by Robert LaFrance
Frankly, and I’ve said this to Frank as well, I’m getting a little tired of reading in my daily newspapers how this government program and that government program—indeed, the government itself—are ‘unsustainable’.
Watch for that word; it’s code. What it always means is: ‘Hey, it’s time to centralize even more things in the cities and stomp the rural areas again’. Despite all their denials, we all know that Hotel Dieu Hospital in Perth-Andover is a thorn in the side of the government, which is doing its best to close down its surgery and move it to Waterville. We also know that they got caught at it. Is that going to change their ways? No, it will just delay it a bit. They want to remove that thorn.
And by the way, I think it’s very inconsiderate of the people in the Plaster Rock area to want medical services. My gosh, that’s unsustainable! If you live on Enterprise Road and break a leg or need an enema, you’ll just have to drive to Waterville. It's only an hour away and you have five pints of blood in your body. This will happen at least until the government decides that Waterville hospital is 'unsustainable’ because it was built in just about the most inconvenient place the government of the day could think of. No, Plaster Rock area folks are just going to have to learn to have injuries, heart attacks, and other medical problems at more convenient times—and places.
I know it’s unkind, and please forgive me, but I keep picturing in my mind the day that a Fredericton bean-counting bureaucrat—one of the ones who decided to downgrade Plaster Rock’s hospital to a bandaid centre—is travelling through Plaster Rock and has some medical problem that needs to be dealt with NOW. Would he, she, or it finally realize that someone living in Plaster Rock deserves the same kind of medical care as someone living in the shadow of Everett Chalmers Hospital in Fredericton? Probably not, because he, she or it would be dead.
You see, governments and some big companies like recessions. Really. I was astonished when I realized this. And government especially like recessions when they have just been elected, because not only can they blame it for all kinds of Draconian cuts to services, but they get to blame it all on the last crowd that was in there. (Liberals, don’t you look so smug; you do it too.)
Back to the word ‘unsustainable’, if you live in a rural area and read that word in a city newspaper editorial, run for the hills. If the subject is health care, the word ‘unsustainable’ means: ‘close as many of the rural hospitals as possible and move those services to us’. When an editorial refers to the present system as ‘unsustainable’ that means "centralize, because they shouldn’t be living out there anyway".
Another clue is made obvious when governments and newspapers start comparing the services New Brunswick has to those in a city of the same population, as if that makes the slightest bit of sense. Since our population is about 750,000, we should have the same number of hospitals as Winnipeg, which has a population of 730,000. The day it takes the same amount of time to drive from Port Elgin, NB to Edmundston, NB as it does to drive from one side of Winnipeg to the other is the day when that argument makes sense.
An added point: recently a man went to a Winnipeg hospital’s ER and waited 36 hours to see a doctor. Then he died. See how lucky we are? He could have gone from Nictau to Waterville in less time, so hey, we’re doing all right, eh?
The city newspapers are having a great time these days with the NB government’s ideas of making New Brunswick into a province of regions and not municipalities. Apparently we in rural New Brunswick aren’t paying our ‘fair share’ for the vast amount of services we get, like hospital care, the right to go skating in civic centres and swimming in the municipal pools. One New Brunswick city has even charged $500-$800 per person for young hockey players to come into town and play with their school team. Picture that if you have three kids on hockey teams.
Oh well, that will leave those pesky rural kids lots of time to drive into the cities and break into homes.
Listening to this (or any other) government, since I don't live in a city, reminds me of the ancient Greek Myth of Sisyphus. For his crimes, he was sentenced to roll a huge boulder up to the top of a hill. Whenever he got near the top, after working for weeks, the gods, led by Zeus, would drive it back down again so Sisyphus would have to start all over.
Our attempts in rural New Brunswick to stop everything from being moved to larger municipalities can be described as Sisyphean. Or, if you object to using sissy words, you could use my grandfather Muff LaFrance’s phrase: “Bob, you gotta realize, some days you just can’t piss a drop.”
-end-
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