Health care unions, the government and the mess that will be

Really? Last year, the McNeil government passed the Health Authorities Act, ostensibly (and laudably) to streamline the province’s health care system, but also (and shabbily) to game that system. The legislation reduced the number of health districts from 10 to two, and the number of collective bargaining units from 50 to four. But the government’s […]

Health care unions: arbitrator’s report unlikely to be the end of the story

By this time next week, government-appointed mediator-arbitrator Jim Dorsey is expected to hand down his final report into which health care worker should be represented by which health care union. His choices seem limited. The Health Authorities Act — which the McNeil government introduced last fall as part of its promise to merge nine district […]

Where’s Leo? … and other notes from the health care week that was

I suppose if the Harper government can commit us to a war without borders — Iraq, maybe Syria — or actual end goals on the strength of a few hours of debate in the House of Commons on a Monday night in October, we should be grateful Stephen McNeil took a full week to ram […]

Leo Glavine: Mis-speaking oneself while saying the same thing

On Thursday, in the warm afterglow of a Throne speech that zeroed in on “unsustainable [public sector] wage increases” and promised a “hiring slow down and steps to achieve a more sustainable wage pattern,” Health Minister Leo Glavine was clear as glass. Premier Stephen McNeil’s government had had it up to here with recalcitrant health […]

What would you do to un-Harper Canada?

Winner of the 2014 Atlantic Journalism Award for Commentary — Any Medium. For as long as I can remember, Canadian politics has been a pleasantly diverting if meaningless game of rascal tossing. We pick one set of rascals to govern us and toss the last set out. After a while, those no-longer new rascals run […]

Nursing shortage? Why is the government making it worse?

So… Faced with a looming shortage of “several thousand” nurses over the next decade as our population both ages and also shrinks (read the Ivany Report; look around you), our new Liberal government responds by… Well, let me count the ways. The government alienates many current nurses by dismissing their concerns about patient safety as […]

Paramedics can’t strike, but that doesn’t cure what ails a sick system

Now that the government has legislatively punted the possibility of a paramedics strike into the hands of a pick-one arbitrator — who will have to choose between dueling union and management last-best offers for wages and working conditions over the next three to five years — it’s time to ask ourselves a question. What’s wrong […]

07/08/2013
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Heath care contract: adding and subtracting

Last week’s to-the-edge-of-the-ledge, past-the-last-minute contract settlement between Capital Health and its 3,600 health workers raises all sorts of difficult but intriguing questions. The first, and most immediate, of course, is could the disruption—even without an actual strike, the anticipation cancelled 560 elective surgeries and emptied 172 beds—have been avoided? The short answer is probably not. […]

Nova Scotia budget: the cost of cutting v the value of investing

In the all-too-brief interregnum between Thursday’s bad-news federal budget and tomorrow’s more-bad-news provincial budget, it’s worth noting the across-the-board, cost-cutting Kool Aid fiscal policy makers in Ottawa and Halifax have swallowed is not the only—or necessarily best—way to slay the deficit dragon. The Nova Scotia branch of the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives, for example, […]

Has the NDP found its governing groove?

Have Darrell Dexter’s New Democrats finally, belatedly discovered their governing groove? When Nova Scotia’s first democratic socialist government arrived at the governing starting gate in June 2009, they were already saddled with an embarrassment of their own making—how to renege, almost yesterday, on virtually every promise they’d made to get elected: a balanced budget, no […]