Nova Scotia’s immigration scandal (Oct 25, 2007)
Bolivar-Getson’s not the only one to blame
To say that Carolyn Bolivar-Getson was a disaster as Nova Scotia’s immigration minister is to state the obvious. After all, this is the woman who, as recently as last week, was defending her government’s indefensible, reprehensible immigrant rip-off program by arguing that those who signed up for the government-sanctioned, $130,000 “economic mentorship” program “did not have to come here under that program. They chose to do that and put their money up front.” Caveat emptor. Tough luck, fella.
The government had already quietly decided to refund close to $60 million — without offering to pay any interest on money it’s held for a year or more — to about 600 would-be immigrants whose money we took but who never got what they paid for. But Bolivar-Getson continued to insist that those individuals who’d had the too-usual misfortune to be mismatched with a mentor (like Iranian plastic surgeon Ali Shirazi whose placement was with a car dealer) or ended up not getting a job or opportunity in their chosen field weren’t eligible to get even some of their money back.
And, oh yes, despite the sickly stench of scandal wafting out from its rotting corpse, Bolivar-Getson blithely told reporters she saw absolutely no need for a review to find out what had gone so wrong.
She had to go.
But while Bolivar-Getson has to carry the can for what happened after last year’s ultimate collapse of the disastrously flawed and failed economic nominee program, she isn’t responsible for creating the mess in the first place.
Then-Premier John Hamm and his first Immigration Minister, our now-Premier Rodney MacDonald, must wear that one.
In December 2002, the province signed an un-tendered five-year contract with Halifax-based Cornwallis Financial to serve as the province’s “designated worldwide marketing co-ordinator” for its much touted economic nominee program.
Under the program’s terms, a wannabe economic immigrant had to pony up more than $130,000 to even get through the door. Close to $30,000 of that went to Cornwallis. More than a dozen other, initially unnamed but “approved” Nova Scotia companies not only got to skim $80,000 off the top of what was left but they also got six months’ free labour from mainly highly skilled, already economically successful would-be immigrants. We now know that at least some of those companies had connections to Cornwallis.
In the winter of 2005, Daily News legislature reporter Brian Flinn was the first to raise questions about the huge fees the program was charging. He pointed out that Cornwallis and its president were major donor to the Progressive Conservatives. That led the party’s chief fundraiser and apologist, Stewart McInnes, to lash out, accusing the paper of scaring off potential corporate political donors by making it seem — horror of horrors — that there might be a connection between such untendered, sweetheart contracts and a firm’s largesse to the party in power.
Could there be? Was there?
That’s still a good question and one that’s never been satisfactorily answered by Cornwallis or the government, which are now locked in a lawsuit over the province’s decision last year to finally bail on the failed program.
In fact, there is much we still do not know about how the nominee program — created in response to the very real need for Nova Scotia to attract more immigrants — came to be, or why Cornwallis got the contract without tender, or why there seems to have been so little government oversight on how the company went about matching immigrants with corporate mentors or what those immigrants got for their money.
We have a right to know what really happened, and why. And who was responsible. As do the would-be immigrants, whose perception of Nova Scotia must have been soured by their experiences.
Getting that information out, of course, wasn’t the purpose of Tuesday’s cabinet soft-shoe shuffle in which Premier MacDonald replaced Bolivar-Getson with Len “It’s-very-difficult-for-me-to-answer-any-specific-questions” Goucher.
The premier’s real goal — in advance of a legislature session in which the festering immigration scandal figures to be a hot topic — is to make it more difficult for the opposition, and for us, to get answers to those questions.
Which makes getting answers even more important.
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.
Copyright 2007 Stephen Kimber
Health care right to strike (Oct 18, 2007)
Parent’s disappointment is disingenuous
So poor, put-upon Labour Minister Mark Parent is “disappointed” in Nova Scotia’s health care union leaders for refusing to meet with him face-to-face, man-to-man, cabinet-minister-to-lowly peon so he could lay before their wondering eyes the glorious, gory details of exactly how his government intends to take away their members’ right to strike.
By the minister’s own reckoning, Monday’s non-meeting with union leaders marked the sixth different non-occasion since June 18 to which he’s generously invited union leaders to come on down and converse over canapés on whether they would prefer to be hanged, drawn and quartered, or simply put out of their misery with a sudden, heart-stopping burst of electrical current. It was also, the minister allowed more in sorrow than anger, the sixth separate time the unions had ungraciously, unaccountably said no thanks.
Which is why Mark Parent, like the parent of a too-puzzling-for-words teenager, is just s-o-o-o disappointed. “When you sit down together and talk, some interesting things can happen,” he lamented. All he ever wanted, he added — cue the violins — was for the unions “to consult with me [on how] to make the collective bargaining process work better, and that’s really what we’re offering.”
Uh, not really.
