“I remember going to a protest (in Sydney during the recent Hezbollah-Israel conflict in Lebanon) and seeing environmental groups going Allah Akhbar (God is great) in harmony with some Lebanese groups,”
Who Are You People And What Have You Done With My Premier?
Aug. 22 …
Sept 5 …
The province announced Wednesday that it has sold its 50 per cent interest in NewGrade Energy Inc., a Crown asset in Regina.
[…]
The upgrader, which processes heavy crude oil into synthetic crude oil, has 162 employees. Half the company is owned by Consumers‘ Co-operative Refineries Ltd.
The buyer of the province‘s share likely won‘t be identified until the fall for regulatory reasons.
$320 million of the proceeds are going to create a new “Green Futures Fund”, And because there are never too many places* to park your political cronies…
In addition to founding the Green Future Fund, the Government will immediately begin the process of establishing a Climate Change Secretariat, staffed by climate change experts. The Secretariat will be placed within CIC to co-ordinate and oversee Government’s climate change agenda in the Crowns and Executive Government.
The NDP has signed Saskatchewan to a commitment to “stabilize” the province’s C02 emmissions by 2010 and reduce them by 32% by the year 2020.
That could happen.
Right after John Deere rolls out a nuclear-powered 9030 Series.
Tony Blair’s Britain
Where the foxes caper unmolested, the government packs your school lunch and the state eats your baby;
Social services’ recommendation that the baby should be taken from Fran Lyon, a 22-year-old charity worker who has five A-levels and a degree in neuroscience, was based in part on a letter from a paediatrician she has never met.
Hexham children’s services, part of Northumberland County Council, said the decision had been made because Miss Lyon was likely to suffer from Munchausen’s Syndrome by proxy, a condition unproven by science in which a mother will make up an illness in her child, or harm it, to draw attention to herself.
Under the plan, a doctor will hand the newborn to a social worker, provided there are no medical complications. Social services’ request for an emergency protection order – these are usually granted – will be heard in secret in the family court at Hexham magistrates on the same day.
From then on, anyone discussing the case, including Miss Lyon, will be deemed to be in contempt of the court.
[…]
The case adds to growing concern, highlighted in a series of articles in The Sunday Telegraph, over a huge rise in the number of babies under a year old being taken from parents. The figure was 2,000 last year, three times the number 10 years ago.
Critics say councils are taking more babies from parents to help them meet adoption “targets”.
Update – Fran Lyon responds in our comments, here.
Tommy Douglas: Half-Tier Health Care
In response to last week’s item from a physican’s wife (The Calvert Manifesto), Saskatchewan blogger Arcolaura offered a few comments that I thought deserving of their own post;
When the Sun Country Health District had a public meeting for input into their strategic plan, they showed us the provincial health goals, including “improved access to quality health care services” or something very close to that. I had to say, never mind “improved” and “quality.” There were a couple hundred of us at that meeting (they had booked a room for 30), and most of us were looking for “restored” access to “basic” health care services.
That was some months ago. Just this week, they finally restored enough services here to stop locking the hospital doors at 11 p.m. every night.
It sounds as though little has changed. In an earlier NPD government incarnation, a different bureaucrat travelled the 120 miles from Regina to explain to Arcola residents that the hospital was likely to suffer reduced services due to the town doctor’s advancing years and pending retirement.
The “town doctor” (for want of a better term for the South African trained practitioners who were rotating through at the time) was in his 30’s.
Previous: Tommy Douglas: Back Door User Fees
Scratch A Socialist
And underneath you’ll find an anti-Semite;
Left-wing extremists and PA Arabs destroyed thousands of grape vines belonging to local Jews in Samaria Wednesday. Some one hundred Arabs and leftists, along with dozens of Arab TV crews certified by various news agencies, marched to a Jewish vineyard near the town of Dolev, northwest of Jerusalem, and proceed to systematically uproot and destroy thousands of young grapevines.
