The announcement that hundreds of jobs will be cut at the Public Health Agency of Canada confirms the worst fears: this government is willing to attack our health to build up the military-industrial complex. This reckless decision from Mark Carney and Health Minister Marjorie Michel will have real life or death consequences for Canadians
“If the last public health emergency taught us anything, it’s that we need to be ready to deal with the unexpected,” said Nathan Prier, president of the Canadian Association of Professional Employees. “Instead, we’re ramping up military spending to appease an unstable U.S. president. This government is ignoring recent history and the current state of our health system, which is in an outright existential crisis.”
The impacts of Donald Trump and Elon Musk’s massive cuts to health programs in the United States, including the Centers for Disease Control and National Institutes of Health, are already being felt globally. Canada should be ramping up its public health work, but instead we’re throwing away critical institutional talent and memory.
This isn’t the first time that the federal Liberal Party has launched an attack on the health of Canadians. The 1995 budget of Jean Chrétien and Paul Martin gutted health funding, along with housing and postsecondary education funding. We’re still living in the crises those cuts triggered today.
Mark Carney’s government continues to push the lie that public sector workers caused the deficit – in fact, we spend less proportionally now than we did under Stephen Harper on public sector workers. The truth of public sector work is that skeleton crews are desperately trying to keep critical programs and services running and are burning out fast while programs and services get worse. Just this week, cuts at the Canada Revenue Agency had to be reversed after public complaints that the agency was understaffed.
The government needs to rein in the optics and get serious about real waste in government operations: stop outsourcing work to pricey foreign contractors, cut down on management bloat, and grant public servants remote work rights so we can save billions in unnecessary annual office costs.
Eliminating public health services and programs means we’re caving to Donald Trump. Defending Canada and Canadians means investing in their health and the workers who know how to get the job done.
