This is the fifth in a series of opinion columns on the 2022 Ontario provincial election, written by Josh Lieblein for The CJN.
When I’m not trying to entertain you fine folks with my political stories, or accumulating new ones, I’m engaged in the respectable business of providing health care to those who need it.
Separating my professional and political lives doesn’t just protect my employers from embarrassment. It also means that I, unlike most politicos, don’t have to sell my soul to a party or candidate just so I know where my next meal is coming from.
It’s not like I have much of a choice, though. Even in these fraught pandemic times, where politics seems to have crept into everything, there’s a not-so-subtle pressure on health-care professionals to stay above the fray—at least publicly.
Sure, you occasionally encounter someone in the medical field who will invoke their status as the descendant of Holocaust survivors to make a point. And those people might even get a flurry of supportive messages in response. But the vast majority of these workers aren’t going to organize and march on Queen’s Park just because of a few trending tweets.
I found this out during my student days when, months before I was to write my licensing exams, the provincial government did what it does every few years. They picked one of the many regulated professions, enacted the barest minimum of consultation, and then changed how things were going to be done in a way that made things harder for front-line workers.
Health professionals tend to assume that they will come out on top in these scrimmages because their patients trust them, and don’t trust the government.
But the government knows a few things that the health professionals don’t.
Importantly, the politicians have much better messaging discipline, and more time, than the white coats—who, I must remind you, have to occasionally take a break from politics and save lives.
They’ve also got a bunch of supportive stakeholder groups who they can count on to take their side.
And, even more importantly, they’re only accountable to the public during an election, whereas the health care professionals have to be accountable every day. If your patient likes Party X, and Party X is currently messing with your ability to care for people, there’s a non-zero chance your patient will blame you instead of Party X for any decrease in quality of care.
My fellow students didn’t know any of this as we drove across the province in May 2010, during Dalton McGuinty’s second term as Liberal premier, for a tour organized by a strategist affiliated with the Ontario PCs.
(Due to my political experiences, I was the only one who recognized any possible sign of these ties.)
We got all the pizza and snacks we could eat. We played all the Mario Kart the bus wi-fi could handle. And when we pulled into Belleville or Brantford or Peterborough or any other city in a target riding, we spent a few hours walking about the streets in our gear—dropping off flyers, waving handmade signs, and yelling, “Stop the cuts!”
It was a pretty sweet deal. But, as that same strategist admitted to me—during a break in Yom Kippur services later that year—most of the patients/voters didn’t see it that way. They just saw a bunch of noisy kids goofing off and engaging in politics, who probably should’ve been studying instead.
It was a tough lesson, but a true one: the people expect you to serve everyone, not just the ones whom you agree with politically. This holds just as true today, as the so-called “doctatorship“ runs up against opposition from the anti-mandates minority.
Josh Lieblein can be reached at [email protected] for your response to Doorstep Postings.