The PA- appointed mayor of Ramallah took part in the march. Though the police and army had been forewarned that the Arabs and leftists were planning a provocation, security forces arrived only after most of the vineyard had already been uprooted.
[…]
The phenomenon of left-wing extremists, from both Israel, Europe and the United States, destroying Jewish vineyards and orchards in Judea and Samaria, though widespread, has rarely been covered by Israel’s state-run media and has never appeared in foreign news agency reports.
Tory! Tory! Tory!
The series traces the history and ideas behind Thatcherism – and how Britain was transformed, painfully. […] it’s interesting to revisit the dark days of Britain in the late Seventies, with power cuts, unburied dead and ossified state-run monopolies somehow billions in debt.
There’s a video teaser and links here.
Kyoto backlash in New Europe
While Europe constantly lectures the rest of the world about greenhouse gas reductions their own situation is a horrible mess. Eight nations sue carbon regulators.
Sask Tops All Regions In Substance Abuse: Experts Puzzled
Tommy Douglas: Sicko (Bumped)
Two-tier, third world;
It didn’t take long for someone to jump on the Michael Moore bandwagon. Choice Medical Services is a Winnipeg based company that is offering health tourism trips to Cuba for those in need of eye, knee and shoulder surgeries as well as drug rehabilitation.
[…]
Provincial Health Minister Theresa Oswald was right on the ball when questioned about the health tourism trips, she was quoted as saying “It’s never been our government’s position to want to infringe on people’s right to do that,” That’s right Theresa, because you have no control over it. That has however not stopped your government from infringing on the people’s right to seek alternatives within Manitoba by refusing a license to the Maple’s Surgery Clinic or by buying the Pan Am Clinic at a price that was very hard to refuse!
Related: Cuban health care for Cubans.
Reader Alert This morning on John Gormley Live talks to a family that has fallen through the cracks. 3 years on a “waiting list” for heart surgery?
Segment is scheduled for 11:00 – 11:30 am Sask time, (1:00 – 1:30 Eastern ). You can listen live at the link.
How Deep, Señor Chavez?
“One hopes the bulldozer manufacturers aren’t foolish enough to pull out. The Venezuela mass grave industry is poised for explosive growth.”
[x] hyper-inflation
[x] price controls
[x] currency revaluation
[x] food shortages
[x] nationalize banks
[x] nationalize industry
[x] land seizures and “redistribution”
[x] silencing opposition media…
[x] President for life.
Any questions?
Previous.
Tommy Douglas: Zero Tier Health Care, Revisited
(As the Calgary quad incident begins to receive international attention, I thought today would be a good time to revisit my 2005 piece on zero-tier health care for newer readers to SDA.)
After my mother died, my brother quipped sarcastically that no one should be admitted to Regina General unless they first survived two hours on a vibrating gurney.
Saskatchewan spends $4 billion a year on health – 44% of the total provincial budget – on a population of under one million, and those dollars are increasingly directed to more centralized systems of delivery. While debate about “wait times” tends to revolve around diagnostics and scheduling of surgery (especially “elective” surgery such as knee and hip replacement), few consider the “wait time” facing the farmer in Val Marie with a crushed pelvis or severed artery.
For when it is decreed that your local hospital is no longer “economically viable” (a curious complaint to put forward under not-for-profit ideology), bureaucrats gather a few hundred miles away, debate the best way to release the bad news, and with a big red pen, draw a line through your town. They will apologize, quite properly, while they advise you, quite improperly, to be grateful that health care is still “free.” You’ll just need to start out a little earlier in the morning to get to it.
Welcome to zero-tier health care.
While the sacred cow of “universality” grazes on in the world of the reality-challenged, vast regions of the country are being transformed into zones of health care prohibition.
With every new cut, more and more rural Canadians are faced with travelling long distances over crumbling roads to seek emergency care – the “vibrating gurney” of the rural ambulance. The only thing “universal” about the system is the rate of taxation and the powerlessness of the very people who pay the bills – the taxpaying patients. The patient taxpayers.
