REGINA – Opposition parties refer to health care as the Saskatchewan New Democrat’s Achilles heel, but NDP leader Roy Romanow is brandishing the issue as though it were the party’s top weapon.
In the Regina launch to the NDP campaign, Romanow painted health-care reform, including the hospital closures, as a necessary step.
“Clearly it doesn’t take much to figure out that system could not sustain itself,” Romanow said. “If we had not acted it would have collapsed.”
A CBC public opinion poll, released just before the election call, showed health care to be the most important issue for most Saskatchewan residents.
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And although the NDP government has closed 52 acute-care rural hospitals, the poll also showed the NDP was the party most people trusted to protect medicare.
The Liberals and the Progressive Conservatives have a different view. PC leader Bill Boyd and Liberal leader Lynda Haverstock have said the Romanow government closed rural hospitals without consulting local people and ignored suggestions on how to save money and keep them open.
But neither would promise to reopen any of the closed hospitals.
Boyd said he would leave that decision to local health boards. Haverstock said:”we’re not saying let’s reverse the process …. We’re saying let’s do a full evaluation” before more changes are made.
Haverstock said any hospital closures under a Liberal government would only occur with the affected community’s agreement.
Romanow has capitalized the public trust of the NDP’s stewardship of medicare to suggest that if people have been upset by NDP changes, they would have been horrified by the changes the Tories and Liberals would have made.
That perception has Boyd and Haverstock taking pains to avoid references to health-care cuts. Haverstock wants to reduce government costs by 10 percent, but said the health department’s budget of $1.6 billion will not be cut.
And Boyd quickly backtracked on a statement that he would apply a five-percent cut to health care and to every other department. He later said he would cut a small amount from health care only if he could find “fat” to trim.
Meanwhile, Romanow, while championing health care, has avoided communities where hospitals have been closed.
