Meant To Benefit Canadians

Let's hear that again? Canada a potential destination for medical-tourism? That's a stretch, isn't it? Universal medicare and hospitalization within Canada is already stretched to its outer limits. And Canada is not in the business, like countries whose economies are struggling, in the business of making a reputation, let alone money, off the avails of surgical-medical expertise, therapies and state-of-the-art, precision equipment.

Canada has long waiting lists for certain surgical procedures. There is a shortage of medical experts in some quite particular disciplines. There exists, relative to other wealthy and developed countries of the world, a relative paucity of expensive diagnostic and surgical equipment. All complicated by the inexorability of a steadily aging population, requiring more hospital admissions and critical care.

But then, there are some that present the situation and the possibility that Canada might indeed open up to a different kind of medical-surgical treatment offered to foreigners suffering from unfortunate medical conditions. Apart from the occasional temporary visas issued to young children urgently requiring life-saving surgery or organ transplants from undeveloped countries through pure charity.

There are those who contend that simply because Canada is so relatively well endowed with the expertise of surgeons who have mastered new life-saving techniques in organ transplantation and surgical advances, that there is an obligation to share with others less fortunate than Canadians who may take advantage of such opportunities.

It's an argument that fails somewhat to convince, since in all instances, save for charity being extended to poor sufferers from abroad, non-Canadians seeking advanced medical-surgical treatment in Canada must pay their own way, and that way tends to be exceedingly expensive. Medical tourists going to countries like India and China experience a good level of satisfaction with their outcomes.

But costs associated with travelling there and other countries offering superior medical treatment in facilities not normally offered to their own populations, are relatively cost-effective to the medical tourist. It has become an industry, one that the travel and tourism industry itself has become lucratively associated with.

There are currently up to fifty countries of the world involved in offering medical tourism, where people may with relative ease, as long as they can pay the freight, receive joint replacement, cardiac surgery, dental and cosmetic surgeries, and surgeries that haven't been approved in their own countries like the MS 'liberation' procedure.

People willing to travel outside their own countries at a special rate tied up with surgical procedures must consider that the regulations and professional medical-school training may not equal the standards demanded in their countries of origin. That follow-up treatment and the drug protocol may prove to be problematical on their return home.

In Toronto the University Health Network representing multi-organ transplants appears to feel that since the medical professions' ultimate role is life-saving, it hardly matters whose lives are being saved, and the option to seek life-saving treatment should transcend borders. Doctors and patients from diverse places on the Globe make contact with the Toronto General for transplants, with patients bringing with them living donors.

But Canada's hospitals, its doctors, its medical-teaching universities are taxpayer-subsidized. There is a universal insurance plan for all Canadians paid out of general tax funds transferred to the provinces by the federal government, and individual provinces exact additional fees from families by way of an added tax in support of universal medicare.

Institutions and the benefits that flow from them are meant for the well-being of Canadians, acknowledging the odd exception for humanitarian purposes.

Even if a foreign patient is prepared to pay the entire cost of travel, the medical-surgical procedure and the follow up requirements, expert time and attention is taken away from Canadians, and operating rooms and hospital beds - already in short supply - are used for foreign, non-tax-paying individuals.

In the end, were this to be ome common practise in Canada, there is nothing particularly humanitarian about offering services to people from abroad. In essence, the services would be offered only to those who have the financial wherewithal.

It might benefit the health professionals by giving them more experience and enabling procedures to be streamlined, but this would occur under normal circumstances as procedures become more widely available.

Canada has, like most other countries, a problem acquiring enough donor organs to service the long waiting list of Canadians awaiting life-saving transplant operations. It makes little practical sense to complicate the issue even further by extending to non-Canadians the opportunity to travel on a visitor's visa for the purpose of acquiring surgery.

The issue is, if not a rare commodity, then at least one that is sufficiently difficult to obtain that its acquisition should be available to a narrow spectrum of beneficiaries; those who are citizens of the country, and who have paid their taxes in support of a universal education and medical care system meant to benefit Canadians.

Election Health Care

Polls have troubling updates to disturb the equanimity of the Liberal Party of Canada. Their choice of leader was not quite the resounding success they planned it would be. Michael Ignatieff seemed as though he might be useful, capable of sweeping the hustings with the magic of his personal style. He seems to have miscalculated on behalf of the Liberals.

The electorate has been instructed by Mr. Ignatieff to view the Conservatives and Stephen Harper as a viperous slithering menace whose underbelly covers nefarious Canada-harming plans, should majority governing status be achieved, to undo all of Canada's social welfare programs. In the process, dragging the country into worse fiscal damnation that they've already managed to incur.

All the forward-looking, progressive fundamentals that make Canada the great country that it is, will be undone if we are foolish enough to grant Mr. Harper the majority he so wishfully urges upon the country. We have the option of voting 'blue', or 'red', either door is open to us; will we then grasp the obvious wisdom of bringing back the natural governing party?

Doesn't appear so. Not if those damn polls are anything to judge by. Even Jack Layton's New Democratic Party is on the upswing, prepared to demolish the hoped-for prospects for the Bloc Quebecois in Quebec. And the Liberals? So far back of the pack we're groping for our binoculars to get them within our line of vision.

Looks as though the latest ploy has fallen flat. And one wonders why. The vaunted intellectualism of the former academic appears to have failed him, in hauling out health care and the dastardly Conservative plan to privatize the country's universality of medicare-hospital care. True, the electorate has a famously forgetful attitude toward the past.

On the other hand, it hasn't been all that long ago that Jean Chretien and Paul Martin between them, with a majority government repeated, ruthlessly slashed social programs. That would include "our cherished health care system", as Michael Ignatieff so lovingly describes it. That very system that he is prepared to defend against the Conservatives' destructive tendencies.

Did no one in the party remind Mr. Ignatieff, who was absent from the country in those days, that it was Mr. Chretien and Mr. Martin who looked the other way when private clinics erupted here and there, in Quebec and British Columbia, throwing the sanctity of the Canada Health Act into disarray?

My goodness, Mr. Martin's personal physician ran a string of private clinics. And it was Paul Martin who allowed the provinces to allocate additional health-care funding transfers wherever they saw fit, not necessarily toward health care spending, without penalty.

So it does make Mr. Ignatieff sound rather hollow and hypocritical as he waxes indignant over Mr. Harper's purported diabolical plan to transfer federal tax points to the provinces to enable them to raise their own revenues, each funding their own health system.

And then there's the interference of the Supreme Court of Canada, striking down on June 9, 2005 a law in Quebec prohibiting people from buying private health insurance to cover medical procedures already offered by the public system. "Access to a waiting list is not access to health care," two of the justices wrote in their decision.

Things are not always what they seem, are they?

Atrocious Love

A child is so wholly dependent on parents for emotional stability and support, for guidance and for caring love, that with all or a portion of those absolute requirements withdrawn from that child the world must certainly appear as a dark void of misery. It is not actually possible for most people to visualize a child so utterly abandoned, left hopelessly adrift by a parent's disinterest, or in certain circumstances, left to psychotic episodes of child abuse and exploitation.

