Yesterday in the legislature we debated Bill 20: Medicare Protection Amendment Act, 2019 at second reading. This bill eliminates the collection and payment of MSP premiums through several sectional repeals of the Medicare Protection Act. The bill also requires the commission to notify a beneficiary when their enrollment is being canceled. The bill introduces transitional provisions to allow the commission to collect outstanding premium debt.

As you will see from my second reading speech, reproduced in video and text below, MSP premiums have existed in British Columbia in one form or another since 1968. Successive NDP, Socred and BC Liberal governments retained or increased this form of regressive taxation for more than 50 years. It wasn’t until the BC Greens made this an issue in 2015 that the BC NDP and BC Liberals could not ignore that action was taken.

I am sincerely grateful to the seniors at the Monterey Centre in Oak Bay who brought this issue to my attention in 2014. As a consequence I initiated a campaign to eliminate the MSP in January 2015. Over the following two years I raised the issue numerous times in the Legislature including tabling a petition with over 65,000 signature on it, responding to myriad emails, and encouraging British Columbians to contact their local MLA to raise awareness on the issue.

In the end, all three parties agreed to move towards the elimination of MSP in the 2017 election campaign. No party could afford to ignore the regressive nature of this form of taxation in light of the widespread attention British Columbians were now giving it. Further details are provided in the speech below.

Video of Speech

Text of Speech

A. Weaver: It gives me great pleasure to rise and stand and speak in support of Bill 20, the Medicare Protection Amendment Act, 2019. This bill enables the elimination of the regressive approach to MSP premiums in the province of British Columbia.

I’d like to start by correcting history, because history is often overlooked. A lot of people are trying to take credit for what’s going on with MSP reform today. I can tell you that MSPs were introduced in British Columbia in 1968. That’s 51 years ago. Successive Socred governments, Liberal governments, NDP governments have come and gone, and each and every government has done nothing to eliminate MSPs. Not once.

It wasn’t until the mid-2000s that this form, this approach, this regressive approach, was turned into a form of indirect taxation, through the B.C. Liberals, a one-size-fits-all approach to taxation. In essence, a head tax, a head tax that led to rather myriad issues.

This issue became front and centre in British Columbia in January of 2015, an issue that the B.C. Green Party brought to the Legislature in January of 2015, with a call for the elimination of MSPs. Both the official opposition at the time and the government at the time will recall I introduced a petition with 65,721 signatures on it that was put together by Michelle Coulter, from Ucluelet.

I introduced another petition of about 7,000 names who contacted the B.C. Green Party. I also proposed at that time an alternate means of actually eliminating the MSP that maintained the revenue. It was at that time that overwhelming public support started pressuring the B.C. Liberal government at the time, and the NDP opposition jumped on it.

So as people reflect upon this historic event today, I would suggest to them that they should look no further than the influence of the B.C. Green caucus on government policy to get us to the elimination of MSPs when, as a single MLA sitting in this House in 2015-2016, we as a group turned this into a provincial election issue and had people fighting over themselves trying to determine who would eliminate it first.

I say that again with sincerity and by pointing to the history. So 1968 was when we introduced MSP premiums in British Columbia. The very progressive Barrett government of the 1970s didn’t touch MSP premiums. The Liberal and Socred governments thereafter didn’t touch…. I daren’t even say this, because I’m so sick and tired of hearing about the 1990s, but nevertheless, in the 1990s, another NDP government didn’t eliminate MSP premiums.

Those last 16 years that we’ve heard so often didn’t eliminate MSP premiums. But I would suggest that it was in those last 16 years that, actually, public pressure and public concern rose. The reason why is people started to recognize that this was tax creep. It was tax creep happening in a truly regressive fashion, in a one-size-fits-all fashion. Whether you earned $3 million a year or $30,000 a year, you were paying the same premium.

What we proposed, what the B.C. Greens proposed in 2015, was a different way of looking at the funding of the premium, a funding that mirrored what goes on now presently in Ontario. While we applaud that the government has eliminated MSP, we would not have done it this way. We would not have done it this way, because the way the government has chosen is to singularly pass that cost on through an employer health premium.

