On disinformation

The Star reports that the Cons are set to axe a health information network which would otherwise be used literally millions of times per year by Canadian medical practitioners. And aside from including the network in part of a set of arbitrary spending cuts, the Cons' reasoning seems to be based largely on the fact that the network contains too much useful information:

Effective March 31, 2008, the Canadian Health Network will cease to exist.

For the past eight years, it has provided citizens and medical professionals with a reliable, non-commercial source of online information about how to stay healthy and prevent disease.

Although the website (www.canadian-health-network.ca) is managed by the Winnipeg-based Public Health Agency of Canada, it is a collaboration of 26 organizations – government departments, universities, hospitals, libraries and non-profit health providers – who draw on 1,600 specialists across the country...

(L)ately, (the CHN) website has been getting 380,000 hits a month, 40 per cent of them health-care professionals. In the last year alone, its usage has increased by 70 per cent. It has established a reputation as a trustworthy portal in a cyberworld of drug manufacturers, health-care conglomerates and self-promoting quacks...

Health Minister Tony Clement launched a new website, www.healthycanadians.gc.ca, in October, to provide users with information about all of the government's programs – its children's fitness tax credit, its revised Canada Food Guide, its toy safety tips, its latest product recalls and its healthy pregnancy guide – designed to promote an active, well-balanced lifestyle.

There's certainly nothing wrong with centralizing all of Ottawa's health information in one place.

What's missing from the new database is any reference to the links between health and the environment, disease and poverty, or violence and gun control. Nor does it touch sensitive topics such as abortion, genetically modified foods or sexual abuse. It completely overlooks mental illness.

In contrast, the Canadian Health Network is all-encompassing. It looks at controversial questions from all sides. It is constantly updated as new knowledge becomes available.

From the usage numbers, it looks to be virtually beyond dispute that the CHN website is seen as useful by Canadian health care providers. And even if one doesn't take as proven the article's suggestion that the network might actually operate with a surplus, it seems equally clear that any program which can offer valuable information to health care providers in the range of two million times every year is more than worth the cost of the Cons' ordered $16 million cut.

But the Cons are apparently of the view that the benefit of a cheap, effective way of improving health care for Canadians is more than outweighed by their desire to remove any uncomfortable material from web pages affiliated with the federal government, as well as to focus more attention on their partisan actions (rather than information which could actually be useful to health care providers).

The end result, though, can only be to make it more difficult for Canadian health care providers to find information relating to the issues which the Cons want to sweep under the rug. And with the Cons taking active steps to ensure worse service for the Canadians who most need a responsive health care system, there's ever more reason to doubt Canada can afford much more of the Cons' course of treatment.