Yeah, under Chretien the feds decided that the way to bring the deficit under control was to gut health care funding.
Here in NB, McKenna had the firm belief that the reason health care costs too much is that we have too many GPs. Which is why lots of people don't have family doctors any more.
Tenpenny, Chrétien decided that the way to bring deficit under control was to gut all the spending, including health care.
A healthy, common sense view, conservatives would do well to try to adopt it (rather than cut taxes and borrow heavily as they have been doing for the past several decades, both here and in USA).
Cutting the spending, balancing the budget is not an easy thing to do. If it was easy, even the conservatives would have done it. Cutting spending causes hardship, it makes people mad. But it had to be done.
Indeed, Liberals got plenty of flak from just about everybody. They were criticized for gutting health care, for gutting military, for robbing the EI program, for gutting the social services and so on. When they get everybody mad at them that tells me that they were doing the right thing. But the fact remains, while Bush was running astronomical deficits in USA ( a typical Conservative way of running the economy), Liberals were running healthy surpluses here in Canada.
So sure liberals cut the health care transfer to the provinces, it was the right thing to do. The deficit monster had to be slain at all costs ( a concept totally alien to the Conservatives).