Now I recognize, and we support the notion, that there was room to grow the employer health premium in British Columbia, as we were by far the lowest employer health premium in terms of employee paying in the country — the payroll tax, in essence. However, the approach we took is that we believe it’s important to place a value on a service, but that value should actually reflect your ability to pay.

We had proposed a measure that followed and mirrored what is done in Ontario, where each and every person in Ontario has an item called an Ontario health care premium. That’s a progressive amount, much akin to what we see in employment insurance and the Canada Pension Plan. You have a third line. It’s called Ontario health premium, which, for low income, is precisely zero dollars, and if you earn over $200,900, I think it is, you pay something like $900 a year — a progressive amount. So there is a value to the health care services — a small cost, based on your ability to pay — which ensures, then, that revenue comes in, but in a progressive fashion. That was our approach.

That was an approach that would have actually not led to the double-dipping situation we have for this single fiscal year. It’s an approach that would have also recognized that across British Columbia, there are many collective agreements where the signing of those agreements has actually included costed benefits, which is the employer paying the medical services premiums. That’s a costed settlement against an agreement that a union, a collective bargaining unit, has actually costed against the salary settlement.

Now, unfortunately, through the elimination of the MSP premium, what has happened is that costed settlement against past settlements is now vaporized. So those benefits, which were accrued and negotiated away by unions from north to south and east to west…. They now can look back and say to their union members: “We have lost that ability to negotiate for that thousand or whatever dollars a year that was coming off.”

I’m actually quite shocked that the NDP decided to choose this approach, because they have thrown under the bus, in essence, every single member of a labour union in the province of British Columbia that had a negotiated settlement that included the medical services premium being costed against that settlement in terms of the actual past negotiations. That’s, in essence, something like $1,000 that has come off each worker’s costed rights. The unions in British Columbia should be up in arms over the NDP approach, because now that costed benefit has vaporized.

Those previous salary settlements could have had that extra amount that was costed to pay the premium added to salary and other benefits. I’m surprised, honestly. I’m surprised that we haven’t heard protests from the unions. Well, maybe not, in light of some of the other kinds of things we’ve seen in areas where they’ve been given…. But that, to me, is quite remarkable.

That progressive approach would have avoided many of the problems that we see with the implementation, particularly for this year. It is this year that there’s a problem with the double-dipping. It would have recognized the costed settlements that were in place with existing collective agreements. It would have respected that amount, moving forward, by allowing members who gave up that money, gave up that in a negotiation, the right to have that come back to their actual negotiated package.

You know, in 2001 and 2002, the B.C. Liberals rose the MSP premium something like 50 percent. Then they froze it for six years, and then again, in 2009 and 2010, they started to increase it again, 4 to 5 percent each year, until 2015. By 2017, all categories of MSP premiums — individuals, families of two, families of more than two — had doubled since the B.C. Liberals took office in 2001. That started to create dissent within the broader public in British Columbia — the sense that there was an unfairness, which is why we had so much support for this initiative that we took on in 2015. As I mentioned, 65,721 signatures were on a petition put forward by Michelle Coulter that I brought to this Legislature. I believe I introduced that in 2016.

It was an issue that I know there wasn’t a single MLA in this room that did not receive many thousands of emails on, from chain emails across the province.

I’m glad that government today and the opposition at the time, and the Greens, in the election campaign, were all climbing over ourselves to say who would eliminate MSP premiums first. I don’t think…. In fact, one of the moments in the 2017 leaders’ debate I thought was quite a fine moment, from my perspective — selfishly, he says — was when I asked the now Premier: “So let me get this right. In your campaigning for MSPs, what you’re planning…. You have a plan to develop a plan to come up with a plan.” That was the NDP approach. And he agreed, remarkably.

