By Doug Draper
There was Premier Dalton McGuinty on a CHCH television news clip last week, trying to persuade us that his Liberal government is not gutting fair access to hospital services in small communities across Niagara and the rest of the province.
A sign of the times. An American private health care provider is posting billboards like this in Niagara, Ont. to take advantage of a health care system here that is beginning to fail us. Photo by Doug Draper
“I do sense a responsibility on behalf of Ontarians to do everything we can to ensure that they have access to the best possible health care, as close to home as is reasonably possible,” insisted McGuinty in response to questions a scrum o reporters asked him about comments made earlier by Dr. Alan Drummond, a spokesman for the Canadian Association of Emergency Physicians. “I am convinced we are leaders on that score.”
McGuinty was responding to comments Dr. Drummond and his association were making on the death this past holiday season of Fort Erie teen Reilly Anzovino.
Reilly, who would have celebrated her 19th birthday last week, died in the early hours of Dec. 27 following a traffic accident in her hometown that had her being rushed to an emergency room at a Welland hospital because as of last summer, thanks to the McGuinty government, the emergency rooms at Fort Erie’s Douglas Memorial Hospital and Port Colborne Hospital have been downgraded to urgent care centres that will no longer take patients suffering some of the most serious medical emergencies.
“This could happen anywhere,” said Drummond who works in the Smith Falls area of Ontario where emergency services are also on McGuinty’s chopping block. “Why don’t we take this opportunity of this tragic death to say, ‘Look, let’s re-dedicate ourselves to planning effectively. Let’s not make health-care decisions based on budgetary constraints within regional health authorities.”
But who is going to re-dedicate themselves to that? Apparently not a government lead by McGuinty, whose health minister sent the word down to the provincially created Local Health Integration Network and Niagara Health System for this region to chop millions of dollars from the budgets for hospital services.
According to another report last week in The Globe & Mail, McGuinty “is distancing his government from the controversial closing of emergency departments in two hospitals.”
Those emergency departments are, of course, the two I’ve previously mentioned in Fort Erie and Port Colborne, and we should all find it to be an abdication of leadership and responsibility on the part of McGuinty that he and his ministers choose, once again, to hide behind the LHIN and NHS for this region as heat shields when, in fact, it is his government that inevitably calls the shots on hospital services in this province.
And don’t have any illusions if you live in Welland or Niagara Falls or Grimsby or West Lincoln or virtually anywhere else outside of St. Catharines, where the province is building a new hospital complex in McGuinty cabinet minister Jim Bradley’s riding. This government will be using one or both of these same non-elected agencies to come after your hospital services next.
While thousands of residents across this region, including the parents of Reilly Anzovino, Niagara MPPs Kim Craitor (Liberal), Peter Kormos (NDP) and Tim Hudak (Conservative), spent time this January calling on the province’s chief coroner to hold a public inquest on the circumstances around Reilly Anzovino’s death, where was McGuinty’s Niagara man Bradley on the hospital and health care file?
While the last many of us saw him, and you can check it out by visiting the Niagara Health System’s website at www.niagarahealth.on.ca, he had his picture taken with the Niagara Health System’s president, Debbie Sevenpifer, in a giant fake colon that was touring through St. Catharines last week to encourage people to go for a colorectal screening for any sign of cancer.
McGuinty cabinet minister and St. Catharines MPP Jim Bradley is on the left and Niagara Health System CEO Debbie Sevenpifer is third from left in this recent picture taken of them and others in a giant replica of a colon. This image is making the rounds with their critics on health care.
Now I obviously have nothing against encouraging people to get examinations for colon cancer. But the image Bradley and Sevenpifer in this fake colon has gone viral across this region (I’ve already received about eight emails depicting it and counting) and many are sharing commentary that can’t be repeated in a family newspaper.
At the same time all of this madness and meltdown of our health care is going on, Kaleida Health, a private hospital server across the border in the United States, is putting up big billboard signs here, telling us we can “fast-track” our needs for medical help over there.
Go on the website Kaleida Health created especially for people on the Ontario side of the border at www.kaleidahealthcanada.com, and it says, “Kaleida Health welcomes our Canadian neighbours. We believe that providing compassionate, quality health care in a timely manner is the cornerstone of maintaining a health life. Our commitement to our patients is simple – when you need us we will be there.”
Gee that sounds better than the rhetoric we are getting out of McGuinty these days, folks, and that is where we seem to be going with hospital services in Ontario.
Right down the colon!
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