The question was posed by a woman in the audience who wanted to know where the Green Party stood on “a huge issue” impacting this area and noted that others vying for political power at the Province have stated their preference, referring to a recent visit by Conservative Party leader Doug Ford who made a pit stop at Huntsville’s Boston Pizza and announced that he too would support two hospitals.
“I strongly support having a hospital in both Bracebridge and Huntsville,” responded Schreiner, who clarified that the hospitals would provide acute care. He said hospital amalgamation is something that the Conservatives started and Liberals continued, but said it’s not something the Greens support, especially if it means people have to travel much further distances to receive the acute care they need.
“At the same time,” he said, “I think we have to start reforming how we think about health care in the province. So much of our resources are focused on treating illness and not preventing illness in the first place.” Schreiner said his party is a strong advocate of more investment in community and primary health care as well as health promotion and illness prevention.
“I think one of the big lost opportunities in Ontario is to empower nurses, to have more nurse practitioner-led clinics and empower nurses to operate at their full scope of practice.” He said that is a lower-cost solution that provides “as high a quality or even higher quality care, and nurse practitioner-led clinics take a more holistic approach,” added Schreiner.
“So it’s not only investing in making sure our acute care systems are functioning properly but it’s also investing in making sure we keep people healthy because that then takes pressure off our acute care,” he said, adding that one of the challenges hospitals are facing is that there are patients taking up beds who could be cared for elsewhere.
Huntsville Mayor Scott Aitchison, who arrived for part of the health care discussion following the municipality’s General Committee meeting, weighed in telling Schreiner and those present that the biggest issue for this area remains the hospital funding formula. It favours “these assembly line operations in big cities where there’s lots of people rolling through and they’re doing dozens and dozens of the same procedure all the time,” he said. “So all the points you made about doing things outside of the acute care system, those are all well and good, we’ve been doing a lot of those things, the problem we have here is there’s not quite enough business to keep that hospital up the road here going 24/7. At the same time, that doesn’t mean that we don’t need that emergency room.”
Aitchison said the challenge to political parties is: “How do you fix the funding formula to address the needs of small town Ontario?”
Schreiner said that same dilemma is applicable not just to health care but schools as well as small business. “One of the problems we have in Ontario is that we have a lot of one-size-fits-all solutions that are written for big business and big centres,” he said.“I would argue the same thing in our health care sector… the funding formula is written for big urban centres as you’ve stated. And so we need to have a different funding formula for large urban centres and for rural communities to make sure people have access to the care they need and it needs to account for the fact that you’re not going to have assembly line care here because you don’t have the population base for it, but you still need acute care facilities,” he told the Mayor and those present.
“Hear, hear,” responded the mayor. “Want a hug?” he asked Schreiner to laughter.
Other issues discussed included the party’s vision for the energy sector in Ontario, raising the minimum wage while lowering payroll taxes for small to medium businesses, reforming the education system, their social housing and affordable housing strategy, and their view on the legalization of cannabis as well as their support of a proportional representation electoral system rather than first-past-the-post.
Schreiner also asked the estimated 60 people gathered that they sign a petition to have the Greens included during election debates, whether they vote Green or not. You can find more about the Green Party platform here.
BY DOPPLER ONLINE ON