Most people feel an instinctive, subconscious need to to cherish a child, support and love a child. It is a deep-rooted imperative inscribed in our collective genes, tied securely to our most basic instinct of survival. Love and compassion flow from strangers toward an abandoned child. People become emotionally moved to do whatever it is in their power, to help a child overcome feelings of being lost and abandoned.

Yet the dreadful fate of some children is to be violated; by extreme physical neglect, by psychological torment arising from lack of care, and by sexual predation. In Ottawa, a trial presided by Ontario Court Justice Lise Maisonneuve has just concluded, with a 57-year-old man being sentenced to 5 years' imprisonment as penalty for having molested and abused his step-daughter from the age of six to age fifteen.

The child was very well aware that her mother was involved in her abuse simply because her mother witnessed it and encouraged it, to keep her husband in a good frame of mind. And the step-father testified that this was an ongoing life-lesson for his step-daughter, to teach her that everything comes at a price. The gifts and money he gave her were in exchange for 'favours', of a sexual nature.

The birthday gift the girl implored her mother to grant her for her fifteenth birthday was to have her mother finally put a stop to the sexual abuse. The young child lived a life of horror, and when her pleas to her mother went unanswered she finally revealed to a friend and the friend's mother what had been occurring to her.

The girl testified against her step-father, but no charges were laid against her compliant and willing mother, because the girl refused to press charges against her mother. The mother admitted to police she was aware of what was occurring, she witnessed her husband touching her daughter's breasts, and knew that from age six the girl was forced to masturbate the man.

The mother gave no explanation for her having assisted her husband in abusing her daughter. And she has no intention of leaving the man. A court-appointed psychiatrist testified that the man claimed the girl enjoyed his sexual attention. The young girl testified in a victim impact statement her empty feelings, lack of self regard, and thoughts of suicide.

And there is, in Montreal, another ongoing trial, that of a doctor, a father of two young children, whose wife, he discovered was having an affair. That knowledge devastated the husband. In the absence of his wife he murdered his five-year-old son and his three-year-old daughter in their beds, using his surgeon's skills to eviscerate them.

The morning he was discovered in his bedroom, having taken a drug overdose, with h is dead children lying bloodied and cold in their beds, police rushed him to hospital. He asked paramedics looking after him en route to hospital to "Tell my wife I love her". And he also said "I did it this morning".

His parents, who lived an hour's drive away had an anxious premonition when they had spoken with him the night before; his mental condition seemed highly abnormal. They had discussed between them whether to drive over that winter's night to ascertain whether all was well, and decided in the end, to wait until morning.

And in Manitoba, a Winnipeg woman was sentenced to 12 years in prison for smothering her two-year-old daughter to death while at a Child and Family Services-approved shelter. She was under the supervision of Child and Family Services while living at a women's shelter where the little girl had been returned to her care. The 29-year-old mother insisted she hadn't meant to kill her child, just stop her crying.

An autopsy of the child revealed she had over thirty separate injuries to "nearly every portion of the body", in the days leading up to her death. Injuries that included bite marks to her legs.

The Debate

Escalating health costs hasn't been a matter brought up as a concern by any of the leaders of Canada's political parties during this 2011 general election, but on the other hand, Canada's health care system hasn't been entirely ignored. The NDP leader, Jack Layton, has been flaying the issue; not the costs involved with ensuring the continued feasibility of universal care, but laments about its perceived inadequacies.

It's one of those hot-button issues none of the party leaders really want to delve into in great detail, because in the details there are looming problems. Governments at every level have been throwing in increasing financial support to desperately attempt to shorten wait times. Drug costs, once identified as the single most costly item in health care, have latterly assumed somewhat less of a burden with pharmaceuticals' lapsed patents.

But as the country ages and the population becomes more weighted with its elderly demographic, the health care system will be put to an increasingly difficult test. It's a grim scenario no one really wants to tackle; it's in the league of items too serious to reflect upon during the course of an election campaign when quick and easy items can be addressed for maximum effect.

Now David Dodge, formerly governor of the Bank of Canada has forecasted some of the problems inherent in the groaning health care public non-debate in a report titled Chronic Healthcare Spending Disease. Universal health care is expensive, and costs are steadily rising. They could continue rising, according to Mr. Doge, to represent 19% of the national economy in two decades.

The current levels of available universality can only be maintained in the future with the imposition of new taxes, or the curtailing of services; neither being appealing solutions. Other options include a form of co-payment by individuals for services received; de-listing services to be paid for by consumers or private insurance suppliers; development of privately funded systems for those able and willing to pay.

Goodbye universality.

Even Mr. Dodge balks at those 'options'. "The Canadian public will not live with denial of service. We cannot do that again." Cutbacks in spending and services would be suicide for any political party that might suggest it, and worse for any party in government that would initiate them. Even at a time of restraint, even at a time of a huge national deficit and debt.

We value our health and the services attendant on them far too greatly.

The issue is one that a resounding 40% of Canadians place ahead of the economy and jobs as issues of importance to them. And, because it is such a vital issue, it may be one of the items taken seriously and addressed one-by-one by the leaders during their nationally televised debate. Because whoever assumes the Prime Ministership will be anticipating the 2014 federal-provincial accord renewal.

So with these concerns in mind, it really boggles that same mind to read that Gerald Savoie, former chief executive of the Montfort Hospital in Ottawa - actually a minor-league hospital in comparison with The Ottawa Hospital and its campuses - retired since 2009, last year received in his retirement $557,622, and is 'entitled' to the same for the current year. The hospital board agreed to these payouts as part of his contract.

Now isn't that rather rich? Under the agreement between Mr. Savoie and the hospital board, although the man will not have actively worked for the hospital for the past two years, he is considered to have 'earned' the handsome sum of $1.15-million as an entitled payout. In contrast, Ottawa Hospital chief executive Dr. Jack Kitts earned $642,071 in 2010, for actively executing the administration of the much larger hospital complex.

Dr. Rob Roberts as president of the University of Ottawa Heart Institute earned $612,037. These rich salaries represent the absolute top end of the highest-earning provincial civil servants in the National Capital. How can the Montfort's board of directors possibly justify glad-handing $1.15-million to a former chief executive?

Might this represent an anomaly or a symptom of the expense-malaise that afflicts the entire system?

Inconceivable Incompetence

Perhaps the single most vital tool that a doctor possesses is his/her ability to diagnose. To make correct diagnoses. When a patient presents with symptoms that are either clear-cut and readily identifiable, or tenuous and problematical, not readily given to causal identity, it can be critical that the attending physician have a good sense of diagnostic capability.

If the symptoms cannot be diagnosed, they cannot be adequately treated. That is an obvious conclusion and an important one, underlining just how important it is that the correct diagnosis be reached. At which point the doctor is able, with confidence, to prescribe medication or an ameliorating protocol, or both, which will be of benefit and relief to the sufferer.

Incorrect diagnoses can constitute a life-and-death situation. There are infrequent, but dreadful consequences on occasion when a presenting sufferer's symptoms are not taken seriously, misdiagnosed and/or dismissed with inadequate recommendations, and which end in a life-threatening situation, and sometimes death.

