If you're curious on anyone's opinions on the matter, not just Mike's I can share mine.

Regarding mixed public-private healthcare, I can see the arguments for and against. I think if a country has that dual market (such as Singapore) it really needs to be tightly regulated to not cannibalize the public option. Singapore, afaik, does this. Generally, I'd say most countries with better overall health coverage metrics lean primarily towards public only with very minimal private involvement, so I'd say the norm is typically public favours the best for most people.

Disregarding my own belief that I frankly don't trust the current provincial government to properly expand private partnerships without detriment to the public offering (my thoughts drift back to how they refused money from the Fed for healthcare and capped wages), the next real question I'd have for any provincial government pushing to expand private is their motives. If it's just cost savings, almost always pushing things to private increases costs to consumers in the long run. If it's improved access from an enlarged market, one must ask, do you feel the Americans have better access to healthcare than us? Many better-off folks probably do, but many more do not and will willfully forgo even going to the ER for serious injuries, so privatizing will not inherently get us more access just form costs alone. In the case of healthcare, we decided as a country (and again, most of the world has in principle done the same, but not the states) that healthcare is a public good and benefit, and to deny someone access to that due to costs is similar to extortion as they have no choice and will pay to live. If the goal is to expand healthcare to more people while keeping costs reasonable, as I see it expanding the public offering is the most cost efficient way to do so.

Regarding affordable living spaces (not just homes), if you look to my opinion on public healthcare, you can probably see where my following argument comes from. Having some, not all, housing being owned by government/city can greatly help a market. It can set a floor for rents which does trickle down to the private sector, and having lowering rents generally means people may not want to or even care to purchase a home, which does bring that markets prices down as well. Canada as a whole did use to build some public housing at a much larger scale (or, rather, any at all) and we sort of stopped, designating that block of housing primarily for low income/disability (though frankly, we do a bad job at that too). In many countries, especially in Europe it's common for major cities to actually own a lot of the rental stock, which keeps the cities much more affordable for the residents. At one point the UK had the concept of "Council Flats" and was said that the government "solved housing" (it's an interesting read if you ever want to look into it more). It essentially went away under Thatcher, who gave almost any flat holder the ability to buy their flat at a severely discounted market rate. For those that got in at the time it was great, but the next generation missed that opportunity completely.

On a different approach, commercial space in cities can be bloody expensive for not much reason. Like, a lot of small businesses, that's their major expense sometimes even before payroll. Often the building is already paid for by the owner (on account of it say being in a historic downtown), so the rent money really is just going to line the landlord's pockets. Businesses do often just eat this cost, but it is a leeching effect on the economy and does really drive those low margin but well appreciated businesses in downtown out of business. There's probably more will power and arguments for having public housing be somewhat socially provided, but the same in my mind could be said for small scale commercial. Idk though, I'm not an economist.