Conservatives axe health network
Carol Goar
This is how a nation's social
infrastructure is dismantled.
First, the Conservatives
cancelled the child-care agreements the Liberals had signed with the provinces.
Next, they gutted the Kelowna Accord, the $5.1
billion federal-provincial agreement to tackle aboriginal poverty. Now they're
scrapping another piece of Liberal handiwork.
Effective
For the past eight years, it
has provided citizens and medical professionals with a reliable, non-commercial
source of online information about how to stay healthy and prevent disease.
Although the website
(www.canadian-health-network.ca) is managed by the Winnipeg-based Public Health
Agency of Canada, it is a collaboration of 26 organizations – government
departments, universities, hospitals, libraries and non-profit health providers
– who draw on 1,600 specialists across the country.
Nothing quite like it exists
anywhere in the world. The closest approximation is
Two weeks ago, Catherine
Drew, executive director of the Canadian Health Network, notified the 26 member
agencies that the program would be eliminated at the end of the fiscal year.
Most of the participants were
shocked. A few had been picking up trouble signals – funding delays and
bureaucratic dithering.
The only explanation Drew
provided was that the Public Health Agency had been ordered to cut its
grants and contributions to outside groups by $16.7 million and it had
reluctantly decided to pull the plug on the network.
"Why would the
government choose to cut this program when it has a surplus?" asked Connie
Clement, executive director of the Ontario Prevention Clearinghouse, one of the
network's affiliates. "Where does it put the question of partnerships
between the government and the non-profit sector?"
Four or five years ago, such
a move might have been understandable. The Canadian Health Network got off to a
slow start. During its developmental stages, few people knew what it was or how
it worked.
But lately, its website has
been getting 380,000 hits a month, 40 per cent of them health-care
professionals. In the last year alone, its usage has increased by 70 per cent.
It has established a reputation as a trustworthy portal in a cyberworld of drug manufacturers, health-care conglomerates
and self-promoting quacks.
Shutting down the network was
a "very difficult decision," said Alain Desroches
of the Public Health Agency. "The agency will continue to look for
effective and innovative ways to provide Canadians with high quality, credible
information through other means."
In fact, Health Minister Tony
Clement launched a new website, www.healthycanadians.gc.ca, in October, to provide
users with information about all of the government's programs – its children's
fitness tax credit, its revised Canada Food Guide, its toy safety tips, its
latest product recalls and its healthy pregnancy guide – designed to promote an
active, well-balanced lifestyle.
There's certainly nothing
wrong with centralizing all of
What's missing from the new
database is any reference to the links between health and the environment,
disease and poverty, or violence and gun control. Nor does it touch sensitive
topics such as abortion, genetically modified foods or sexual abuse. It
completely overlooks mental illness.
In contrast, the Canadian
Health Network is all-encompassing. It looks at controversial questions from
all sides. It is constantly updated as new knowledge becomes available.
Losing the program won't be
the end of the world. Canadians will find other useful websites such as
MedlinePlus.gov run by the National Institutes of Health in the
But the idea of a
comprehensive, national database, built and maintained by the best people in
their fields will wither.
The belief that Canadians can
work together, with the government providing a common forum, will wane.
A promising experiment will
die.
And the government will look
for another non-essential program to cut.