Just such an occurrence appears to have taken place at The Ottawa Hospital, when the then-high-commissioner to Canada of Cameroon, Solomon Azoh-Mbi, brought his wife Mercy Azoh-Mbi to the hospital in October 2009 for diagnosis and treatment when she fell suddenly ill. An attending emergency-room physician, Dr. Bruce Cload, assessed her as suffering from the flu.

This coincided with a flu epidemic in the city. One might assume that the emergency room doctors had seen quite a few people presenting with flu symptoms. Mrs. Azoh-Mbi did not have to wait long to be seen by a doctor, but when she was seen, that doctor severely misdiagnosed her condition. He prescribed Tamiflu and discharged her to the care of her worried husband.

Who had brought along his wife's medical records. Which showed that Mrs. Azoh-Mbi had a heart condition and had a mitral valve replacement. As his wife's condition deteriorated, an anxious and desperate Mr.Azoh-Mbi called an American doctor for advice who, on the description of Mrs. Azoh-Mbi's medical history diagnosed endocarditis, a serious condition afflicting heart patients with mitral valve replacements.

By the time she was re-admitted to hospital and finally placed in the intensive care unit, the damage she had rapidly suffered was too far advanced. Mrs. Azoh-Mbi's condition was so grave she experienced permanent brain injury, and her legs and arms had to be amputated. She now requires around-the-clock care.

High Commissioner Solomon Azoh-Mbi has launched a law suit against several of the doctors involved in the emergency room of the hospital, and against The Ottawa Hospital itself, for $30-million. Most of which will be used to pay for personal attendants, medication and prosthetic devices his wife will require for the rest of her natural life.

If Not Bread, Then Circuses

Haiti continues to suffer. Hundreds of thousands of its people remain confined in abject poverty in refugee camps. The rubble from the devastating earthquake that levelled Port au Prince and other cities remain as indelible everyday reminders of the disaster that laid waste an already barely functioning nation.

Elections that took place within an unprepared community remain unresolved. Government inaction is legendary, but this stalemate helps no one. The international community which has continued its investment in aiding the country has advanced no large initiatives that would result in rescue of the situation.

Ruin is everywhere. Homeless quake victims see no future for themselves or their dependants. Women and girls continue to be victimized by sexual assaults in the camps during the night. There is no true order, security and safety anywhere. These deplorable conditions barely succeed in inspiring anyone to light-heartedness.

Haitians - some of them - have turned instead to partying. The traditional Carnival is set to kick off, and young women in coquettishly sensual brilliant garb are prepared to entertain the Carnival-goers. Everyone will applaud their saucy efforts and dance techniques. Everyone is invited to attend and to celebrate.

Those who do not believe that Haiti has anything to celebrate will absent themselves. But the festivities will proceed nonetheless. Not all of Haiti's many musical bands have signed on to performing for the big seasonal event.

I don't even feel like singing a carnival song", Joseph Zenny of the band Kreyol-la lamented. "Morally, I don't feel inspired. The people are tired; they are tired of the tire burnings, the crisis. Look at the country. It's better they take the money, remove the people from underneath the tents."

But nothing, nothing trumps Carnival.

National Contrasts

China must surely be one of the few countries of the world that encourages its citizens to smoke. The national revenues acquired through taxation of tobacco and the fact that the government itself is inextricably involved in tobacco production as a revenue-retrieving renewable crop seems to be paramount. Incentives are given generously to farmers who grow tobacco. Farmers are able, in China, to make a better living growing food crops than tobacco, but they are encouraged to grow tobacco crops by government agencies.

At times of drought, precious water for irrigation of tobacco leaf growth will be made available through government auspices for tobacco growers, but will be withheld from farmers growing food crops. China is the largest tobacco producer in the world, producing approximately one-third of world output. Most of which is processed into cigarettes meant strictly for domestic consumption. Of a population of roughly 1.3-billion, it is estimated that over 320-million Chinese are smokers, and another half-billion suffer from second-hand effects as 'passive smokers'.

All the dreaded health hazards associated with smoking are visited upon Chinese smokers no less than elsewhere in the world. Elsewhere in the world, however, national governments, in recognition of the deadly effects of tobacco on human health, have taken strenuous efforts to warn their populations of the cumulative and deadly morbidity rates in long-term smoking. Whereas in China that national conscience has yet to emerge.

Reason: representing less than 1% of sown agricultural land, tobacco growing and manufacturing processes, generated about 95 billion in tax and profit a decade ago for the government. Contrasted with less than half that, at 40 billion to tax revenues through the entire agricultural sector. Taxes and profit from tobacco production result in 15% of net income for the government.
Compelling reason for the state to hold back on warning consumers of deleterious health effects.

And in Canada, the government has launched through Health Canada, a new set of impressively graphic health warnings to be printed both on the exterior and interior of cigarette packages. "Canada is the only country in the world that actually takes over the inside of the package as well as the outside", explained Cynthia Callard, executive director of Physicians for a Smoke-Free Canada. "This is really innovative."

Under the draft legislation Tobacco companies will be compelled to use four toxic emission messages to be included on the side panels of cigarette packages, along with a choice of 12 new images meant to cover 75% of the outside panels of packages. To be effective and in place by year's end. And the eight new health messages which will be appearing, in full colour,on the inside of packages.

Effectively resulting in Canada's newest efforts to emphatically get the damaged-health message across to the smoking public. To take full effect at the distributor and retail levels by 2012.

In Canada, taxes on tobacco sales were increased years ago, in an effort to make smoking less affordable, to encourage smokers to reduce their smoking habit. And to encourage adolescents to understand that this is an expensive habit, one that will hit their disposable income as well as their future health. Because of the politics involved in dealing with illegal production and sale of unauthorized contraband cigarettes in the aboriginal community, Canada has a severe hiccough in its meaningful attacks on cigarette consumption.

Aboriginal, First Nations communities that advertise themselves as 'sovereign', under their own laws and recognizance, oppose federal government interference in their production and sale of illicit tobacco. The new packaging rules will not, as a result, apply to contraband cigarettes produced on aboriginal reserves, despite their accounting for 20% of the Canadian market. And aimed in large part, at consumption by young people for whom the far lower cost is critical.

The First Nations reserves, in other words, acting in moral compliance and ethical agreement with the Government of China - intent on enhancing their incomes - considering as irrelevant to their larger purpose the impact on peoples' health, well enough recognized through scientific enquiry and medical research.

Impartial, non-subjective values. Submission to the overriding concern of revenue enhancement. Responsible governance. Seen otherwise: people do have the privilege of invoking personal choice, responsibility, pride in the useful virtue of intelligent choices.

Seat Belts Save Lives

Legislation is generally enacted when it comes to public policy revolving around health and safety issues to make the country, the province or the municipality a better place for its residents. In Canada, running lights in vehicles are always on, ensuring good visibility in traffic, making it a universal, not a choice option. It is illegal to decide not to fasten seat belts in a moving vehicle. It may be uncomfortable, but it's a life-saving device.

