By Klaus Rohrich
Wednesday, March 28, 2007
Deep inside every left-lib socialist type there resides an inner fascist. It would appear that Ontario Health Minister George Smitherman has discovered his inner fascist and is giving him free rein. This propensity that the Left seems to have for imposing its peculiar values on individuals because they know what's best for all of us can range all the way from forcing us to wear bicycle helmets or seat belts to sending us to re-education facilities where we are forced into Right Thinking.
Smitherman's recent musings about the possibility of making smoking in apartments illegal is a trial balloon to see what public sentiment might be toward such legislation. It is also another step in the frog marching of society toward some perfect utopia where the nanny state, i.e. Smitherman & Co. would ensure that everyone enjoys the same degree of misery.
One wonders how Smitherman might feel about initiating a ban on unprotected promiscuous sex between men because that particular lifestyle choice could result in the spread of HIV/AIDS? Chances are he would be outraged at the very thought, as that particular health issue does not fall within the acceptable boundaries of political correctness.
As health minister, Smitherman's performance has been dismal, as he appears to be much more concerned with upholding the tenets of his very own brand of radical socialism than he is in actually making healthcare for all Ontarians more accessible. Recently Smitherman bragged about how it took only 307 days of waiting to get a knee replacement in Ontario. Only 307 days!
However his assertion was later belied by the Fraser institute who pointed out that Smitherman was counting from the time a patient had been seen by a specialist and had had completed all the diagnostic testing necessary to arrive at that course of treatment. So the real wait time is closer to two years as the time between a GP's referral to an orthopedic surgeon is generally in the range of six months. And the wait for an MRI is also somewhere in the range of six months, meaning that the wait time could be over two years.
Rather than pat himself on the back for his specious claim that patients only have to wait 307 days for a knee replacement, it might behoove Smitherman to think about the suffering this wait imposes on the patient. And it's not like the patient doesn't suffer before he gets to see a specialist.
The other thing that Smitherman is adamant about is that for profit healthcare will never be acceptable in Ontario under any circumstances. Same old Leftist argument; we don't care if the system is broken and Canadians are dying while they wait for rationed treatments, we will only look at our healthcare system in the way we have always looked at it, and the only remedy for fixing it is more money.
Two years ago Paul Martin gave $42 billion to the provinces, ostensibly to beef up the quality of healthcare. What was left of that money when provincial politicians finished buying our votes with it went to provide raises for members of the various unions whose members work in the healthcare field. The $42 billion didn't take a single day off the wait times that Canadians have to endure. Of course Smitherman has the support of all the unions working within the healthcare system in his ill-advised fight against for profit healthcare.
Smitherman has always been sleazy; it's just a part of his character. When he worked for the Barbara Hall mayoral campaign, it was Smitherman who urged supporters in a letter to secretly organize and fund raise prior to the start of the campaign, despite the fact that this was against the Municipal Elections Act and therefore illegal. This eventually resulted in Hall quitting the mayoral race, but it didn't do anything to make Smitherman any less sleazy.
Here's a question that Smitherman should be forced to answer in a public forum: If smoking is so bad for people why is it that the same government of which he is a minister is collecting billions in taxes from the sale of cigarettes and essentially acting as a dealer in a hazardous and addictive substance?
My guess is that Smitherman would rather those kinds of questions weren't asked so he could get on with the job of regulating our lives.
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