Thank you for your question.
In my first economics of education course, I show the extent to which healthcare eats up the budget. The fact that more and more is being invested in these causes funding for more or less everything to decline, particularly in education, but also in the community services that support the most vulnerable people. The result of this underfunding is that very little prevention work gets done.
I sit on the scientific committee on the prevention of obesity at Quebec's Institut national de santé publique, which is its public health expertise and reference centre. The committee has all sorts of lovely ideas about prevention for children and adults, but when it comes time to fund them, there is no money left to do it.
So all the money is often spent on caring for older people, and that is to be expected. However, the result of chronic underfunding of healthcare is that there are no prevention measures. Consequently, obesity among young people in Quebec and everywhere in Canada has risen enormously over the last 30 years. That problem would be fairly easy to solve with properly targeted prevention measures, because doctors and everyone working in the field have a lot of good ideas. However, they have no money to put them into action. So much for healthcare.
The education sector is also underfunded. So we find ourselves with a lot of children who have all sorts of problems and we don't have the resources to help them, because the money is being redirected to other needs that seem more urgent.
It has to be said, however, that children are our future. If we don't spend money on them, we are heading for a wall. We are eventually going to have to wake up. We can't keep investing money elsewhere than in our children, because that is going to catch up with us later on and we are going to find ourselves with a very messed up population when they reach adulthood.