One Party, Two Standards

Aaron Derfel's story in The Gazette shows Montreal to be the country's "mecca of private health." It confirms what many suspected, and Ottawa has refused to recognise. During the last election, Paul Martin declared himself the defender of medicare against the brutes from Alberta (Harper and Klein). Even "Landslide Annie" got into the fight. Ralph Klein was threatened with the withholding of millions in transfer payments if Alberta violated the Canada Health Act.

As a doctor from BC points out: "The federal government and (Prime Minister) Paul Martin will never hit on Quebec in the way that he will hit on Alberta and British Columbia."

Derfel's piece recounts instances of all sorts of different colours and sizes, which if they were taking place in Alberta they would be denouced as gross violations of the Health Act. But the defender of medicare is absent from the scene.

"The federal government and (Prime Minister) Paul Martin will never hit on Quebec in the way that he will hit on Alberta and British Columbia."

Montreal is home to probably the country's only truly private orthopedic hospital, where patients pay up to $12,000 for a hip or knee replacement - surgery requiring overnight stays and a 10-day convalescence.

The Duval Orthopedic Clinic is a hospital on two sites - in north-end Montreal, where Dr. Nicolas Duval performs the operations at a private plastic-surgery centre, and in Laval, where patients recover in a former nursing home.

Duval has opted out of medicare and his hospital receives no government funding. In contrast, the Cambie Surgery Centre in Vancouver, where Day works, carries out partial knee replacements but the surgeons there still bill medicare.

Montreal is also home to Canada's first private emergency clinic. Since opening in October, the MD Plus Medical Clinic has tended to nearly 500 paying customers. About 30 per cent of the cases are emergencies - from patients complaining of chest pain to a woman with flesh-eating disease

Private MRI clinics have existed in the Montreal area since 1992, and, despite proliferating, have not reduced waiting lists in hospitals. That might be because the radiologists in these facilities also practise in the public system. They have more of an incentive to do the scans privately.