Maple and Brett Belchetz, at the intersection of private, for-profit healthcare and MAiD

 

For many years, the same voices telling us we need more private healthcare have also been advocating for expansion of medical assistance in dying.

Dr. Brett Belchetz is a key figure in Canada’s increasingly privatized healthcare space, as CEO of private healthcare provider, Maple. As a former management consultant at McKinsey and a senior fellow of the Fraser Institute, it is unsurprising that Belchetz is a proponent of private healthcare, or keen to convince the public that for-profit care is superior - normalization of these positions has made Dr. Belchetz very rich, and set to become much richer.

Belchetz’s role in Canada’s legalization and expansion of medical assistance in dying may be more surprising.

As we wrote earlier this year, Galen Weston’s decades-long plan to privatize primary care in Canada under his ownership has been incredibly successful, despite flying under the radar for most Canadians. The pandemic provided the opportunity for a giant leap forward for Loblaws, Shoppers and Maple.

The timing of the pandemic couldn’t have been a bigger gift for Galen’s healthcare and profit ambitions, in many ways. He had already managed to get Doug Ford to drop the planned increase to the Ontario minimum wage, via a secret meeting right after Doug was elected, ensuring sky high profits when Loblaws was one of the only locations open for “essentials.”

By 2020, a few quarters into the pandemic, Loblaws invested $75 million in virtual health provider Maple Corporation, for whom the pandemic had already been a windfall. But Maple and Loblaws were already connected, as Shoppers Drug Mart was already invested in the company.

Setting the stage to privatize Canada’s much-beloved public healthcare system has been decades in the making. Canada’s media outlets have gone to great lengths to platform and position Belchetz as a “medical expert” - he is a regular guest on CTV and Global, and writes op-eds for Postmedia and The National Post - but there are two features of his background that never make it into his introduction or his biography.  (more...)

Maple and Brett Belchetz, at the intersection of private, for-profit healthcare and MAiD