Ready or not, a new debate about the future of health care has begun

In a year-end interview with the CBC’s Rosemary Barton last month, the prime minister restated his view that a “long-term conversation about increasing funding to health care” should happen “when the pandemic’s over.”

A few weeks later, with the Omicron variant spreading fast, it’s even harder to know when that conversation should start.

But an unofficial debate about health care in Canada is already taking shape — between demands for more public funding on one side and calls for a “greater role for private health care delivery” on the other.

With the highly contagious Omicron variant and a sizeable population of unvaccinated Canadians