Git them country people into town! (June 19 column)

One law for the rich, one for the cynical 

                                                  by Robert LaFrance 

            Last week, after my column appeared, someone told me I was being too cynical and pessimistic. A newspaper reporter and columnist, cynical?

            Those alleged $236 million in cuts in our health care department will of course all come down to one thing – close rural hospitals so that cabinet ministers and city newspaper editors can make sure THEIR hospitals are ‘ready, aya, ready!’ when the flashing lights appear in their driveways.

            More than any other time in my 65 years, rural New Brunswick is being victimized, marginalized, downsized and any number of other words that end in ‘ized’. Every time I open my daily paper from the city, there’s yet another story about us selfish rural residents who won’t do the decent thing and become city dwellers, or cheer when the governments move more of our services to the cities.

            Look at all the money we’re wasting on rural schools when we could just bus all the kids to the nearest city. Look at the money we waste by having our blood samples collected here and then sent at great expense to Saint John or Timbuktu. Why, we should just take the 6-hour drive, down and back, to save them all that trouble of sending it.

            That rant’s over. Let’s move on to the next one.

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            In my never-ending rant on redundancy, I refer you to one of the latest – ‘moving forward’. People, and I include politicians in that category, often slip that phrase into a sentence that is perfectly happy without it. Watch for it, and sneer when you hear it. It joins our old friends ‘hot water heater’, ‘continue on’, and ‘all-pervasive’. Oh, yes, and there’s another old favourite: ‘at this particular moment in time’. Wouldn’t the word ‘now’ suffice?

            And another thing, how is a ‘forensic audit’ different from a regular audit? Do they have a team of CSI type investigators looking for bloodstains on the company’s two sets of books? Also, if I hear the word ‘iconic’ one more time, referring to a celebrity, I shall, in the words of Beatrix Potter, go distracted.

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            Speaking of audits, Senator Pamela Wallin’s expense claims are about to hit the fan. A new report I just heard on CBC Radio (93.3 FM) said that some of the details have leaked out “and it is said to be even worse than Mike Duffy’s”. Whew! Can we stand any more claims of these fat cats (as the saying goes) ripping us off?

            Let me see now…we have senators who haven’t, to this point, had to provide any proof whatsoever of their expense claims. The fox in the chicken coop indeed!

            Readers, let’s all be honest. Suppose each of us was or were allowed to claim up to $50 for a meal when we are (allegedly) doing government business. Suppose we went to Tilley Takeout and the meal came to $15.46. Wouldn’t there be just a WEE bit of temptation to round that off to $39.50? Or perhaps even fifty dollars just to keep the numbers even. After all, we have to think of the person adding up the expenses. Wouldn’t $50 be easier for him or her to add up than $15.46?

            Back to Pamela Wallin: During their careers as CTV journalists, they exposed more than one example of fraud and the fixing of books. Didn’t they think of that when they made their ‘clerical errors’ that will probably end up totalling a quarter million dollars or? I’ve been watching the news coverage and I have formed the opinion that the CTV reporters on this story are even more vicious than Duffy and Wallin were in their day.

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            Another story I have been watching with interest is the Oland murder case from Saint John. It is always enlightening to watch the entire newscast and see stories about other murders. In those cases, where the accused is not associated with a large pile of money, the murder might take place on a Tuesday and by Friday the trial is over and the accused is sent to the gallows.

            Oops. A bit of exaggeration there. The point, of course, is that when the suspect has money or access to money it seems to take longer for ‘justice’ to be served. But I suppose justice, like revenge, is a dish best served cold.

            Let each of us picture if we were the suspect in the case. Would it be twenty-five months or so before my name or your name were released to the public? I fear not. More like twenty-five minutes.

            If I were a cynical type I would say that there’s ‘one law for the rich and one law for the poor’ but let us remember that Dennis Oland hasn’t even been charged yet and it may well be that someone else did the dirty deed. However, for our Canadian law to work, shouldn’t it at least seem to be applied equally to rich and poor?

