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Woodward's Trump revelations raise questions about Canada's response to COVID-19 – CBC.ca
The revelations in journalist Bob Woodward’s new book about what U.S. President Donald Trump knew about the threat posed by COVID-19 in the early days of the pandemic have prompted new questions about the Canadian government’s response to the virus, given how much intelligence is shared between the two countries.
Trump told Woodward on Feb. 7 that the U.S. knew that the virus was essentially airborne — “The air, you just breathe the air and that’s how it’s passed,” he said — and that COVID-19 was five times more deadly than even the most “strenuous” cases of the flu.
Trump has been widely criticized for saying such things in private while downplaying the risk in public and failing to adequately warn the American people about a virus that would, as of Friday, claim the lives of 192,616 U.S. citizens.
Trump has defended his public statements about the virus, saying he didn’t want to create “panic” and “cause serious problems for the country.”
Watch: Trump tries to downplay his pandemic comments
But Canadian officials also were reluctant to pronounce on the threat posed by the virus in the early days of the pandemic. Health Minister Patty Hajdu even suggested at one point that the news media was stoking fears about the novel coronavirus.
Hajdu and senior public health officials were saying publicly that the risk of transmission was low in Canada right up until early March. When the risk level suddenly jumped to “high” on March 15, the government scrambled to impose an economic lockdown to curb the spread of the virus.
A week after Trump’s call with Woodward, Hajdu told the Thunder Bay Newswatch on Feb. 14 that Canada had seen “a stabilization of cases.”
“I’ve talked a lot about how we have the outbreak that is obviously related to a physical illness … but there’s also the outbreak of fear and the pandemic of fear is a very common partner to pandemics or outbreaks of other illnesses,” she told the local news outlet.
“We need to remind Canadians that the risk factor for contracting this virus in Canada is a close contact with someone who recently travelled to the region,” she added, referring to Asia.
Two months later, there’d be tens of thousands of new cases — many of them generated through community spread by returning travellers from Europe and the U.S.
Wesley Wark, a professor at the University of Ottawa and one of the country’s foremost experts on Canada’s intelligence agencies, said the U.S. likely had better reconnaissance on the virus than the Canadian government did in the early days.
But Wark said he believes it’s “very likely” that some information about the real threat posed by this virus flowed from the U.S. to Canada, especially at the “liaison” level between U.S. officials and Canadians embedded at the embassy in Washington.
He said that, like many U.S. officials, the federal government here downplayed some hard truths of the pandemic, such as the risk of asymptomatic transmission.
“It seems clear to me that Canadian officials — even though they didn’t have, I don’t think, access to the more alarming intelligence the U.S. had — were clearly concerned in ways similar to the Trump administration about creating panic, sowing confusion in the Canadian public, and they were certainly concerned about the resource implication of taking earlier measures against COVID-19,” he told CBC News, citing the government’s initial reluctance to close borders and impose quarantines on returning travellers.
Dr. Theresa Tam, Canada’s chief public health officer, warned against border closures for weeks. “They are inappropriate and could actually cause more harm than good in terms of our global effort to contain,” she said on Feb. 3, before travel was brought to standstill seemingly overnight in mid-March.
Hajdu repeated those lines on Feb. 17, saying border closures were “not effective at all” at controlling the spread of disease.
Tam said at the end of January that she expected Canada would be spared the brunt of the virus.
“Canada’s risk is much, much lower than that of many countries. It’s going to be rare, but we are expecting cases,” she told the Commons health committee.
Asked on Jan. 28 if the federal government was preparing to help provinces and territories deal with a possible surge in cases and strained hospital capacity, Hajdu said that while Canada was ready to assist, she didn’t see an imminent risk.
“I think it’s very premature to say that there will be additional resources needed at the hospital level,” Hajdu told CBC’s Power & Politics. “Every indication is that we will not at this point in time.”
She said Canada was “phenomenally well-coordinated” and “well-prepared” for a possible onslaught of COVID-19.
