Federal Initiatives: 1) Liberals Take First Step Toward Pharmacare With Bill For Birth Control, Diabetes Meds; 2) Online Safety A Key Part Of Ottawa’s New Gender Plan — And To World Peace, Says Envoy
1) Liberals Take First Step Toward Pharmacare With Bill For Birth Control, Diabetes Meds
Coutesy of Barrie360.com and Canadian Press, Published: Feb 29th, 2024
By Laura Osman
The governing Liberals took their first major step toward national pharmacare Thursday as the health minister tabled a bill that paves the way for a universal drug program and secures NDP support in the House of Commons.
But Health Minister Mark Holland made clear there is still a long way to go before all drugs in Canada are covered under a federal program.
The bill allows the government to negotiate with provinces and territories to cover birth control, along with diabetes drugs and supplies, for anyone with a health card.
Holland said the cost is likely to be in the realm of $1.5 billion, but he said that estimate is very likely to change over the course of his talks with provinces.
“This is a proof-of-concept opportunity to try (providing) two drugs on a universal, single-payer model,” Holland said at a press conference Thursday.
“We’re going to have an opportunity to evaluate the effectiveness of that model.”
He said he believes the government will be able to show significant cost savings in fairly short order.
In addition to testing the waters on universal coverage, the bill also fulfils a promise made to the New Democrats, who touted the legislation Thursday as the fulfilment of a long-held dream.
“This is historic. This is the dream of our party since the conception of our party,” NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh said Thursday morning.
“It is happening not by coincidence, it is happening because New Democrats fought and we forced the government to do this.”
Pharmacare is a central pillar of the political pact between the two parties, which has the NDP helping the Liberals stave off an election in exchange for progress on a list of shared priorities.
Its future had seemed uncertain amid a months-long stalemate over the wording of the legislation and the number of drugs they planned to launch with.
The NDP announced they clinched the negotiations late last week, in the lead-up to a negotiated March 1 deadline to table a bill.
Health critic Don Davies, who led the negotiations for the New Democrats, said the final pieces were put in place over the weekend.
“The Liberals fought us every step of the way. They resisted, they delayed, they opposed, but New Democrats persisted,” said Davies.
The legislation makes reference to a single-payer, universal model — something Davies said he insisted on.
And it includes universal coverage as a binding principle that must guide the implementation of a future pharmacare program.
Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre spoke to the media in the foyer of the House of Commons Thursday, but walked away when reporters asked him for his position on the government’s pharmacare plans.
As it stands, Canada is the only country in the world with a universal health-care system that does not also have universal coverage for prescription drugs outside of hospitals.
In December, the NDP and Liberals agreed to push back the original timeline, which would’ve seen legislation fully passed by the end of last year.
The reticence on the Liberals’ part largely came down to cost.
A full fledged pharmacare program would cost the government nearly $40 billion a year by the time it is fully up and running, the parliamentary budget officer estimates.
Singh threatened to pull out of the deal if the March 1 deadline wasn’t met with legislation that earned his approval, though he was open about a desire to keep the deal alive and see a pharmacare bill debated in the Commons.
The bill calls for the minister to put together a committee of experts to make recommendations about how to pay for a national, universal, single-payer plan within 30 days of the act receiving royal assent.
Alberta and Quebec have already said they want to opt out of the program and would rather put the money toward their existing drug plans.
“We were not consulted about the federal government’s plan and, although information available to us is limited, we have concerns about the proposed limited scope,” Alberta Health Minister Adriana LaGrange said earlier this week.
LaGrange said Alberta intends to opt out of the program, but still wants to receive its per-capita share.
On the other hand, British Columbia already covers many contraceptives as part of its provincial pharmacare program, and Manitoba’s government has already pledged to do so as well.
Ontario also provides many contraceptives for people under the age of 25 who don’t have private insurance, and has existing programs to support people with diabetes. The provincial government says it wants more information about what the bill will mean for those programs.
“I was very clear with the minister when we spoke that I’m not writing off anything, but I’m also not buying into something where I don’t know exactly what’s there,” Ontario Health Minister Sylvia Jones said Thursday.
Singh called it disappointing that provinces would dismiss the program out of hand, without seeing the details.
Despite the immediate concerns from Alberta and Quebec, Holland said he is “very optimistic this is a plan we can deliver across the country.”
In addition to the initial plans for diabetes and birth control drugs, the bill lays out several next steps and deadlines designed to nudge the government toward a bigger pharmacare plan.
Those steps include asking the new Canadian Drug Agency to develop a list of essential medicines within a year of royal assent, which would inform which drugs are covered in the future.
2) Online Safety A Key Part Of Ottawa’s New Gender Plan — And To World Peace, Says Envoy
Courtesy of Barrie360.com and Canadian Press Published: Feb 25th, 2024
By Dylan Robertson in Ottawa
Authoritarian countries are leveraging social media to set back progress for women worldwide, a Canadian special envoy says, as Ottawa refreshes its cross-government gender policy.
