Ontario results warning
Ontario vote a caution for Harper
The last time I bothered to clue in to the state of Ontario politics, which is to say sometime around the beginning of the current provincial election campaign, Dalton McGuinty’s Liberal government was in deep doo doo. The government had broken too many of its previous promises, the pundits and the pollsters had already concluded; the Tories, under the wonderfully named John Tory, were poised to take power if only because they weren’t the Liberals. Or so they claimed.
What a difference a campaign makes.
As I write this on the morning of election day, the outcome — if you believe the polls (always a dubious proposition) and the pundits (even sketchier) — is already a foregone conclusion. You will be reading in your newspaper this morning that McGuinty and his Liberals have cruised to a convincing majority victory.
What happened? Well, everything. And nothing. The short answer is that John Tory seized on an issue almost no one in Ontario cared about — public funding for religious schools — and somehow transformed it into the issue that trumped everything else, drowning out any reasoned, or even unreasoned discussion of Dalton McGuinty’s actual record as premier or all of those issues — the province’s troubled manufacturing economy, its crumbling infrastructure and underfunded health care system — that actually matter to people.
Such are the unpredictable, illogical and ultimately unstoppable ways of electoral campaigns.
There is — or should be — a lesson in all of that for Stephen Harper. Be careful what you wish for.
Canadian voters do not appear all that dissatisfied with the current minority government situation; they certainly aren’t clamouring for a chance to give Harper the majority he craves. So merely being seen to be the political leader who triggers yet another unnecessary federal election — and Harper’s recent tough-guy, sabre-rattling, every-vote-is-a-confidence-vote posturing will be seen for exactly what it is — could backfire in ways no one, least of all Harper himself, can safely predict.
As John Tory discovered, the distance between being poised for power and looking for another line of work is short.
CBC Radio’s Information Morning has taken up the case of Dr. Michael Goodyear, the oncologist whose five-years-and-counting battle with Capital District Health Authority I wrote about in this space last week.
The Cole’s Notes version of the story: Five years ago, the CDHA suspended Goodyear’s hospital privileges, ostensibly because his continued practice endangered the safety of patients but more likely because he didn’t get along with a supervisor. The case has dragged on and on, destroying Goodyear’s career and personally bankrupting him while robbing the rest of us of his much-needed services as an oncologist.
On Tuesday, Information Morning interviewed Goodyear and Dr. John Sullivan, the president of the district’s medical staff association, which has taken up Goodyear’s case, along with that of Dr. Gabrielle Horner, a cardiac researcher who has endured a similar ordeal at the hands of Capital Health and is currently suing the CDHA over its treatment of her.
Yesterday, the program invited CDHA officials to respond specifically to the question of why it has taken so long to deal with Goodyear’s case.
The answer was pathetically inadequate.
That’s not to blame Dr. Brendan Carr, the interim vice president of medicine at the hospital, who wasn’t even in his current position when the dispute began, but who was handed the thankless task of trying to make sense of the CDHA’s sense-less arguments.
Carr, of course, couldn’t talk specifically about Dr. Goodyear’s case, only hypothetically about the process. While admitting that asking why the case has taken so long to resolve was “a very good question,” Carr insisted that “due process is in play” and that the CDHA was simply “exercising our duty to the public” in order to “maintain the public’s confidence in the health care system.”
For five years?
The “public” was not impressed. The program followed Carr’s interview with a selection of telephone calls and emails it had received in response to its interview with Goodyear. All agreed that five years was way too long for a case like this to drag on.
One caller was a former patient of Goodyear’s, who said he’d been “fortunate” to have him as his oncologist. Another came from the family member of another patient who’d died from his cancer but who described Goodyear as “professional and honest” in all his dealings with the family and added that the case against him seemed like “a waste of time, money and talent.”
Indeed.
Still another correspondent echoed my call from last week that Premier Rodney MacDonald and Health Minister Chris d’Entremont intervene to settle this mess.