As CBC reported last month, the public servants who manage the National Emergency Strategic Stockpile (NESS) warned in early February that there was a shortage of the personal protective equipment (PPE) needed to weather a pandemic. It still took weeks for the federal government to sign contracts for goods like N95 respirators, the masks used by health-care professionals to protect themselves from COVID-19.
Hajdu said in an interview Thursday that she took the virus “deadly seriously” at the outset and that she “absolutely” knew the virus had the potential to “kill many more people than the flu.”
“We were doing things very early. All along the way, we were taking appropriate measures based on the risk it was presenting to Canada,” she said, adding there was “extensive screening at the airports.” But the government didn’t begin collecting personal contact information from travellers inbound from Hubei province in China — site of the initial outbreak — until Feb. 19.
Wark said Hajdu’s message wasn’t clearly communicated in those early days — and there was a clear push by the government to minimize threats.
“What was the evidence that the Canadian public was prone to panic about the government being bold about the truth? Where’s the evidence?” Wark said.
“That wasn’t the public’s response to SARS in 2003. It wasn’t the response to other outbreaks, like H1N1. It’s a politician’s mindset that is frequently rolled out and it has no basis in evidence or in history and it was certainly misapplied to COVID-19.”
While senior U.S. officials were sounding the alarm in late January to Trump about the imminent risk the pandemic posed to the American people and the world, Canadian public health officials continued to rely on what we now know was often questionable advice from the World Health Organization.
In a Jan. 28 intelligence briefing, U.S. national security adviser Robert O’Brien gave Trump a “jarring” warning about the virus, according to Woodward’s reporting.
A ‘national security threat’ unlike any other
He told the president that COVID-19 would be the “biggest national security threat” of his presidency. He urged swift border closures to stop Chinese nationals from transmitting the virus on U.S. soil, according to Woodward’s book.
“This is going to be the toughest thing you face,” O’Brien told Trump.
Three days later, during a January 31 interview on Power & Politics, Hajdu said Canada would take its cues from Tam — who also had a senior role at the WHO, where officials were said to have a strong working relationship with China, then the global hotspot.
“You’ve heard Dr. Tam speak about China’s efforts to contain the virus. They indeed have been extraordinary,” Hajdu said.
“That is part of what gives the World Health Organization confidence that the risk of further exposure and spread globally is low … I along with Dr. Tam am very confident that China is working very closely with its partner countries to contain the spread.”
The Associated Press would later reveal that the Chinese regime suppressed evidence of the virus’s transmissibility for six days in early January before going to the WHO to brief the agency on the extent of the COVID-19 outbreak.
O’Brien’s intelligence warnings, along with recommendations from U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar, would prompt Trump to declare a national health emergency on Jan. 31.
Canada — deferring again to the WHO instead of tracking the path of its closest ally — would not follow suit.
On Jan. 31, Dr. Anthony Fauci, head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, publicly warned the American people that new, troubling research about COVID-19 had emerged.
Fauci said there was no longer any doubt that people displaying no symptoms of COVID-19 could still pass the virus along to someone else.
Canada slow to react to asymptomatic transmission
“In the beginning we were not sure if there was asymptomatic infection, which would make it a much broader outbreak then what we’re seeing. Now we know for sure that there is,” he said.
“It was not clear whether … [a] person could transmit it to someone while they were asymptomatic. Now we know, from a recent report from Germany, that that is absolutely the case.”
Canada ignored Fauci’s about-face. Later on Jan. 31, Hajdu downplayed the German report on asymptomatic transmission Fauci cited — which would later prove to be accurate — saying it was out of step with what the WHO had told Canada.
“The science is still quite weak,” she said in another interview with Power & Politics. “There are some reports but the World Health Organization does not believe, at this point, that the virus is contagious when people are asymptomatic.
“I’m extremely comfortable with the leadership of Dr. Tam and her level of expertise. Our position is completely in line with the WHO’s position. There is no sufficient evidence to say the virus can be spread when people are not exhibiting symptoms.”
