The world still faces a massive crisis over forcibly displaced people. In 2015, there were more than 65 million — the most since the Second World War. And half were under the age of 18. About 24 million of these people have fled their countries and are counted by the United Nations as refugees. A much larger number, 41 million, are internally displaced, forced to flee their homes but remain within the borders of their countries. In Syria, for example, 6.6 million people are internally displaced, which represents 30 percent of the population. Continue reading ‘Globalization of indifference’, ignoring the world’s refugee crisis
Dr. Brian Day, undercutting medicare. (Day website photo)
Vancouver orthopaedic surgeon Dr. Brian Day is challenging a law that prohibits doctors from working in both the public and private health care systems simultaneously and extra billing their patients while they do so.
Day did some boxing in his youth and now, bizarrely, he compares himself to the late Muhammad Ali as a kind of freedom fighter against injustice. He says he’s going to court not out of self-interest but rather on behalf of patients on waiting lists.
Opposes equal access
The basic tenets of medicare, which covers hospital stays and physicians’ services, are that it be tax-financed, publicly administered and equally available to everyone. Day is not impressed with equal access as a core value. He told the National Post: “We in Canada will give the same level of services to a wealthy person as to person who isn’t wealthy, and that doesn’t make sense.” Muhammad Ali he is not.
Extra bills patients
In fact, it seems that Day has been extra-billing patients for years. According to a B.C. Medical Services Commission audit initiated in 2008 and completed in 2012, Day’s clinic illegally charged patients hundreds of thousands of dollars more for services covered by medicare than is permitted by law. Day filed his legal challenge in 2009, after the audit had begun, claiming that the law preventing a doctor from extra billing patients is unconstitutional.
Wants it both ways
In Canada, the fee for physicians’ services is negotiated between the medical profession and agencies of a provincial government. There is nothing to stop a doctor from practicing entirely outside of the public system and billing his or her patients rather than the government. What Day wants, however, is the right to provide services in both the private and public systems, and also to charge more than the negotiated fees. Then-Health Minister Monique Begin made that illegal in 1983 because she believed it created a financial barrier for the poor and people of modest means.
Reform, but don’t privatize
Day’s critics say that his solution would mean reduced services for patients who don’t have the extra money to jump the queue. Former Saskatchewan Premier Roy Romanow, who led the Royal Commission on the Future of Health Care in Canada, concluded in 2002 that Canadians cherish their health-care system and see it as a right of citizenship. Most often it works well, but it’s also in need of improvement and innovation, which Romanow said demands thoughtful reform but not privatization.
Political door is closed . . .
Most Canadians and their doctors support medicare, too. But attacks upon it have been constant and led most notably by the Fraser Institute, a Vancouver-based lobby group that also dislikes unions and public schools, and challenges the science of climate change. Some politicians, including former premiers Ralph Klein and Mike Harris, also wanted to undermine medicare but citizens and voters wouldn’t stand for it. Interestingly, both Harris and Klein after retiring from politics became associated with the Fraser Institute, which receives at least part of its financing from groups in the U.S. linked to the Koch brothers and far-right organizations.
. . . so use the courts
In Canada, the political door has been closed to Day and his backers so they are now are trying to use the courts in their bid to to undercut public health care.
In her use of rhetoric Hillary Clinton is a foil to Donald Trump. U.S. State Department photo.
Dear readers of Pulpit and Politics:
Normally, I post my articles directly to my website, but in this case I am making a slight exception. Policy Options magazine has just published a piece that I wrote about the competing rhetorical styles being used by Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump in the U.S. presidential election campaign. I am asking you to read the piece by going directly to the Policy Options website site. You can do that by clicking HERE.
Supporters of the family of Colten Boushie, who was shot to death, gather at the North Battleford, Sask. courthouse on Aug. 18. Photo by Peter Garden
Colten Boushie, a 22-year-old First Nations man, was shot to death on Aug. 9. He was in a farm yard near Biggar, Sask., about 100 km west of Saskatoon. Gerald Stanley, a 54-year-old farmer, has now been charged with second-degree murder. According to Boushie’s family, he and four friends were returning from swimming at a river when they sought help for a flat tire at a farm. Stanley’s family, meanwhile, issued a statement through their lawyer, saying that what occurred on that day is not as simple as what has been portrayed.
Racist comments on Facebook
Either way, Boushie’s death has unleashed a torrent of public emotion and comment on social media. On Aug. 18, roughly 200 people gathered peacefully in support of the Boushie family at the North Battleford, Sask. courthouse, where Stanley was arraigned. Elsewhere, a Facebook page called Saskatchewan Farmers Group included racially toxic comments following Boushie’s shooting. One commenter, who wrote that “his [Stanley’s] only mistake was leaving three witnesses,” is the elected reeve of a rural municipality in southern Saskatchewan. The page has since been taken down and the once-outspoken reeve is now unavailable for comment.
