A sign directing visitors to the emergency department is shown at the Childrens Hospital of Eastern Ontario in Ottawa.Adrian Wyld/The Canadian Press
Where to start?
Re On Health Care, We Need Action, Not Petulance, From The Premiers (Nov. 10): I believe the biggest issue with health care in Canada is not a shortage of money, but a shortage of manpower. Canada has made minimal efforts to increase medical training domestically.
British Columbia’s offer to increase pay would poach family physicians from other provinces, but do nothing to alleviate a national shortage. It would also likely not increase the number of medical graduates who choose family medicine.
It takes a minimum of six years to produce a licensed family physician. The need to expand our medical schools should be desperately urgent.
David Barker MD Whitby, Ont.
Re What Ails Canadian Health Care? Bloated Bureaucracies, For Starters (Nov. 10): Ontario’s hospitals each have a CEO and senior executive team. Reporting to each of them is an army of senior directors, managers and supervisors. All of these bureaucrats are paid enormous sums of money; none of them touch a patient.
This fractured system serves as a barrier between institutions, physicians and patients. Our taxes support redundancies that hinder seamless access from primary-care physicians to specialists, and from one institution to another. (The system is also being drained by IT costs; each hospital has its own team to implement and support upgrades and downtime backups.)
I do not believe that these problems will be resolved by the very bureaucrats whose jobs are jeopardized by reform. Until that happens, Ontario will likely not have a “system” that functions efficiently and in a cost-effective manner.
Sylvia Asa MD Toronto
Re Some Honest Math On Health Funding (Editorial, Nov. 9): Having read your discouraging editorial, I found myself wondering: Do we really need provinces?
Your newspaper regularly reports on calls for national strategies to address the many concerns troubling our country, be it the growing demographic of seniors requiring care, accrediting professionals from other jurisdictions, energy policy, climate change.
Yet 13 provincial and territorial jurisdictions continue on their merry way, apparently incapable of collaborative action among themselves, much less working co-operatively with the federal government. I realize we cannot put the toothpaste back in the tube, but I wonder how Canadians can ever hope to sustain our prosperity with so many players riding madly off in all directions.
Martha Musgrove Ottawa
So our federal government – that still has a dysfunctional payroll system after all these years; that messed up the ArriveCan app to the tune of $54-million; that can’t efficiently process passports; that reneged on commitments to quickly bring Afghans to Canada – wants a pan-Canadian health data system as an accountability measure for provincial partners.
I can only imagine how sideways such a sensible data project might go.
Gwen Hayes Toronto
Health and reconciliation
Re Manitoba Reverses Policy On ICU Care (Nov. 9): During my time as chair of the Standing Committee on Indigenous and Northern Affairs, I had concerns about infrastructure needs that impacted the quality of life for Northern residents.
A Métis witness at committee suggested that a military base located in the far North could provide benefits such as medical care and employment to residents. Another approach could entail the use of naval vessels with dedicated staff and facilities at strategic locations within the Arctic Archipelago.
However, the naval refuelling station planned for opening at Nanisivik in 2013, as an example, is still not fully operational. The path to reconciliation needs more than platitudes to be truly meaningful to Indigenous Northerners.
Bob Bratina Hamilton
Canadians in rural and remote communities must not be last in line for medical transfers based solely on postal code. As a rural physician who practised for many years in Nunavut, the experiences described by patients, families and care providers are all too familiar to me.
The Society of Rural Physicians of Canada has issued a call to action on rural patient transfers. Key points include an end to interjurisdictional squabbles and enactment of a ”no refusal” policy for remote patients, many of whom are Indigenous. Rural physicians should not be spending time “telemarketing” their patients to southern facilities.
There should be urgent action by policymakers to ensure equitable access to tertiary care for all Canadians. Children, and their families, deserve this to be made a priority.
Sarah Lespérance MD, CCFP; president, Society of Rural Physicians of Canada Petitcodiac, N.B.
Re How Many Reports Will We Ignore Before We Work On Reconciliation? (Nov. 4): The evidence seems clear that, since the 1967 Hawthorn Report, reports don’t do it.
They do, as columnist Tanya Talaga writes, produce low-hanging fruit. The fruit provides smoke that shelters entrenched government policies which sustain ongoing poverty and what results from it.
“Communities know what needs to be done.” But governments don’t allow them the legal autonomy or a fair share of public revenue to do it. Empathy from the rest of us won’t do it either.
Hundreds of millions of peoples around the world gained freedom from dispossession and subjugation in the late 1900s, because the imperial regimes they were under were too expensive to sustain. We all should know what the Canadian regime is costing us. Not just in public funds, but in lost economic dollars because of missed opportunities, from access to quality education to delayed or forgone development projects.
Russell Banta Former chief federal land claim negotiator Ottawa
Get out
Re Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan Takes Crypto Hit (Report on Business, Nov. 9): Anyone who invested pension funds in cryptocurrencies should have been fired yesterday. The ones who didn’t fire them yesterday should be fired today.
Brian Grier Calgary
Story to remember
Re What Of The Fallen? (Opinion, Nov. 5): The restriction on returning Canadians for burial in Canada was not changed until 1970. Readers may be interested in knowing why the law was changed then, since Canada was not involved in any war.
In October, 1969, the Canadian destroyer escort HMCS Kootenay suffered a catastrophic explosion. Since the ship was only about 210 nautical miles west of Plymouth in Britain, it was towed there to assess the damage.
Eight men were killed instantly in and near the engine room. They were buried in Britain, as the law specified. Their families were upset about being unable to bring their loved ones home, and this anger spread to include leaders and parliamentarians.
The law was changed in 1970. The names of these men can be found on the Bonaventure Anchor Memorial in Halifax’s Point Pleasant Park, along with many other casualties who died in peacetime in service of their country.
Gordon Forbes 1969 HCMS Kootenay survivor Peterborough, Ont.
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