Other senior public health officials in Canada also deferred to Tam and the WHO, while dismissing recent U.S. conclusions and the German report.
“The WHO and Dr. Tam … their assessment of the situation is the information supporting that is still very weak,” said Dr. David Williams, Ontario’s chief medical officer of health, on Jan. 31.
“The Public Health Agency of Canada and the WHO are saying that, at this point, we don’t have hard evidence of infectious infectivity of an asymptomatic person,” added Dr. Barbara Yaffe, Ontario’s associate chief medical officer of health responsible for communicable and infectious diseases.
A gap in intelligence-gathering
It wasn’t until April 7 — 66 days after Fauci’s initial alert — that Tam would publicly concede that “the virus causing COVID-19 can be spread from an infected person in the period just before their symptoms appear.”
“Evidence suggests that this is happening more often than previously thought … some infected people who never develop symptoms are also able to transmit the virus,” Tam said in a tweet.
Wark said the early failures of public health officials can be traced to a gap in Canada’s intelligence apparatus. The country just doesn’t collect enough health-related intelligence, he said. “We didn’t have a lot of independent sources of our own,” he said — which explains the reliance on the WHO.
Wark said much of Canada’s intelligence-gathering on disease is carried out by the Public Health Agency of Canada. But recent reporting has suggested that the agency’s Global Public Health Intelligence Network (GPHIN) was sidelined in the early days of the pandemic.
The GPHIN raised the alarm about a strange, pneumonia-like virus circulating in China at the end of December.
But GPHIN scientists have since come forward to say they felt muzzled and ignored by Health Canada officials when they tried to warn them about the pandemic threat. Hajdu conceded in an interview with CTV on Thursday that, when she became minister of health in November 2019, she had never heard of the GPHIN.
“I think it’s clearer and clearer that the U.S. had its own sources that painted a much darker picture of COVID than anything Canada had from its own sources,” Wark said.
“We weren’t connected. The Canadian security intelligence system doesn’t do global health. We don’t have a system to make good use of that U.S. intelligence.”
In 2018, the Trump administration released its National Biodefense Strategy. The first goal of the strategy is “surveillance and detection activities to detect and identify biological threats and anticipate biological incidents.”
“There’s no comparable Canadian intelligence community mandate,” Wark said.
Wark said that by late January, it was clear that there was considerable human-to-human transmission of the virus, based on reporting out of China and Thailand — but Canadian officials continued to question the science of asymptomatic transmission for weeks.
Turning a ‘blind eye’
“There was absolutely no reason to assume a rosier picture. At the end of the day, there was no reason not to assume that human-to-human transmission was going to occur. The evidence was mounting by the last week of January that this was the reality,” he said.
“Why they turned a blind eye to that … why the health authorities continued to think that basically COVID was going to be contained in China, that just represents a profound failure of intelligence or assessment and of imagination.”
Speaking to reporters in northern Ontario Friday, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau was asked when it became clear to his government that COVID-19 posed a major threat to Canada.
Watch: Trudeau on Canada’s early indications of COVID-19’s threat
Trudeau said Tam convened a meeting with public health experts on Jan. 2 to address “concerns we had and talk about our preparation.”
He said his government was well-briefed throughout and responded to challenges as they arose.
“Every step of the way, we were informed by our experts as to how to keep Canadians safe, what needed to be done, what measures would be helpful in continuing to support Canadians as we were aware of this potential,” he said.
“But, as people know, we were very much learning on the way as we responded.”
News
Just bought a used car? There’s a chance it’s stolen, as thieves exploit weakness in vehicle registrations
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The fight against Canada’s worst-ever auto theft epidemic has largely focused on ramping up inspections at shipping ports, where organized crime groups have exported the overwhelming majority of stolen vehicles.
But criminals are adapting, police say, by increasingly selling hot vehicles in Canada to unsuspecting buyers with little protection, exploiting a weakness in provincial registration systems that veteran investigators argue needs to be fixed.
