flirting with Melania Trump, documenting every waking moment on Instagram, his medium of choice.

And now? Poof. He’s vanished.

And it’s working.

— Warren Kinsella is CEO of the Daisy Group, a public relations and crisis communications firm

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A health care tax.

Hmmm.

I am writing those ominous words sitting in a hospital emergency ward. Belleville General, emergency bed three.  

A few days ago, I was biking in minus-twenty weather – I go out every day, year round – and wiped out.

Smashed my head, hard, on the ice that had – until that point – hidden it’s presence. Did you know that the human head bounces when it hits hard stuff? Mine did. Bang, bang.

I was wearing a helmet, which probably saved my life, but it didn’t mean no problems. Problems aplenty lay ahead.

Felt dazed. Didn’t black out. Bike mirror broken, bike scraped up.   Because I’m a stubborn Irish bastard, I kept riding a bit, on asphalt. Then home.

The trouble started the next morning. Headaches, out of it (more than usual), and a lot of vision gone in my right eye.

I didn’t want to end up here in emerg, but my doc wanted to rule out a “brain bleed,” quote unquote. Despite being a stubborn Irish bastard, I relented.

So began my journey through an overburdened, overworked health care system. And you know why. We all know why. Underfunded by Ottawa, overwhelmed by a virus that has cancelled the future.

Sitting on assorted waiting-room chairs, I (naturally) did what I wasn’t supposed to do, and read the online response to Quebec Premier Francois Legault’s latest pandemic gambit: taxing the unvaccinated.

Punitive or proper? Unfair, unwise? Or right and reasonable?

Every other columnist in Canada has taken a whack at Legault’s plan, by now. But no one, to my knowledge, has done it from the perspective of a hospital bed. So here goes.

Legault is assisted by public opinion. Since Summer 2021, give or take, Canadians have overwhelmingly favored the vaccination side.

A considerable number, in fact, have favored actually punishing those who choose to be unvaccinated. Like, really punishing them: denying them employment, denying them mobility, denying them benefits – including health care benefits.

Legault is a politician, a popular one, and he’s seen the polling. His tax-the-unvaxxed policy will be popular.  Count on it.

Before heading to the hospital  I talked to a former Prime Minister about it. We agreed it won’t violate the Canada Health Act – various provinces have assessed health care premiums in the past. In my home province of Alberta, for example, I was denied health care because I – a penniless law student – hadn’t paid my premiums. Healthy or not.

Other jurisdictions in the world have been tougher than Legault. Austria plans to hit up the unvaccinated with penalties in excess of $20,000 a year. Greece has said it’ll do likewise, albeit for a smaller price tag.

So Legault has public opinion and precedent on his side. But what about constitutionality and fairness, which are intricately related?

Constitutions are documents which are all about equality – about ensuring all citizens are equal. Legault’s policy clearly (and proudly) discriminates against an identifiable group.

It doesn’t, or shouldn’t, matter that the group in question is stupid and reckless. Constitutions are arguably crafted to protect the reckless as well as the virtuous. Litigation is inevitable. A predictable result isn’t.

And what about fairness? Is Legault being unfair? Perhaps, but no more than the ten per cent of unvaccinated Quebeckers who are occupying 50 per cent of the province’s hospital beds. They’re being unfair, too. They’re putting their fellow citizens at risk.

From my perspective in emergency room three, I think Legault will get away with it. Mainly for one reason: because it’ll be popular.

People are tired of this. They’re mad, they’re sad, they’re fed up. They will vote for any politician who can promise them a speedy end to the pandemic.

And Francois Legault knows it.

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As the pandemic grinds on, as more and more of us get infected, there’s lots of blame to go around.

Anti-vaccination spreadnecks, for making a bad situation much worse. Inept politicians, who falsely claimed that the pandemic was coming to an end, or that it was nothing to worry about. Canada’s federal government, for mishandling everything from vaccine procurement to border crossings.

The framers of Canada’s Constitution deserve some blame, too, even though it’s arriving more than a century late. Let us explain.

Responsibility for health care — and, critically, responsibility for the financing of health care — isn’t clearly addressed in our Constitution. Hard to believe, but it isn’t.

Federal responsibilities are listed in Section 91. Provincial responsibilities are detailed in Section 92.

But as no less than the Supreme Court of Canada ruled in 1982: “Health is not a matter which is subject to specific constitutional assignment but instead is an amorphous topic which can be addressed by valid federal or provincial legislation, depending (on) the circumstances.”

“Amorphous?” And: “Depending on the circumstances?”

You don’t need to be a constitutional scholar to recognize the problem created by this constitutional fuzziness. It is a sure-fire formula for federal-provincial squabbling over the funding of health care. And, in the intervening 155 years, there’s been plenty of squabbling — because, on average, health care costs more than any other program.

In Ontario alone, the biggest program areas are hospitals ($25.8 billion) and the Ontario Health Insurance Plan (which is made up of physicians and health practitioners, at $17 billion). Taken together, those two expenditures alone account for 58% of the health ministry spending planned for this year. Nearly 60%, and growing every year.

And in the decade leading up to the pandemic, provincial health-care spending grew by nearly 120%. That’s a formula for bankruptcy.

Throw in a pandemic, then, and you’ve got a fiscal crisis that defies description. COVID-19 has overwhelmed our doctors, nurses and hospitals — and has completely gutted provincial health budgets, and budgetary planning.

Because constitutional responsibility for providing health care, you see, has fallen mainly to the provinces. And responsibility for funding much of it is the role of the Justin Trudeau government.

The Trudeau regime repeatedly claims to “have Canadians’ backs” during the pandemic. But it simply doesn’t.

In September, the premiers and the prime minister met to discuss the health funding catastrophe. The premiers of the two biggest provinces, Doug Ford and Francois Legault, were quite specific: They told Trudeau the provinces need the federal government to do more.

Ford and Legault and others wanted Trudeau to increase health-care transfers to the provinces by $28 billion this year. That would boost the $42-billion transfer the provinces receive to $70 billion.

“We’re here to ask the federal government: Step up to the plate,” Ford said. Legault, meanwhile, issued a warning to the federal Liberal leader: “Don’t come and invent all sorts of new programs and new spending when the priority of Canadians is to properly finance health care. And right now it is not well financed.”

And it isn’t. Anyone on a waiting list, anyone seeking a vaccination or a booster, anyone who has tried to see a doctor or get a hospital bed knows that the Canadian health system isn’t at a cliched “breaking point” anymore. It’s broken.

The pandemic is the biggest personal, political, cultural, and economic event of our collective lifetimes. None of the other fetishes of the Trudeau government — like approving hefty pay hikes for its MPs — come close to being as important.

More than perhaps at any other time in our 155-year history, we need to properly fund health care. We need to dramatically step up our efforts to fight and beat COVID.

Our Constitution may not have addressed that.

But Canada needs to, now, if we are ever to be free of the prison that is the COVID-19 pandemic.

— Warren Kinsella is a lawyer and former Chief of Staff to a federal Liberal Minister of Health

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