Don't go alone into a hospital in Winnipeg!

Have we reached the point where we need despanchantes to make sure the health care system doesn't kill us before it cures us?
The Winnipeg health care system seems to keep losing track of people who try to tackle it alone.
We have now found out about three cases where patients have died because the system wasn't paying attention to them -- first the Sinclair case, and now two elderly patients who were dumped into cabs and send home alone to freeze to death on their doorsteps.
The moral of the story in all three cases seems to be -- don't try to deal with the health care system alone anymore.  When you go to a hospital these days, you need to take someone with you who's got your back.

String 'em up

They wore aprons and sneaked behind Harper to hold up little paper signs.
The horror! The horror!
Now esteemed senator Bob Runciman thinks lèse-majesté is the crime of the century when Harper is the target.

Former Ontario solicitor general Bob Runciman is questioning why two activists who got to within an arm's-length of the prime minister this week were allowed to "walk away scot-free and smiling" — and he says he'll use his Senate seat to bring in new laws to deter similar future protests.
"People who sneak into these kinds of events, using phony ID, impersonate others, or conspire with others to do the same, should face indictable offences with serious fines and/or imprisonment," said Senator Runciman in a written statement sent to the parliamentary press gallery.

Piffle.
Next, they'll want to ban silly costumes.
Oh, wait....

Disabled, poor and Aboriginal shouldn't be a lethal combination

I hadn't realized before this that Brian Sinclair was Aboriginal, as well as being disabled and poor.
It was a lethal combination --  Sinclair sat in his wheelchair in a hospital emergency waiting room for 34 hours dying due to a blocked catheter.
It happened in Winnipeg, but it could have happened in any prairie province.
The Globe and Mail article provides us with an update on the inquest into his death. And even in this article, his race is minimized, mentioned only at the end.
In prior articles, which described how other patients tried to get help for him, his race isn't mentioned at all.
Even the most recent Globe article begins with the usual complaints about emergency wait times and short staffing, as though this accounted for the neglect that Sinclair endured.  It is only at the end of that article that we find out that Sinclair was not just disabled and poor, but also Aboriginal.
It was a death sentence:

Marcel Balfour, acting executive director with the Assembly of Manitoba Chiefs, said it would be a missed opportunity if the inquest were not to address the role Mr. Sinclair’s race, social status and disability played in his treatment. Although Sinclair’s case is extreme, Balfour said the organization has heard similar complaints from other aboriginal people seeking medical care.
“That intersection of race, poverty and disability, I think, really needs to be examined,” he said.
Emily Hill, lawyer for Aboriginal Legal Services of Toronto, which has standing at the inquest, said numerous hospital employees have testified they worked 12-hour shifts in the emergency room but didn’t see Sinclair. She said the inquest needs to delve into why the double amputee, who was partially blocking an aisle in the emergency room, was so invisible.
The answer may lie in the negative stereotypes of aboriginal people that are “deeply rooted in Canadian society,” she said.
“As a result, there is discrimination,” Mr. Hill said.“What aboriginal people experience in the health-care system, in the justice system, in the education system — in all kinds of places where Canadian society is reflected — is that extension of systemic racism.”

Yes, exactly.
We minimize, neglect, ignore and assume the worst about Aboriginal people all the time.
"I'm not racist" is the phrase you hear all of us saying across the Prairies all the time.  But all that means is we don't wear pointy hoods and burn crosses.
In reality, we don't understand what racism actually is, we don't realize how racist we ourselves actually are, and we certainly don't acknowledge how pervasive it is across our part of the world.
I remember this great clip from the great movie, Smoke Signals, where Thomas describes how his dad was found guilty of "being an Indian in the 20th Century".  That's all it takes:

C-c-c-christ, its c-c-c-cold

It's 33 below here tonight -- with the windchill, its almost 50 below.
CTV reports that they're expecting another snowstorm in Ontario, and there are still widespread power outages tonight in Newfoundland.
A recent article in Salon explains the link between extreme weather and global warming:

. . . the temperature gap between the Arctic and the rest of the hemisphere gives rise to a band of steady winds called the jet stream that governs weather patterns across the region.
Your location relative to the jet stream “says everything about the weather conditions that you’re experiencing,” Francis said.
As the Arctic warms, the temperature gap between north and south narrows. Francis’ research suggests this causes jet stream winds to slow down, and the path of the jet stream to meander.
That prompts weather in America and elsewhere to change less quickly. It becomes hung up, essentially, in extreme loops that can lead to unusually long periods of heat or cold, rain or drought.

Boy, that's for sure. And are we ever tired of the cold here this year.

Happy new year

Great line of the day

At The Galloping Beaver, Dave provides this excellent description of Harper:

I question Harper's intelligence at times but his competence is not up for debate. This is one of the least competent prime ministers Canada has ever endured.

