Healthcare Performance Statistics Still Not Demanded

[Michael Hardner]

As I point out on my blog Democracy 2.0 continues to march forward, now properly evolved as the opportunity to 'twitter' your Harper or 'facebook' your Layton. ( Yes, that was sarcasm. ) Initially, Democracy 2.0 sounded like it was supposed to be a grand re-imagining of how we might use the web to relate to our governments, but that might not even be necessary.

Across the world, we have largely settled on what a 'government' does. There are no Thomas Paines for us to hear from: the western form of government has "won". The big speeches and debates are more a relic of the 18th, 19th and 20th centuries. What we need now, today, is management of those services that keep us economically and physically healthy. We need health care, infrastructure, education and justice to be managed efficiently so that we can move forward and pursue the happiness that the Declaration of Independence promised.

Meanwhile, the eHealth controversy has passed with Dalton McGuinty remaining barely singed. (Cue Liberal sighs of relief.) The complacency of Ontarians in this regard is mind boggling. Governments, especially in Canada, have never been defined more by their services than now and yet citizens don't seem to care.

I would like to hear that Democracy 3.0 is coming - a web-based report card on how our governments are doing at delivering adequate services for a reasonable cost. There is nothing left-wing nor right-wing about that. If services are managed efficiently, we can afford to raise taxes, or instead provide more services. But it shouldn't be a debate that the services that we expect be managed correctly.

In fact, there is no debate now, but only because there's inadequate information on how our governments are performing. McGuinty promised to address the problem of waiting lists in 2003, and 6 years (!) later, we have incomplete reports (self-reported of course) from the Ministry of Health indicating that the problem may be getting better. But at what cost, we don't know.

The first step to addressing this situation is for us to care about how these systems work. Every July 1st, the newspapers run stories about how no Canadian knows who Pierre Trudeau or Charles Tupper was. But isn't it more relevant - and more important - that we know how well we're doing at managing our own healthcare ?