Sir: Efforts to turn Wallaceburg’s Sydenham District Hospital into a “fast-patient and do-you-want-fries-with-that” drive-thru persists.
Health and health care in Canada, the difference clearly defined, are both based on legislation and policy. Canada’s constitution, the supreme law of the land, guarantees to protect the rights of all, aboriginal, non-aboriginal, to the legal definition of health care for everyone, rather than controlled by a select few.
Canada’s $185-billion health-care system – $135 billion of that being taxpayer funded – guarantees taxpayers have an authority, an ownership and are major stakeholders to a level of health care they want. Government is retained by taxpayers to manage, not control, at taxpayer expense. Taxpayers pay for a level of service and health care.
Private–public partnerships are consistently encouraged by government.
In the matter of mandatory and expected health care, taxpayers have a binding contract with the federal and provincial governments, whereby such a contract could be considered agreements enforceable at law.
Federal and provincial authority involves health-care overlap, making both government levels fully responsible and obedient to the constitution relevant to the legislative definition of health care.
Provinces do not have exclusive jurisdiction to totally manage the delivery of or the totality of what would constitute health care. Health care is governed by power of our constitution, acting exclusively for the majority of the taxpayers and not what a handful may like to see.
The preamble for health care mirrors that of our Supreme Court of Canada mandate, that is, to act in the best interest of the majority, not any one group, organization, coffee club or moped gang. Additionally, taxpayers have a charter right to demand the health care they want and expect by its definition.
Further, under our constitution, for any and all amendments, Ottawa has complete jurisdiction to transfer required funding to provinces as would be required, based on constitutional realities for the responsible and provincially mandated delivery of health care for all or specific jurisdictions.
The framework of governance for our 150 Ontario hospitals is intended to rest with provincial authority, without federal veto, digesting the process from Ottawa to the province, through the Ministry of Health, entrusted to be strictly, efficiently, responsibly, absent of unnecessary patient risk, entrusted to LHINS, working within a contracted framework with the respective hospital.
Such would guarantee a level of emergency and general health care, that, pursuant to the Canada Health Care Act, under “care policy” would provide the former without creating delays, financial and other.
Legislated health care does not start at the respective hospital but starts when the emergency call is first received. In the world of “triage,” this means getting to the patient in emergency, performing the required mobile care at point of patient contact and getting the respective patient to the hospital emergency room without unnecessary delays. Emergencies from Port Lambton, Walpole, a plethora of points north of Wallaceburg, having to transport emergency patients into Chatham, adding up to an hour of time, pending on weather, would create the delays that our legislation qualifies not to support.
It appears to me legislation is on the side of the thousands of people I have experienced at numerous Save Our Sydenham meetings. Health care belongs to and is the property of the taxpayer, having the jurisdictional and authoritative power to direct without equivocality, a demand to retain a full capacity hospital in Wallaceburg.
Additionally, removing responsible legislated emergency care from SDH is akin to dismantling our Wallaceburg public and high schools, our arenas and parks and cultural centres all the while expecting the community to grow. It isn’t going to work and gives rise to review involuntary mismanagement.
John Cryderman
Chatham