“The market is so lucrative it’s easy cash,” said Det. Sgt. Greg O’Connor of Peel Regional Police, west of Toronto.
While it is impossible to know what criminals do with all stolen cars and difficult to track shifting trends, police now estimate nearly one-third of stolen vehicles are being resold in Canada, marking a significant increase from just six months ago when the vast majority of vehicles were believed to have been exported.
And often, buyers have no idea.
Derek Crocker bought a used Ford F-150 pickup truck from a dealership in Toronto in 2022. Just a few months later, his own investigation revealed the truck’s vehicle identification number — or VIN — had been replaced, mirroring the VIN of a similar truck registered in Utah.
“The whole reason you buy it from a dealership is so you don’t have to worry about dealing with that sort of thing,” he said.
In retrospect, there were small tells.
After Crocker entered what should have been the truck’s unique VIN in Ford’s app, the function to remotely start the vehicle never worked. The app also listed the vehicle as being located in the United States and indicated a different amount of fuel than his own vehicle tank was holding.
But it wasn’t until his F-150 was in an accident and required body work that the problem with the VIN was revealed. The repair shop ordered parts based on the VIN it saw on the dash. But the parts did not match.
“So I Googled the VIN number that was on my truck, and I found a truck for sale in Utah,” said Crocker.
It turns out that was the true VIN, which thieves had cloned, placing fake VIN stickers with the Utah truck’s VIN on top of the true number for the truck Crocker bought.
VINs are most prominently displayed on a vehicle’s dashboard, as well as on the ownership title. When a vehicle is stolen, the VIN is flagged across North America to prevent it being sold.
But criminals are replacing the VIN plate, often with one from a comparable vehicle that has been totalled, legally exported or one registered in another province or U.S. state. They may go through junkyards, export records or simply walk through a mall parking lot to find a VIN to clone.
In doing so, they re-VIN or “wash” the vehicle of its stolen status.
Crocker called police, who seized the vehicle and returned it to the insurance company of the original owner.
Crocker’s own insurance would not cover his loss because he’d — albeit unknowingly — purchased a stolen vehicle. After a long discussion with the dealership that sold him the stolen truck, his money was returned.
“They did nothing extra,” Crocker said. “They didn’t help me at all.”
How could 2 cars with the same VIN be registered?
Provincial centres that administer vehicle registration, such as ServiceOntario, do not have a system that checks if VINs already exist in other jurisdictions.
“You can have a vehicle registered in one province and the same VIN on a different vehicle registered in another and we need to stop that,” David Adams, president and CEO of Global Automakers of Canada, told a recent auto theft summit in the Greater Toronto Area.
Neither Canada nor the United States has a national vehicle registry. Multiple police agencies are urging federal and provincial governments to create one.
“The reality is this is a national issue. And that’s why a national registry that moves itself beyond any sort of provincial jurisdiction is important in all capacities,” Nick Milinovich, deputy chief of Peel Regional Police, said in an interview.
CBC News asked Ontario’s Ministry of the Solicitor General why the province’s database can’t detect whether the same VIN is actively being used in another province or state.
“If changes to the provincial registration process are required, we won’t hesitate to make them,” it responded in a statement.
How to spot a potentially stolen car for sale
While it is impossible to know precisely how many fraudulently registered stolen vehicles are back on the road, recoveries have surged.
“The number of re-VINS is just blowing through the roof right now,” said O’Connor. “It’s costing drivers, banks, insurance companies big money. It’s a massive problem.”
It is impossible to know the full extent of the illegal economy and the proportion of vehicle exported versus those kept in the country. But police forces across southern Ontario have reported a surge in recoveries of vehicles that have had their VINs altered.
Car buyers are being advised to look at the VIN on the dashboard and the pillar between the front and back driver’s side doors to see if the numbering is bubbling, a sign there may be a sticker on top of the real VIN.