Folic acid and other vitamins and minerals are added to certain foods to increase the odds of a healthier population. Vitamin D for healthier bones for milk-drinking children; fortified cereals and breads for optimum health opportunities for the public. Children are routinely inoculated against measles, whooping cough, diphtheria, tuberculosis. Treatment plants make our drinking water potable.

And since the use of fluoride in drinking water universally there has been a huge drop in the incidence of tooth cavities and decay in the general population. Particularly among children. It is now rare for a child under the age of 10 to have more than one or two cavities, unless they're addicted to sugary sweets and neglectful of tooth hygiene.

It was an intensely controversial subject, whether or not to embark on this bold, new experiment; putting fluoride into the public's supply of drinking water, decades ago. But common sense prevailed against the naysayers, those who warned the public would suffer from exposure to the chemical, and we've never looked back.

Its use is heartily endorsed by dentists and doctors and their professional bodies.

But it seems there are sadly backward places that still exist in their insistence that the state, or the municipality should not be permitted to force anything on the population. So the clever folks who populate Calgary and their municipal council decided to vote on the issue. And the anti-fluoride activists triumphed.

"It's about freedom. It's about choice and it's about people taking ownership of their own health, not having it imposed on them."

Right, Calgarians now have the freedom to visit their dentists far more often than previously. But this is their freedom we're talking about, their choice and their determination to live free and as they will. They will doubtless have reason to regret that choice, but that's what they chose.

On reflection, at some future date, when the sad statistics come in, and their children's teeth reflect their choice they can always recall the euphoria that accompanied their victory.

That's Justice...

Ontario's disgraced former chief pathologist, Dr.Charles Smith, has officially had his license to practise medicine removed. It is amazing that someone so incompetent, who was very well aware of his lack of competence as a pathologist, was permitted to continue in a post that was so important. His supposedly expert testimony, supported by the trust placed in him as a provincial pathologist, ruined too many lives.

In the course of his professional activities he was responsible for the wrongful conviction of men and women whom he led judge and jury to believe had acted criminally in the deaths of young children. He effectively took away peoples' lives, branded them, through his uncompromising brand of pathological certainty (no pun here) that he had the uncorrupted answers to vexing questions of responsibility for unexplained deaths.

The province continues to pick up the pieces representing the disasters he brought to families. With convictions overturned after innocent people spent years in jail through their wrongful convictions, the province has paid out millions in compensation. As though money could somehow compensate for shame, grief and loss of liberty.

Dr. Smith was decidedly not the leading expert on pediatric forensic pathology he presented himself as, encouraged by his superiors who simply could not be bothered to ensure they had the right professional in the right place. Working out of the Chief Coroner's office he was responsible for inaccurate and often accusatory testimony in 20 investigations of death, which led to criminal charges against parents or other family members.

He believed implicitly in himself, despite his later admissions of insecurity. These professed misgivings never gave him pause to consider what kind of dreadful damage he was doing to other peoples' lives. In this he was horribly irresponsible, arrogant and deliberately oblivious to the harm he was imposing upon others.

He gave misleading evidence under oath. And now has been found guilty of professional misconduct and incompetence by the College of Physicians and Surgeons' disciplinary committee. Took long enough. The committee reached a deliberation that Dr. Smith was deserving of the "most severe" penalty possible, in officially revoking his license.

That will be the extent of the penalties imposed upon this disgusting caricature of a practising medical professional. "It's pretty difficult to charge someone for being incompetent", was the casual reflection of a lawyer. He has been and will continue to be sued in civil court by those whom his testimony caused such grief.

Any findings in favour of those who have sued this dreadful man have been settled by the Government of Ontario, the co-defendant in the suits.

"Buy More, Drink More"

At last, an Ontario politician addressing a subject dear to the hearts of all Ontarians. This is no taboo subject, it's a feel-good exercise, imbibing lustily to soothe one's feelings of having been hard done by through the political/social juggling act of the environment-obsessed Liberal government of Dalton McGuinty. We just think we're a trifle upset by soaring energy bills, thanks to Premier McGuinty's dedication to green measures.

He made a pledge to rid Ontario of its coal-firing plants, and he's doing it. Of course, the fact that scientists and environmentalists share those concerns and have been instrumental in designing cleaner-burning furnaces and more upgraded methods to scrub the burn-off to render it far less harmless to the atmosphere appears to be dismissively incidental. That a growing popular movement protesting the proliferation of wind farms is another inconvenience this government can deal with.

Taxpaying, voting families who struggle to make ends meet and are faced with increasing electrical bills will be absolutely thrilled out of their minds to discover that Ontario's Conservative leader Tim Hudack is prepared to address these problems, and go out of his way to placate the voters. Be happy, don't be concerned, give yourself a break and have a beer.

"I do hear from people who say 'come on, I can't even get a buck a beer in this province thanks to Dalton McGuinty's policies", divulged Mr. Hudak in a frank talk about how a government under his auspices would handle the rising cost of energy, food and whatever else irks the electorate. "A buck a beer" is on the horizon. That should salve many peoples' concerns.

Salve, but not solve the real issues. People will be able to afford their beer now, cheap! now, drink more!?! If they're sloshed out of their minds they'll be more likely to be less abrasively troublesome. Slashing the price of a case of 24 beers from the current $25.95 (bottle deposit not included) to a far more palatable $24.00 is certain to make a biiig difference in peoples' lives.

For one thing, we'll have an extra, disposable, luxurious $1.95 jingling around in our pocketbooks affording us the opportunity to splurge on other desirable items we cannot conceivably live without; bags of yummy potato chips, for example, to go with the beer. Or salted peanuts; take your pick, the choice is yours!

Why, parents concerned about the rising cost of milk can just do as the French once did, and dilute beer (instead of wine) to serve to their youngsters. The LCBO and the beer-producing industry will thank them for such graciousness and generosity in promoting the incidence of future alcoholics, to further burden the provincial health-care system.

Decisions such as these have far-reaching consequences, and Mr. Hudak is extremely perspicacious to understand that making beer more affordable will end up making life far more pleasant for the peasants.

Global Obesity

Can anything be more repulsive than a 300-lb man or woman? Well, possibly. How about a man or woman weighing 500 pounds? Sounds impossible, but it isn't, at all. Somehow, lifestyles develop and a kind of psychological lethargy sets in where people may realize that they are gaining weight,and tell themselves they'll get around sooner or later to doing something about it, but that intention just doesn't materialize.

Eating can be such a comfort. When we're frustrated, bored, trying to cope with life, it can seem like a pleasurable break just to push all those irritations and fears temporary out of thought and relax. What could be more relaxing than indulging in the pleasure of consuming food. Not just any kind of food, since it's not necessarily sound nutrition that people crave, but comfort food. Comfort food tends to be food laden with fats, and fat begets fat.

Foods that whet our appetite smell good, taste good. We become accustomed to sweet and sour and fat. Lots of salt, plenty of sugar, not necessarily together, but not necessarily not. Hamburgers, fries, breaded fried chicken, ice cream, whipped cream, milk shakes, sundaes - when we want to give ourselves a taste treat. Tastes good to our discriminating taste buds. Easy to obtain, as near as any of the ubiquitous fast-food outlets.

