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Letters: Health care and cemetery maintenance

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Letter to Editor

Medicare in Danger.

I first met Canadian Medicare in the person of Nurse Kaplan, who helped stitch my left eyebrow at the Jewish General, three weeks after I stepped off the boat in Montreal.

Since then our family’s involvement with Medicare has been steady, for various reasons. With one notable exception in 58 years, our collective experience of Medicare has been most positive.

There are certainly those whose experience does not accord with ours, and currently the doomsters, gloomsters and Conservatives, in both Ottawa and Victoria, emphasize the negatory – as they have done since Medicare’s inception.

They take a great deal of perverted enjoyment at the current creaks and groans in Medicare’s structure caused, not by inefficiencies, but by the remarkable number of services which Medicare has made available to the public over the last 40 years.

Inevitably, among the Right’s political pronouncements on Medicare, weasel words like ‘opportunity’ (privatisation), ‘flexibility’ (wholesale privatisation) have once again raised their ugly heads.

So has the seldom-defined, infinitely malleable concept of ‘freedom’ which I suspect, in the Rustad/Poilievre universe, means the withdrawal of all communal and social responsibility; a society where one of Tommy Douglas’s aphorisms would be only too accurate:’ “It’s every man for himself”, said the elephant, as he danced among the chickens.’

And in late August, Alberta’s Premier Smith at a UCP meeting in Drayton Valley, suggested that some rural Medicare services could be turned over to the Catholic Church. One can only wonder how Poilievre and Rustad view Smith’s ruminations.

In any case, with these two gentlemen in Ottawa and BC respectively, the destruction of Canadian Medicare, whether drip-by-drip, or wrecking ball-by-wrecking ball, is more certain than at any time since its inception.

Recent statistics from Britain, for instance, highlight the point that, under successive Conservative governments the number of those on National Health Service waiting lists has ballooned from 2.5 million people to 7.6 million.

In addition, statistics on life expectancy there are shocking.  A person born poor in England today can actually expect to live a shorter life than the previous generation. Since 2021, life expectancy among the English poor has been shortened by 6.3 months!                      

We cannot allow Poilievre and Rustad to introduce such a skewed, twisted, sabotaged and unjust healthcare system in BC and Canada where, 58 years ago, with infinite gratitude, I first met Canadian Medicare, and the delightful Nurse Kaplan, God bless her.

 

JC Vallance,

Cokato.

 

Fernie Cemetery

I visited Fernie on the week-end of September 7th, to attend our Class of '64, 60th anniversary reunion.  Although only about a third of the class was able to attend, we had great time visiting and reminiscing.

I also visited the cemetery to attend to family graves of both my wife's and my families.  It is very disappointing to find the poor  level of maintenance at the cemetery.  Yes it is mowed but little else is done.  The thistles and other weeds growing truly are an eyesore.  The number of graves that have sunken or have head stones sunken is not appropriate.  I know this has been going on for several years as I have repaired graves of old friends of my parents that have no living relatives in the Fernie area.  I shudder to think what this will look like in a few years when I am unable to maintain the family grave sites.

I am sure that the City can find some dollars to do some weed control and fill in sunken graves and reset headstones.  I do not see this level of neglect at other cemeteries, some a lot older than the Fernie cemetery.

Yours truly

Roy Slavens

Williams Lake