Perhaps our premier might now want to take time out from pretending to know what health care workers think about his anti-strike legislation and deal with a health care issue that is not only endangering “the health and safety” of Nova Scotians but that is also clearly crying out for action from the top.
Don’t hold your breath.
Stephen Kimber is the Rogers Communications Chair in Journalism at the University of King's College. His column, Kimber's Nova Scotia, appears in The Sunday Daily News.
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Available May 13, 2007
Copyright 2007 Stephen Kimber
Kimber’s Nova Scotia (Oct 7, 2007)
Kimber’s Nova Scotia
October 7, 2007
Out of gas
Despite pleas from local residents, a pitch from internationally famed photographer Sherman Hines and even a brief stay of demolition by the Queens Municipal Council, Liverpool’s architecturally rare and historically interesting Petro Canada gas station is no more.
Demolition crews spent the week leveling the station, which was built in the 1920s for the Fina gas company and featured pillars and stonework throughout.
The company said the station had to be demolished so it can determine the extent of oil and gas contamination in the soil under the building and clean it up, but local residents claim there were other, less destructive ways to remove any contaminated soil.
Sherman Hines initially proposed turning the building into an automobile museum and later offered to cart away its bricks and rebuild the structure somewhere else, but the company spurned both suggestions.
Municipal council did its part too, ordering a delay in the demolition to see if residents could strike a deal with the company. They couldn’t.
“It’s a loss to the town and it’s a loss to the heritage of the town and anyone who cares about vintage heritage,” Hines told the Queens County Advertiser.
With the levelling of the Liverpool station, there are just a few service stations from that era left in the province, including a still-functioning one in Bridgewater and a former station that is now a collection of retail outlets in Mahone Bay.
That got their attention
When a South Shore Regional School Board member mused recently that the only way to get the provincial government to pay attention to the “woefully inadequate facilities” at Centre Consolidated School might be for students to stage walkouts and demonstrations, the department of education very quickly got the message.
The minister and deputy minister, along with department officials responsible for capital projects, all attended a hastily convened face-to-face meeting with the school superintendent and two board members, assuring them — in the words of a report from superintendent Nancy Pynch-Worthylake — that it recognized “the need for an extensive renovation project at the school.”
The province has agreed to fork over $60,000 immediately to help deal with the most urgent issues — including constructing a barrier-free entrance and upgrading washrooms in the elementary section of the school.
The $60,000 will help, but it’s the barest of beginnings. The board’s director of operations, Paul Rand, told a recent school board meeting the school needs over $6 million worth of work.
No word on when that cash might flow. Can you say the next election?
Score one for Rodney
Rodney MacDonald’s plan to introduce legislation to take away the right to strike from the province’s health care workers has a new ally.
John Malcolm, the CEO of the Cape Breton District Health Authority who had previously opposed such legislation, says the threat of a strike in his district last year changed his mind. He’s not only changed his mind, he’s joined the Nova Scotia Association of Health Organizations $350,000 lobbying effort to convince the rest of us to support the controversial legislation
A strike, he told the Cape Breton Post’s editorial board last week, would have been “terrifying,” resulting in the closure of three emergency rooms, cancellation of elective surgeries and continued cancer treatment only for people already receiving treatment.
“It’s this and the changes I’ve felt in the system over the last five years that have brought me around to saying we’ve got to look at this differently,” Malcolm explained. “You have a disruption of services, you create a backlog. I don’t know how you ever get out of that.”
This fall’s legislature sitting — if Rodney ever calls it — will be interesting.
The burning question
If you haven’t already ordered your winter supply of firewood, forget about it, or accept the fact that you’ll probably end up with wet wood in your woodstove or fireplace.
That, at least, is what a number of suppliers told the New Glasgow News this week.
The problem, says Darcy Graham of Nodar Farms in Upper Stewiacke, is that much of the best wood is now being turned into chips and shipped to markets overseas. The problem has been getting worse over the past decade as demand for firewood goes up at the same time the supply goes down, but it’s reached a crisis point this year.