Running the VIN through a paid service like Carfax could also yield key warning signs. For example: a vehicle that records show has been declared salvage after a crash later reappearing undamaged. Or a VIN with a sales and registration history almost exclusively in one province or state suddenly being for sale in another.
If an insurance company discovers a vehicle has a fraudulent VIN, the policy is voided. When police seized Crocker’s truck, insurance would not pay to replace it. He was only able to recover his money when the dealership that sold the stolen truck paid him out.
But police and insurance investigators have begun to warn of a proliferation of re-VINed vehicles being sold exclusively through social media platforms like Instagram.
“If you’re paying cash for that vehicle [in a private sale] or you do a bank transfer,” said O’Connor, “there’s no recourse.”
WATCH | A stolen car is found in Ghana:
CBC’s David Common informs Len Green that his stolen car has been found in Ghana, 8,500 kilometres from Toronto, where it first went missing a year ago.
Registry employees alleged to be in on the crime
Police also allege organized crime has recruited employees at ServiceOntario, the registration centres operated on behalf of the province that offer an array of services, including issuing licences and managing the database of registered vehicles.
At the end of 2023, Toronto police charged seven ServiceOntario employees with a collective 73 charges, including fraud over $5,000, tampering with a vehicle identification number, breach of trust by a public officer and trafficking in identity information.
They allegedly provided an auto theft ring with registered addresses for specific vehicle models. Once stolen, the same employees assisted the ring in “re-VINing” the vehicles.
Fraudulent VINs may never be detected, although Peel police alone have seized more than 50 such vehicles in 2024 alone.
At other times, employees at ServiceOntario have flagged suspicious activity, such as when the same person shows up dozens of times to register different vehicles. That was allegedly the case with Milton Hylton, who was charged with 168 counts of various Criminal Code offences in March.
He was released on bail, pending trial. No charges are yet proven.
WATCH | An alleged repeat re-VINer is arrested:
CBC News takes you inside a police surveillance operation, witnessing an auto theft takedown connected to a growing aspect of the billion-dollar crime. Criminal rings are increasingly selling stolen cars in Canada to car buyers who often have no idea.
According to the warrant used to search his home and requested by Peel Regional Police Const. Gurinder Athwal, the 24-year-old travelled to “multiple ServiceOntario locations throughout the province and fraudulently registered vehicles.” Police say more than 100 vehicles were involved, and describe stolen Dodge Rams, Dodge Durangos and BMWs among them.
CBC News was present at the moment of Hylton’s arrest in Mississauga as multiple undercover police vehicles conducting surveillance moved in.
As investigators searched and then towed his silver Mazda, they say they found documents to register even more vehicles inside.
Hylton had just a few weeks earlier been banned from entering ServiceOntario locations without an appointment, because of suspicions. He was in the company of a woman he identified as his girlfriend. His sister was also arrested days later and now faces 36 charges of uttering forged documents and trafficking of stolen goods.
3rd-party registration being exploited
In a news release, Peel police describe Hylton as using “loopholes in the ServiceOntario procedures that allow ‘authorized’ individuals to conduct third-party transactions.”
While third-party registration is intended for car dealers, provisions for it mean nearly any individual can transfer registration of a vehicle or register a vehicle in another person’s name.
This process is typical in other Canadian provinces, too.
“It’s a huge problem,” said O’Connor. “And that’s how a lot of these vehicles are getting through.”
For instance, the warrant in the Hylton case alleges he transferred vehicle ownerships to both a speciality tool shop in Etobicoke and an automotive exporter in St. Catharines. Neither business authorized the transfers, and both insist Hylton is neither an employee nor known to them.
Were the vehicles in question stolen, the new registration would have detached them from their previous owners. Anyone buying the vehicles would be none the wiser and would have no insurance or other protection if the vehicle’s stolen status was ever uncovered.
Peel police say Hylton sold dozens of vehicles over a year through social media under the Instagram handle “Royalty in the Building.”
