Is Nova Scotia effectively using health dollars from Ottawa

The health care system in Nova Scotia is broken and nobody seems to want to take the government to task as to why it is or if they have a plan to correct this.

When questioned, the government says it is not getting enough money from Ottawa. I hate to say the government is not being truthful, but they are twisting the truth. We are the most heavily populated province in the Maritimes and since we are given money by the government on the basis of population, we are getting more money than P.E.I., New Brunswick and Newfoundland. So if the government was using this money for health care we should be fourth worst in Canada, not the very worst.

The fact is the government gets a chunk of money that Ottawa says is for health care ,but the provinces are able to spend it on anything they want to. Our government apparently does not want to spend it on health care.

Was the $8 million spent on the Yarmouth ferry taken out of our health care dollars? Then again, would we know? How could we?

Look at our system. We pay our doctors less than any other province, we put extra work on our front line workers and then they have the gall to say they are doing their best.

Well, to me, they are not even trying to do their best. They are using your health care dollars to fund something else.

During the election. a reporter asked Prime Minister Justin Trudeau why his platform didn't say how many childcare spaces his government was creating? He replied truthfully that child care spaces are the province’s responsibility Ottawa provides the money. The next day the Liberals were saying how many childcare spaces they were going to create.

The provinces are using this money for other things and then because we are only uninformed voters they blame this failure on Ottawa, and we believe what we are being fed.

Quebec was the only province that used the money for the purpose it was given. Childcare is $10 a day in Quebec. They also used their health care dollars to fund a form of pharmacare. Quebec is the poster child of what can happen if you use the money from Ottawa for the reason it is given.

When are we going to demand our government does the same? Feel free to distribute this column because the voters should know.

Walter Jones lives in Amherst. His column appears weekly in the Amherst News.