NDP Help Liberals Kick Pharmacare Can Further Down the Road

A national pharmacare plan is one of those countless empty promises the Liberal Party of Canada has been making for decades. Only a fool would believe any pledge from the Liberals to enact a national pharmacare plan worthy of the name. So of course, that’s exactly what NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh did when he signed the “confidence-and-supply” agreement to support the Liberal government until 2025. One of the core aspects of that agreement was to pass a Canada Pharmacare Act in 2023 setting up a framework for a national drug plan. Even that promise was vague, giving plenty of room for the Liberals to weasel their way out of anything concrete.

Nevertheless, that low bar was too high for Justin Trudeau’s government to meet. The word “pharmacare” did not appear once in the government’s 2023-4 budget. Now Parliament is closing up shop for 2023, and the government has failed to so much as table a Canada Pharmacare Act. Remember that the NDP only pledged to support the Liberal minority government so long as the latter kept the terms of the confidence-and-supply deal. On the basis of that agreement—itself a horrible deal, where the NDP agreed to support the Liberals for what former prime minister Stephen Harper accurately described as “nothing”—the NDP would be more than justified in withdrawing support and bringing down Trudeau’s government.

Luckily for Trudeau, Singh and the NDP bureaucracy are too spineless to hold the Liberals to their transparently empty words. The Liberals and NDP announced today they have agreed to a new deadline to table a Canada Pharmacare Act: March 1, 2024.

NDP galaxy brains will try to argue this is some brilliant four-dimensional chess move by Singh. To the rest of us, it looks like precisely what it is: abject political cowardice. The Liberals broke the conditions of the deal by which the NDP agreed to support their government, yet the NDP continues to support that government. Whenever Liberals finally table a Canada Pharmacare Act—which may or may not be before pigs fly—if you think it will be anything but a half-assed con job full of loopholes, I have some buildings on Parliament Hill to sell you. After all, that’s what the Liberals did with their so-called “anti-scab” legislation—another condition of the confidence-and-supply agreement—which was full of loopholes for the bosses and took power away from rank-and-file workers.

This is what Liberals do. They lie. They make false promises. They provide the illusion of reform to give a progressive veneer to the naked class dictatorship of Canadian capitalism. The NDP are trying to help the Liberals sell that illusion. But the electorate isn’t buying it. Anyone outside Singh’s bubble sees how ridiculous his support for the Trudeau government makes him look any time he tries to criticize that same government. By chaining itself to the status quo and taking responsibility for unpopular Liberal policies determined by big business, the NDP has only boosted support for Pierre Poilievre’s Conservatives, absurdly allowing the reactionary Poilievre to pose as “anti-establishment”.

The ineffectual policies of the NDP leadership flow directly from their reformist outlook. Unable to break from capitalism and put forward a socialist program, they try to present themselves as better managers of capitalism, a system no longer able to offer real reforms. If the NDP had supported only bills that benefit the working class and pushed for bold policies such as universal, free pharmacare now, they might have channeled the growing anger of Canadians against the political establishment. Sadly, by continuing to support an unpopular government that doesn’t fulfill promises their support was based on, the NDP ensures that the main political beneficiaries of Liberal failures will continue to be the Poilievre Conservatives.