That name is associated with Facebook and Instagram accounts where apparent car buyers offer testimonials.
“I called up Milton. I told him I got my money up, I need plates, I need a car. And he got it just like that,” a person said in a testimonial while standing in front of a Honda Civic.
“Got my new SUV, fully loaded. Tints, light, rims, inside’s clean. Everything’s legit,” another person said in a testimonial.
“You give him your cash. You’re on the road. You ain’t got to go to ServiceOntario. You don’t got to do no running around,” said another.
WATCH | Inside a weeks-long auto theft investigation:
CBC’s David Common gets exclusive access inside an auto theft surveillance operation, targeting a suspect who allegedly re-vinned more than 100 stolen vehicles to be resold, sometimes to unsuspecting buyers in Canada.
CBC News spoke with several police and insurance officials from across the Greater Toronto Area about third-party registrations.
Each insisted the loophole needed to be closed to prevent illegal transfers. But none wanted to speak on the record, citing the provincial Ministry of Transportation as a good partner they did not want to publicly besmirch.
Meanwhile, the auto theft problem continues to grow.
In 2022, an unprecedented $1.2 billion worth of vehicles were stolen across the entire country. By 2023, more than $1 billion was lost in just Ontario alone, according to the Équité Association, the national organization charged with reducing insurance fraud.
“It’s one of the top three revenue generators for organized crime,” said Milinovich. “It’s high reward, low risk, and an easy crime.”
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OTTAWA –
A new poll suggests the Liberals have not won over voters with their latest budget, though there is broad support for their plan to build millions of homes.
Just shy of half the respondents to Leger’s latest survey said they had a negative opinion of the federal budget, which was presented last Tuesday.
Only 21 per cent said they had a positive opinion, and one-third of respondents said they didn’t know or preferred not to answer.
Still, 65 per cent of those surveyed said the plan to spend $8.5 billion on housing, aimed at building 3.9 million homes by 2031, is good for the country.
Leger’s poll of 1,522 Canadians last weekend can’t be assigned a margin of error because online surveys are not considered truly random samples.
People in Alberta were most likely to say they had a very negative impression of the budget, with 42 per cent selecting that option compared to 25 per cent across the entire country.
More than half of the people who took the poll said they are in favour of the government’s plans to spend more on energy efficiency, national defence and student-loan forgiveness for health care and education workers.
And 56 per cent said they think the increase to the capital gains tax inclusion rate — a move that’s estimated to raise another $19.4 billion in revenue over the next four years — is a good thing.
The Liberals are billing the change as critical to their plan to improve generational fairness by taxing the ultra-rich.
It has drawn criticism, including from the Canadian Medical Association, which warned on Tuesday that it could affect the country’s ability to recruit and keep physicians.
The budget proposes to make two-thirds of capital gains — the profit made on the sale of assets — taxable, rather than half. For individuals, this would apply to profits above $250,000, but there is no lower threshold for corporations.
The medical association said many doctors will face higher taxes because they have incorporated their practices and used those companies to save for retirement.
While the Liberals are aiming changes to the capital gains tax at younger Canadians including millennials and gen-Zers, Leger’s poll found it had the support of 60 per cent of respondents over the age of 55 — the highest among any age group.
People between 18 and 35 were least likely to support the Liberal plan to spend another $73 billion on defence in the next two decades. Just 45 per cent of respondents in that age group said ramping up defence spending is good for the country, compared with 70 per cent of people over the age of 55.
Leger also asked questions about the country’s fiscal future.
Almost half the respondents, 47 per cent, said they want to see the government cut back on spending and programs to get the budget balanced as quickly as possible.
Just 16 per cent said spending more and running large deficits is the best plan for the next five years, and 14 per cent want to see the government increase taxes to bring the deficit down.
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Alberta’s health ministry says an audit has determined that more than 40 medical clinics in the province are advertising membership fees for services, nearly a year after one such plan landed a Calgary clinic in hot water.
