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The most striking aspect of the Health Communiqué issued by the First Ministers on September 11th, 2000 is that almost no one has read its actual text. None of our national or even local newspapers saw fit to publish it. If one compares the exhaustive coverage of the life and death of our remarkable former Prime Minister Pierre Elliott Trudeau to the coverage of the Health Communiqué, it is a stark contrast. Despite its legitimate status as the most expensive, and possibly the most contentious intergovernmental agreement in recent Canadian history, few Canadians actually know what it contains, beyond dollars. It is not because the agreement lacks substance. In fact, it is a great deal more substantive than most Canadians believe. Why the media chose to cover the shallow, last-minute politics of the agreement negotiations rather than its substance escapes me. Perhaps reading itself has gone out of fashion among Canadian journalists? Perhaps the politics of reaching the agreement had come to so dominate the thinking of journalists that the actual content of the deal was of little interest? Canadians were not well-served by this lapse.
How the First Ministers arrived at their deal in broad terms is of somewhat more consequence than who said what to whom at the final meeting. Over the past year Ottawa's demand was for a "plan" for reforming Canadian health services - medicare, as the shorthand runs. The Premiers narrowed their demand to a single issue, the restoration of federal transfer payments and to a single number of $4 billion. Television ads in the style of campaign attack ads escalated the battle. Ontario declared, " We have a plan, all that is missing is the federal money." Ottawa responded that a plan was still needed. Name calling ensued.