If that’s actually what Parent and the MacDonald government had in mind in the aftermath of last April’s 16-hour mini-strike at the IWK Health Centre, all they had to do was open a public dialogue, not only with the unions and the representatives of the province’s health care employers but also with the rest of us.
If the government had framed the question as — let’s say, for the sake of argument — “Is there a better way to deal with labour disputes in the critical health care sector?” then the unions might very well have been keen and active participants in that discussion. And, out of that discussion, what the minister calls “interesting things” might actually have happened.
Because the discussion then would have actually been a discussion.
Instead, the government began with a narrow and non-negotiable premise: We are eliminating your right to strike; how do you think the dirty deed should best be accomplished?
Despite the many and very real crises the province’s health care system faces — too long wait times for all manner of tests and procedures, shuttered emergency rooms, lack of family physicians in rural communities, spiraling out of control costs — the government has done its level best to make the non-issue of health care workers’ right to strike the sole centerpiece of its fall legislative agenda.
Why?
Not because of Premier Rodney MacDonald’s much ballyhooed “concern for patient health and safety,” or because labour disruptions in health care are such a pressing issue for Nova Scotians — the IWK strike was the first since 1981, and it lasted less than a day — but because this government sees attacking health care workers’ right to strike as a potential vote-getting diversion from its own many and well documented failures to come to grips with the real health care problems we face.
Will it work?
It will if Rodney MacDonald’s government can frame the question as narrowly as a recent Bristol Omnifacts Research poll for the Daily News, which essentially asked respondents if they thought strikes are the best way to deal with labour disputes in the health care sector: “Using a scale of 1 to 10,” the pollsters asked, “how acceptable do you consider [strikes] as a means of resolving labour disputes in health care?”
Duh?
Ask a dumb question; you get the answer you were looking for.
The MacDonald government’s hail-Mary hope of winning the next election is now based on making Nova Scotians believe that that is the question, and the only health care question worth asking. If they can engineer their own defeat by pressing ahead with legislation the opposition parties have promised to vote against and then successfully cast their opponents as pro-strike, anti-health care, they might just be able to pull it off.
But I’m guessing Nova Scotians are smarter than that.
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.
Copyright 2007 Stephen Kimber
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
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
Iran’s president not problem (Sept 27, 2007)
Denouncing Iran’s president rings hollow
The problem with lobbing rocks inside glass houses is that the shards often end up all over you.
Consider the case of Lee Bollinger, the president of Columbia University, whose 15-minute, scattershot denunciation-introduction of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad at the university earlier this week was so gratuitous, insulting and self-serving it could have been written by the White House (or perhaps by those great Canadian military minds who gave us Afghan President Hamad Karzi’s supposed paean in praise of Canada’s military role in Afghanistan in the House of Commons last year).
Bollinger was doing his best intellectual tap dance to on-the-one-foot defend Columbia’s controversial decision to invite Ahmadinejad to speak as part of the university’s World Leaders’ Forum — the invitation was, he said, “in the great tradition of openness that has defined this country for many years,” ignoring the reality that he himself last year unilaterally rescinded his School of Public and International Affairs’ invitation for Ahmadinejad to speak — while making sure that no one, but especially funding agencies and potential donors, missed what he thinks of the the Iranian president. He represents “the mind of evil” and exhibits “all the signs of a petty and cruel dictator” whose views are “repugnant” to right-thinking Americans everywhere, Bollinger declared.
In his rambling tirade, Bollinger did raise some important questions about Iran’s human rights record and its treatment of women, homosexuals and religious minorities — all of which deserve better answers than Ahmadinejad offered — but too many of Bollinger’s barbs seemed at best, hypocritical.
Talking about one Iranian dissident, for example, Bollinger lamented that the man “does not know whether he will be charged with a crime or allowed to leave the country…”
Uh, Lee, can you say Guantanamo Bay?
At another point, Bollinger charged that Iran “leads the world in executing minors.” Of course Bollinger didn’t mention that it was only two years ago when the U.S. Supreme Court — by only the narrowest of margins (five-to-four) — finally put an end to this “cruel and unusual” form of punishment. At that point, 20 American states still had laws on their books allowing the executions of those under the age of 18.
And so it went.
“Can you tell us why Iran is fighting a proxy war in Iraq?” Bollinger demanded, repeating administration allegations that Iran support insurgents “undermining American forces in Iraq.”
The next day, the chancellors of seven Iranian universities released an open letter of rebuttal to Bollinger, inviting him to come to Iran and respond to their 10 questions, one of which included: “Why did the US support the bloodthirsty dictator Saddam Hussein during the 1980-88 Iraqi-imposed war on Iran?”
Can you say proxy war, Mr. Bollinger?
It probably goes without saying that Bollinger also parroted the Bush administration’s line that Iran’s nuclear enrichment program is just a cover for that country’s plan to build a nuclear bomb — which, to be fair, it may very well be.