In fact, one of the plans to develop a plan to come up with a plan was to create a committee — an MSP Task Force. Government actually put such a committee together before the budget last year, and then decided that government knew best exactly how it was going to move forward with the elimination of the MSP, despite the fact that the committee had yet to actually return their reports.

So while the committee was talking about a variety of measures and metrics and ways that the revenue could be replaced, whether it be through a sugar tax or whether it be through a small employer health tax or whether it be through a health care premium, government decided to go its own way and go 100 percent with the health care premium.

That’s government’s prerogative and government’s choice. As I say, again, I’m surprised that there wasn’t uproar within the union movement in this province, because I can tell every single union member in this province that has had, historically, MSP premiums paid by their employers, that they’ve just lost out a thousand bucks plus, at least, for each and every one of them, from a negotiated previous costed settlement against what they were owed and deserved because that was costed against their settlement.

It’s actually quite remarkable that government has gone this way. And yes, I know this full well because I have acted as chief negotiator twice in bargaining agreements where we have actually costed our MSP premiums against a negotiated settlement. So yes, I know this to be true.

With that said, I do applaud the fact that we are, indeed, moving towards the elimination of MSP. The co-benefit that is not often talked about is that there’s an entire bureaucratic structure that is no longer needed. There are literally tens of thousands, maybe even hundreds of thousands, of letters that are emailed every month saying: “This is what your MSP premium for this month will be.” If you think about 100,000 letters going out at $1 a letter, that’s $100,000 a month for a start, but it’s much, much more than that.

We also know that there is a very serious problem in terms of collecting long-term debts that have been accrued in the MSP premium. Part of it is unknowing debt — there are those who can’t pay — but there are also those very egregious examples out there where people have gone away and not realized that they, apparently, owed MSP. They come back to rather large bills.

I’ll give you a real-world example. A student might be working in British Columbia for one summer after graduating from high school. Say they graduate from high school in June, they attend their convocation, and they work through the months of July and August. They might have a union job. They might actually be in a union job where they look at their paycheque and they realize that, as part of their employment, the employer was paying MSP.

So they go and take their job. It’s their first job straight out of high school. They see that the employer is paying the MSP, but they don’t really know what that is. Then they decide that they’re going to go to Europe for college. They go to Europe for four years; they leave the province of British Columbia. They may go to France or Britain or Germany or Sweden or Norway and attend a collage there for four years. Then, perhaps, they might want to come back to Victoria or Vancouver and work in British Columbia.

Well, guess what. The second they come back to British Columbia, they get a bill. They get a bill for four years of MSP premiums plus accrued interest because they did not opt out of MSP when they left the country to go to these other jurisdictions, for which they were 100 percent covered by the local jurisdiction. When you’re a student in England, you’re covered. If you’re a student in other jurisdictions across Europe, you’re covered. But you’re expected to continue to pay here unless you physically opt out.

Now, the number of people who physically opt out has been so small, you could almost count it on a hand, because people didn’t know they had to do that. The number of people who had these outrageous bills presented to them upon their return is huge. Therein lies the problem.

We know that what happens is that a young person — and there are many examples of this — will come back from abroad. They’ll get the bill, and they have a choice: do they pay this bill they think they owe, even though they weren’t eligible — or they may have been eligible, but they didn’t use it, or even know they did — or do they not? In many cases, they don’t.

What happens then is that collection agencies start to come after them. Then they have a credit rating…. They’re starting off in their life. They may have worked for one summer — one summer — in a union job. They didn’t that that company that was paying them actually was paying the MSP. They come back four years later, and they get a bill for thousands and thousands of dollars. They don’t know what this is about. And then the collection agent comes after them, and on and on it goes.

That’s no longer going to be the case, and that’s a good thing. That’s a good thing, because we don’t need those collection agencies. We have a lot of debt on the books that is going to have to be forgiven, I suspect, or collected by some other means, but at least we’re moving forward and beyond this.

Again, coming back to this. This was a campaign issue from the B.C. Liberals. They didn’t want to be left out. Fifty percent cut, they planned. When the B.C. NDP ran, they campaigned to eliminate….

