In a debt-ridden province facing a health care crisis and shortages of doctors and nurses, BC Conservative health critic Dr. Anna Kindy offered a possible solution during her Friday, May 9 visit with Prince George-area MLAs: Get rid of some of the health authority bureaucrats and spend that money to hire more doctors and nurses.
“There’s a health-care crisis and we’re not even to the worst point of it,” Kindy said. “This government is not planning, it’s all band-aid solutions and ER closures are just the tip of the issue. We’re looking at a lack of primary care, lack of ability to see a specialist, wait times are completely unacceptable, and it’s even worse in rural areas.”
Kindy pointed to a study of the 31 OECD (Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development) countries that shows Canada spends the sixth-highest percentage of its GDP on healthcare but ranks at the bottom in terms of number of doctors, MRI access and in the number of hospital beds.
“Our bureaucracy has ballooned under the health authorities and I’ m not saying we should spend less, but I’m saying re-divert the money to the front lines, where it should go,” said Kindy. “We have six health authorities and 74 vice-presidents and it goes on from there.”
Kindy has worked 38 years as a family physician in Campbell River and her husband, Peter Olesen, is a plastic surgeon. They’ve seen firsthand the deterioration of healthcare services and her desire for change is what convinced her to enter politics.
She took aim at the province’s safer supply policy that started in 2020 that gives drug users at high risk of overdose free supplies of pharmaceutical-grade opioids prescribed by a physician or nurse practitioner. Kindy said that’s one of BC’s harm reduction strategies that has not worked.
“Safe supply has no evidence behind it, it was started during the pandemic and pushed through and called safe supply,” she said. “My own patients were saying to me, why are doctors prescribing without monitoring, Dilaudid, up to two week’s worth that you could bring home, and everybody knew it was being diverted (to be sold as a street drug) very early on.
“Kids don’t start drugs with fentanyl, they start with pills. We don’t know how many kids are actually addicted to opiates. That should not have been started. We knew early on it was being diverted and this government is too ideological to backtrack when it sees it’s going on the wrong direction and we see how much harm it’s produced.”
The province also decriminalized hard drugs in a three-year pilot project introduced in January 2023 that makes it legal for adults to possess up to 2.5 grams of heroin, fentanyl, cocaine or methamphetamine. But a Journal of American Medicine Association study published in March showed there’s been no significant reduction in drug deaths and more people are being hospitalized due to overdoses.
Kindy says the street drugs now available are more harmful than ever and every effort should be made to eradicate them.
“We need to stigmatize drugs, not addicts,” she said. “This is not heroin, this is fentanyl plus a lot of other crap, and that why we’re seeing the brain injuries. Heroin people could last a long time, (but) with what’s on the street now, if you’re doing what’s on the street I can almost guarantee you within one of two years you’ll either be dead or brain-injured, and that’s what we’re seeing.
“That’s why we need to react quickly, stigmatizing drugs in school and getting people out of that through detox and treatment. If people are breaking the law things need to happen quickly and we will have to mandate treatment.”
Prince George-Mackenzie MLA Kiel Giddens said tackling the illicit drug problem starts with prevention programs and education such as the bill introduced earlier this week by Richmond-Queensborough MLA Steve Kooner to make it mandatory for schools to adopt anti-drug curriculum.
“Obviously harm reduction has a role in the process but the problem is the NDP has focused solely on harm reduction while not focusing resources on treatment, not focusing on enforcement or our current laws or prevention,” said Giddens.
“You’re not seeing that direct prevention focus anymore and we’re certainly not seeing a focus on treatment and that’s what needs to change. From this government there is an ideological bias against abstinence-based recovery. I’ll commend the City of Prince George and local governments in this region who have come to the conclusion that abstinence-based recovery is absolutely needed, but they’re not seeing results from the province.”
Prince George-North Cariboo MLA Sheldon Clare said the drug culture that exists in the downtown core of most BC cities has steadily worsened since the federal government adopted a catch-and-release approach to prosecuting chronic offenders.
