Feels like I've seen The Grand Seduction twice. In reality, I saw the 2003 film Seducing Doctor Lewis | La grande séduction and the 2013 film The Grand Seduction.
Both films are written by Ken Scott (Michael Dowse co-wrote the English language version) with other directors: Jean-François Pouliot (Francaise) and Don McKellar (English).
The stories are the same, maddeningly. A lot more similar than Delivery Man, the English language remake of Starbuck (both from Ken Scott). The premise is that a small fishing village needs a plant that will provide jobs. The company insists the town have a doctor, something the town has struggled to find.
Big city doctor gets tricked into coming to the small town. The people of the small town work hard to convince said doctor to stay.
Canadian film has certainly tackled the issue of health care. Think Denys Arcand's The Barbarian Invasions, the only Canadian film to win an Oscar in the international film category. The image of patients in hospital beds in the hallway felt like a parody.
What has been a quaint topic in those Ken Scott films is an ever growing reality in Canadian health care: finding a doctor in Canada is a difficult task.
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"Roughly six million Canadian adults don't have access to a family doctor—up from 4.6 million in 2019. The situation is particularly alarming in rural communities where only 8% of physicians are serving nearly one-fifth of Canada’s population." This according to a Royal Bank of Canada (RBC) report.
The numbers in Ontario alone is about 1.8 million without a family physician. This first person account gives some intricate details on the search for a family doctor.
Please do not capture this out of context as a bash of the medical system in Canada versus the United States. Medical debt and anxiety that only happens in the United States is not a part of the rest of the world. The Canadian health care system is being hit with retirement of doctors due to burnout from the COVID-19 pandemic, Baby Boomers doctors retiring, and difficulty of trained medical doctors from outside Canada to get credentials to practice in Canada. The Jason Kenney government was chasing away doctors in Alberta but that was more about politics.
Those who have watched Transplant either on CTV in Canada or NBC in the United States know the complex route of the pilot episode so Dr. Bashir Hamed can practice medicine in a Canadian hospital. That is not typical though the show gives us a perspective on that struggle, even in getting to practice medicine.
Canada has 2 huge struggles in administering medicine in a single payer system. The country is mostly rural (think The Grand Seduction) and health care is run by the provinces.
Also, the provinces ask for money from the federal government but don't always spend that money on health care.
A recent episode of the Backbench podcast explored some of the many concerns over Canadian health care. Mattea Roach, the Backbench host (yes, that Mattea Roach), has a nice perspective in that she grew up in rural Nova Scotia and now lives in the big city in Toronto. Roach noted that big Canadian cities are starting to see the inequities of the Canadian health care system that rural people have known for a long time.
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Canadian doctors have plenty of debt when they get out of university, though not nearly on the scale of the debt that U.S. doctors have. The issue with Baby Boomer doctors retiring, plus more old people who need care: these are true in Europe, Asia, and other parts of the world. The world also had to deal with the damage of the COVID-19 pandemic on health care systems.
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W. Kamau Bell and his United Shades of America show took a look at the reality of health care in Canada in 2018. Some of that was from previous testimony from Dr. Danielle Martin on the realities of health care in Canada in 2017. British Columbia and Vancouver have been on the forefront on opioids in ways the United States could only dream of doing.
U.S. news rarely talks about Canada, even when the U.S. president comes to Canada and spends the night. Often, real TV journalists rely on stereotypes of other countries, especially Bell. We explore Canada and aren't afraid to delve into the true state of the country or talk about Nickleback (how did Nickleback get into the Canadian Music Hall of Fame?).
Health care should not be a profit-making enterprise, even as we saw the significance of private long-term care homes in Ontario. Canada is the closest example of single payer to the United States. Americans should pay more attention to health care north of the border, good and bad.
photo credits: The Grand Seduction; Transplant/CTV
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