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Let us weep (June 12 column)

Let us weep with the anger and joy of government cuts

 

                                                            by Robert LaFrance

 

            It would be funny if it weren’t so sad, annoying, and ludicrous. The provincial government hires consultants (at who knows how many tens of millions of dollars) to find savings in the Department of Health and they identify $236 million or some such figure.

            First of all, isn’t that why we pay our own (bless ‘em!) high-level bureaucrats zillions of dollars in salary? Aren’t THEY supposed to be running things at maximum efficiency? Isn’t that why we pay for their fact-finding trips to New Zealand and Norway?

            That $236 million is going to be found in individual hospitals, and my grandmother wears Super-Ked army boots to bed. I get the feeling that the figure was picked off a tree by the government when it should have stayed in the orchard.

            One of the points was that hospital cafeterias in New Brunswick cost $30 per patient to operate, while in Quebec they cost $10. Hmmmm. It wouldn’t have anything to do with the billions of dollars in extra subsidies that Ottawa sends to Quebec each year to calm the separatists, would it? Are those consultants really that naïve? Apparently.

            “It will impact staffing levels,” said one government bureaucrat, “but services will remain the same.” Yes, I seem to remember hearing that same tired refrain before, like every time any government cuts any services.

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            Let us leave that subject and go to Belgium.

Many people I know are all atwitter about the Stanley Cup playoffs. They have evidently forgiven the greedy owners and players for the lockout/strike that chopped off the first few months of the season, and now they’re settling down to the Armageddon among U.S. hockey teams.

            I’m not going to talk about the Stanley Cup Playoffs. I am referring to – or ‘making reference to’– as many people insist on saying these days – the Warfarin Cup in Belgium. A manufacturer of pet food – I believe the stuff is fed to rats – is sponsoring a competition among professional teams there for a top prize of that cup and 50,000 Swiss francs for each player on the winning team. A team from Brussels is leading the final, three games to one. Just a side note: It’s curious that the headquarters of the European Union – lots of Mike Duffys there – is in the same city as a maker of rat food.

            “Bob, you do realize that Warfarin is mouse and rat poison, don’t you?” said Flug.

            Ahem, well, yes, of course.

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            Each of us has a list of things we’d like to see invented, do we not? As I look at the six spoiled items I just found in the back of the fridge, it occurs that a Lazy Susan (a name my cousin Susan hates for some reason) would be a great thing to have in a refrigerator.

            Possibly some fridge manufacturers do include this item, but our old Maytag doesn’t have that feature. Here’s why it is a vital one: after we have spent our hard-earned dollars in buying things like cottage cheese, they usually get pushed to the back of the fridge. Three months later, after the neighbours have reported a stronger than usual stench coming from our house, we take a look.

            Take this morning for example; I know that the turnip I just took out of the back of the vegetable tray was put there no later than Jean Chretien’s second term as prime minister. It was wizened and it was the colour of the Mediterranean Sea. “It’s not all spoiled,” I said to my spouse. “I could cut off a piece at one end and put it in a stew.” Some people don’t appreciate humour.

            That Lazy Susan would be a good idea though, and would save us untold (I’m not telling) dollars in grocery bills. The problem is, as I have mentioned, that once some foods go into the fridge, they are blocked from view and therefore forgotten until the neighbours call.

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            My late mother’s sister is cursed with a name that sometimes gets a severe reaction. It’s Semetik. Last month she was walking along the sidewalk in Ottawa when she got ‘caught short’ as the saying goes, and had to dash into a nearby hotel to use the washroom. Unknown to her, her nephew Sigfreid was the desk clerk, and when he saw his aunt coming out of the washroom, practically hollered: “Auntie Semetik!”

            That’s all right so far, but mingling in the lobby and waiting for the annual meeting of Ottawa B’Nai Brith to begin were about 30 members of that organization which is a ‘Jewish advocacy and community volunteer service organization’ as they say on their web page. The lobby went silent, because what these jewish people heard was “anti-semetic” and they had had enough of that over the past few centuries.

