A recent survey found that the majority of Canadians don’t think that the government should prioritize pharmacare, but instead focus on issues like long surgical wait times and building more long-term care homes when it comes to healthcare.
This survey comes as the Liberals and the NDP struggle to negotiate what a potential national drug plan might look like, following an announcement that they would extend their deadline to come up with a plan to March 1, 2024.
The pharmacare plan is a crucial part of their supply-and-confidence pact, with the NDP promising to support the Liberals in the House of Commons in exchange for creating a national pharmacare plan.
Legislation on the pharmacare plan was initially supposed to be tabled this year, however the two parties could not agree on the details.
The Leger survey asked Canadians what the top two health-care priorities should be and of the respondents, only 18% mentioned creating a new, universal single-payer drug plan.
Whereas 36% of respondents said that surgical wait times and expanding mental-health services should be the top priority.
The survey also revealed that 53% of respondents were unaware of a potential pharmacare plan in the first place.
“All of that comes before having a universal single-payer drug plan,” Christian Bourque, Leger’s executive vice-president told CTV News.
“It’s not at the top of Canadians’ priority list.”
The NDP are adamant to create a universal, single-payer system but Liberal Minister of Health Marc Holland has repeatedly said that the government must be more financially prudent about it.
The Parliamentary Budget Office estimated that implementing such a plan would cost billions annually.
”We estimate the incremental cost to the public sector (that is federal and provincial governments combined) to be $11.2 billion in 2024-25, increasing to $13.4 billion in 2027-28,” said the PBO.
Only a minority of respondents, 22%, said that a new drug plan should replace basic drug coverage that they receive through their employers.
About 44% of respondents supported a plan that would offer coverage to those who didn’t already have it through their work, seniors and people who earn less than $90,000 annually.
“That’s probably due, to some extent, to the fact that two out of three Canadians do have private health-care coverage, either themselves or through their spouse,” said Bourque.
He also noted that while the majority of respondents didn’t support the idea, there weren’t too many who completely opposed it either, even amongst Conservative voters.
“Once you look inside the actual Conservative voter base, only 23% of them say ‘I don’t want (any) part of pharmacare,”’ said Bourque. “So, if there was a form of pharmacare, I think it would be good news for a majority of Canadians.”
However, if the Liberals and the NDP do manage to come to some agreement around a pharmacare bill, there still isn’t any guarantee as to when it would be implemented and it’s unlikely that it could happen in the immediate term.
The survey was conducted online from Friday to Sunday with 1,622 Canadians participating. It cannot be assigned a margin of error because online surveys are not considered truly random samples of population.
