How do you know when a serious social problem is solved?
That sounds like it should be something that’s easy to measure. Consider the doctor shortage – surely we can say that’s solved when everyone who wants a family doctor has one, and when there’s no ER closures.
But the biggest problems are impossible to solve overnight.
It’s possible to “solve” a problem, with the result only appearing five or 10 years later.
This has been a live issue in the election. John Rustad’s Conservatives want to be able to point to David Eby’s NDP and say that he’s failed to solve homelessness, street disorder, the housing affordability crisis, and so on.
The NDP has a two-pronged defence – first, they say that we are turning a corner on these issues! We’ve been doing stuff, they say! Housing reform, seniors care, a new medical school, hospital expansions!
Second, they like to blame Rustad himself for the problems. Hey, you were in the Liberal caucus for years, Eby pointed out repeatedly during the televised leadership debate. These problems all started then! Why didn’t you do anything to fix them?
And Rustad, if he had wanted to, could have pointed out that those problems went back even further, as far back as the previous NDP government in the 1990s or the Socred governments of the 1980s!
That’s the thing about big, intractable problems. They have deep roots, and they linger.
But the NDP’s first defence, the “We’re turning a corner!” claim, always strikes me as at least plausible.
Have we solved the doctor shortage? No, not now. But has it been solved for 2028 or 2030? When we’re graduating new doctors and our recruitment efforts have borne fruit?
Maybe. We can run the numbers, but the real world will throw a wrench into any projection you care to make.
This is one of the great problems in politics.
Getting elected relies on blaming the other guys for everything that’s wrong with society (something is always wrong with society) while claiming that you can fix all of it.
Then once you’re elected, you switch gears and talk about how hard everything is to do. Because that’s true! It’s really hard, and it doesn’t matter which side of the aisle you’re one. It’s not like Rustad will be pulling 500 more doctors out of his sleeve if he becomes the next premier.
He’ll tout new plans and common sense solutions, and in a year or two, the NDP will be ready to tear a strip off him in Question Period asking why an ER had to shut down. (Because none of those new docs will be graduating for at least a few more years.)
And if the NDP’s current policies do solve the doctor shortage, then that solution should start being noticeable… well, around the time of the next provincial election in 2028. Maybe a year or two later.
Whoever is in office then may get the credit for it.
Or they’ll be dealing with one of the other problems that take more than a decade to solve.
