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Myth 1: Did Harris cut health care funding? Fact: The Mike Harris Progressive Conservative governments reallocated money within the health care system, but never cut funding one year to the next. For a quick end to this discussion, the graph below is from the Ontario Ministry of Finance including the figures from the Ontario Liberal Budget of 2004. Even the Liberal authors demonstrate that Harris never cut health care funding.
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Myth 2: Harris closed 28 (or 40 depending on the tale teller) hospitals. Fact: Harris rationalized hospitals and hospital administration. He “closed” some old out of date hospitals and replaced them with modern state-of-the-art new ones and merged many administratively. If, as the Liberals did in St. Catharines, Harris closed two in a community, he usually built a new one to replace it. His opponents never cared to talk about the new hospitals. Also, with the help of the independent Health Services Restructuring Commission, Harris took three separate hospitals, each their own corporation, and put them under the umbrella of one hospital corporation – because the old corporations on paper ceased to exist, his detractors chalked up it up as three closed hospitals. The hospitals were all still there and operating normally, but under new names.
As one health care consultant noted, “Premier Harris appointed an Independent Commission that made recommendations to his government on how to make hospitals more effective and efficient. There was no closing of hospitals but amalgamations of corporations in the same city. These amalgamations have worked very well for most regions that undertook the commission’s recommendations. It made the delivery of health care more effective and that is a positive legacy of the Harris government. In fact, these amalgamations have continued on with many hospitals in Toronto, Hamilton, London and Kingston choosing to follow the model”.
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Myth 3: Did Harris fire 6,000 nurses? When Harris came to office in 1995, there was a predominant hospital issue in Ontario known as ‘bed blockers’. This term mainly referred to the thousands of elderly people who were too frail to go home but not sick enough to be in an acute care hospital. There were many health care professionals having to look after these folks in hospitals. Acting on health care professional’s advice; Harris took money from hospital budgets and put it into home care budgets. There were dramatic increases in home care services and the elderly left the hospital beds, went home, and started to receive home care from nurses who were moved from the hospital system to the home care system. According to critics, any nurse who changed employers or job description was calculated as having been fired by old Harris himself.
“Nurses were not fired, they moved from one corporation to the new corporation and got severance with the notice and were rehired immediately by the new corporations. The government does not hire or fire nurses nor do they set their salaries. Only independent hospitals can to this as they are not-for-profit organizations,” explained the consultant.