“The blanket approach to healthcare that this government has adopted is causing all kinds of harm and we see it in downtowns everywhere,” said Clare. “It’s combined with a mental health crisis, it’s combined with this excess handing out of drugs and the failure to prosecute which started in 2017 and this is all overshadowed by the debt that we’re facing in this province of some $75 billion.”
On the topic of mental health, Kindy pointed to a review of forensic hospital system (for individuals found not responsible for criminal actions due to mental illness) which showed that BC, with a population of about five million, has just one forensic psychiatric hospital, located in Coquitlam, as compared to Ontario, which has 11 forensic hospitals serving a population of about 15 million. There are only three forensic beds available to Northern Health patients and they are in Kamloops.
“This is a prime example of this government not planning for the future we need, and this is why we’re seeing more violence,” said Kindy. “Murders have increased over the last two years over 82 or 83 per cent and in terms of sexual assault and assault cases, it’s up over 90 per cent in two years.”
Clare has seen emergency wards struggling with staff shortages and being flooded with patients who have nowhere else to go for primary care because they lack a family doctor and he says the northern half of BC is especially hard hit with healthcare staff leaving the area because they’re overworked.
“We’re not recruiting and retaining physicians and nurses in these communities,” said Clare. “We also have a serious problem with competitive relationships where you have one community competing with the community next door in the recruiting process to get doctors. There has to be a more collaborative approach to provide incentives to bring medical professionals. We’re going to need to because we’re seeing areal exodus, particularly in the North and rural areas.”
ER closures are now common occurrences in smaller towns in the province. Mackenzie hospital was closed for several days this week due to nursing shortages. Giddens visited the hospital last weekend to meet with health staff and he said they are doing what they can to keep that facility open.
“We need a system that actually gives them to tools to do their job,” said Giddens. “They’ve relied on the Travel Nurse program and things like that but that’s a band-aid solution. We need long-term systemic change to really help.”
Kindy says previous governments were shortsighted in not planning for an aging population and pushed through policies that decreased enrollment in medical schools which has contributed to the current doctor shortage. She said most Canadian medical schools have increased class sizes but they’re still not producing enough physicians. She advocates doubling the intake of medical students.
“Forty per cent of GPs will be retiring in the next five years and we’re talking the same or pretty close probably with specialists, so we’ve got to plan that and increase our pool,” she said. “We have Canadians that have gone to very reputable medical schools outside our borders — Ireland, Australia, New Zealand — and they have a hard time coming back to our country, and they’re Canadian. We need to open those doors.
“We need to making it easier for people with foreign degrees but we also need to make sure we keep the quality up. If they prove to be well-trained we should make it easier for them and even help them financially to where they need to be, which is practice medicine.”
The Conservatives are also pushing for better pre-hospital care, especially for rural British Columbians. Kindy says the government should be looking at how other provinces and countries operate their ambulance system to find solutions.
In March, Sparwood Mayor David Wilks wrote a scathing letter to Health Minister Josie Osborne about the shortfalls of BCEHS’s air transport system for critical Code Red patients citing 10 infant/pediatric transport cases since the start of this year in the East Kootenays that did not go smoothly, one involving a child with a treatable condition who died before being moved to a higher level of care.
“When we’re talking about preventable deaths, which is what’s happening, we have to have that discussion,” said Kindy. “The overdose crisis is taking away a lot of resources away, potentially, from people that are calling (for an ambulance).
“There are systems that are working well and the one that comes to mind is the STARS (Shock Trauma Air Rescue Service). Pre-pandemic, Cranbrook had the STARS system because they are actually closer to Alberta and there was an issue with transport and since then they haven’t renewed the contract with STARS.
“The system is also failing in terms of transport. We have to look at other models and this is where the Conservatives are doing a good job. We’re actually looking outside our borders, not just within Canada.”
Giddens plans to press the government on its its plans for the proposed patient care tower to be built in Prince George by 2031.
“We need cardiac care, there still is a lack of clarity around the helipad at the patient care tower at UHNBC and we’ve been trying to seek clarification on whether the government is actually going to do what they said they would do,” said Giddens.
“Right before the election (Premier) David Eby made a commitment to putting in a helipad as part of the concept plan. We still have not seen that plan or any evidence in the budget or in any documentation that is going to happen.”
