BC Health Care Isn’t a Funding Mystery. It’s an Accountability Failure
British Columbians are told the same story about health care every year.
“The system is strained.”
“Demand is rising.”
“Costs are exploding.”
“If only there were more money, things would improve.”
These are common refrains, and governments love trotting them out because they’re comforting and absolve leadership of responsibility. They suggest the problem is structural, inevitable, and largely beyond anyone’s control.
That story is wrong. Very wrong!
The most persistent failure in British Columbia’s health-care system is not funding. It is management. More specifically, it is the way decisions are made, responsibility is diffused, and accountability is designed to disappear before it ever reaches an elected desk.
Anyone who has sat in a boardroom or overseen a large public institution, as I have, recognizes the pattern immediately.
Authority is fragmented.
Decisions are pushed downward into committees.
Risk aversion is rewarded. Escalation is discouraged.
When outcomes go wrong, no one technically violated the process, so no one is responsible.
Convenient.
Health care did not arrive at this place overnight, and it is not the result of bad people or malicious intent. It is the predictable outcome of a system that treats process compliance as success. Sober second thought is treated as interference rather than patient-centred leadership.
In British Columbia, life-altering decisions are routinely made by panels and agencies that operate behind closed doors, guided by criteria the public rarely sees and shielded from accountability. Ministers are warned against “undermining integrity,” then left to act as human shields for faceless, unaccountable bodies.
Bureaucrats are encouraged to stick to protocol rather than exercise judgment. The result is a system in which no one owns outcomes, even when those outcomes are indefeasible.
This is not a funding problem. It is a governance failure, and ultimately a moral one.
If that sounds abstract, consider what the government has now put on the public record.
Data obtained through Freedom of Information requests revealed that 4,620 British Columbians died in 2024–25 while waiting for medical care. Hundreds died waiting for surgery. Thousands more died waiting for diagnostic imaging, often long after medically recommended timelines had been exceeded. These deaths were not routinely disclosed to the public, and families were not systematically warned when care could not be delivered in time.
In response, Conservative health critic Dr. Anna Kindy introduced Bill M-219, a narrowly targeted piece of legislation that would have required health authorities to inform patients of the actual expected wait time, the medically recommended timeline, and the options available when life-saving care could not be delivered on time. It would also have required transparent reporting of how many British Columbians die while waiting.
Last month, in December 2025, the NDP government voted it down.
That vote matters.
By rejecting Bill M-219, the government did not reject a funding proposal or a structural overhaul. It rejected transparency. It chose to keep patients in the dark rather than provide information that could help them make potentially life-saving decisions. That is not a failure of capacity. It is a failure of leadership.
Money can expand capacity, but it cannot fix a structure that rewards delay, hides decision-making, and treats patient knowledge as a liability. Pouring more dollars into a system designed this way makes the failure more expensive.
Defenders of the status quo often argue that political involvement in health-care decisions is dangerous. That risks politicizing medicine. That ministers should defer to experts and stay out of the way.
This argument confuses oversight with micromanagement and moral responsibility.
No serious person is suggesting politicians should practice medicine. But leadership means owning outcomes, not outsourcing responsibility and hoping the process absorbs the fallout. When a system repeatedly produces results that violate public expectations of fairness, compassion, and basic honesty, elected officials are not merely permitted to intervene; they are required to do so. They are obligated to.
What is missing in British Columbia’s health-care system is not expertise. There is no shortage of that. Doctors and nurses across this province deliver extraordinary care under impossible conditions.
What’s missing is accountability.
Competent systems make clear who decides what, under what criteria, and with what recourse when decisions fail. They publish standards. They explain denials. They create escalation paths. They name responsibility. They accept scrutiny.
British Columbia’s system does the opposite. It obscures. It fragments. It delays. It treats transparency as a liability rather than the foundation of legitimacy.
That is why patients and families feel abandoned. Not because they expect miracles, but because they cannot get answers. Not because they demand perfection, but because no one seems willing to say, publicly and plainly, “This decision is mine, and here is why.”
If the government wants to restore trust in health care, it should stop pretending this is a mystery only money can solve. The fix begins with leadership willing to take responsibility for outcomes, expose decision-making to daylight, and accept that the process exists to serve patients, not protect institutions.
Until that changes, no amount of funding will buy back the trust this system has burned through.