Category Archives: Uncategorized

Transit workers spoof Wynne running ad with attack on P3 policy

Posted on May 2, 2014 | 3 comments

Confirmation of the June 12 election is barely an hour old and the Amalgmated Transit Union Local 113 has already  launched its election campaign ad. Its a spoof of Kathleen Wynne’s running commercial that highlights the dangers of public-private partnerships.

The 2014 budget highlights more than $35 billion spent on 80 P3 projects. That includes everything from hospitals to courthouses. The ATU is concerned that approach is being extended to transit.

The ATU video also shows Stephen Harper, Tim Hudak and Rob Ford applauding as Kathleen Wynne runs past a series of failed P3s, including the cancelled gas plant.

The ad will be airing on Toronto television stations beginning today.

Be among the first to watch it below:

More on P3s:
Report identifies cost of Ontario P3s — 16 per cent more
St. Thomas Mental Health Centre opens with fanfare and problems
New Kingston hospital a departure from recent P3s
ORNGE wasn’t the first costly warning McGuinty ignored

3 Comments

Posted in Uncategorized

Tagged , ,

Libs say budget “platform for next 30 days” after NDP vows to pull the plug

Posted on May 2, 2014 | 2 comments

Well that was quick.

NDP Leader Andrea Horwath told the media this morning that she cannot support the Wynne budget, or more specifically, the Wynne government.

Horwath’s remarks suggested it wasn’t so much about the content of yesterday’s budget, but about trust in the present government.

A June 12 provincial election has now been set.

Energy Minister Bob Chiarelli told the Ottawa Citizen this morning “this budget is our platform for the next 30 days.”

The Liberals wasted no time in going on the attack, revealing their strategy to brand PC Leader Tim Hudak as representing the values of the U.S. Tea Party and accusing Horwath of bringing “zero policy forward.”

Horwath noted that the Wynne government had not delivered on past promises, including fixing home care and establishing a Financial Accountability Office.

Yesterday OPSEU President Warren Smokey Thomas had called upon Horwath to pull the plug on the two-and-a-half year-old minority government, calling the spring budget a “wholesale transfer of wealth from the public to the corporate sector.”

Continue reading →

2 Comments

Posted in Uncategorized

Tagged , , , , , , ,

EORLA: Cornwall cuts an improvement? We want to see the evidence

Posted on May 2, 2014 | Leave a comment

Cornwall residents will not have to travel to Ottawa to have tissue samples taken in the lab. Instead just a tiny part of them will make the trip – their tissue samples. The patients can stay where they are, as will the Cornwall-based pathologists whose job it is to analyse the results.

The net effect will be four jobs lost in the Cornwall Community Hospital lab run by the Eastern Ontario Regional Lab Association (EORLA). These are the professional staff that would normally prepare the samples for the pathologists to analyse.

The impact on turnaround will depend on who you talk to.

The hospital argues that this represents an improvement, suggesting the lights are just that much brighter in the big city lab and this will somehow lead to a quality nirvana and rapid turnaround.

The reality is the samples will have to be transported to Ottawa where the specimen slides can be prepared, and then sent back to Cornwall for analysis. That’s a round trip of 212 kilometres.

Continue reading →

Leave a comment

Posted in Uncategorized

Home care increases slip downward in 2014-15 budget

Posted on May 1, 2014 | Leave a comment

Ontario Health Minister Deb Matthews has had a fairly consistent narrative of late – health services should be delivered closer to home, or more specifically, in the home.

It’s been the justification for a lengthy freeze on hospital base budgets – now predictably frozen for the third year. The answer to every hospital cut is ‘don’t worry, it will be delivered in the community.”

If there is one interesting aspect of the 2014 provincial budget it’s this: the amount of money the Wynne government has allocated for home care is beginning to slip.

Last year’s budget promised a six per cent increase for home care. This year it is pegged at five per cent, or $270 million. The three year total for home care is forecast to be $750 million, which suggests a further slide in investment next year and the year after.

Continue reading →

Leave a comment

Posted in Uncategorized

Tagged , , ,

PSW minimum wage hike not the end of the story

Posted on April 30, 2014 | Leave a comment

Deb Matthews promised and delivered – sort of.

The Ontario Health Minister had committed earlier this year to revisit compensation for personal support workers. Minimum wage for PSWs had not changed since 2006.

This she has done – announcing yesterday that the minimum wage for PSWs would escalate in three steps to $16.50 per hour by April 1, 2016.

The first step is retroactive – PSWs earning the previous minimum wage of $12.50 per hour will see their pay rise to $14 an hour as of April 1 of this year. Next April 1st it will rise to $15.50 for 2014-15.

It’s a good start but not the end of the story.

Continue reading →

Leave a comment

Posted in Uncategorized

CAMH asks staff to mail patients’ cigarettes back home

Posted on April 30, 2014 | 3 comments

Ah, Rosie.

Toronto Star columnist Rosie DiManno recently used her shotgun style prose to take the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health (CAMH) to school.

While addiction is part of CAMH’s mandate, not everyone who seeks help there has arrived to engage in a smoking cessation program.

