I have written before about our exploitation of third-world medical systems, but a news report this week brought home to all Canadians how despicable this practice is. Added to that, our unwillingness to educate our own healthcare providers has contributed to the mess in our hospitals.
How Would We Feel?
What if you met a nice, friendly guy from, say, Denmark, and you asked him why he was in Canada, and he said, “I’m here to recruit doctors. Denmark has a great social safety net, a declining population, and we’re a desirable country to live in. We think there might be a lot of Canadian doctors who would like to relocate.”
To which most Canadians would respond indignantly, “But we need our doctors.”
And his appropriate response would be, “Well, it’s a free country. If they’re tired of working in your over-extended, under-funded, frenetic medical environment and want to move to Denmark, you can’t keep them here.”
But That’s Hypothetical
It was until this week, when it all became real. Doug Ford, bless his selfish little heart, just went on the news and invited medical personnel from other provinces to come and work in Ontario. He also promised to sweeten the pot by allowing for-profit clinics a bigger share of the pie. Colonial Capitalism at its finest.
Benefit Analysis
Will an element of for-profit medical service help the present shortage? Probably not much. Back when our problem was lack of facilities, it would have helped, because businesspeople would build clinics. Now, when our problem is shortage of personnel, all we’re doing is moving people from one part of the system to a more expensive area. Like cutting off one end of the rope and adding it to the other end. (And if you want to explore that metaphor, it’s a very bad idea because you end up with a shorter rope with a weak spot at the knot.)
Will stealing doctors and nurses from other provinces work? Definitely. For Ontario. Yes, there are people stupid and/or greedy enough to want to live in a province run by Doug Ford.
Two Solutions to a Shortage
- Produce more of whatever we need. This costs money, but it solves the problem for the long term.
- Cheap and easy: Free Enterprise. Shift more of the scarce product to wherever we are and shift the need and the suffering to somebody else. Works a charm!
The COVID Lesson
In the last three years we learned that if you sell off your research labs because it’s cheaper to buy from outside the country, then when you suddenly need research done, you must stand in line. The same applies to medical personnel (and a whole bunch of other skilled trades). It may sound cheaper to let other countries do the training and then scoop the workers, but in the long run it’s too dangerous. Outsourcing basic needs to other countries (like China) is sticking your head in the lion’s mouth.
An Odious Practice
We encourage developing countries to educate themselves and become civilized, and then we siphon off all the educated people, leaving them with a diluted gene pool and a poverty-stricken, uneducated lower class to run their government. Another lesson we learned during COVID was that if you suddenly give a poorly educated group of people a dose of power, they will probably not use it wisely.
The Bottom Line
It’s time Canada and the developed countries started pulling their own weight in the education of medical personnel, and stopped the odious game of stealing from the developing nations their most precious resource: their educated workers.
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