Tag Archives: Canada

News

In Alberta, tens of thousands of patients are waiting for surgery

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From Global TV (in Regina). (H/T Jojo)

Excerpt:

As the Alberta Health Services Board gathers to determine the fate of its CEO, tens of thousands of Albertans are still waiting for surgery while complete operating rooms sit empty.

“I was bed ridden for about three months,” says Michel Gosselin, who needs surgery on his back. “I’ve been in pain for a year and two months.”

Dr. Robert Hollingshead, an orthopaedic surgeon, says patients like Michel often wait upwards of a year once they’re finally booked for surgery. It’s a problem doctors and surgeons in all fields face because of a serious shortage of operating rooms in Alberta.

Despite pleas to the Province, little progress has been made even though a number of new operating rooms have been built, including six operating rooms that were originally used by the Health Resource Centre to perform 1,000 public hip, knee and ankle surgeries a year.

However, the Health Resource Centre is now defunct after AHS ended its relationship with the private surgical facility to in October, forcing it into creditor protection.

[…]…AHS opened the McCaig Tower at the Foothills Hospital, touting that it would offer 23 new operating rooms, 11 of which were already complete.

But one month later, less than 2 have been opened.

“It’s a travesty to open 11 state-of-the-art operating rooms in an almost $560-million facility and then open only 2 of them, and in fact, only run 1.4 – they’ve only staffed it for 1.4,” says Dr. Hollingshead.

Fifteen functional operating rooms sit empty in Calgary alone while the health system is so busy that new surgeons will likely have no place to operate.

Dr. Hollingshead predicts if the situation doesn’t improve Alberta could lose as many as 30 graduating surgeons over the next 5 years.

Singple-payer health care in Canada is not as good as the left wants you to believe.

 

News

Should it be illegal to coerce a woman to have an abortion?

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Rod Bruinooge
Rod Bruinooge

Story from Life Site News. (H/T Mary)

Excerpt:

The vote on the Canadian bill seeking to criminalize abortion coercion, which was initially pushed back to February, is now set for December 15th.

The bill, called “Roxanne’s Law,” is named after Roxanne Fernando, a Manitoba woman whose boyfriend attempted to coerce her to have an abortion after she became pregnant in 2007.  After refusing to have the unborn child killed, Roxanne was beaten and left to die in a snow bank.

It was introduced in April as a private members bill by Conservative MP Rod Bruinooge (Winnipeg South), who serves as chair of the parliamentary pro-life caucus.  It is opposed by Prime Minister Stephen Harper, who says he “will oppose any attempt to create a new abortion law.”

The bill, also known as C-510, received its first hour of debate on November 1st.  “No pregnant woman should ever have to choose between protecting herself and protecting her baby,” Bruinooge told the House of Commons.

It will receive a second hour of debate on December 13th.

The bill has gained wide support among religious and pro-life organizations, including the Evangelical Fellowship of Canada, the Canadian Bishops’ Catholic Organization for Life and Family, and Priests for Life, among numerous others.

Conservative prime minister (Stephen Harper) has committed to not changing abortion law at all while he has a minority government, probably because he feels he doesn’t have a mandate to do that since he never campaigned to do that. However, this law is so sensible and moderate, I have to think that he should allow a free vote on the issue, and let the social conservatives see that they have a home in the federal Conservative Party. This measure is so moderate that it would be difficult to see how anyone could be against it.

The latest poll has the Conservatives at 33.3% support, and the socialist Liberals at 27.1% support, and the communist NDP at 16.6%. To get a majority, the Conservatives have to be north of 40%. Canada is still a very liberal country.

UPDATE: Mary writes:

I agree that they should allow a free vote on the issue. It’s something that even the pro-choice side should support – provided they’re really pro-choice…

This is actually really important. There need to be repercussions to coercing a woman into abortion. It could save a lot of lives. Most abortions are not wanted and many are coerced. Read this to see just how bad it is: http://www.theunchoice.com/pdf/FactSheets/ForcedAbortions.pdf

And:

In the US context, listen to this recording of the testimony of a woman was coerced into an abortion by Planned Parenthood and hear how they try to shut her up when she wants to tell them why PP is not worthy of taxpayer funding:

News

Ottawa-Carleton District School Board wants to know children’s sexual orientation

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From Mercator Net. (H/T Ruth Blog)

Excerpt:

A former Canadian Prime Minister, Pierre Trudeau, once famously quipped: “The state has no business in the bedrooms of the nation.”

Unless, it would seem, the “nation” means schoolchildren ages 12-17, and the “state” is local school board bureaucrats and/or the provincial Ministry of Education. The Ottawa-Carleton District School Board (Ontario, Canada) plans to issue a survey which asks, among other things, for children to disclose their gender (four choices) and sexual orientation (nine choices). Proponents claim the survey is voluntary, but rather than requiring parental permission for the survey to be administered, the onus is on parents to opt out in writing (by Nov. 19), if they do not wish their child to participate.

[…]Although the survey is touted as being anonymous, each form is tagged with a code that can be traced back to the individual child, and, by extension, his or her family. Critics wonder what kind of inferences will be drawn, and who will have access to information that involves the cultural, religious, financial, and educational status of students’ parents.

Now why do you suppose they want to know about the religion of the parents and about whether the child is gay? Hmmmn. And how will the parents’ decision to opt out affect the children’s test scores? Hmmmn.