By JOAN BRYDEN
OTTAWA (CP) - Stephen Harper's vow to reduce wait times for medical procedures seems to have mysteriously vanished from the prime minister's famous five priorities.
The Conservative government has rarely uttered the words "wait times" in the past couple of months.
But the vanishing act was complete in a guest column penned by Harper in the July issue of an obscure conservative journal, Report Magazine. The column was unearthed and brought to wider public attention Thursday by Maclean's columnist Paul Wells.
Harper boasts about his fledgling minority government's achievements since bringing down its first budget in May.
"It's been quite a ride ever since, with progress being made on all of our five priorities - from cleaning up the federal government, to cutting taxes, cracking down on crime, supporting families and strengthening our country at home and around the world," Harper writes.
But until now, strengthening the country was not listed as one of the Conservative government's five priorities.
Throughout last winter's election campaign and in the April throne speech outlining the new Conservative government's agenda, the fifth priority was always "work with the provinces to establish a Patient Wait Times guarantee."
Harper brandished his short list of five priorities repeatedly during the campaign to draw a contrast with then-prime minister Paul Martin's reputation for failing to find focus.
"If you don't have a clear idea of what you want to accomplish, you probably won't get much done," Harper said last January when he first laid out his five priorities.
"You need to know what you believe in, what you want to do and have a plan to do it."
The wait-times guarantee was supposed to ensure patients would receive medical procedures by specified deadlines. If timely care proved impossible locally, provinces were to foot the bill to send patients out of province.
Harper never offered to give the provinces any additional federal cash to help meet his promise of timely care. Indeed, he suggested they had sufficient money through a $42-billion, 10-year deal struck by Martin in 2004.
One provincial official said chances are "nil" that the wait-times guarantee will ever get off the ground as long as Harper refuses to back up his promise with the money to make it happen.
Or as Ontario Health Minister George Smitherman put it: "You can't get something for nothing."
During a conference call last week with his provincial counterparts, Smitherman said federal Health Minister Tony Clement insisted no additional money would be forthcoming to shorten wait times.
Smitherman said no province is averse to moving on wait times, but he said he was "awestruck" by Clement's attitude.
"You cannot pretend there are not extraordinary additional costs associated with it," he said in an interview.
A spokesman for Harper denied the wait-times guarantee has been dropped from the government's agenda.
"Certainly the wait-times guarantee remains in our priorities," said Stephane Rondeau, insisting that Harper's column "does not define the government's agenda."
Rondeau could not say why Harper didn't mention the promise in the column if he remains so committed to it.
"I cannot comment on that but there's no way we're moving away from that priority."
NDP health critic Penny Priddy, a former health minister in British Columbia, accused Harper of trying to accomplish "privatization by stealth," doing nothing to shorten wait times in the public health system and giving private clinics time to "put down roots."
"I don't think they ever really intended to do very much," Priddy added, blasting Harper for blithely replacing the wait-time issue with another more vague priority to strengthen the country.
"This is really condescending to Canadians to think you can do this and no one will notice."
Liberal leadership hopeful Bob Rae, a former Ontario NDP premier, said Harper and Clement "have absolutely no intention of following through on" the wait-times promise.
"If you're going to make it real, you have to be prepared to invest in it."
Rae said Harper is dropping the promise deliberately "because their real agenda is to drive the provinces to establishing two tiers."
"That's what the real agenda is, it's to tell the provinces and the public that if you want speedy treatment, go to the private sector."
Rae noted that Harper deep-sixed the wait-times guarantee in another recent missive.
In a letter to the editor in the Calgary Herald last week, Harper didn't mention the guarantee as he boasted about cutting taxes, introducing child-care allowances, cracking down on crime, beefing up the military, standing firm against terror and starting to reform government institutions.
The prime minister also promised to strike a judicial inquiry into the collapse of the Fraser River salmon fishery and to "oppose racially divided fisheries programs."
Rae said the letter in the Herald and the Report magazine column suggest Harper has adopted a "very American style" of saying one thing to the general public and another to his hard-right constituency.
"He seems determined to maintain a communication almost as if not only is he prime minister, but he's still sort of the archbishop of the right-wing church. He has to communicate directly with right-wingers to let them know that he's still one of them."
