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Empire-builders try to destroy Port Colborne hospital
October 6, 2008 on 8:14 pm | In Social & Political Issues | No CommentsPort Colborne is under threat of losing its hospital that residents largely paid for out of their own paycheques, essentially unaided by outside money, starting first with the loss of emergency services and culminating in the facility’s disappearance into a $1billion-mega hospital over 30 minutes away in St. Catherines, Ont.
It’s part of the theft that keeps stealing as a result of the Tory regime of Ontario ex-premier Mike Harris that ended in his disgrace as he walked away from the messes he and his handlers created.
Harris and his band of NeoCon villains included Niagara Tory Tim Hudak whose wife Deb Hutton was a Harris handler (Harris was a dumbbell polished up as a Tory figurehead to turn Ontario into a money watershed for special interests).
They merged the Port Colborne hospital into a Niagara Health System bureaucracy with grand designs of medical empire. To that end they propose a mega-hospital they quietly estimate at $300 million. Since you can triple any bureaucrat cost estimates to convert them into actual numbers, it amounts to a $1 billion facility.
Step one is to kill local emergency rooms, including Port Colborne’s despite a promise by the McGuinty government to keep them strong as shown in this press release published by the Liberals December 12, 2007:
PORT COLBORNE – The McGuinty government is improving access to emergency services in the Port Colborne area by approving a $400,000 renovation of the emergency department at Niagara Health System’s Port Colborne General Hospital site, Deputy Premier and Health and Long-Term Care Minister George Smitherman announced today.
“Our government is committed to lowering wait times in emergency rooms because Ontarians deserve faster access to care,” Smitherman said. “This new state-of-the-art emergency department will help provide this improved care to Port Colborne area residents.”
The renovated emergency department will feature a new nursing triage area, improvements to the patient waiting area, better security features and infection control improvements.
“We’re excited to be moving forward with this important upgrade of our Emergency Department at the Port Colborne General Site,” said Debbie Sevenpifer, president and CEO of the Niagara Health System. “A modernized ER will be a better functioning ER to serve the needs of our patients.”
“Our government is making sure that Port Colborne area residents have the best possible access to hospital emergency care,” said Kim Craitor, MPP for Niagara Falls.
It’s up to the McGuinty government now to take control of the situation and return the formerly self-sustaining Port Colborne hospital to the people who actually paid for it before it was merged into the NHS mess and saddled with a deficit not of Port Colborne’s making.
They would suffer deaths and serious injuries being shuttled to emergency facilities so far away in St. Catherines.
Frank Touby
Conservative used to mean something good
October 6, 2008 on 7:45 pm | In Social & Political Issues | No CommentsThere was a time not too long ago when “conservative” stood for something honest and good. It described a political and social position that built North America. It meant honest labour was a high virtue, along with reasonable self reliance, concern for one’s fellow citizens, a sense of fairness for all and a proper reluctance to have government do for us what we could and should do for ourselves.
It demanded government effectively and honourably perform, produce or regulate services or products that only it should be responsible for; vital things that private sector operatives might use to unfairly penalize or exploit citizens. Such things as delivering mail, telecom and energy; raising an army; commissioning domestic police; schooling children; providing for the necessities of life.
“Conservative” meant something then. Something honourable and good and fair. That was before the NeoCons hijacked the term and perverted it to mean wrongly enriching the well connected and deluding the gullible into thinking they, too, can be connected if they string along.
Today it has taken on a sad veneer of provoking feelings of greed and jealousy against the unfortunate. “Conservative” has been appropriated by the warlords who control monster corporations. While it’s their royal prerogative to demand taxpayer bailout for their egregious blunders and outright evil greed, they obstruct public remediation of the condition the growing ranks of the unfortunate deserve: it is often those warlords who have created the misfortunes.
“Conservative” has become the label of Big Liars. They tell outrageous lies, repeatedly, expensively, stunning honest opponents into near silence; tricking voters into swallowing their bullshit. There’s a word for it now that came from the second stolen election for George W. Bush: Swiftboating. Look it up in Wikipedia. As a repeated, loud lie, it changed the story of a genuine Viet Nam war hero and made it seem as if he were an elite shirker. Like George W. Bush.
A group of super-wealthy reactionaries gathered up some Viet Nam vets, only one of whom served on Democrat candidate John Kerry’s boat, to accuse him of lying about his military service. No doubt some cash was involved for the old fellows to travel to political rallies and recall events the way they claimed. After all, it was sharks like T. Boone Pickens who were picking up the tab. All other vets who actually served with Kerry backed the official version of his heroic service.
Stunned into silence by such blatant, heavily financed lying, the Kerry campaign took the high road to nation-wrecking defeat: another four years for the “conservatives.”
In Canada, the Big Lie is a term like “accountable government” from the most secretive prime minister in decades. There are many more. The Big Lie is that private business is more efficient than properly run government activities and costs less.
The Big Lie is that Canada will continue to be an independent nation while giving away its living in free trade deals that only serve corporate warlords.
You get the idea. Lots of Big Lies, brashly and expensively proclaimed, that effectively go unchallenged. That’s what “conservative” has come to mean.
In Toronto, a Big Lie was that Amalgamation would be more cost effective than the existing government form. In Ontario, a Big Lie was that downloading provincial responsibilities onto municipalities would be “revenue neutral.”
The willful hallucination that big business and professions are the best watchdogs over themselves is another, deadly, Big Lie.
The Big Lie of all Big Lies that marks this perversion of the once-reputable term “Conservative” is that selfish private interests can best serve the tax-paying public. To that end, they do their utmost to make government fail, or appear to fail, so that a hapless citizenry will let the well connected rob them blind. In the U.S. it appears that their aim is to destroy the middle class and replace it with a quivering, fearful mass obedient to the will of their elite betters. Thus they have privatized the armed forces with such as Blackwater, intend to use combat troops domestically, shipped the National Guard off to foreign wars and gutted the admirable U.S. Constitution that protects against an outlaw state.
The only chance for remediation is Barack Obama. We must pray he isn’t another David Miller-style dud.
FRANK TOUBY