“To increase surgery capacities, we will … contract with private surgical clinics that agree to follow the Canada Health Act,” says BC Health Minister Adrian Dix.

It’s hard to believe BC’s Health Minister, Adrian Dix, is part of the same government fighting Dr. Brian Day and our patient plaintiffs in court. The minister made these comments in addressing the issue of the ever increasing backlogs to surgery wait lists due to the COVID-19 pandemic. As our supporters know, our provincial government healthcare systems are not equipped to handle the demand of patients normally, let alone during a global health crisis. This is why Canadians should have the right to access private alternatives.

Read more in Ian Mulgrew’s latest article.

The unexpected public health crisis brought on by COVID-19, is quite fairly dominating the news cycle of the world at the moment. What does this mean for us fighting for more freedom and better outcomes in Canadian healthcare? The Nobel-prize winning economist Milton Friedman once said: “Only a crisis – actual or perceived – produces real change. When that crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around. That, I believe, is our basic function: to develop alternatives to existing policies, to keep them alive and available until the politically impossible becomes the politically inevitable.” The Canadian Constitution Foundation’s team was reminded of this quote in reading a recent opinion piece in the Financial Post by Gwyn Morgan on our healthcare systems’ response to this crisis. Canadians should always be fighting to do better, and we should be keeping this in mind even in times of crisis.

We depend on the generous support of Canadians to keep the fight for patient rights going. Please consider donating today. The initial trial in BC has ended, but we expect an appeal in BC regardless of the court’s decision and any money given now will help us pay for future legal fees.

The marathon trial for healthcare freedom and patient choice in the Supreme Court of British Columbia has finally ended. After years of delays, caused in large part by the government’s lawyers, the patient plaintiffs and the Cambie Surgery Centre had their case heard in court. At no point did the opposing government lawyers introduced any hard evidence or data to show that private clinics operating in BC for decades have caused harm to the province’s public healthcare system. We expect a decision that will recognize the Charter right of Canadians to seek private healthcare when they’re left suffering on a waiting list.

Read more in Ian Mulgrew’s latest here.

As mentioned before, we fully expect this case to make its way to the Supreme Court of Canada. Any donations made now will help us on our way to get the rights of all Canadian patients recognized in all of Canada and by all levels of government.

Happy New Year! The fight for Canadian governments to recognize the right of all Canadians to seek out healthcare continues into the new decade. The case’s final closing arguments will be made the week of February 24th in Vancouver, following which we expect up to a year for a judgment to be rendered by the court.

Today we’d like to share with you a new report released yesterday by the Fraser Institute called Understanding Universal Health Care Reform Options: Private Insurance. In this report, the researchers found that among 17 high-income countries with public healthcare, only Canada has laws prohibiting private health insurance for medically necessary treatment. The report also highlights that among those countries, Canada has the longest waiting lists for medically necessary treatment.

Canada’s lackluster health outcomes have been reported in reports we have shared to our supporters previously (e.g. Commonwealth Fund, 2017). This is precisely why the CCF has taken up this fight for patient rights. It’s simply absurd that Canada—and Canada alone—prevents its citizens from fully exercising their fundamental right to seek out healthcare. Please consider supporting this case. We fully expect this case to make its way to the Supreme Court of Canada, so any donations made now will still help us pay the legal fees in the subsequent stages of this important project for healthcare choice and freedom.

The Canadian Constitution Foundation will be appealing the recent decision by the Supreme Court of BC in our case to find out how much money the Government of BC has spent trying to fight Cambie Surgery Centre and the patient plaintiffs in our Healthcare Freedom case. The CCF will be filing our factum before the end of the year before a hearing date is set to continue with this fight for information the public should have access to.

In a case about healthcare rationing and waiting lists, we believe British Columbians should be able to know how much money their government has spent paying for lawyers to use delay tactic after delay tactic in the hopes of exhausting the plaintiffs.

Healthcare Freedom Case Update

Cambie Surgery Centre and the patient plaintiffs have submitted their final arguments. The oral argument for these submissions begin on November 18 and will go for about three weeks.

You can download and read the plaintiffs’ final argument here.

After successfully halting the enforcement of new fines against clinics that have been serving patients in BC for decades, the Government of BC is once again employing procedural delay tactics to fight our Charter challenge by demanding our team subject them to a contempt motion in order to get them to stop sending compliance letters to clinics demanding the payment of said fines. In other words, after our team managed to get an injunction against the fines, the Government is still threatening physicians who perform medically necessary surgeries privately that they may lose their surgical privileges in public hospitals! This is an outrageous move, and yet another ridiculous process our team would have to go through and pay for in order to stop these letters.

We will provide a follow-up to this development soon. In the meantime, you can read about this on CBC. And you can find this motion injunction decision on this issue here as well.

Our healthcare freedom case continues. Just as the Crown’s lawyers have used delay tactics to waste the time of the patient plaintiffs—and the money of taxpayers—these last few years, the Crown wasted more time this last week by bringing in experts who proceeded to admit to the Court that they were in fact not experts on BC’s healthcare system or on the Medicare Protection Act being challenged in this case.

This is appallingly wasteful behaviour for the Government of British Columbia in a case about patients left suffering on waiting lists, to say the least. This is especially the case when it is considered with their other efforts to hide their costs of this marathon legal process.

Read more in Ian Mulgrew’s latest article here.

Our healthcare freedom case for patient rights resumed again this Monday. As revealed by sworn statements by surgeons working in BC, the lack of operating time being rationed has not been able to keep up with what is needed for suffering patients.

As Pamela Fayerman reports:

…He used to tell patients they’d get their surgery in 2.5 years. Now [Doctor] Javer, the head of the St. Paul’s Sinus Centre and co-director of ear, nose and throat research at UBC, says he has to tell them the waiting time has gone up to four years.

Read more about this newly presented evidence in the Vancouver Sun here. And please consider donating to this case using the button below to fight for the right of all patients to seek out medical care in the private sector when they’re left suffering on a government waiting list.