True, smoking tobacco is addictive. Its negative health consequences are well documented.

CAMH has been escalating its war on tobacco for some time, starting with the elimination of smoking rooms back in 2003. Since then they have prohibited patients from smoking anywhere on the property – both inside and out. Now the patients are told they cannot even store their ciggys in lockers on site, even if they have to run out into the streets to actually smoke them.

April 18 DiManno called CAMH’s war on tobacco a “pathology,” noting derisively that they (CAMH) “can act as coercively as they please against some of the most vulnerable people among us and call it a matter of health.”

Continue reading →

3 Comments

Posted in Uncategorized

Tagged , , , ,

2014 budget: If your hospital is not already on the rebuild list, it won’t be

Posted on April 29, 2014 | Leave a comment

When Charles Sousa unwraps his Ontario budget on Thursday there likely won’t be any new money for expanding hospital infrastructure.

Coming out of the Harris era, the McGuinty/Wynne government faced a considerable backlog of infrastructure needs, including updates to many Ontario hospitals.

To date there have been more than 100 major hospital infrastructure projects – or a project for two out of every three hospital corporations in the province. About a third of these projects have been costly long-term public-private partnerships where the private sector is responsible for the design, construction, financing and maintenance.

Paul Rosebush, CEO of the South Bruce Grey Health Centre told Bayshore Broadcasting that the economic forecast has raised some red flags that essentially mean that if you are not on the existing list for a rebuild, you won’t be.

Continue reading →

Leave a comment

Posted in Uncategorized

Tagged , , , ,

Why the CN tower will be yellow tonight

Posted on April 28, 2014 | Leave a comment

Each year more Ontarians lose their lives through their job than by criminal homicide.

It’s a sobering thought.

In 2012 the WSIB reported 254 workplace-related fatalities and more than 140,000 injuries in Ontario. Of those 254 deaths, 64 were traumatic fatalities. By contrast, in Ontario there were 161 deaths by homicide in 2011.

Today is the National Day of Mourning for Workers Killed and Injured on the job.

Healthcare is responsible for the second highest percentage (16.9%) of allowed lost time claims among 16 sectors classified by the WSIB. Manufacturing, which has twice as many people covered under WSIB, has a lower rate of lost time claims. Much of these health care injuries are strains and sprains from what are defined as “assisting occupations.” The typical injury within health care is from overexertion experienced by a woman between the ages of 50-54.

While our sector is not known for occupation-related deaths, in 2013 four members of an Ornge air ambulance crew were tragically killed when their Sikorsky helicopter crashed in Northern Ontario. The WSIB notes that transportation-related events are the leading cause of traumatic fatalities.

Continue reading →

Leave a comment

Posted in Uncategorized

Tagged , , , ,

Big-pharma backed patient groups attack bill banning paid blood and plasma collection

Posted on April 25, 2014 | Leave a comment

The current debate over paid plasma donation has brought out a number of patient groups – including those funded by big-pharma – that are suggesting Canada has no choice but to pay for plasma donation owing to a world-wide shortage.

Given Canadian Blood Services has been emphatic about sufficient supply on the world market, this is a rather curious claim.

If you go to the home page of Alpha 1 Canada (which is funded by Kamada, Grifols, and GlaxoSmithKline, among others) there is no mention of their members having difficulty obtaining existing plasma–based products.

So what changed, other than lobbying by Canadian Plasma Resources?

In fact one of Alpha 1 Canada’s sponsors, Grifols, just opened a new fractionation plant in Spain that will double capacity in that country and assist in increasing their world-wide output from 9.6 million litres to 12 million litres of fractionated plasma by 2016. Grifols accounts for 20 per cent of the world market for plasma-based pharmaceuticals.

Continue reading →

Leave a comment

Posted in Uncategorized

Tagged , , , ,

Will Act banning paid blood and plasma collection die in committee?

Posted on April 24, 2014 | Leave a comment

All the election talk raises the question of whether the opposition parties will pull the plug on the present minority government before passage of a bill that will ban paid plasma collection in the province.

The Voluntary Blood Donations Act 2014 was referred to the legislature’s Standing Committee on Social Policy after it passed second reading April 14.

The question is, will the parties drag the Act out in committee to an inevitable death, or will they push it back quickly to the legislature for third reading? The former, rather than the latter seem more likely at this point. Readers concerned about this issue may want to contact their MPP’s soon to encourage passage.

The private for-profit Canadian Plasma Resources has already opened its doors in Toronto without licensing from either the Federal or Provincial governments.

Yesterday Dr. Ryan Meili (EvidenceNetwork.ca) and Dr. Monica Dutt (Chair, Canadian Doctors for Medicare) published an op/ed in the Globe and Mail arguing paid plasma donation “poses significant ethical, safety and public health concerns.”

They made particular note of the World Health Organization’s caution that where paid blood donations are permitted, the number of voluntary donors decrease. This point should be underlined given the blood shortages Canada faced towards the end of last summer.

Continue reading →

Leave a comment

Posted in Uncategorized

Tagged , , , , , , ,