(Niagara At Large is posting the following statement from Domenic Ursini, the provincial Conservative candidate in the Welland riding, for our readers information.)
“Dalton McGuinty’s announcement that a supervisor has been appointed to oversee the Niagara Health System shows just how out-of-touch he is with hardworking families in Niagara. The health care buck stops on Dalton McGuinty’s desk – yet he refuses to be held accountable and rather hide behind his latest NHS supervisor.
Welland riding Conservative candidate Domenic Ursini
McGuinty’s Health Minister admitted the Liberal failure on the NHS file when she was quoted as saying “The people of Niagara deserve to have confidence in their hospitals and I think that it’s clear to me that they don’t have the necessary confidence” (Welland Tribune, August 15, 2011)
Dalton McGuinty is the reason the people of Niagara have lost confidence in their hospitals.
We’ve seen 79 days of inaction on the part of the Dalton McGuinty on the C. difficile crisis in Niagara. And Dalton McGuinty’s Health Minister continues to be Missing in Action.
This news is too late for the families in Niagara who have been impacted by this tragedy.
Ontario PC Leader Tim Hudak has been calling for a review of the Niagara Health System since 2007. Under a Tim Hudak Government, health care will be patient focused and the so-called Local Health Integration Networks will be eliminated with the money saved being diverted to frontline care.”
Domenic Ursini is a former Port Colborne city councillor and a provincial Conservative candidate in a Welland Riding covering Welland, Port Colborne, Wainfleet, Thorold and south St. Catharines.
(Niagara At Large encourages you to share your views on this post in the comment boxes below. Please remember that we will only post comments by people willing to share their full and real names.)
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McGuinty’s Health Minister continues to be Missing in Action.- let me modify this statement as I do believe she is not missing in action because there is no action – she’s just plain MISSING period !!!!!!!!!!!!
Tim Hudak (Ontario’s Conservative party leader) needs to personally come to this region now and emphatically state, loud and clear, and in detail his party’s guarranteed changes to the health care system in Niagara.
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Please correct me if I’m wrong, but was it not the Harris PC’s, with Hudak on board, that decimated the system in the first place? Along with increasing poverty and unemployment thereby creating more health problems, they now want to fix what they broke. How short are our memories? Promises are only words and easily forgotten, we need quick action, not years of debates.
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Stasia, blame Harris if you must but also blame his predecessor Bob Rae and Paul Martin’s drastic cuts in federal transfer payments to the provinces in the 90’s. The fact is there is plenty of blame but we need to deal with the here and now. McGuinty increased the bureaucracy yet has failed to improve patient outcomes. That’s the issue here.
If you want to attribute blame locally at the provincial level in my riding Welland, look no further than Peter Kormos whose singular contribution to the debate was to demand an elected NHS Board. Candidate Forster has sat on Regional Council for almost eight years while the decision for the Regional Cancer Centre (sic) / St.Catharines Hospital was made in the worst possible location, the implementation of the HIP and most recently the C-difficile outbreak. She has been strangely silent over this critical period. As a Port Colborne resident along with my neighbours in Fort Erie have seen our emergency facilities decimated and our small hospitals raped and pillaged of beds, staff and equipment . Welland Hospital is a filthy mess in her home town yet again- silence.
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I spoke recently with a retired nurse (rather than a P.R specialist), who has been out of the system for a few years. She told me that hospitals out-sourced cleaning staff (for $10.00/hour wages), and that these people weren’t properly trained to do an effective job. The government isn’t dealing effectively with key issues such as out-sourcing. Conclusions? Put the real issues on the agenda: E.R re-openings, more nurses, less out-sourcing. The money is there. The current financing model for health care is broken.
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John, the only reason Cindy Forster couldn’t speak up was because of conflict of interest rules. Note she has to declare before any meeting that has health care in Niagara on the agenda, because of her work with the Nurses Association.
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I don’t trust Hudak with our health care either; his government would work hand in glove with Harper, who never supported medicare, and find ways to privatize more of it. Politicians like this who never had to spend any of their own money on these sorts of things and even if they had to, always had more than sufficient funds, don’t have a clue about those of us that do not have the money to pay out of pocket for health care.
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