Of course, the self-described Farmers Group cannot claim to represent all farmers. The Saskatoon-based National Farmers Union, a modestly sized but well-established organization, issued a news release of their own, condemning racist comments, including those on the Farmers Group page.
Premier Wall says “stop”
The torrent of racist comment on social media was such that Saskatchewan Premier Brad Wall pleaded for it all to stop. “Racism has no place in Saskatchewan,” Wall wrote on his Facebook page. His post received more than 500 comments — most of them supportive — but there were others that were unrepentant: “Wanna stop racism? Revamp those obsolete treaties and make every adult in Saskatchewan pay taxes.” Another said: “The very sad truth is that [by] being ‘white,’ we can be discriminated upon more than any other race and no one faces any repercussions.”
The treaties
These latter two comments capture a sentiment that fuels the antagonism toward First Nations people in our country. The original inhabitants occupied and used the land for tens of thousands of years but were forced by the British Crown — and a succession of Canadian governments — to give most of it up. In the Prairie provinces, they surrendered that land in seven treaties negotiated in the 1870s. As a result, the First Nations were shunted onto small reserves to make way for European settlement. It’s both ignorant and malicious for the descendants of settlers who benefit from those land surrenders to now say that the treaties should be torn up.
Who’s on top?
The second comment — that it’s really white people who are discriminated against more than anyone else — is simply not true. How is it that the descendants of settlers whose governments forced First Nations from their land and into poverty can somehow see settlers as the victims? Indeed, the bigots and the foolhardy on social media have had their day. But surely, we won’t allow them to prevail in the near and distant future.
Donald Trump speaking to media in 2015. Photo by Gage Skidmore
In her nomination speech to the Democratic National Convention in July, former U.S. Senator and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton described her Methodist faith as the foundation of her activism. “[My mother] made sure I learned the words of our Methodist faith,” she said “‘Do all the good you can, for all the people you can, in all the ways you can, as long as ever you can.’” This is almost Sermon-on-the-Mount material, and one hopes that Clinton actually means it.
Trump and evangelicals
Meanwhile, her political rival Donald Trump says that he’s a Presbyterian. But in his nomination speech to the Republican National Convention, he only explicitly mentioned religion while praising evangelical Christians. “I would like to thank the evangelical community,” trump said, “because, I will tell you what, the support they have given me — and I’m not sure I totally deserve it — has been so amazing.” Continue reading Religion and America’s election, Trump doesn’t do Beatitudes
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau speaks to reporters at a June 22 news conference in Ottawa. Photo by Art Babych.
As MPs headed back to their constituencies for the summer, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau held a news conference in late June. Before submitting to questions from journalists, Trudeau talked about three promises kept since the Liberals won power in October 2015. They had, he said, delivered on a tax cut for middle-class Canadians and modified the Canada Child Benefit to support families. They also promised to strengthen the Canada Pension Plan for future retirees. Continue reading Canada Day 2016, celebrate but let’s not be complacent
Professional deniers sow doubt and muddy the waters about climate change
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and the premiers have appointed several task forces to propose ways in which Canada can reduce greenhouse gas emissions. This action follows last December’s Paris climate conference where leaders of 195 nations reached an accord committing them to lowering those although they did not say by exactly how much. Continue reading Climate change deniers sow doubt, muddy the waters
Gordie Howe has died at 88. The man called Mr. Hockey was born into a poor family near Saskatoon, Saskatchewan in 1928. I idolized him when I was a boy and wanted desperately to play professional hockey one day. Here is the story of how I finally encountered Gordie in my adulthood back in 1994.
Please note: this is a repost
It was early March and minus 30 degrees in Regina, Saskatchewan. The prairies had endured a two-month deep freeze. I was awakened in my hotel room that Saturday morning by the growling sound of car motors turning over slowly, then dying, and the distinctive crunch that tires make on snow when it is that cold.
Later, at the airport terminal, I learned that my flight to Edmonton was delayed so I half-heartedly turned to reading a newspaper. When I looked across the small waiting room, I noticed a slope-shouldered man leaning against the wall. Big, but not bulky, he was perhaps 60 years old, with deep lines in his tanned face and thinning grey hair.
He was dressed casually in a pair of beige cotton twill pants and he wore a dark blue sweatshirt over a white turtleneck. He squinted at the clock across the room and blinked several times in quick succession. There was something about him which was familiar.
The next time I looked up, he was being approached by a stout woman in a bright red coat. She offered him a writing pad and a pen, blushing robustly as she did so. He took the pen, signed deliberately and handed the autographed page back with a slight smile which brought an even brighter flush to her face.