The audit was launched last December. In July, CBC News reported that a medical clinic in Calgary’s Marda Loop district was moving to a membership system and planned to charge $4,800 a year for a two-parent family membership, covering two adults and their dependent children.
The next day, Health Canada said the arrangement at the Marda Loop Medical Clinic equated to patients purchasing “preferential access” and warned Alberta that it could face cuts to federal health transfers if the situation wasn’t handled.
Alberta Premier Danielle Smith and Alberta Health Minister Adriana LaGrange directed Alberta Health to investigate, and the clinic halted its plan for membership fees shortly after.
In December, LaGrange told CBC News that “appropriate action” would be taken if audits determined that violations were found, adding the province would do whatever it took to ensure clinics were in compliance.
The province promised the audits early in the new year. Now, the health ministry says it has conducted interviews to gather information on operations and business models of the clinics, adding this work is ongoing.
“Over 40 clinics in the province [advertise] a membership meant to pay for a defined set of uninsured services, while also providing insured services covered under the Alberta Health Care Insurance Plan at no cost to Albertans,” wrote spokesperson Andrea Smith in a statement.
“Once this review is completed, its findings will be used to inform next steps. Alberta’s government will also determine if additional audits of more membership clinics is required.”
In July, Health Canada said executive and primary health clinics charging patients enrolment and annual membership fees exist in a number of provinces. Generally, investigations have indicated that clinics provide members with an variety of uninsured services, such as life coaching and nutritional services.
“However, in some cases … these fees are also a prerequisite to accessing insured services at the clinic (i.e., medically necessary physician services). Mandatory fees to access or receive preferential access to insured services are contrary to the Canada Health Act,” the government department wrote in a statement.
A spokesperson for LaGrange told CBC News in July the ministry wasn’t aware of any other clinics offering services for membership fees that didn’t align with legislation.
What comes next for those 40 clinics is a murky grey area, said Fiona Clement, a professor at the University of Calgary in the department of community health sciences. Much of it has to do with the exact language being used when services are outlined as parts of packages.
“We’re on the razor’s edge of exact wording there that runs them afoul. Really, I think it will come down to what the government is willing to fight with these clinics about,” she said.
CBC News asked the provincial government for a list of the clinics identified, but did not receive it by publication time. A spokesperson with the province said if any clinics are found to be non-compliant with legislation, appropriate action would be taken.
Report had identified 14 clinics
Clement said the big issue that got the Marda Loop Medical Clinic in hot water was the concept of guaranteed access.
“That’s the problem that Marda Loop got into, because there you are charging access to medical care, which is the part that contravenes the Canada Health Act,” Clement said.
At the time the Marda Loop clinic fell under scrutiny, it was clear there were other such clinics providing membership programs, in Calgary and Canada.
In 2022, researchers from Dalhousie University and Simon Fraser University released a paper tracking the number of clinics taking private payment across the country. Between November 2019 and June 2020, the period of the analysis, there were 14 private clinics in Alberta with a range of membership fees and private payment.
“So, 40 is a larger number than I was expecting. And I think it speaks to growth in this area, the number of clinics that are charging fees for different parts of care,” Clement said.
“I think it underscores the lack of stability, and the need to really think about how we’re funding primary care, because more and more clinics are turning to this private charge as a revenue source to keep the doors open.”
Provinces that allow private health-care providers to charge patients for medically necessary services have dollars clawed back by the federal government under the Canada Health Act.
According to Health Canada, Alberta was subject to a $20,450,175 deduction to its Canada Health Transfer payment in March 2024 under the diagnostic services policy. That’s up from $13,781,152 last year.
But the province received $20,538,796 in partial reimbursements tied to its March 2023 and 2024 deductions, which represents actions that Alberta Health has taken to limit patient pay for publicly funded goods or services, according to Clement.
“I guess we’re making some progress. But it’s still a big number, which says there’s still a lot of patient billing going on,” she said.
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Provincial audit turns up more than 40 medical clinics advertising membership fees
