I was not surprised to see Premier Doug Ford put out a folksy video encouraging Ontarians to find alternative Ontario-based sources to purchase alcohol now that the LCBO workers have indeed gone on strike. I was surprised that anyone would find Ford’s video surprising. It’s actually shocking, come to think of it, that Ford doesn’t do more of his public announcements wearing an apron while working the grill in his backyard. It might not be peak Ford — what that would even look like is too terrible a thing to contemplate — but the recent booze video has got to at least hit a seven or eight on the Folks O’Metre. He lives for that kind of thing, and, the hell of it is, he’s good at it. It’s why he’s won two majorities.
So, yeah, no surprises on that front. And no real objection from me, either. I’ll also be showcasing the work of some small Ontario-based booze businesses soon. The strike, though horrible for the LCBO’s workers, is undeniably an opportunity for independent Ontario businesses to boost their own profile. They can and should. It’s not wrong for Ford to give those businesses a boost at a moment when they might need it and when the customers they need may be unusually willing to listen to their sales pitch.
What was a bit surprising was some of the pushback to Ford’s video. There was always going to be pushback to the video; there’s pushback to anything Ford does. But the specific pushback I saw making the sounds on social media was that, instead of giving Ontarians a map showing us where to find booze, Ford should be showing us a map of where to find family doctors.
And that’s … weird. And wrong. It misstates both problems: the problem of the LCBO strike and the problem of our failing health-care system.
They aren’t just different problems (obviously). They are fundamentally different kinds of problems. We have enough booze. Distribution is the current problem, not a booze shortage. We do not have enough family doctors. This is a wildly different thing, and we don’t do ourselves any favours seeking cheap political points by pretending they are the same.
Again, let’s be explicit about this: Ontarians who are struggling to access booze today are not victims of a booze shortage. They are victims of a disruption to the province’s alcohol-importation and -distribution system, including the closing of the LCBO’s retail outlets. But the booze exists. It’s still being made. We just can’t access it, either because it’s not being imported or because your local LCBO outlet is no longer open for shopping.
This is not the problem we have with family doctors in this province or with health-care services generally. There is not some stockpile of family doctors or diagnostic specialists or imaging experts or nurses who are just sitting around idle in their scrubs, and Ontarians somehow cannot find them. We don’t have enough trained people to meet the demand for patient care. This is a completely different problem, and we need to be clear about that. We are not a handy map app away from solving our problems with family doctor shortages. We are thousands of family doctors away from solving (or not solving) that problem. I’ve written about this before, but right now, about 2 million Ontarians don’t have access to a family doctor, and that’s a catastrophe, but that number is set to double in the next few years. Almost a third of the population won’t have access to a doctor. That’s astonishing.
A map can’t fix that. In fact, anyone with real-world experience knows it’s very much the opposite: a family doctor who can take on additional patients is exceptionally valuable, and word spreads fast all on its own. Recently, a relative of mine finally scored a family doctor within a reasonable distance of her home because she heard about it via a local community Facebook post. A new clinic had opened to serve a busy Toronto community, and it didn’t need to do any advertising. It just let locals share the good news via social media. The new clinic’s doctors were fully committed to grateful new patients in a matter of days.
If you want to be angry at Ford for seeming not to care that the LCBO is on strike, well, sure. That’s fine and fair. (I also suspect that the map video was very deliberate messaging on his part and that anyone offended is not the target audience, but still.) Also, if you want to be angry at Ford for being premier while the health-care system goes into a sustained slo-mo collapse, that is also fine and fair. Indeed, I’d say it’s necessary.
But I’d add this: be angry about the right things. The problem we have in Ontario is that we don’t have enough doctors practising family medicine. We don’t have enough nurses. We don’t have enough support staff and PSWs to keep our LTCs and community-care system functioning. We don’t have enough staff to operate the brick-and-mortar facilities that we already have open and functioning. That’s why they keep closing — if we’re lucky, only temporarily.
This is a big problem. It’s a crucial, life-and-death problem, and Ontario is now in a race for talent (or to the bottom, alas) with other jurisdictions that also don’t have enough people. This is a problem we should remain focused on. Let’s not get distracted by booze maps.
Correction: A previous version of this article incorrectly stated that Doug Ford recorded a recent video at his cottage. In fact, it was recorded in his backyard. TVO Today regrets the error.
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