Poorer countries are becoming more in touch with what pleases the palate of richer countries. In populous India and China the middle class is slowly growing, and they're demanding what they see as better food; more meat and more fat. Obesity, a new study in The Lancet has observed, has become a worldwide phenomenon, it has doubled since 1980.

Why would a world-respected medical journal report that? Well, because obesity becomes a direct lead to highly increased risks of serious health problems like diabetes, high blood pressure, high cholesterol, sleep apnea, asthma. And how about heart disease, and various types of cancer, and increased risk of stroke?

Even children are now not immune to the growing obesity epidemic. It's a familial thing partially; fat parents raise fat children because of patterning into sedentary lifestyles, because of over-eating and poor food choices and the easy availability of fast foods with the wrong type of calories. Calorie-dense, nutritionally absent.

We're not even supposed to think this way, since it abrades the feminist agenda, but working mothers buy a whole lot of convenience foods. And convenience foods are just that; convenient, but not necessarily food, as in whole food, nutritional food, real food, just processed stuff claiming to be food. Which kids eat, because it's there and even they can just haul it out of the freezer, pop the stuff into the microwave and feed themselves.

In Canada in 2009, 73% of women with children under age 16 living at home were employed outside the home. It's tough to be a working mother, with time for not a whole lot, let alone to think about and to prepare nutritious, home-cooked meals from primary food products. Kids' health suffers; 17% of children in Canada are overweight; 8% fall into the obese category.

Canadians are by no means the most highly representative population for obesity; that dubious honour goes to the United States, with New Zealand hot in second place, but Canada's right up there. The Lancet looked at 199 countries and territories for their study in global BMIs.

Japan, to their credit had the lowest average BMI in their population; 22 for women, 23 for men, and then Singapore with 24 for men and 23 for women. Whereas the U.S. had a BMI of 28 for both men and women, and New Zealand 27 for both genders. The average BMI for Canadian women rose to 26.7 in 2008, and for men it was 27.5 in 2008.

The deleterious health impact on these populations simply cannot be overstated. The question is, what's to be done about it? It's costly for nations to mend abused bodies, but how to prevail when trying to inform people that their self-destructive behaviour shortens their life-spans at a time when medical science has succeeded in offering us longer life spans?

Diabetes "Myths"

People afflicted with diabetes walk a tightrope of blood sugar control. Both high- and low-blood sugars on a consistent and repetitive basis represent threats to longevity and overall quality of health. Long-term diabetes often leads to neuropathic problems (which may result in limb amputations), eyesight impediments (leading to blindness), heart attacks, stroke potential and kidney failure.

The struggle to maintain consistent, balanced, moderate blood sugar levels is uppermost in physicians' minds and that of their patients.

Both high- and low-blood sugar counts are threatening episodes to be avoided if at all possible. Extreme and ongoing hyperglycemia (high-blood sugar) will inevitably lead to vital organ destruction. Extreme hypoglycemia can lead to convulsions as the brain becomes starved of fuel - can sometimes lead to death. The balancing act of maintaining acceptable control is a difficult one.

Adult-onset diabetes, commonly called Type II, is considered a lifestyle disease; obesity combined with a sedentary habit, treated with drugs. Whereas Juvenile-onset diabetes (infants, children, teens, young adults), now called Type I, treated with multiple daily insulin injections, has its genesis in the mystery of the auto-immune system going berserk resulting in the Islands of Langerhans in the pancreas no longer able to produce insulin.

Type I diabetes is extremely difficult to manage, even for the most conscientious and accepting of patients, requiring extreme self-dedication to the task at hand. Many people resolve to rise above this chronic threat to normalcy, treating their condition as an inconvenience and adeptly rising to the challenge to live a life as close to normal as possible, while managing to take the care required to enable them to do so.

Others are more vulnerable to feelings of inadequacy and resentment, both reactions that in the long term become extremely self-fulfilling and often leading to the early onset of life-continuing complications. Some young people with diabetes defy and in a sense deny the limitations imposed upon them by their revealed condition which makes them vulnerable to self-destructive impulses leading to impairment and death.

It is difficult to feel much in the way of outraged sympathy for a young woman employed by the Canadian International Development Agency who insists she has the right under Canada's guaranteed freedoms to embark on year-long assignments to potentially dangerous geographical hot-spots. Bronwyn Cruden had already travelled through her field postings to countries like Togo, Jordan and Egypt.

She considers herself ill done by because of a Health Canada policy that does not permit federal employees with Type I diabetes to be posted under government auspices to hostile environments. "It would put the lives of other people at risk", is the explanation put forward by Justice Department lawyer Alex Kaufman, representing CIDA and Health Canada at a Canadian Human Rights Tribunal.

"Afghanistan", he explained to the discrimination enquiry where Ms. Cruden lodged her complaint, "is dangerous enough as it is; we do everything we can to minimize the risk." Reasonable and responsible. People with Type I diabetes in particular are essentially far more vulnerable to health problems than those whose bodily functions are not impaired, dependent on injected life-prolonging and -normalizing endocrine hormones.

Ms. Cruden is concerned about her career. She informed the tribunal that the long-term (year-long) posting denied her to Afghanistan because of her diabetes would have given her the kind of field and management experience she considers to be critical to advancement within CIDA. She is now demanding compensation for lost wages and opportunities. And insists that Health Canada should change its policy.

Anyone who has witnessed a Type I diabetic go into convulsions as a result of extremely low blood sugar will never forget it. It is a horrifying and spectator-helpless spectacle of the body in extreme duress. Ms. Cruden testified before the tribunal that she monitors her blood-sugar levels very carefully. While on a previous one-month assignment to Kandahar she had erroneously taken an insulin overdose.

That resulted in a severe low-blood-sugar episode where she began violently convulsing in her bed. A startled co-worker in the next room heard the commotion, alerted medical staff, and Ms. Cruden was rushed to a nearby hospital where she was treated, then discharged. This was an incident witnessed by others, there well may have been other such incidents Ms. Cruden prefers not to divulge.

There are many people who live with diabetes and who accept that they must, for safety reasons - their own and that of other people - live within certain boundaries. That awareness of personal responsibility both self-directed and outwardly, has caused some not to acquire driver's licenses. There are times and there are reasons why individuals must accept limitations imposed upon their aspirations.

This is one of those times for this particular ambitious young woman. Who may find the satisfaction she craves through other avenues less potentially fraught with danger to herself and to those around her.

Reproductive Biology Assists

It's fairly fundamental to existence, the survival of the species, the genetically ingrained code invested in all organisms - the urge to reproduce. But not all creatures are destined to reproduce their species. And, among human beings, no less than among other creatures produced by nature, there will always be men and women whose reproductive capacity has been impaired - from birth or through other circumstances affecting their biological destiny.

But it is also human nature to deeply desire that which is withheld. To want something that most people take for granted in the most casual way but that is denied others. People aspire to be like everyone else, to have the positive experiences and accoutrements that others around them have. While many people have no intention of growing a family, others are dedicated to having the pleasures (and pain) inherent in raising children of their own.