Colorado high

In two days, marijuana in Colorado will be legal.  As Neil Steinberg writes:

... this Wednesday, Jan. 1, Colorado will become the first state in the nation, and one of the rare places in the world, where adults can freely purchase marijuana, no strings attached. You don't have to be sick. You don't need a prescription. You only need to be older than 21 and fork over the money....
"I have a feeling we'll be visiting a lot more often in the future," I deadpanned to my mother, who smiled, happy at the thought of more visits. Legalizing pot is the sort of shift that encourages humor. We went to see "Monty Python's Spamalot" at the Boulder Dinner Theatre Friday night — first rate singing, dancing and serving, by the way — and the obligatory insert-a-topical-local-reference-in-the-show segment of course referred to Colorado legalizing pot. "Not that anyone will notice a difference," said King Arthur, or words to that effect.
I suppose there are all sorts of somber, valid, good-public-policy reasons to be concerned, but at this point it just seems humorous, to see society open its arms to what is basically a low-level, self-indulgent method to disengage your brain from the world for a while. Compared to the huge swath of death and destruction, illness and heartbreak carved by alcohol, I just can't see getting worked up at this point about sweet old Mary Jane. Like gay marriage, the surprising thing will someday be that it was ever illegal.

Exactly.
Compared to alcohol, dope is nothing -- mild, benign, virtually harmless. Yes, its possible to get just as hooked on dope as on drink, but nobody ever got high and then started fights with their friends or threw up on their boss or stumbled home to beat up their wife and kids.
As long as you have enough cornflakes ...

Still thousands without power

Having our own furnace break down on the Sunday before Christmas, and anxiously awaiting the repairman at midnight as the temperature in the house dropped lower and lower, I could only imagine how much worse it would have been to be freezing in the dark for days on end.
So I have been very closely following the blackout story in Toronto over the last week.  What a terrible Christmas it has been for so many people.
And the state of Toronto politics didn't help.
Municipal leadership matters.  It will likely never be possible to precisely measure how badly the lack of municipal leadership in Toronto affected the planning and implementation of power restoration.  But both Toronto Hydro and the Province of Ontario would have had their own priorities during the crisis, and while they did their best, they could not focus only on Toronto, nor could they be responsible for deciding whose needs were most urgent.
Only municipal government can do that.  And in Toronto, the municipal leaders were instead jockeying around behind the scenes, avoiding each other, minimizing the problems and fighting about who should speak to whom.  As the Toronto Sun says,

...demands by various councillors that Ford declare an emergency were politically motivated, lest Ford get any credit for being front and centre during the emergency.
On the other hand, Ford’s claim that declaring an emergency would cause people to panic was silly. One reason Ford didn’t want to declare an emergency was that he would lose his remaining mayoral powers to Kelly.

It mattered -- without leadership, the Toronto citizens could not get a straight story. Instead, they got wishful thinking.

Toronto Hydro should have been more honest with the public from the start about the lengthy timelines it was facing for getting everyone who lost power back on the grid....
Stating at the outset that it might be more than a week until all power was restored would have given people the opportunity to make realistic plans from the start for staying or leaving their homes.

Without leadership, problems were minimized and people couldn't get the information they needed:

Berardinetti said the city hadn’t set up enough warming centres in hard-hit Scarborough, and urged people who had a generator to spare to contact her office so that it could be borrowed for another local home.
Gary Crawford, Southwest Scarborough’s other councillor, said Friday at least 12 streets in his ward still had significant outages, and many there felt forgotten.
“There’s a real sense of abandonment, that people just don’t care - which I don’t think is the case,” he said.
Some residents, isolated and elderly, stayed because they worried leaving would open their homes to thefts, said Crawford, while others hadn’t yet seen a Hydro truck nearby and just wanted information.
Paul Ainslie, a councillor for Scarborough East, counted three areas in his ward that were still dark.
“We’re not talking house by house, we’re talking streets,” he said, adding his distaste for an appearance Mayor Rob Ford had made at a local school.
The school had power and the mayor, Ainslie said, had for a “photo op” pulled a crew from Hydro Windsor away from their work reconnecting homes around it.
The only warming centre in his ward was at Toronto police’s 43 Division station, and its community room wasn’t big enough to sleep in, he said.
“I had a lot of low-income and elderly people who were freezing in their homes” because they couldn’t get to a centre where they could stay overnight, charged Ainslie.

And apparently nobody at City Hall even got around to ordering door-to-door checks -- it took the Ontario Premier Kathleen Wynne to get these underway.