“I’m selling people wood that’s only been cut a month or two and I’m telling them that,” Graham explains. “They’re in a situation where they’ve got to buy because they can’t get wood anywhere else.”
Graham isn’t alone. David MacKay, who sells split firewood out of Truro, told the newspaper he’s down to just three or four weeks’ stock. “We won’t have enough wood to go through the winter; we usually do, but we won’t this year.”
Although both MacKay and Graham say they’re considering cutting and stockpiling more firewood in the spring, Graham points out that “it’s costly for us to hold onto it.”
The solution, they say, is to buy your wood for next winter in the spring. “I’m thinking next year my phone is going to be ringing off the hook in April or May,” Graham says, hopefully. “People are going to be getting their wood earlier next year.”
Maybe.
All’s well that ends well
The curtain is about to fall on a three-year soap opera at Parsboro’s Ship’s Company Theatre and — as happens more often on stage than in real life — the final act appears to include a surprise happy ending.
This real-life play began three years ago when the theatre company moved into a new facility and applied to Parsboro for tax exempt status as a cultural institution.
The town said no, designated 22 per cent of the building as commercial and dinged the theatre company for that share of its property taxes.
The Ship’s Company countered that it couldn’t survive the extra costs and, besides, other municipalities with theatre companies exempted them from property taxes.
Relations between town and theatre got so bad, reports the Amherst Citizen, that they were “barely [on] speaking terms” at the beginning of the summer.
But now, thanks to last minute negotiations, the town has agreed to tax the theatre on only 12 per cent of its property instead of the original 22.
“I’m thrilled, and you can put that in bold, capital letters,” Ship’s Company general manager Chuck Homewood told the Citizen. “This is a wonderful step in the right direction.”
The denouement should occur later this month when council holds second and final reading on the revised tax exemption bylaw.
No curtain calls, please.
Whose obstacle course
Former-gym-teacher-turned-premier Rodney MacDonald says he wants to remove the “obstacles” that prevent community groups from using local school facilities after hours. But critics say his own government’s failure to foot the bill for the required extra insurance is the biggest obstacle those community groups face.
The long simmering rural issue bubbled back to the surface during a recent meeting of a committee of the Tri-County Regional School Board in Yarmouth. The commitee was discussing the board’s community use policy. Board members said they too wanted to open up their school rooms and gymnasiums — often the only large public gathering spots in rural communities — but their school insurance policies won’t cover such “non-school” activities. That means the groups often have to ante up hundreds of dollars to buy additional insurance just to hold one meeting or event. And, worse from the school board’s point of view, they end up blaming the board for forcing them to purchase the insurance.
Responding to those concerns, the premier told the Yarmouth Vanguard he’s instructed his ministers of education and health promotion and protection to figure out ways to make the province's schools more accessible.
If he’s really serious, says school board vice-chair Ron Hines, the solution is simple. ”If the province is so determined to provide these facilities to the community they should have liability insurance that would cover the whole thing across the province.”
Back to you, Rodney.
Come in, the water’s warm
No one around Isle Madame had seen such a creature before. It was a six-foot-long, 60-pound fish with “large silver scales and a large, round mouth” that recently washed up on shore in an estuary of a brook in nearby Port Royal.
So they called the Department of Fisheries and Oceans. DFO sent out an officer to examine the sea creature. He confirmed the fish was, in fact, a tarpon.
A tarpon? Sometimes called the “silver king” and prized by sports fishermen because they put up such a good fight, tarpon are usually only found in the tropical and sub-tropical waters around the Gulf of Mexico, Florida and the West Indies.
How did it end up in Isle Madame? Good question? Can you say global warming?
Stephen Kimber is the Rogers Communications Chair in Journalism at the University of King’s College. His column also appears in Thursday’s Daily News.
SOURCES:
Amherst Citizen, Cape Breton Post, New Glasgow News, Queens County Advertiser, Port Hawkesbury Reporter, Southshorenow.ca, Yarmouth Vanguard.