After waiting 10 days on oxygen in an intensive care ward, where it was more likely that a knowledgable visitor would tend to a distressed patient or dysfunctioning equipment than any of the five nurses charged with holding down chairs, we began to wonder when the lung specialist planned to show up to discuss our mother’s condition.
He had to be reminded, as it turned out. Standing over the duct-taped linoleum, he shared the diagnosis and advised it was terminal. With no hope of treatment, we arranged for her return by ambulance the 120 miles to our local rural hospital, where she was finally treated for pain and was tended to by a nurse she knew as a friend. Thank heaven for small mercies – for it had been slated for closure earlier that year.
The “not for profit” lie is so bold, so obvious, so outrageous, that it’s difficult to understand how it’s survived this long.
The truth is precisely the opposite. Everyone in the Canadian health-care system, from top to bottom – from doctor, to nurse, to bureaucrat, to cleaner, to kitchen staff – has a guaranteed profit, guaranteed payment, often in wages that eclipse those in the private sector, regardless of quality or timeliness of patient care.
And even this isn’t enough for some – they demand guaranteed patients, through the eradication of what private sector competition there is.
The only participant who lacks a guaranteed return under this “not-for-loss” monopoly is the one paying the bill, the patient whose assets are involuntarily seized through taxation to keep the hulking, insatiable bovine alive and belching. The most powerful check and balance of all – the ability of the customer to refuse payment to protest inadequate service – has been removed from the equation.
Discussing the abysmal quality of care my mother received with a friend who works in the bureaucracy, I suggested that the imbalance might be partially restored through a holdback system, in which a percentage of wages or fees would be released only upon patient or family signoff – in the way that holdbacks are used in the construction industry to ensure the job is well and truly complete.
She disagreed with the idea, for, as she correctedly argued, “Some people might withhold payment unfairly.”
To which I replied; “Welcome to the world the rest of us live in.”
More – a doctor turns number cruncher. “The main reason socialists love public health care is because they know they can get rich off of it. “
Tony Blair’s Britain
The Labour Party’s legacy grows;
Essex-based firm BladeRunner produces clothing lined with the material for police and security guards.
But inquiries from parents have now prompted it to modfify school uniforms.
Barry Samms, one of the firm’s directors, said the company initially produced stab-proof hooded tops that were bought by teenagers.
It was then asked by parents about the possibility of strengthening school uniforms with Kevlar.
The firm now offers to line blazers and jumpers with the material if pupils send in their uniforms.
Blazers cost £120 to stab-proof and jumpers £60 to £70.
“initially produced stab-proof hooded tops that were bought by teenagers.”.
Nice.
(submitted by reader “Larry” who ponders the market potential here in the “land of the living knives”.)
Comment of the day;
“Its like reading the Dune series all over again.”
Tommy Douglas: Away In A Manger
Because high risk pregnancies come with so little warning;
Well, you can’t expect a G7 economy of only 30 million people to be able to offer the same level of neonatal ICU coverage as a town of 50,000 in remote rural Montana. And let’s face it, there’s nothing an expectant mom likes more than 300 miles in a bumpy twin prop over the Rockies.
More on the Calgary quartet at BBC.
More reaction: Don Surber strikes a similar theme.
Next Time You Fly, Ladies
Be sure to pack a headscarf. ‘Cause that’s coming, too.
North Shore Tax driver Behzad Saidy refused to take Bruce Gilmour and his dog from a West Vancouver coffee shop to Gilmour’s Vancouver home in January 2006, saying his Muslim religion prevented him from associating with dogs because they’re “unclean.”
In addition to paying Gilmour $2,500, the taxi company was required to implement a policy for transporting blind people and their guide dogs.
It’s against the law for cab drivers not to transport blind people with guide dogs, but a settlement agreement between Gilmour and the taxi company says an exception to that law would be a Muslim driver refusing to transport a dog because of religious beliefs.