“Would you stop?” he demanded rhetorically of the Iranian president. That call might have sounded slightly less hypocritical if Bollinger had coupled it with a demand that Iran’s enemy, Israel, rid itself of its equally-unconfirmed but decidedly more real cache of nuclear weapons. Or, closer to the home, that the Americans government — which has been threatening to attack Iran — live up to its commitments under the nuclear nonproliferation treaty to reduce its stockpile of weapons.
It is also intriguing to note just how selective Bollinger has been in confronting dictators.
In an article in the online edition of The Nation, Jayati Vora, a former student in Columbia’s School of Public and International Affairs, recalls attending a similar speech two years ago by Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf. “As one of many Indian students at the event, I burned with questions I was dying to pose about democracy, women's rights and peace with India,” she writes. Instead, she says, she was astounded to find on her seat a pamphlet distributed by the university stating that Musharraf had “’assumed the office of chief executive of Pakistan in October 1999.’ There was no mention of the coup through which Musharraf seized power,” Vora writes. “Not once did Bollinger refer to the military man, who had overthrown the elected government and then refused to hold elections as promised, as a dictator — a word he seemed to have no problem using to describe Ahmadinejad.”
But then, of course, Musharraf is a friend of America. And that makes all the difference in the world.
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.
Copyright 2007 Stephen Kimber
Health care right to strike (Sept 20, 2007)
Health care strikes not the issue
It is intriguing to watch politically tin-eared, ideologically wrong-headed Rodney — the premier who couldn’t make up his many minds on Sunday shopping until it was too late for him to claim anything but blame — now relentlessly clutching between his teeth the chewed, spit-up bone of legislation to outlaw strikes by health care workers, even after the Opposition parties had well and truly cremated the cadaver.
“The issue,” the premier bravely insisted to reporters last week after both opposition parties announced they wouldn’t support his minority government’s anti-strike legislation, “is long from over.”
The real question is how did it get started in the first place.
Back in May, less than two weeks after a now-you-see-it-now-you-don’t, 15-hour strike by 600 workers at the IWK Health Centre resulted in the cancellation of 59 surgeries, the discharge of 30 youths with mental illnesses and the rescheduling of 474 appointments, MacDonald called a press conference to dramatically declare that “our current system of resolving impasses has failed all of us… Moreover, I believe it is destined to fail again.”
Therefore, he said, his government had no choice but to introduce legislation to create a new “dispute resolution system” for health care workers in order to “protect the health and safety of Nova Scotians” from all those greedy, villainous, care-only-for-themselves nurses, technologists, therapists and other front-line health care workers who have hijacked our health care system with all their many and various outrageous demands and strikes and walkouts and…
Uhh… Wait a minute.
The actual, long-term consequences of the IWK strike, while certainly unfortunate, were probably not much worse than a typical winter storm. And, while no one likes to see such disruptions, especially at a hospital dedicated to the care of children and women, the reality is that there haven’t been a lot of labour stoppages in our health care system.
According to union statistics, in fact, there have been just three health care workers’ strikes in the past 25 years. The government has puffed up that number to 100 “separate work stoppages,” apparently by totaling up the number of institutions affected by each strike. But however the government wants to fiddle the numbers, the reality is that most Nova Scotians — for very good reasons — don’t see strikes by health care workers as a matter of major import.
That’s because there are lots of other real health care issues for them to worry about.
The shortage of doctors and nurses willing to practise in rural Nova Scotia, for example. The continuing closures of emergency rooms all over this province. The too-long wait times to see some specialists…
And yet this government chooses to train all its legislative and political resources on what is essentially a non-issue.
The government has done its best to spin the story dizzy. Labour Minister Mark Parent, for example, has tried to claim he has only the health care workers’ best interests in mind. “I believe the truth is that health-care workers are focused on helping others,” he wrote in a paternalistic op-ed piece last week, “and don't want the stressful internal conflict that comes with the prospect of a strike.” But the reality is that 94 per cent of those dedicated, stressed-out health care workers at the IWK felt they had no choice but to vote in favour of strike action last spring. Not because they wanted to strike. But because they wanted what they considered a fair settlement.
MacDonald himself still seems to believe he can still score political points with legislation he now knows could force an election. “Regardless of what has been said the last couple of days,” he told reporters last week, “I believe that the people of Nova Scotia want the government to move forward with this legislation and I hope that both of the opposition parties, once they see the legislation, will be supportive.”
Ironically, even as he tried to make the case against strikes, however, he helped make a more compelling one against his own government’s many health care failures.
“The question I’m going to ask him,” MacDonald said of Liberal leader Stephen McNeil’s decision not to support the legislation, “is how many appointments is it OK to cancel? One thousand? Five hundred? How many minutes is it OK for someone to wait in an emergency situation?...”
Good question, Mr. Premier. Perhaps you’d like to answer that question in Digby where the lights go out in the emergency room on a regular basis — not because of any labour dispute but because there aren’t enough doctors to staff the place.
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.
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.