And when they cannot themselves successfully achieve that cycle they rebel. In a way it's rather ironic, that people who take the reproductive process for granted and carelessly birth more children than they can manage, and ignore the very basic emotional and material needs of those children form a representative portion of society, while others who fervently wish to raise and love children stand hopelessly by.

Of course those without children can resort to the ages-old sharing of adopting a child, as is done in many 'primitive' cultures, and many advanced societies as well. But the deep-seated urge to reproduce one's own genes is not so easily by-passed since it is written into our genetic coding as the instinct for survival. And modern medical technology has intervened to give hope to those without hope.

Truth is, it's difficult for many to sympathize with a man and woman struggling to achieve that most basic of human rewards and disciplines, the birth of a child. In vitro fertilization has given new hope to many childless couples. It has become a self-sustaining industry, one that is able to extract huge sums of money from desperate people, even with its fairly low success rate.

That it represents a slow, laborious, agonizing process, and an expensive one ensuring that only the well-padded may apply, and still with scant results, demonstrates the tenacity of human desire. Among woman over 40 years of age the success rate for IVF is 10%; under that age, an IVF cycle can have a 30% success rate.

There are risks associated with fertility drug usage; two-fold risk of malformations, Down syndrome, heart disease, malformations of the uro-genital system in boys among them. Women conceiving artificially remain at higher risk of complications like high blood pressure, gestational diabetes and placenta abruption where the placenta peels away from the uterus.

When things go awry there is a call on the public health system to care for mother and child, irrespective of mode of conception leading to the biological creation of another organism. Public funding of infertile couples' attempts to conceive, however, would represent another burden on an already over-stretched health care system.

The inability to conceive may represent a personal misfortune to childless couples, but it does not represent a health problem or medical urgency in the conventional sense. Public health care is there to service the health needs of an entire population, when people require medical and surgical interventions as a result of accidents, chronic health impacts, disease onset and other health malfunctions.

Artificial conception aids, the clinics and the health professionals that offer them, have become an industry, a very profitable one, existing on the margins of the traditional organization of health providers, not entirely unlike the vanity industry of cosmetic surgery.

There are times when cosmetic surgery is recognized as a necessary procedure, however, and the same might be said for reproductive techniques - but rarely.

Empathy Falters, and Ebbs

"She has been denied equal access to, and benefit from, government information and services provided online to the public on the Internet, and that this constitutes discrimination against her on the basis of her physical disability, namely that she is blind." Federal Court Justice Michael Kelen

The plight of the disempowered who are beset by the reality of physical impairment or mental impairment is one that all societies face. We generally regret, as a society, and as caring individuals, that many people face life disadvantaged. With congenital illnesses that impose many strictures upon life satisfaction and attainment of aspirations and life-goals. Those who face life with far more complications standing in the way of their achievements than those of the majority who are healthfully fully-functional and capable.

And advanced societies, particularly those that are wealthy with high educational standards like Canada, are mindful of the needs of those with special needs. We generally agree and take steps to ensure that people who are in any way handicapped are given special advances in opportunities to equalize as much as possible, their futures. Hearing-impaired and sight-impaired people can attend institutes of higher learning to enhance their future opportunities, and physical assists are generally built into structures to assist the physically impaired.

To do all of this is costly but meaningful, in asserting and competently assuring that all residents of a country are exposed to equal opportunities as a right, not a privilege. Disadvantages that can compromise equality are matched with initiatives that serve to alleviate those perceived barriers to equality. The majority makes an effort to accommodate the minority requiring additional assistance, and this is fair enough.

But, like the over-accommodation seen in many minority-rights efforts, such as favouring lesser-qualified women for posts over their more qualified male counterparts, situations can arise that simply exacerbate social conditions by creating victims out of the majority. One such questionable instance is represented by a woman, blind from birth, who brought suit against the federal government, claiming a "system-wide failure" to provide her with the opportunity to apply on line for government positions, and to fill out forms on line.

Specialized software that would accommodate the blind demographic in Canada who wish to access the identical type of services that their sighted counterparts can and may do, is now to be installed to service the visually impaired. Governments in Canada have long since made an effort to ensure that all minorities are represented in government hiring, and quotas representing visual minorities, women, and the physically impaired have long been put in place.

That federal services are available through other channels, such as by telephone, by appearing in person at a site, and by regular mail means that not being able to conduct business on the Internet through government web sites does not shut applicants out fully. But these traditional and alternate methods of useful application were of no interest to one particular applicant, a Toronto resident, blind from birth, who works as an accessibility consultant and is computer-proficient.

"I went to court to catch the government's attention because they were not paying attention to any of us when we said we could not access their websites, we could not apply for jobs, we can't do anything. I think it's sad that the government fought this for four years and a lot of taxpayers' money was wasted", complained the applicant, Donna Jodhan, after winning her legal battle.

On the other hand, the government cannot and should not be all things to all people all the time. There exist other, alternate methods of communication, either and any of which could be conveniently used. If Ms. Jodhan was so concerned about the use and misuse of taxpayers' funding, she might wish to give a thought to the installation of a new protocol to service this limited demographic and its associated costs in adaptive technology.

The design and implementation, the hiring of professionals to see it through to completion, to service the new program to the satisfaction of those, like her, who demand their equal rights absolutely equally at whatever the cost. Including tax-funded $150,000 to cover the legal costs which she incurred, and which the government has been ordered to refund to her.

There are Canadians who are not computer-literate. They cannot use the on-line services available to Canadians through federal Internet sites. Do they now have reason to complain that the federal government has shut them out of a convenient alternate method of completing forms, of applying for government positions?

Would a court assume their equal rights to be needful of an outreach by government to teach those with no computer-related knowledge how to be computer-literate and -capable?

Unethical, Immoral, not Illegal?

"If you have money, you live; and if you don't, you die."

That's the kind of matter-of-fact statement reflecting the hard life realities in impoverished countries of the world where medical treatment can be obtained but not by the vast mass of the population, only those who represent the elite, the entitled, the moneyed class. And of course health-tourists who travel to countries like India where they can obtain expert surgical procedures not recognized in Canada.

Thank heavens, we live in Canada. Where universal access to timely and state-of-the-art medical intervention is not only possible, but a matter of life. Life defeating death. We are indeed fortunate. Of course there's been a creeping incidence of private, for-profit interventions that we mostly decry; clinics and medical specialists who've opted out of our universal health care system.

But the universality of Canada's public health care system is an enviable one. Particularly when it works. And often enough it does. Occasionally it slips up and people are left untreated on the brink of expiration, cautioned to be patient and simply await their turn, and then there occasions a tragedy and that patient no longer needs to wait for his/her turn.

Now, we learn of another, odious practise recently revealed that appears to be common in Quebec. Where skilled surgeons supplement their comfortable incomes (which they claim, as people are wont to do, that those incomes do not reflect the value they give to their communities) display an unwonted venality. Accepting thick envelopes padded with thousands of dollars to expedite individuals to the top of the waiting list.

Alternately, agreeing to perform the surgery themselves rather than delegate it to an inferior-skilled practitioner or a junior surgical professional.

