Quietly, one day after the new government was sworn into power in late June, Health Minister Christine Elliott announced that Ontario would only pay for prescriptions of young people who did not have private insurance already.

Goodbye free meds; hello $1 beer.

This is truly a strange time to be living in Ontario. One month after Doug Ford’s new government scaled back the OHIP+ plan — the one that gave free prescriptions to Ontarians under the age of 25 — the premier was out on Tuesday paving the way for discounted beer.

Those two developments aren’t strictly connected (unless you’re under 25 and using beer to cure what ails you) but they do tell us something about what this new government regards as Ontarians’ priorities. With some justification, the Ford government can argue that when Ontarians voted in June, they cast their ballot in favour of cheap beer for all and against a universal drug program for young people.

Mark an X; take your chances.

What many might be wondering now, however, is what this says about the larger future of pharmacare in this country. If Ontario’s government has turned its back on this limited version of pharmacare — not so long ago seen as a pilot for a more ambitious, pan-Canadian program — will Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s government be pursuing the idea anymore? The odds, in my view, aren’t all that good.

For clarity’s sake, we should note that the free-prescription plan is not totally dead in Ontario. Quietly, one day after the new government was sworn into power in late June, Health Minister Christine Elliott announced that Ontario would only pay for prescriptions of young people who did not have private insurance already.

“Our government is announcing our intent to fix the OHIP+ program by focusing benefits on those who do not have existing prescription drug benefits,” the news release said. “Children and youth who are not covered by private benefits would continue to receive their eligible prescriptions free. Those who are covered by private plans would bill those plans first, with the government covering all remaining eligible costs of prescriptions.”

A lot of people would say that sounds kind of reasonable. In fact, it sounds an awful lot like what federal Finance Minister Bill Morneau seemed to have in mind immediately after the Trudeau government announced its own plans to pursue pharmacare.

In a speech to the Economic Club of Canada last February, Morneau said: “We need a strategy to deal with the fact not everyone has access, and we need to do it in a way that’s responsible, that deals with the gaps, but doesn’t throw out the system that we currently have.”

The key part of that sentence is “deals with the gaps.” Essentially, that’s the pharmacare plan that the Ford government is going to put in place of the universal OHIP+ program.

Morneau was roundly criticized after his remarks for appearing to prejudge the results of his government’s own advisory panel, headed by former Ontario health minister Eric Hoskins — who, not so surprisingly, also introduced the OHIP+ plan to the province before jumping ship to go work for the Trudeau gang. Hoskins has been saying that he has a mandate to explore all kinds of pharmacare models — not just ones that fill “gaps” in coverage. But if any of Hoskins’ plans depend on provincial co-operation, it’s hard to imagine Ontario backing a bigger plan than the one the Ford government just cut.

And given that the Trudeau government is already heavily in battle stance with Ontario over the carbon tax, it’s probably not looking for any new fights with the Ford government.

What may keep pharmacare alive as an idea, however, is the federal Liberals’ ongoing efforts to steal as much support as possible away from the New Democratic Party. NDP leader Jagmeet Singh, who will announce plans this week to seek a seat in the Commons, has said that pharmacare will be a big-ticket item in the party’s 2019 platform. It was, in fact, shortly after the big NDP convention last February, and its focus on pharmacare, that Trudeau’s government announced it was formally consulting on implementing a program of its own.

As well, the case for pharmacare was bolstered by a big Commons committee study, which came out strongly in favour of a national program. Last December, at an iPolitics event devoted to the future of pharmacare, one of the Liberal MPs on the committee, Oakville’s John Oliver, flatly said he looked forward to campaigning in 2019 with a promise to usher in pharmacare.

“The expectation, the hope, from those that have been championing this for some time is that 2020 is the year that we see the beginning,” Oliver said at that lunch. “It’s going to be gradual but that’s the year we begin to see national pharmacare being implemented.”

All of this though — the NDP’s convention, the committee report, the establishment of the Hoskins study — happened before Ontario was taken over by Ford Nation. And just as the Trudeau government has had to adjust accordingly for the reality of Donald Trump in the United States, it will be doing the same now to take account of Ford at Queen’s Park. It will be very interesting to see how it figures into what’s likely a new Throne Speech coming in September.

Pharmacare, and the hopes for it be part of the 2019 election campaign, may be one of the casualties of this new Trudeau adjustment process. Ah well. There’s always cheaper beer.

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