by Joseph Roberts

Joseph Roberts: How can Canadians be healthier? What can the government do to improve the services that are offered so they prevent illness in the first place and be taken better when they do get sick?

Jack Layton: We have to start by protecting the planet from the pollution that we produce, including CO2, among other noxious substances. I spent six years chairing the Board of Health in Toronto and it always struck me that we spent less than one cent of the total of each health dollar on prevention, on health promotion to help people avoid disease in the first place. We spend 99.9 cents fixing up the diseases that have already happened. It seems to me it’s totally wrong in terms of the proportion of investment.

Starting out with very early investment in children and their health and nutrition in those early stages has huge benefits later on. We’re pushing very hard for a national strategy around making sure that all kids get decent food from the earliest stages and for a good early childhood care program across the country.

Then there’s no question that medications are becoming more and more an important part of people’s care. As we’ve seen in some of the analyses, there’s sometimes too much medication and the costs are devastating. So you end up with people who can’t afford their medication and end up taking it wrongly as a result. We hear stories about people who say they can only afford half the medication - especially seniors find themselves in situations where they’re trying to make ends meet. So there they are cutting the pills in half figuring maybe it’ll stretch for two months, but it is actually harming them to make that change.

JR: Currently it seems the federal government is pretty much in the pockets of the big drug companies. When it comes to the natural food industry and health products, it’s as if the federal government thinks that’s all just snake oil and that Big Pharma can do no wrong. There’s no dead bodies from echinacea, chamomile or Vitamin C, but there’s a lot of dead bodies from, for example, the anti-depressants that were approved by the government. Vioxx and celebrex have killed tens of thousands of people yet there still seems to be this old-fashioned outlook of giving the natural products a really hard time right now. Instead of looking at serving Canadians, they’re just talking about how to protect drug company interests. They’re now asking for testing on rosehips and things like that which people have been taking for thousands for years with a lot of evidence showing how helpful they are. People are concerned that the new Natural Health Protectorate is actually going to be harming people because they don’t really know what they’re doing and they’re working from a drug model rather than a third category model or natural health product model. Have you had a chance to support any of those initiatives?

JL: Sure. Our party was in the forefront when they were wanting to take moves back in 1997 which would have resulted in, for example, a lot of the Chinese herb and medicine stores having to go out of business. We organized petitions and campaigns across the country to support that sector. There’s no question we want some testing done. I don’t want to be taking some natural product that’s been laced with pesticide somewhere, so of course we need to be balancing the interest of the public which is expecting somebody to test products.

Of course, as different alternative therapies become more and more popular we’re actually seeing the big pharmaceutical companies moving more and more into some of these areas. So that’s one of the dynamics that’s underway.

But I think that what should concern everybody is that when your doctor tells you that you need a medication and maybe sends you home from hospital or is counting on you using that particular product, be it alternative or more conventional pharmaceutical, if you can’t afford it then you’re not really having access in a fair and equal way in our society to the health care that you need.

So we believe, as Tommy Douglas always talked about, in the extension of Medicare to pharmaceuticals because right now one in ten prescriptions are not even being filled. We know people can’t even afford many of the natural products that they’re taking on the advice of their experts. We need to work to make health care accessible to everybody.

JR: What got you involved in politics?

JL: Lots of different things. I talk about this in my book, Speaking Out Louder. My great-grandfather was a great inspiration to me. He was a blind immigrant to Canada. He’d applied for a job as an organist and when he got here they turned him down when they found out he was blind. So he began to organize a campaign for a basic pension for people who had disabilities, which I always thought was an inspirational objective and vision.

Then my parents got me involved as a young person in different issues. There was a little church youth group which would go down and work with the homelessness, making sandwiches and that kind of thing. When you’re age 13 and 14 that has a real impression on you and it struck me very wrong that some people being unable to have the basics in such a rich society.

Of course, I ran into Tommy Douglas, like many of us were fortunate enough to do, and he was standing up against the War Measures Act in Quebec. That was a very worrisome, scary time, yet there he was saying the Act was wrong and that terrorists would win if we gave up our freedoms.

JR: Sounds familiar today too.

JL: It certainly does.

JR: I think there’s a huge desire among Canadians to have a more peaceful world, yet it seems like we’re being dragged along by the current government to participate more and more. Where would you see Canada in its foreign policy in regards to Afghanistan and Iraq?

JL: Right now the Canadian government is going in the wrong direction, rapidly, when it comes to foreign policy as regards to the pursuit of war, fighting as opposed to peace-building. We can see examples of this, whether it’s the decision to prolong the engagement in Afghanistan, now working with even more and more American soldiers coming in and we know their style and approach has not been one that Canadians would have wanted to promote.

Unfortunately the Liberals decided to support that extension, so now we’re there for three more years, and a pact towards peace and the use of the United Nations to really be that civilian-led peace-building process with all its complexities is being pushed aside in favour of a military approach.

I have a feeling we’ll be back at this two years from now still talking about whether there will be a further extension and we’ll be having the same debates. I think a majority of Canadians want Canada to be a voice for peace and they want our actions to reflect that. Right now we’re allowing the sale of a company that we all invested in as Canadians to produce satellites, RADARSAT. It’s important for the missile defense system of the US, the weaponization of space that Canadians opposed, and yet we’re letting this be sold to Americans even though Canadian tax dollars went into it. This means we’re going to be part of the weaponization of space in a tacit sort of way. That’s why we’re fighting against these initiatives from the Stephen Harper government.

JR: We can’t have a healthy people or environment unless we have a healthy government. In BC we had a referendum on the single transferable vote. What do you see could be done to make democracy function better in terms of involving people more? Is there any form you would prefer?

JL: Well, first of all we have to find a way to get to proportional representation so that every vote counts. The question is what’s the best way to get there. It’s been unfortunate. There’ve been a number of referendums now and they haven’t been able to get over the thresholds that were set, which in my view were somewhat arbitrarily high, but nonethless we’ve got to bring proportional representation into Canada one way or the other. We also have to abolish the unelected Senate. There’s no way a group of unelected, appointed people should be passing laws. That’s something from two centuries ago that we should be abandoning as quickly as possible.

JR: Thank you so much for your time today.

JL: Sorry we don’t have longer, but call and we can always talk over the phone if you have any other questions.