 

            To use a phrase Desi Arnaz used to say to his wife Lucy, of ‘I love Lucy’ fame, Sigfreid had “some ‘splainin’ to do”. Now, there’s a family movement to change auntie’s name to something safe, like GorillaJaws.
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Government lied? (June 5 column)

No need of complaining at this point 

                                                            by Robert LaFrance 

            At the time of this writing, it has been raining for eighty-seven straight days, and yet I’m not complaining. Now that I’m 65, I have been reviewing the worst things that could happen in life, and rainy weather ain’t even in the top ten. Indeed, it barely makes the top one hundred.

            So let’s leave the subject of weather and go on to mentioning some of the other things that are going on in the world. I would rather not talk about flooding here and there, because that’s back to the weather. One thing I have been watching though, is how our government spends our money.

            I might be mistaken on this, but I seem to recall someone in Horizon Health saying that closing surgery at Hotel Dieu would save $1 million. If it was said at all, it was a lie of course, but what has frosted my earlobes today is the news story that the government has given a QUEBEC consulting company $6.2 million to show NB how to save $26 million in D.O.T.

            I’m not sure if I can write down how angry this makes me, and I write for a living. What was Premier Alward thinking? Not much. At the very least he could have hired a consulting company from New Brunswick, but Quebec, that cradle of Confederation?

            He could have hired just about anyone to do that job, because we all know they will recommend that D.O.T. snowplough the roads half as much, lay off a bunch of workers, close garages, and hire them (the consultants) back to administer all this. There will be no saving; there never is.

            Here’s a radical idea: instead of Quebec consultants, how about if the government asks the people who actually do the work where and how money can be saved? Snowplough drivers can suggest all kinds of money-saving things to do – like getting rid of about three tiers of administration, deporting all the spin doctors to Syria, and not wasting money on consultants.

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            Okay, I’ve calmed down now.

            We have a new club member. A chap moved here from a place called Pune, which he says is somewhere east of East Africa. Specifically, it’s south of Mumbai, India. His name is Harry Krishna and he sells computer equipment and even repairs the little dears. If you own a computer, you need Harry. On Thursday evening we were all at the club and welcoming him to the Scotch Colony. You will notice that we seize on the flimsiest excuse to have an evening at the club; last year we welcomed the Venusian New Year until the early hours – on Venus.

            Those of us who have heard of the game soccer, or football as it’s called outside Canada and the U.S., were sorry to hear that David Beckham had retired. He was a great player and also a great self-promoter. However, when he left the Real Madrid football team about five years ago to move to the Los Angeles Galaxy soccer team, he must have often been confused. All his life he had played football, and then, in his mid-30s, he was hired at a mere $50 million a year to play soccer. He managed it though. As one who saves quotes of famous people, I will say my favourite from Beckham is this: “A manager can’t give players what they haven’t got. Their job is to make them find what they need inside themselves.”

            We keep hearing about inventions that were made by New Brunswickers and I am happy to say that one of the most useful has recently been traced to a Victoria County man, Hiram N. Kinney (1920-1991). This is quite a shock to those who knew Hiram and all those who attended his funeral in Lerwick – just to make sure. It seems that when Hiram was working on the Canso Causeway he was sitting around and groaning about an infected toe. Drinking a glass of Newfy Screech just to ease the pain, he spilled some on that toe and felt immediate relief. I had assumed his invention was something like fingernail clippers, but it turned out to be Screech Owl, a sure-fire pain reliever when applied directly. However, there are still some who apply it the old-fashioned way – down the throat.

            A committee from the club’s Board of Directors has planned a camping trip for the last month of June when the rain is expected to slow down a bit. They are supposed to choose some sort of shelter for the 23 people on the board and set up the itinerary. You might say they are making TENT-ative plans.

            Sorry. 

 

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