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Terence Corcoran: PM’s global tours abandon national crises

From health care to energy to interprovincial trade, Canada’s old order is failing

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It is likely no coincidence that Prime Minister Mark Carney announced three byelections upon his return to Canada from a three-nation grand tour to the other side of the planet where he once again bolstered his image as a big-time player on the diplomatic stage. The well-planned visits to Australia, India and Japan were overshadowed by Donald Trump’s war in Iran — at least until Carney had to issue a statement “with regret” that he had initially supported Trump’s military actions.

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The Liberals may have been hoping Carney’s global image will help with the byelections. Maintaining good diplomatic relations with other nations is important, but there’s another regrettable aspect to the PM’s frequent global excursions. Through most of his year as a wanderer, the Liberals have abandoned more crucial national issues. While Carney cutely tries to speak Japanese at a media event with Japan’s new prime minister, Canadians at home want answers to real questions.

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A trade deal with Japan might be desirable, but what about health care in Canada? Also hovering uncertainly over the Liberals are carbon and climate policies, interprovincial trade, the build-homes promise, federal deficits, taxes, and the Liberal  perspective on trade and relations with the United States.

Carney enjoys giving political lectures on the decline of “the old world order,” but has never acknowledged the precipitous decline of the old order in Canada’s health-care system established under the Canada Health Act. Under the act, health care in Canada becomes “medicare,” a complex regulatory and financial structure that all sides of the political spectrum today agree is malfunctioning at the expense of patients.

The dire state of Canadian medicare was described again this week in a new paper in the Canadian Journal of Emergency Medicine co-written by Dr. Alecs Chochinov, head of Emergency Medicine at the University of Manitoba. Thousands of Canadians are dying in emergency wards due to lack of care, and after the deaths the health-care system moves on without change. As Chochinov and his colleagues wrote, “A review is launched. A statement is issued. Regret is expressed, perhaps a policy adjusted. Then the system resumes its normal operation.”

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Proposed solutions are many. The system needs more funding, better information, reorganization, increased private service, and possibly a new Canada Health Act. Perhaps the most coherent long-term critic of the system has been Dr. Brian Day, who heads a private cardiac clinic in British Columbia.

As an advocate for private health care, Day argues in his 2025 book (My Fight for Canadian Healthcare: A Thirty-Year Battle to Put Patients First) that the approach of governments to reform  has become “a randomized mixed bag of arrogance, authoritarianism, hypocrisy, ignorance and, most of all, inertia.” The current crisis, he adds, threatens to create provincial bankruptcies and inflict “misery, pain and death on patients.” As evidence mounts of wait lists, overflowing emergency rooms and doctor shortages, Day’s predictions are already a daily reality.

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The message to PM Carney: Canada’s medical order is broken.

And so is Ottawa’s energy policy regime, now shrouded in uncertainty over oil and gas pipelines, electric vehicles, carbon emissions and taxes, the future of renewables and the feasibility of Carney’s great energy transition, a plan he routinely cites as if it were a no-problem objective. Ten years ago Carney warned that if companies did not get out of the oil and gas business, they would become owners of “stranded assets” and fall into bankruptcy.

Not much chance of that today given the growing demand for fossil fuels that still account for 81 per cent of global energy needs compared with 6.5 per cent for wind and solar. Some now say that wind and solar facilities are at greater risk of becoming stranded. A recent Barclays paper said the risk comes from the failure of countries to expand electrical grids to meet green supply. “Historically, stranding meant coal plants. Today, renewables facing multi-year interconnection queues, curtailment, and congestion risks are increasingly likely to be impaired.” It’s a risk for Canada, recognized in a recent “groundbreaking” but very general “memorandum of understanding” among provinces to build a national electrical grid.

Still unresolved are government regulatory and financing plans for electric vehicle imports and production, battery plants and critical minerals development. Many plans have gone astray, although Ottawa and Ontario have reached a pact for one-track regulatory approval to accelerate the decades-long Northern Ontario Ring of Fire mineral development. But projects that involve fossil fuels, such as pipelines for oil and liquified natural gas, require multiple layers of political and economic agreement to overcome environmental and financial obstacles.

Where do Carney and his Liberals, committed to the energy transition away from fossil fuels, stand on policies that are now complicated by the emerging military and economic crisis surrounding Iran? Ottawa is also silent on whether it will support continuation of the supply management regulations and the existence of interprovincial trade barriers that raise prices for consumers and are a major economic loss to the country. A recent IMF paper estimated that removing interprovincial trade barriers would boost Canada’s economy by about seven per cent per year, or $210 billion.

So welcome back home, Mr. Prime Minister, before you leave for Norway. What are your plans for Canada?

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