"I've learned that it's current practise ... everyone within these hospitals knows about it. It's systemic, and it's been so for a long time now."

This is a narrative through the mouth of a high-ranking physician with experience at a number of Montreal-area hospitals, explaining that obstetricians regularly deign to accept cash from families anxious to ensure that it is the contracted obstetrician who will show up at the hospital for the delivery, not whichever doctor happens to be on call at the hospital at the time.

"We wanted to have the operation done by (someone) who we know is the best. I gave it to him discreetly and he took it. He knew what was in the envelope. He took the money and never showed up."

That was one plan that went awry, when the surgeon quietly took possession of the cash-stuffed envelope and somehow a member of his surgical team managed to conduct the surgery, not he. A formal complaint is in the planning stages. Who will they complain to, the surgeon who forbore to act on his part of this sleazy bargain?

The hospital, which will deny that such a practise exists? The province which underfunds its health system, even as it continues to extend its grasp of another province's equalization hand-outs? This blackest of black markets is representative of another type of two-tier system we hardly imagined exists in Canada.

It helps immeasurably to know that the head of the Quebec Association of Specialists considers the phenomenon to be "disgusting, scandalous and indefensible", and that "It makes me very sad". All is not lost thank our lucky stars; the Quebec College of Physicians condemns any form of kickbacks.

Of course they deny knowledge of any complaints about the practise.

Reserve Compensation

"When the money doesn't come from the pockets of people on the reserve, when it instead comes from other taxpayers via Ottawa, there's really no reason to rein in salaries." Mike Milke, director, Fraser Institute's Alberta office, author of Incomplete, Iliberal and Expensive: 15 Years of Treaty Negotiations in B.C.

People on the reserve don't pay taxes to begin with. And the people of Canada who do pay taxes are generally in agreement that their tax dollars should go to reserves as the preferred traditional places of abode for First Nations who insist that reserve life is the only one they will consider, unlike their peers who take their opportunities for advancement in education and the professions living in urban areas, and who do pay taxes.

And the Canadian taxpayer foots the almost-$8-billion annual hand-over in support of the operation of the country's reserves. Canadian taxpayers feel themselves morally obligated to do this without question. On the other hand, they reserve the right to feel that this funding be spent wisely and allocated to benefit the infrastructure and social needs of Canada's aboriginal populations.

Psst! Those assurances have been lacking.

A politician is a politician is a politician. Regardless of their constituency. And traditions must be upheld; above all the traditions that insist the Assembly of First Nations has a distinct and deliberate purpose beyond which no one should question their utility. Chief of the Assembly, Shawn Atleo, presents himself no differently than his predecessors. Brooking no interference in the work of the Assembly, and certainly no criticism of the traditions of First Nations reserves.

Access to information requests have lately informed the Canadian public through the research done by the Canadian Taxpayers Federation that far too much of those yearly allocations are being applied to cross-purposes; benefiting the few at the expense of the many. The ordinary reserve aboriginal is getting short shrift; the services they anticipate due them are not forthcoming.

There is nothing particularly new about this. It has always been assumed that reserve chiefs and their band councils generously apportion to themselves the lions' share of funding meant to improve the lives of their bands. Perhaps it's the extent to which the band councils and the chiefs have improved their lives and those of their immediate families at the expense of those whose interests they are presumed to represent that is so hard to fathom.

The Assembly of First Nations is invested in keeping the reserves intact. They persuade their members, the country's aboriginal populations, that this is the best way to honour their ancestors, by living as they did, on the land in the traditional time-honoured way. This is a monumental hoax, but a profitable one for band councils.

The reserves may be squalid, life boring, unemployment rife, education and health poor, but it is traditional.

And in the meanwhile, there are First Nations chiefs whose tax-free salaries exceed the after-tax income paid to the country's provincial premiers. The records released at the request of the Canadian Taxpayer Federation, while not naming names, show individual salaries can be sky-high. Sixty of the 577 chiefs across the country were remunerated at an annual $90,000 tax-free.

More than 700 reserve politicians earned over $100,000. On one reserve of 304 souls the chief 'earned' a total tax-free salary of $243,000; the councillors on that same reserve each took home a handsome $200,000 in salaries, travel per diems and honoraria. One council member really stood out, hauling home $322,103 in "other" remunerations.

This is not particularly pleasing to band members themselves who don't particularly dote on their band councils, and find much fault with them. Principally their princely remunerations. While reserve infrastructure crumbles into decay and services are too costly to maintain adequately. They are, understandably, resentful, and feel they deserve better. And they do.

As for National Chief Shawn Atleo? He is incensed with the Canadian Taxpayers Federation, characterizing its campaign to release data "an insult that paints First Nations leadership as overpaid, unaccountable local bosses, uninterested in the challenges faced by First Nations citizens."

And aren't they?

Indomitable Spirit

Child prodigies can emerge from the unlikeliest sources. Nothing taken for granted; the most stimulating environment and deliberate exposure to stimulating educational opportunities cannot make up for inherent brilliance. Not all incipient geniuses are slated to emerge triumphantly from the chrysalis of their initiation into life, but some, on the evidence of their rare emergences, do manage to meet their manifest destiny.

Dr. Tofy Mussivand, chair and director of the Cardiovascular Devices Program of the University of Ottawa Heart Institute, professor of surgery and engineering at the University of Ottawa and Carleton University, Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada and long-time member of the Prime Minister's Advisory Council, clearly is one of those rare cerebral eminences that do manage to find their way from obscurity to brilliant discovery.

Who might have imagined that this distinguished 67-year-old, a medical-mechanical-visionary of earned renown - a child of poverty who grew up in the highlands of Iranian Kurdistan and Turkey's Mount Ararat - would become Canada's leading medical engineering theorist and producer of vitally important medical patents. He describes himself as a child eager to know everything about the world around him, with questions his father could not answer.

"I remember the first pencil I got. And I remember the first page of paper I got to write on. It was exciting for me."

Dr. Tofy Mussivand

Simple, everyday items for a child growing up in Canada, a prosperous and advanced country, but wonderful gifts of opportunity for a child born to impoverishment and a fundamental agricultural existence.
But this was a child inspired to learn, to fill his experience with new ideas, to absorb information and to become what he today represents.
And today he is to receive a major national "Knowledge Translation" award from the Canadian Institutes of Health Research for his inspired innovations. This is by no means his first nor his last professional honour; many previous such have been bestowed upon him.

"Only in Canada some shepherd boy like me could come and get this opportunity. I never give up. The tougher it becomes, the more exciting it becomes to me." Challenges inspire him to greater achievements. And we are the beneficiaries.

Dr. Mussivand, along with the engineers, doctors and others associated with him are in the process of developing prototype medical devices, many related to the heart, but by no means all. Other have applications for genetics, neurobiology, surgical safety, blood testing and the reduction of hospital infections.

A remarkable man, a credit to himself and his colleagues, and a gift to Canada and the world.

