The Reminder is making its archives back to 2003 available on our website. Please note that, due to technical limitations, archive articles are presented without the usual formatting.
By Jonathon Naylor Frustration surrounding the NRHA made an unsurprising appearance Monday as Flin Flon's three major MLA candidates gathered for a public forum. I say unsurprising because for a lot of voters, this election boils down to health care and which candidate and party can be entrusted with its future. At one point during the forum, NDP candidate Clarence Pettersen was rudely heckled by a woman in the crowd who reminded him, and everyone else, that the Flin Flon General Hospital does not have its own surgeon. She suggested the hospital ER Ð which the NDP has promised to upgrade and expand Ð is useless without an in-house surgeon. But it was hardly an honest argument, since out-of-town surgeons have for the past two years been covering shifts at the hospital. Have there been gaps in surgical coverage at the hospital? As this newspaper has reported, yes, there certainly have been. And those will need to be addressed by whichever party wins power Oct. 4. But to say our ER is meaningless unless the surgeons who work there actually live in Flin Flon on a full-time basis? That's a bit much, and it denigrates the life-saving work they do. Tom Heine, the Liberal candidate who has made health care a major focus of his campaign, was at his most passionate whenever his signature issue came up. While Mr. Pettersen argued the governing NDP has dealt with the well-publicized concerns surrounding the NRHA, Mr. Heine insisted they had not. Patients will be in the best position to decide who is right. The appropriate challenge now for both Mr. Pettersen and Mr. Heine will be to answer, in no uncertain terms, what a "fixed" NRHA will look like. Does it mean everyone gets a doctor's appointment whenever they need one? Does it mean no one ever again alleges their physician misdiagnosed them? What is a realistic goal and how is progress objectively measured? Imperfection Health care will never be perfect, so it comes down to how much imperfection we are willing to swallow. But Monday's forum, held before some 60 voters at the City Hall Council Chambers, was about much more than a single issue. Mr. Pettersen was perhaps in the most challenging spot since his party has been in power for the last dozen years. This meant that although he has not been our MLA, he effectively has a record to defend, for better or for worse. Darcy Linklater, the PC candidate from Nelson House, was in an awkward position at times since some of the questions related specifically to the community of Flin Flon rather than the riding as a whole. And Mr. Heine worked to ensure his candidacy is seen as more than just a one-trick pony, kicking around the health care issue to no end. Like the other candidates, he displayed a breadth of knowledge. When questions from the floor were accepted, one man asked Mr. Pettersen how much longer the NDP can continue to blame the PCs Ð out of power for a dozen years now Ð for today's problems. It was a legitimate query considering how often the NDP campaign, both locally and province-wide, has dredged up the fear the PCs will privatize Manitoba Hydro if elected. No one can dispute the PCs of the 1990s denied they would privatize MTS and then did so anyway. But how fair is it to say the PCs of today would sell off one Crown corporation because the PCs of long ago sold off a different Crown corporation? If that's fair, then it should be equally acceptable for the PCs and Liberals to reach years into the past to come up with scare tactics of their own. They could start by going around saying the NDP will shut down hospitals, cut services and eliminate rent controls because, after all, that is what the NDP did in Saskatchewan during the 1990s. My point is, we need to move past vague, unproven allegations on all sides and vote with the future in mind. In this riding in particular, we face some exciting opportunities and dreadful challenges in the coming years. What matters now is who will be up to the task. Local Angle runs Fridays.