They didn’t really articulate how. Frankly, I don’t think they actually figured it out, because their plan was to develop a plan to come up with a plan, and the plan was going to be first developed by a committee that was developing a plan that they ignored.

They staggered their way through, and they decided to come through with this employer health tax approach. That’s their prerogative. We understand that. We recognize that they are government, and they have these choices to make. While we support the overall notion of MSP being reformed, we don’t believe that that was the appropriate way to go in its entirety. A small component, yes.

The B.C. NDP campaigned on cutting the MSP, and they initially did it by 50 percent. In actual fact, what they did was basically leave in place the B.C. Liberal budget, which had already reduced it by 50 percent. They had promised to move on to the entire elimination, which is where we are right now.

The first step of the MSP premium, reducing by 50 percent, happened in Budget 2018. Here we are now moving forward with the completion, through this tax. Again, when I look at this…. We’ve had a platform issue even in 2013 — going back to the history. In 2013, we were calling on the elimination. It actually was formally put forward repeatedly in 2015 and 2016. As I stated, I’m very, very pleased that we’re actually at this position now.

Overall and in conclusion, since 2015, we’ve outlined a number of regressive natures…. One of the things that we’ve outlined, as well — and I hope the Minister of Health takes note — is that right now we’re penalized in British Columbia for being a destination of choice for elderly Canadians.

Why I say that is that it’s very simple to calculate the amount of money that is spent on health care and weight that as a function of age. We know that the average age in British Columbia is lower than the average age in other provinces. We know that the federal Canada health transfer is based on the number of people, with no age weighting to that number of people. So we know that when you do a simple weighted average….

We know how much health care money is spent as a function of age. We know it increases exponentially toward the latter years of your life. We know that when you take the age profile of the province and you weight the Canada health transfer by that age profile, B.C. is short by something in the order of $200 million of Canada health transfer money that should be coming to us, based on an age-related approach.

We know that people in British Columbia may work in the oil sands in Alberta during their younger years. They may be paying provincial taxes in Alberta. They may be working in the Hibernia fields. They may be working in a factory in Ontario. Then in the latter stages of their life, they may choose to come back and live in a place where there’s no snow in the winter. Where is that place? That place is often Vancouver Island.

We know this is going on in Canada. That is the beauty of this great nation that we have: we allow people to freely go from east to west and north to south. We encourage people to come here, and we have a long history of being a home…. In fact, Victoria — I’ve grown up here. I don’t know whether it’s still called this, but it certainly was called this when I was a younger person: the city of newlyweds and nearly deads. I’m one of those few people who has moved from the age of newlywed to nearly dead. There are not many of us out here, but I am….

Interjection.

A. Weaver: Maybe. The member for Chilliwack-Kent is suggesting I’m speaking too soon. I hope so. Certainly, I’ve watched the growth of this town over the last 57 years, and my goodness, it has grown. It has grown and become more diversified. It’s quite exciting.

But coming back to that Canada health transfer. I sincerely hope that we do have the pressure being put on the federal government to reflect upon the nature of the Canada health transfer and the unfairness of people paying their taxes in other provinces and then retiring to British Columbia.

I would suggest that it is entirely defensible to argue that the Canada health transfer should be weighted by age, based on the amount of health care spending we do as a function of age. I’ve done the calculation. And 200 million bucks? We could use that. I’m sure the minister could use 200 million bucks. We could fund all sorts of drugs, like Orkambi, for example. I’m just joking. But we could — $200 million is nothing to sneeze at. This is something that I hope they’ll encourage.

Anyway, with that said, I do commend the Minister of Health. I mean that sincerely. We in British Columbia are very lucky and fortunate to have a minister who goes so deep on files and is truly committed to this file. We’ve seen some very good things happen in this province. This is one of them. Again, I don’t necessarily like the way the funds are being replaced, but I do certainly have full confidence in the Minister of Health, the direction he’s taking this province in health care.

With that, I’ll take my place and thank him for his good work.