"Real Vision" For Health Care

Guess Maxime Bernier, obviously a deeply devoted Conservative, doesn't much care about the regard with which he will be held in Quebec. He can, doubtless, rely on the loyalty of voters in his riding, who returned him handily in the last election, despite his unfortunate indiscretions that lost him a plum cabinet post.

Mr. Bernier has been openly critical of his province. Which he characterizes as infantile and greedy. Reflecting just how many other Canadians regard Quebecers. Who love to flirt with the prospect of nationalism and the potential for separation from Confederation, and use it as a bludgeon to keep the rest of Canada sufficiently concerned to allow the province its coy blackmail.

He has castigated the City of Quebec for having raised fiscal eyebrows in anticipating that the federal government was prepared to hand over millions of dollars for a new hockey franchise which the city could proudly take ownership of. The wealthy league and its overpaid hockey stars felt too that it was reasonable to accept tax money to establish a franchise they themselves were not prepared to fund.

And here is Mr. Bernier, recommending that the concept of transfer payments - meant to provide a system of equalization among the provincial social and health facilities ensuring that Canadians, no matter where they live in the country - would have access to equal services, be abolished.

Leaving a clear provincial jurisdiction in the provision of such services to the provinces.
And enabling them to undertake to fund those enhanced and innovative medical-hospital services that would result, through tax-funding. The federal government to diminish the level of its taxation of income, leaving the way clear for the provinces to take up the slack.

As far as Mr. Bernier is concerned, the current traditional one-size-fits-all transfer protocol has not resulted in a dependable and current universal health care system. It stifles the ability of provincial governments to seek alternate methods more useful and efficient than the current model.

And he may be right. And Quebec will most surely detest him for yanking the plush carpet of exorbitant transfer payments out from under their toasty feet.

Scene of Disaster, Not Fiesta

One can hardly conceive of people suspended in a state between mourning and hope for the future lending themselves to celebration, but in a sense that too might be representative of hope for the future, rather than to descend into a state of mournful abeyance of life. So family members who have spent the past month awaiting word of their loved ones trapped 700 metres underground, could perhaps be forgiven, given the state of their mental anguish, to want to express briefly some kind of joy in life.

The 200th anniversary of Chilean independence, near on the horizon, and ordinarily a holiday of great exuberant expression, has been irremediably marred for the thirty-three Chilean miners trapped in their subterranean chamber, and by extension, for their families awaiting their release from their current state of virtual suspended animation. Not all family members, however feel exhilarated by the thought of celebrating while their husbands/brothers/fathers/uncles/cousins are trapped below.

"I thought we agreed not to do such a thing" the wife of the oldest of the 33 trapped miners has reportedly reminded the others. "Let's save the party for when the men are with us", represents her words of elderly wisdom. And the country's mining minister, Laurence Golborne, is in complete concordance with that sensible position, with his reprimand to the would-be cheerleaders, that Camp Hope is "not a fiesta or a holiday camp.

"It's the site of a massive rescue operation and we would do well to remember that." In fact, it would seem rather ghoulish to onlookers of which there are scant numbers permitted other than the media, and even more perplexing to the rescue teams working feverishly to drill no fewer than three options, each of which has the potential of saving the trapped miners. Plan A has begun as has Plan B, as alternates, but then another, Plan C will soon begin drilling.

And it is Plan C, if it succeeds, that might see rescue operations concluded far sooner than the December 31 potential. Each of the planned drilling sites can be successful in reaching and extracting the men, but Plan B is a shorter, more direct route and Plan C shorter even yet, representing a depth of 597 metres, and potentially cutting rescue time by at least a month. And time is certainly of the essence.

The sooner those trapped men are rescued, the better the prospects for their mental health outcomes. There will be ample time to celebrate, once the rescue plans have resulted in the triumph of completion, and each one of the miners has been released from his personal hell in a mind-destroying prison of earth and stone.

In the meantime, to ensure that calm prevails, the medical team overseeing the health of the men have logically concluded that there should be no alcohol provided to the trapped men. Some of whom are already suffering from depression, and for whom alcohol could complicate their condition. The trapped miners themselves thought it might be a relief to celebrate their country's independence day with Chilean red wine and empanadas.

There might be a swift and short-lived release from the demoralizing condition many are beginning to suffer as they continue to come to grips with the reality of their ongoing imprisonment. Their anguish at being trapped for over a month compounded with the realization that they must continue living as they are now, for three times as long. One month's misery extending into three months of ongoing agony, despite the determination to endure the unendurable.

Most of the trapped miners are new to the mine. Older, experienced workers had left the mine. Those who took their place, some of them migrants from Bolivia, were desperate for employment, for a job that would pay up to twice what they had been minimally earning before coming to the San Jose copper and gold mine whose owners had ignored government safety rules and regulations.

The pain of a catastrophic forced incarceration will remain long after rescue has been effected. The trapped miners must mine deep within themselves to discover their interior resources of hope, the will to survive their ordeal. And when they do, despite the lingering trauma, the joy of life re-discovered will sustain them.

What Pharmaceutical Debate?

Beware the pharmaceutical industrial complex. And its stranglehold on the fond attention of government. That is one hugely powerful lobby. And a too-too clever manipulator of physicians and their hapless patients. Foxily manoeuvring public relations and pricey advertising to convince the public that they are ill, ill, ill, and only especially designed pharmaceutical products are capable of lending them a few more years of life.

But people being people, there is an never-ending search for bargains. Who wants to pay the full prevailing price when they can procure the very same product at a highly reduced price? The U.S. believes in the free enterprise system, untrammelled by government interference, while in Canada the government takes a more price-regulatory role. Which means that on-line pharmacies can offer Canadian prices to price-sensitive Americans.

The on-line pharmacies mop up business, scrambling to fill the need for American consumers of drug products, and the pharmaceutical industry in the U.S. screams bloody murder. So along comes the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to most convincingly assert that foreign-produced products have not been approved - by their rigid standards, and therefore there is little guarantee of their efficacy.

Now the issue has turned from pharmaceuticals to birth control devices issuing from Canadian manufacturers. Which, like their drug counterparts, cost a whole lot less procured from a Canadian source than an American manufacturer. Take IUDs; the charge is $700 for product and um, installation, in the U.S. But perform the procedure with a Canadian-made IUD and the price plunges to $224.

But, says the American FDA, they're not guaranteed by us to be reliable! Ah, respond those who would prefer the bargain, private corporate interests have brought government in to pound home their preference, limiting the consumer to the purchase of the inordinately costly product on the pretext that the alternative is inferior.

Oddly enough, the Canadian product happens to be manufactured in the same overseas factory as the American product; in other words, same product, different brand name. But, just think: if the foreign-produced-and-sold birth control devices truly were that unreliable, the end product would be a much-needed increase in the American birth rate.

So what's this debate about, anyway?

All the American nativists who decry the incursion of immigrants bringing with them values not commensurate with American ones, and who dilute the culture of the United States intolerably, could be influenced perhaps to procreate more generously, if they were given to understand the reality that the country must increase its population base to compete internationally as a growing workforce, and collect the appropriate taxes connected thereto for the purpose of providing vitally needed social services.

Like health care, like veterans' services, like old age pensions, like employment insurance - ad nauseum.