Foreigners, private health care and the annoyed auditor: fed politics this week

OTTAWA – Outrage was the predominant tone on Parliament Hill this week, despite the omnipresent Christmas decorations with their messages of peace on earth.

The chief of the defence staff, Jonathan Vance, headed up the anger parade on Monday, lashing out at his own rank and file after Statistics Canada released an update on sexual assault in the Forces showing that almost 1,000 men and women were victimized over the space of a year — double the average in the general population.

The acrimony spread to environmentalists and opposition parties on Tuesday when Prime Minister Justin Trudeau announced he would approve the twinning of the Kinder Morgan pipeline through a Vancouver suburb.

On Thursday, the House boiled over when Democratic Reform Minister Maryam Monsef not only rejected the tortuous findings of an all-party committee on changing the electoral system, but accused the MPs on the committee of not doing their job. On Friday, she apologized.

Beyond the noise and big headlines, there were concrete revelations on overheated housing markets, privatizing health care, and a persistent lack of drive and direction within the federal government. Here’s how politics touched Canadians this week:

FOOTLOOSE FOREIGNERS

The head of Canada’s housing agency is telling Canadians to ease up on blaming foreigners for sky-high housing prices, especially in Vancouver.

Evan Siddall, the president of the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corp., said this week that offshore buyers are actually not a major factor driving unaffordability, and warned Canadians against scapegoating an easy target. Rather, home-grown forces — low interest rates, a growing population, rising incomes and a shortage of new housing in key markets — are mostly to blame.

Does government policy match his analysis? In British Columbia, where the housing bubble is most pronounced, the provincial government slapped a 15-per-cent tax on foreign buyers. Ontario rejected that approach and recently took steps to make first-time home-buying more affordable. At the federal level, a bundle of measures earlier this fall partly targeted foreign buyers but focused primarily on excessive domestic borrowing and lending.

A separate report this week, from former environment commissioner Scott Vaughan, warned that Canada’s economy is far too dependent on oil, gas and real estate for its wealth.

HEALTH CARE HARDBALL

Health Minister Jane Philpott has sent another threatening letter to a province experimenting with private health care services. This time, Saskatchewan was in her sights. The letter, which became public early this week, warned the province to stop using private MRIs and CT scans because it is breaking the Canada Health Act rule that provinces must pay for all medically necessary services.

If Saskatchewan doesn’t back down, Philpott suggested the province could face a clawing back of some of the federal transfer money it receives.

It’s the second such letter to be made public this fall. In September, Philpott chided Quebec for its user-fee system.

The letters come at a delicate time in federal-provincial talks over health care. The provinces want Ottawa to agree to cancel scheduled decreases in the rate of transfer payments; Ottawa, in turn, would rather dedicate money to specific areas of health care such as home care and perhaps mental health. The impasse is nasty and could taint next week’s climate-oriented first ministers meeting in Ottawa with Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.

FED-UP AUDITOR

Michael Ferguson has been in the auditor general’s job in Ottawa for five years now, and clearly he is fed up. He used his fall report on government activity this week to chastise the feds for repeatedly focusing on arcane process and procedure, while neglecting to make sure their programs were actually delivering results to the people they were meant to help.

Ferguson has a sympathetic ear in the Trudeau government. The prime minister has made a show of embracing “deliverology” — setting up systems within the bureaucracy to define specific policy outcomes and then measure results.

But the auditor general does not point to any signs of the system getting better, and in some cases, he said it’s getting worse. Departments take too long to deliver results, public reporting is shoddy, departments can’t show value for money, and they too often develop processes that are incomprehensible for regular people, Ferguson complained.