THE NEW DIVISION

I once heard this phrase: A division between church and state

Hmm

Here we have the sitting party that call themselves Conservative. But that's after they were the Alliance Party. And that was after they were the Reform Party. I remember, years ago, video taping a closed rally for a Reform MP. Closed, mind you. I wasn't working for the media. We were just taping the session for the MP's personal use. He made it very clear that he was talking about things he would never normally discuss in public. One of those things was his insistence that everything he did for his party, everything he did as a politician, had to be connected to the the Church, to God, to his religion. He was quite adamant that he saw an important part of his agenda to bring God into Parliament and into the country

But we all know that the Conservative Party is NOT the Reform party. They don't have the share the same convictions. They have no hidden agenda.

Uh huh

Two quick items

We all know that religious organizations are opposed to abortion. Presently in this country women have that right. A government would be quite foolhardy to openly try to alter that in any way. And doing so would require public debate, a vote in Parliament, etc. It would most certainly become an election issue. But there are many things governments do (besides suspending Parliament apparently) that do not require debate or votes. Like all but demolishing the Canadian Federation for Sexual Health which used to be called Planned Parenthood which means that prenatal health care, emergency contraception and other maternity-related research and education have been gutted. Do we think certain religious groups may be please by this?

Governments can also do things like take the most pro Israel stand of any gov't in the history of this country. And by pro Israel, I mean anti-Palestinian, lumping all of those peoples in with "Muslim extremists" and for the very first time, abstaining from voting on the recognition of Palestine as an independent state. Christians aligning with Jews against Muslims. ... the head of the Canadian Bnai Brith praised Prime Minister Harper for not being an "objective broker" and for his religious convictions

The division of church and state. Let's have another hmmm

Yeh, this is definitely the new division

STATE OF DISUNION

Do we get the system we deserve? Or maybe we rise (or descend) to the level of gov't that we can handle.


To wit: This week I had to take Collette to the emergency dept at North York Gen. Monday she had so much pain she could barely work and it had gotten much worse by Tuesday. She had phoned her doctor, but it was too late to see her, so she suggested we go to the hospital.


When we got to the ER it was moderately busy. Lots of kids. Everyone running around with masks, fearing N1H1 lurking in the vending machines. A little disconcerting actually, all the nurses with the masks on, some even with goggles, like a scene from a B movie where some manufactured plague is about to turn us all into zombies ..


The triage nurse saw Collette pretty quickly and she was officially registered. That was a set up, really, perhaps the hospital's cruel way of toying with us. Because that speed was definitely a misnomer. To cut the story short (OK, I know, that's not like me, but I currently have a cold, and yeh, I should have worn the fucking mask) we sat there for 7 hours. Seven hours, in an ER that wasn't busy and barely had an ambulance come in.


Looking around and overhearing some of the other patients I did get kind of miffed that there were people there who perhaps didn't need to be in an ER. A very loud couple was sitting by us, reeking of booze and the guy's basic complaint sounded a lot like heartburn. Eventually they left, before being seen, after creating a bit of scene. They were inspired to do so by a mother who screamed and wailed because her child was not being attended to in a timely fashion. I don't blame her but it did open the floodgates of people going up to the nurse and yelling. That really didn't work. It only inspired one doctor to tell Security to keep the patients away from him.


Yeh, we wouldn't want that, would we. Doctors interacting with patients. Ewww.


Part of the problem is that after 11 pm, the ER loses one doctor. Yeh, a big hospital in one of the more densely populated areas of Toronto, gosh we won't have any patients after 11 ............ will we?


We all know that Ontario cut back medical services. The same gov't that allowed shop owners to steal millions of dollars of gov't sponsored lottery money and, as an alternative to brick and mortar medical funding, set up online services and the like, like E-health ... which basically turned out to be some kind of pork barrel swindle that wasted billions of dollars of tax payer money. Oh yeh, the same gov't that gave themselves a 23 thousand dollar raise, to improve our quality of service. And we sat our ass for 7 hours in an emerg, before anyone saw us.

When Collette finally saw the doctor, she was out in about 15 minutes with a diagnosis of a kidney infection and a prescription for antibiotics. So we were out there ... too bad the diagnosis was wrong. So not only do we wait for 7 hours, we don't even get the service we needed.

We ended back in the ER the next night. It was even less busy than the night before. Another 6 hrs before being seen by a doctor. At least this time he got the diagnosis right, Collette had a bowel infection. They kept her overnight and sent her home with better drugs. She's doing better now but had to take the week off work.

I'm pretty much pissed about all this. I'm sorry, but I find the quality of service we got verging on shitty. I know I'm not alone in that, and I know, I know, many many people have it way worse. Yet we put up with it. We whine and we bitch and we know its fucked up but we keep getting these inept immoral govts who seem designed to only serve themselves. Like, we'll give ourselves the biggest raise in the history of provincial gov'ts by you all will have to do with fewer doctors.

What?

A recent ombudsman report basically stated that our government's are slow, unresponsive, inept and disenfranchised from their voters and that this has been building for some time. And we built it folks, no doubt about that. We let them lie and bamboozle us and when they fuck up we let them get away with it.

We had to wait 7 hours to see a doctor, but if someone parks the wrong way on my street, they get a ticket in five minutes ...

Yup, we get the gov't we want.