Canada’s ambassador for women, peace and security, Jacqueline O’Neill, says these threats require supporters of gender equality around the world to work together.
Western countries must help buck a global trend of strongmen leaders seeking to prevent women from having meaningful roles in public life, she said in a recent interview.
“Authoritarian governments are very much cracking down on space for communities to organize, for the media to have free speech and for women’s rights activists to pursue their work,” said O’Neill, who advocates for women both abroad and at home.
She pointed to research such as that of Harvard University professor Erica Chenoweth, who has documented how resistance movements are more successful when they integrate women in leadership and frontline roles.
One way that governments are trying to stifle such opposition is by using social media to support, spread and even fund a narrative that women’s rights are a foreign import meant to challenge traditional values, O’Neill said.
She calls it technology-facilitated gender-based violence.
Women in Canada are no strangers to online harassment.
Gov. Gen. Mary Simon convened female politicians, activists and journalists last year to strategize on how to deal with vile online abuse.
And Global Affairs Canada has started adding security expenses to grants it gives to human-rights activists abroad, O’Neill said, for everything from physical office locks to training on digital hygiene so people can protect themselves online.
The department says Liberal ministers approved the third national action plan on women, peace and security in December.
The recently approved policy is meant to provide guidance across the government — from its approach to diplomatic summits to how it conducts domestic policing and welfare programs.
Though it has not been released publicly and O’Neill said she can’t share the details, she suggested it will address online harms.
She signalled it will also include considerations around how climate can affect women’s security.
“We’re seeing a lot of armed groups around the world taking advantage of climate disruptions to both recruit women into their forces (and) to abduct girls to be, effectively, sex slaves,” she said.
She noted that natural disasters and other climate emergencies, such as drought, can cause families to pull their girls out of school so they can work or be part of forced marriages.
As part of her role, O’Neill was in East Africa last month taking stock of the situation for women in countries that recently experienced conflict but have since lost global attention.
“We wanted to convey that they’re equally important to us now, and that we’re equally engaged,” she said.
There, too, she heard activists speak to an increasing chill on their freedom of speech.
O’Neill visited the Tigray region in Ethiopia, where a terrible war ended in late 2022. Hundreds of thousands of people died and there were widespread accounts of rape.
There, she said she met with women who were receiving help because of Canadian aid as they recovered from sexual violence perpetrated by militants.
“They did things like inserting objects in women’s wombs that would prevent them from ever having babies again,” she described.
Many survivors said they’d been knocked out during these attacks, and only learned what happened years later when an infection emerged or they couldn’t get pregnant, and medical tests found evidence of foreign objects such as nails or rocks.
“There was an ethnic dimension to this in wanting them to never reproduce,” said O’Neill, emphasizing that systemic acts such as those go beyond domestic or gender-based violence.
“It’s equally horrific, but it also requires a different kind of response, and it requires justice on a different level.”
The Canadian envoy said she saw a concerning lack of services to reintegrate women in the country — meaning efforts to allow women to resume employment, including in politics, rather than being left to provide basic services and support to their communities in the wake of war.
In Mozambique, O’Neill saw that reintegration has been a major part of the effort to help reach a lasting peace following a long civil war.
The success of the country’s 2019 peace treaty depends in part on making sure female combatants are included in reintegration efforts, she said.
In Kenya, O’Neill visited a training centre for peacekeepers that tries to reconcile the roles of police, military and civilians in conflict areas.
She said the curriculum included information about how to find signs of sexual violence on a systemic level.
The training might help Kenyan police officers on a planned deployment to Haiti, O’Neill said, as part of a mission that aims to stabilize the Caribbean country for which Canada announced a $80.5-million contribution on Thursday.
O’Neill is not the only envoy in the international community with a title focused on women, peace and security.
But the Canadian version of that role is unique, O’Neill said.
In addition to advocating for women abroad and telling their stories to Canadians, she is also tasked with seeing what Canada can learn from how countries rich and poor are making gains for women.
“Every country in the world has something to share about what they’re doing,” O’Neill said — and “so many things to learn.”
Patricia is the Business Mentor and owner of Grow Vantage and a Past President of the Barrie Chamber of Commerce. She applies over 30 years of business experience (from start-up to corporate) to mentor entrepreneurs. Since 2011, she has held over 6,500 coaching and training sessions in-person and online. Through Ask For Directions Training, her entrepreneurial training program (and parent company Grow Vantage), and as a business coach, she works with start-ups who are new (or who have lost traction) to design, launch and grow their businesses. Along with 20 other expert instructors she teaches strategies in marketing, sales, communications, and finance, as well as practical techniques to increase productivity, and manage their businesses. In other words, everything entrepreneurs need to learn to grow and run their businesses successfully, and avoid the costly mistakes they can't even see coming - that lead to delays in growth and getting stuck.
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