Praying for peace

Pope Francis would have agreed with John Lennon (and Francis is likely the first pope since John XXIII who would have done so):

Pope Francis, celebrating his first Christmas as Roman Catholic leader, on Wednesday called on atheists to unite with believers of all religions and work for “a homemade peace” that can spread across the world.
Speaking to about 70,000 people from the central balcony of St. Peter’s Basilica, the same spot where he emerged to the world as pope when he was elected on March 13, Francis also made another appeal for the environment to be saved from “human greed and rapacity”.
The leader of the 1.2 billion-member Church wove his first “Urbi et Orbi” (to the city and world) message around the theme of peace.
“Peace is a daily commitment. It is a homemade peace,” he said.
He said that people of other religions were also praying for peace, and – departing from his prepared text – he urged atheists to join forces with believers.
“I invite even non-believers to desire peace. (Join us) with your desire, a desire that widens the heart. Let us all unite, either with prayer or with desire, but everyone, for peace,” he said, drawing sustained applause from the crowd.

Merry Christmas

"





And one more:

Playing politics while Toronto freezes in the dark

Toronto mayor-in-name-only Rob Ford is refusing to call what is happening in Toronto "an emergency":

Officials played down questions about why Toronto hadn’t declared a state of emergency. Mr. Ford said the damage didn’t warrant it. He has had some of his powers stripped after recent revelations about drug use, and some councillors questioned whether politics played a role in refusing to declare a state of emergency.

Almost 200,000 people are freezing in the dark, and Rob Ford won't call it an emergency because if he did, then he couldn't host any more press conferences.

Happy Festivus

Great line of the day

Dan Savage on the War on Christmas pity party:

Sarah Palin and Bill O'Reilly and Fox News and the Family Research Council and the woman who allegedly punched another woman outside Walmart earlier this week for saying "happy holidays" instead of "merry Christmas" managed to break me of the "merry Christmas" habit. I suspect I'm not alone. This constant bitching from the right about "happy holidays"—a perfectly lovely expression that embraces Christmas Eve, Christmas Day, Boxing Day, Pancha Ganapati, New Year's Eve, New Year's Day, Hanukkah, the Epiphany, Saint Nicholas's Day, Hogmanay, Twelfth Night, and Kwanzaa—has made one thing clear. Not that there is now, or ever was, a war on Christmas. But that saying "merry Christmas" is an asshole move. Just as conservatives made patriotism toxic during the Vietnam War by conflating it with blind obedience to authority ("My country, right or wrong!"), modern conservatives have made "merry Christmas" toxic by associating it with Christian fundamentalism, religious intolerance, and the politics of imagined persecution.

Oh, so its for my own good, is it? How thoughtful of you!

Canada Post CEO Chopra thinks I'll be a happier, better person if I have to pick up my own mail.

“The seniors are telling me, ‘I want to be healthy. I want to be active in my life,’” Mr. Chopra told MPs. “They want to be living fuller lives.”

So that's what I've been missing to live a fuller, happier life -- a two block (at least) daily walk to pick up my mail.
Who knew?
And while we're at it, maybe the city can dig a community well at the mailboxes too, so it won't have to raise our taxes anymore to fix any deteriorating water lines.
Because after all, it's not a government's job to provide Canadians with actual services we need, like mail delivery. (Or to feed hungry children either.)  No, its the government's job to keep its services from becoming a burden on taxpayers.  And the easiest way to do that is to stop providing the services!
Simplicity itself.
And then I can get even healthier if I have to use my little red wagon to pick up our water every day while I'm getting the mail -- that's whole body exercise right there.
And firewood, don't forget firewood. Maybe we could pick that up, too.
Who needs natural gas heating at home when we can warm up by trudging through the rain or sleet or hail or snow to pick up everything we need, just like the pioneers did.
Maybe my husband and I can dig an outhouse in the back, and we could raise some chickens in the shed, too.
Thanks so much, Canada Post and Mr. Chopra, for giving Canadians the opportunity to experience the 18th century all over again.

.@mayzee01 @JohnOCAP Uber-bourgeois Chopra: Cuts are for the seniors' (and no doubt disabled people's) own good. Overfed, overpaid wretch.
— Dr.Dawg (@DrDawg) December 19, 2013

Great line of the day

No More Mister Nice Blog is writing about the NSA scandal, and this is pretty much how I feel now too:

At first I was an Edward Snowden skeptic. But I learned to separate my feelings about Snowden and (especially) Glenn Greenwald from my feelings about what they've exposed -- NSA surveillance violates constitutional principles so blatantly that I've stopped caring about Snowden's motives or Greenwald's journalistic practices. There's too much here, as has been confirmed by journalists who've written about it and aren't named Greenwald.

Yes, exactly. The secret surveillance story has transcended its scribes. Which is why the right-wing attacks on Greenwald and the CBC over the G20 spy story fell so flat.