Via Mark Steyn, who (as you might expect) has more commentary. As do BCF and Shaidle
Update – Damian Brooks – “Steyn may well be right, but the case he’s chosen to highlight doesn’t make his point.”.
Update II – BCF says “not so fast….”
Stiff Upper Suicide
England is in the middle of a profoundly disturbing social experiment. For the first time in a mature democracy, a Government is waging a campaign of aggressive discrimination against its indigenous population.
In the name of cultural diversity, Labour attacks anything that smacks of Englishness. The mainstream public are treated with contempt, their rights ignored, their history trashed. In their own land, the English are being turned into second-class citizens.
[…]
Almost every interaction with any public service now leads to a detailed analysis of one’s ethnic status. A vast race equality industry has been built up, filled with overpaid paper shufflers, consultants and advisers with little to do except invent new grievances.
There is an air of the Maoist permanent revolution about their activities. Since immigration now runs at probably one million people a year, the make-up of society is changing dramatically. So, in this climate of endless demographic upheaval, the race relations brigade will always be able to invent more work for itself.
[…]
Yet anti-English discrimination undermines the central plank of the propaganda for mass immigration. We are constantly told we need vast influxes of foreigners to boost our economy and fill vacancies but unemployment levels in immigrant communities are so high and skills so lacking that we need to reserve parts of our economy for them.
So if we have to spend a fortune on training schemes, why are we inviting hundreds of thousands of arrivals from the Third World and Eastern Europe here every year?
Heil Hezbollah (bumped)
When the concept of “multiculturalism” was introduced to Canadians, most assumed it meant “more pavilions at Folkfest”.
UPDATE – the billboard’s backers defend their actions. (Nasrallah. Jesus. What’s the difference, really?) … and plenty of reaction from the paper’s readers. (scroll to bottom)
Update 2 – Reader “Geothermal” posts this email in the comments:
Hello,
Your comments have been forwarded to the Mayor’s office. Please note, the billboard has been removed as of this morning.
Thank you for using 311.
Sincerely,
Sean McCorkell
311 Acting Supervisor
311@city.windsor.on.ca
Good News For The Fart Jar Industry
Ladies and Gentleman – open your wallets and extend a great big welcome to Canada’s new Air Registry;
A group of provincial leaders pushing for hard climate change measures failed to gain consensus on Friday, but were consoled with an agreement by all 13 leaders to start a national greenhouse gas emissions registry.
“I’m not suggesting this is Earth shattering,” said B.C. Premier Gordon Campbell…
“Earth shattering”?
Those are hardly the first words that come to mind.
Great Moments In Headline History
Eleanor Roosevelt Had A Dream
A pioneering experiment in progressiveness, the story of Arthurdale;
Delivered late and vastly over budget,[11] Arthurdale displayed all the characteristics of a boondoggle, a political creature that “puts people over profits” and is widely familiar to all Americans, circa 2007. The pre-fabricated houses, even when it was known that they were unsuitable for West Virginia winter and wouldn’t fit their foundations, were still built but then torn to pieces and remodeled. An article in the August 1934 Saturday Evening Post speaks of how chimneys were built eight feet away from their houses’ sides, after which the houses were reconstructed to meet the chimneys.
From padded payrolls, to houses stuffed with goodies (“most Arthurdale families found their new homes lavish,” Hoffman 2001, p. 44), to the importing of rhododendrons (a flower native to the Arthurdale area) from sixty miles away (just to leave them to rot), to wells being drilled at great expense and then abandoned, the project was every bit the financial disaster that one should expect when giving management over obscene sums of cash to people who believe “profit” is a curse word.
Even Mrs. Roosevelt herself noted “much money was spent, perhaps some of it unwisely,” and if you substitute “perhaps some” with the far more accurate “all,” she would have been spot on.
A great read.
(h/t reader Daniel Ryan)
Feel The Diversity
When the concept of “multiculturalism” was introduced to Canadians, most assumed it meant “more pavilions at Folkfest”.
(Punjabi Stephane – call your office.)