​Car 54, where are you?

Trivia buffs, or people of a certain age may recall the plea from police headquarters searching for two hapless and wayward New York City cops, Toody and Muldoon.

In New Brunswick where just 79 per cent of people have a family doctor or nurse practitioner, the call to Car 54 is a comparable one, yielding similarly frustrating results. The situation here is getting worse. Just seven years ago the percentage of New Brunswickers with a doctor was 93 per cent.

New Brunswick is also falling behind the rest of the country. Nationally, 86 per cent of Canadians had a family doctor or a nurse practitioner in 2024. That is seven points better than the percentage for this province.

These statistics are drawn or derived from a massive telephone survey of 55,000 people conducted by the New Brunswick Health Council. The size of the sample is a good indication of the accuracy of the survey.

New Brunswick’s poor record in attracting primary care providers is putting strains on other aspects of the health care system, particularly emergency rooms, where patients with severe and less-than-severe medical conditions inevitably must line up to receive medical attention. Of course, severe sufferers go to the front of the cue.

Another vital part of the medical system is nursing care. Nurses shouldered a very heavy burden during the COVID pandemic, when staffing shortages and burn-out caused many nurses to withdraw from the system outright or take early retirement.

Recruiting doctors, nurse practitioners or nurses to the medical system has become a huge problem.

The federal government’s proposed increased tax on capital gains will fall unfairly on doctors. Many family doctors incorporate and receive fee-for-service payment under Medicare, effectively serving as a small business in the system.

Full disclosure to readers, this writer’s son is a medical doctor. However, as a specialist in a large urban hospital, he is on salary and does not receive payment on a fee-for-service basis. This means he is not affected by the proposed changes in taxation on capital gains.

This federal government does not like to make exceptions in the case of important policy changes. It did make an exception, though, in the case of removing the carbon tax on heating oil in Atlantic Canada.
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It is not wrong to backtrack in some cases when this is the right thing to do. The primary care situation in New Brunswick is in crisis. It is time for the Federal and New Brunswick governments to make a call out to Car 54. Our situation here is not a comedy sitcom.