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
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
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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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.
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