Live election results: Trump retakes the White House, defeats Harris by winning key swing states
Donald Trump was elected the 47th president of the United States on Wednesday, clearing the 270 electoral votes needed to clinch the presidency.
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said Friday provinces and territories need to start negotiating pharmacare deals as soon as possible, a day after legislation to enact the program received royal assent.
"This is real progress, but now we need the provinces and territories to come to the table and sign agreements with us that supports Canadians and takes pressure off their household budgets as soon as possible," Trudeau told reporters as he wrapped a trip to the Association of Southeast Asian Nations Summit in Laos.
He said the program will help people who are struggling to pay for prescriptions, and said his government "not only (believes) in a woman's right to choose, we act on it."
The pharmacare bill passed the Senate without amendments Thursday, and received royal assent shortly after. In the long term it will inform the creation of any future universal pharmacare plan but in the immediate term the bill paves the way for the federal government to sign deals with provinces and territories to cover diabetes and birth-control medications as part of the public health system.
The deals are required for the medications to be covered in each jurisdiction.
With the Liberal minority government hanging on precariously, it's not clear how much time the government has to sign any deals, and NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh warned Friday that the status of pharmacare remains 'fragile."
"I'm worried," Singh said in a news conference on Parliament Hill.
Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre, whose party would win a significant majority if an election were held right now, has indicated he would "reject" a single-payer drug plan. Some premiers have balked at the idea of signing onto it.
"So my message to Justin Trudeau is 'you can't delay and drag your feet the way you did to get to this point," Singh said. "You can't fight us at every turn like you did up until this point. Now you've got to get to work and meet with provinces and territories and get deals signed. That is the only way that people will actually receive the benefit."
Pharmacare has been a central part of NDP policy for years and Singh made it a pivotal piece of the now-defunct supply and confidence deal he made with Trudeau two years ago. He would not say on Friday whether NDP support for the Liberals on future confidence votes will be tied to how quickly the government gets deals with the provinces.
Liberal Health Minister Mark Holland has said he hopes to have all provinces and territories on board by next spring. British Columbia has already signed a memorandum of understanding to provide coverage. Manitoba, which began covering prescription birth control on Oct. 1 to fulfil an election promise made by the NDP government there, has indicated interest in making a deal with Ottawa.
Others have been more skeptical.
"I'm not saying it's going to be easy," Holland told reporters on Friday. "Getting this bill adopted in the House and getting it through the Senate was incredibly difficult."
He urged premiers to look past partisanship, singling out Alberta Premier Danielle Smith, who has said she will opt out of the federal program, saying, "Can we not agree that we need to live in a society where people have access to the medication that will stop them from getting sick?"
A spokeswoman for Ontario Health Minister Sylvia Jones said in a statement Friday that Ontario hasn't received any details on what the government is proposing to do with this bill.
"Instead of calling on the provinces to strike a deal with no detail, the federal government should focus on working collaboratively with provinces to adequately support health care services across the country," said Hannah Jensen in an email.
"This year alone, our government has invested over $85 billion in our health care system which has allowed us to have the highest rate of primary care providers and the shortest wait times across the country, provide publicly funded drug coverage for nearly half of our population through OHIP+ and the Trillium drug plan, while also investing in innovative, publicly funded, life-changing treatments."
Alberta's Minister of Health Adriana LaGrange said the province is committed to finding ways to make drugs more affordable and accessible, but that the federal government has not shown its vision for pharmacare beyond contraceptives and diabetes medication.
"Alberta has some of the most comprehensive public drug programs in the country, covering more than 5,000 drugs, and we intend to maintain our current benefit offerings. The federal government can assist us in enhancing our current offerings by not adding duplicate programs or creating unnecessary and costly administrative burdens," she said in a statement.
The Liberal government has had similar negotiations to sign deals with the provinces and territories to sign deals for health-care funding.
The initial program that covers diabetes medication and contraceptives is a "universal, first-dollar, single-payer model," according to the health minister, meaning that patients will not pay for the medications. He has in the past said that people who have a private health plan that covers the medicines can choose whether to use their health coverage or the federal plan.
But Holland refused to speculate on whether a future national pharmacare program will be a mixed-payer system or a single-payer system, an "ideological debate" that he argued has been going on for too long. The answer to that question will be "driven by data, science and evidence," he said.
The law calls for the government to convene an expert panel within the next month to investigate the next steps in establishing a full-fledged pharmacare program.
That committee will report its recommendations to the health minister within a year.
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Oct. 11, 2024.
With files from Liam Casey in Toronto.
Donald Trump was elected the 47th president of the United States on Wednesday, clearing the 270 electoral votes needed to clinch the presidency.
Donald Trump was elected the 47th president of the United States on Wednesday, an extraordinary comeback for a former president who refused to accept defeat four years ago, sparked a violent insurrection at the U.S. Capitol, was convicted of felony charges and survived two assassination attempts.
Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau congratulated Donald Trump early Wednesday morning on his second United States presidential election win.
In his column for CTVNews.ca, former NDP leader Tom Mulcair says Donald Trump's icy relationship with Prime Minister Justin Trudeau could aggravate what already promises to be a very difficult situation for Canada, socially, economically and environmentally.
It was a moment that encapsulated one of the biggest challenges facing U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris' campaign – which, in the end, proved insurmountable. A country crying out for change got a candidate who, at a crucial moment as more voters were tuning in, decided to soft-pedal the change she knew she represented.
U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris will deliver a speech conceding defeat in the presidential election to Donald Trump at 6 p.m. (2300 GMT) on Wednesday, two sources told Reuters.
Dozens of popular brands of bread have been recalled in Canada after pieces of metal were discovered in some of the products.
A British doctor who was disgruntled about his inheritance and injected his mother's boyfriend with poison presented as a COVID-19 vaccine was sentenced Wednesday to 31 years in prison.
The Saskatchewan Health Authority says people who ate food from a pizza restaurant near Saskatoon last month may have been exposed to typhoid fever.
A Vancouver artist whose streetside singing led to a chance encounter with one of the world's biggest musicians is encouraging aspiring performers to try their hand at busking.
Ten-thousand hand-knit poppies were taken from the Sanctuary Arts Centre and displayed on the fence surrounding the Dartmouth Cenotaph on Monday.
A Vancouver man is saying goodbye to his nine-to-five and embarking on a road trip from the Canadian Arctic to Antarctica.
A Windsor teen’s social media post showing off a distinctive Windsor pizza topping has gone viral, drawing millions of views worldwide and sparking new curiosity about Windsor-style pizza.
Auston Matthews has come face to face with his look-alike. On Thursday, the Maple Leafs star met seven-year-old Grayson Joseph, who went viral for dressing up as an Auston Matthews hockey card.
A Halifax junk remover shares some of his company’s strangest discoveries.
When Leah arrived at work directing traffic around a construction site, she never expected to see a van painted in all sorts of bright colours, and covered in eclectic decorations, including a stuffed moose attached to its roof.
After 14 years of repairing and selling bicycles out of the garage of her home, a Guelph, Ont. woman’s efforts have ended – for now, at least.
Epcor says it has removed more than 20,000 goldfish from an Edmonton stormwater pond.