The seat beside mine
Then he surveyed the room and spotting an empty seat he walked over and dropped into the seat beside mine. He began to shuffle with some papers, removed a stocky felt pen from his pocket and laboriously made some thick-nibbed notes. I had been an amused spectator but now I had a dilemma.
Should I tell him how as a child I loved winter, no matter how cold it became, because I could play hockey? Every day after school I went to the outdoor rink in our little Saskatchewan town until supper time, playing pickup with anybody who was willing. Immediately after supper I ran all the way back to the rink, before the other kids came for night skating. In that half hour I would spread shovels and scrapers the length of the ice, then I would take a puck and stick handle my way through the maze, up, around and back, again and again, believing completely all the while that one day I would play in the NHL.
Should I greet him? Say his name? Shake his hand? Ask for his autograph? “I met your dad once,” I found myself saying, “when I was a kid.” He looked at me with a steady hazel-eyed gaze, giving away nothing, as though I was a goalie and he was waiting for me to move first.
“It was out behind the Barry Hotel in Saskatoon. My father went in for a beer and left me sitting in the car with the motor running and the heater on. A little while later he came out with an old guy and he said, `I want you to meet Gordie Howe’s dad.’”
A slow smile lit Gordie’s face. “Yeah, that’d be like the old man,” he said in a soft drawl. And that was all. He went back to making felt pen notes, and I to my Saturday paper.
My dad’s loyalty
My father did not like to travel alone and often took me along for company. He could rarely pass a hotel without stopping, and when he did he gave me a dollar to buy soft drinks, chips and chocolate bars to eat while I waited for him. He had a habit of striking up conversations with strangers and so he began to talk to the older man seated near him in the Barry.
It must have been loyalty to me that led my dad to invite Gordie’s dad, Abe Howe, out to the car to meet a skinny 12-year-old. My dad knew that for me hockey was life and that I would discuss no other future. On our way home that evening, as the moon bathed the snow-covered fields in blue light, my father said that I should write a letter to Gordie Howe. I should tell him that I had met his father. I should tell him how much I loved hockey and wanted to play in the NHL.
Letter to Gordie
I wrote the letter and sent it to Gordie Howe, care of the Detroit Olympia. I hoped against hope for an answer but did not really expect one. Then one morning during the Christmas holidays when I was still in bed, my father came home from the post office.
“For you,” he said and he flipped something into the air which landed on my blanket. It was a postcard, a black and white shot of Gordie Howe. He was on the ice, in his dark Red Wings uniform. He must have been doing stops and starts for the camera, because the ice chips sprayed up toward the lens from where he had come to a halt. He was leaning away from the camera, looking at me over his left shoulder. I turned the card over, and there across from my name and address he had written, “Best regards, Gordie Howe.”
I cherished that card but lost it somewhere along the way. I never did make the NHL although I did have a few pretty good years in the Potash League in central Saskatchewan. I had never met my childhood idol, until now.
Flying with Gordie
When the ticket agent called the flight to Edmonton, I was in for a surprise. To get there from Regina, I had to fly north to Saskatoon, then south to Calgary, only to fly north again to Edmonton. “Dammit,” I said to no one in particular. “I didn’t know I was going to Saskatoon.”
“I didn’t know I was comin’ to Regina,” Gordie said. “I sat on the runway in Chicago for an hour and I watched my plane leave for Calgary without me. Now I’m in Regina and my luggage isn’t.”
I preceded him onto the plane, a small Fokker jet, only to find that we were sitting in the same row, me on the aisle and he scrunched into the window seat. Once we were airborne, Gordie shut out the surrounding noise just as he had in the airport and tended to his own matters.
He pulled out a hardcover book and opened it carefully, his place marked by a thick elastic band wrapped around the cover and the pages he had finished. It was a book about the rise and fall of hockey czar Allan Eagleson, whose career had been riddled with conflicts of interest and practices that cost hockey players millions of dollars.
Gordie read slowly, wearing a pair of gray-rimmed glasses, his thick index finger moving slowly across the page as he parsed each line. Above the sturdy hands his wrists looked the size of juice cans, and seeing them I remembered how he could shoot a hockey puck from either the right or left side with equal force and accuracy.
I noticed, too, that both of his wrists had arthritic lumps on them, each covered by a scar, probably from surgery. It was his painful wrists, not the failure of his legs or lungs, that led to his retirement from the Detroit Red Wings after 25 seasons in the NHL. The wrists must have continued to hurt him during the additional eight seasons he played after coming out of retirement, before he finally quit for good at age 51.
Goodbyes
When we put down in Calgary I stood, took Gordie’s coat from the luggage rack, and handed it to him. He looked up and smiled. “Nice to make your acquaintance,” I said, the words sounding formal and banal. In fact, I hadn’t even introduced myself.
“Sure,” he said. “And now if I can just get re-acquainted with my luggage.”