Copyright 2007 Stephen Kimber
Michael Goodyear’s ordeal continues (Oct 4, 2007)
Five years of ‘stress, isolation and poverty’
Dr. Michael Goodyear marked an anniversary this week. He didn’t celebrate.
Five years ago on Tuesday — Oct. 2, 2002 — Goodyear, a respected medical oncologist and ethics researcher, received a letter from his bosses at the Capital District Health Authority.
As the result of ongoing personality clashes with his division head over Goodyear’s “communication… availability and judgment,” the chief of medicine, Dr. Elizabeth Anne Cowden, informed the doctor she was varying his hospital privileges.
The problem is that you can’t simply vary a doctor’s hospital privileges — which are critical to his ability to do his job — because he doesn’t get along with his boss. You have to prove he poses a real threat to his patients’ safety.
The CDHA hasn’t — and it’s had five years to make its case.
The District Medical Advisory Committee spent three months investigating the allegations against Goodyear, and found no substance to them. A complaint was also lodged with the doctors’ governing body, the Nova Scotia College of Physicians and Surgeons. It too was unable to substantiate the allegations, and eventually withdrew its complaint.
Despite that, the Capital District Health Authority — which, by its own rules, should have dealt with Goodyear’s case within a month after the initial emergency variance — has dragged its feet, all the while refusing to restore his privileges.
Worse, it appears — on the face of it — to have done its best to consign him to languish in a kind of extended exile. According to a complaint Goodyear lodged this summer with the province’s human rights commission, the CDHA has restricted him from “clinical practice, research, teaching, administrative duties and publication and presentation of my work.” It stripped him of his position as the authority’s research ethics chair — despite the objections of other members of the committee and several former chairs — and locked him out of his office. He was eventually forced to declare bankruptcy.
“Five years (and still counting) is a significant time taken out of one's life at a time when one is supposed to be at one's most productive and thinking about planning for retirement,” Goodyear mused in an email this week. “Five years,” he added, “is a long time to spend under continuous stress, professional and social isolation and poverty.
The only recent development in his case is that the CDHA’s board has finally agreed to assume jurisdiction of the case from the hospital’s privileges review committee, which hadn’t managed to come to a conclusion in five years of sort-of trying.
While that should be good news, Goodyear notes, “the two bodies are now, as expected, arguing about the terms of such a transfer [of jurisdiction], and this is continuing to occupy the now even larger list of law firms engaged in the process.”
Ah, yes, the lawyers — the only ones who actually benefit from this protracted affair.
And not just this one.
We know through freedom of information requests that the CDHA has already spent more than a million dollars on outside lawyers to fight a similar — and similarly ongoing, not to mention similarly frivolous — case involving pioneering heart researcher Dr. Gabrielle Horne.
The Horne case started at almost exactly the same time and involved the same non-issue of personality differences with her bosses. Last September, the authority’s board finally ruled that it had had no authority to vary Horne’s privileges but it did so in such a reluctant, roundabout way that Horne is now suing the health authority.
Which means the case will cost taxpayers — and Nova Scotia’s underfinanced health system — even more than it already has.
We can only guess that the CDHA has spent at least as much on outside lawyers in Goodyear’s case — and will continue to run the clock until it runs out of legal options.
Or until the premier and his minister of health insist the authority stop wasting our money on lawyers to cover its collective ass and spend it on providing health care instead.
Are you listening, Rodney? Chris?
***
In last week’s column, I quoted Jayati Vora, a former student in Columbia’s School of Public and International Affairs who’d written an article for The Nation about Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s recent speech at the university. I described Vora as a he. Well, “he” is, in fact, a she. My apologies.Stephen Kimber is the Rogers Communications Chair in Journalism at the University of King's College. His column, Kimber's Nova Scotia, appears in The Sunday Daily News.
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Copyright 2007 Stephen Kimber
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About
STEPHEN KIMBER, a Professor of Journalism at the University of King's College in Halifax, is an award-winning writer, editor and broadcaster. He is the author of one novel -- Reparations -- and seven non-fiction books.
Buy his books at Amazon.