NDP critic and health CEO battle over cuts CBC.ca
That’s $144 extra in taxes that people in B.C. have to pay, and it’s on a single expense only. When you add up all of the expenses that will increase from the HST, it could result in revolt. But don’t expect the government to see it from that point of view. If anything, they argue, the HST will allow businesses to deliver products and services at a lower cost, which will allow them to lower their prices in tandem. But that may just be wishful thinking. Both Terasen Gas and Hydro warned that any savings would “likely not” be sufficient enough to offset the increases that will show up on utility bills.
The truth is that the residents of B.C. will likely not take this latest outrage lying down, or grimacing through clenched teeth as they did when the carbon tax was shoved down our throats. To take a page from Brian Mulroney’s legacy, nothing will do in a politician better than an ill-timed and ill-conceived tax. Certainly the tax will offer new-found riches to the province, but at a terrible political price. This is a price increase that will be seen and felt by everyone in the province, with 12% in taxes being taken off everything from restaurants to new houses. How many people are going to want to leave a 15% gratuity for their waitress, after they just tipped the government 12%? Worse still, how many people are going to want to eat out at all?
An Ipsos Reid poll shows that 85% of B.C. residents oppose the tax, with 70% being “strongly opposed”. The winners in this scenario are clear: the provincial government will get greater revenues than before, and a one-off $1.6 billion gift from Ottawa for “harmonizing”. Big business will, according to Finance Minister Colin Hansen, pay $1.9 billion less in taxes because they will be able to claim back the tax they pay. But where is the “win” for the people? The working class struggling to make ends meet in a recession? The frightening thing is that British Columbians are already “taxed to the max” as it is, without adding more weight to our backs.
Of course there is one way out of this. And the rage might just be strong enough to make it happen. A recall campaign gaining 40% of the signatures of registered voters to end the Liberals legislative majority may be possible. The downside to this idea, however, is that under B.C. Elections laws, any recall cannot start until 18 months after the election, which would be November 2010, four months after the HST goes into effect. Then again, four months into experiencing the HST first-hand might be just what’s needed to turf Gordon Campbell and his Liberal government out. Until then, the Liberals might want to try not doing anything else to enrage the people of this province, because the load of straw on that camels back is getting mighty heavy indeed. “http://network.nationalpost.com/np/blogs/fullcomment/archive/2009/08/16/raphael-alexander-teflon-and-the-b-c-liberal-party.aspx
Don’t blame authority, blame Liberal gov’t The Province – You had to feel sorry Thursday afternoon for the citizens who turned out for a rare public Fraser Health Authority board of directors meeting to express their concerns over the region’s increasingly …
Fraser Health Authority slashes services Globe and Mail
B.C. Liberals down, NDP up in poll, Among the respondents, 38 per cent said they would vote for the B.C. Liberals, down eight per cent from the May 12 election. Support for the B.C. NDP was 46 per cent, up four per cent from the
=All I can think of to say at this point is that I sure wish the election was coming next week.
=Shame on them and anyone that voted Liberal.
=We need to recall Gordon Campbell and his “Liberals”.
=What is it with B.C. that we can’t scare up some decent politicians to run the province? Oh wait. It isn’t just B.C., it’s the whole damn country!
=Thats because all the Lieberals can do is lie lie lie lie to the public.
=And they don’t give a crap about the taxpayer.”
http://www.cbc.ca/canada/british-columbia/story/2009/08/27/bc-mustel-poll-politics.html
see also https://thenonconformer.wordpress.com/2009/07/20/bc-liberals/
see also https://thenonconformer.wordpress.com/2009/06/03/corupted/
Former eHealth Ontario chief executive officer Sarah Kramer landed the top job at the troubled agency after Premier Dalton McGuinty directly intervened in her appointment, over the objections of some of his own civil servants. Ms. Kramer abruptly resigned from eHealth Ontario in June, amid scandal over lucrative contracts awarded without competitive tenders and nickel-and-dime spending by consultants. It became one of the most politically damaging episodes of the McGuinty government’s 5 1/2 years in power. Senior officials in the Ministry of Health had opposed the selection of Ms. Kramer because they felt she did not have enough experience to oversee the daunting task of modernizing the province’s medical records, one of the government’s top priorities, according to sources close to the situation. Any obstacle to Ms. Kramer assuming her new duties disappeared the day she met face to face with Mr. McGuinty in his Queen’s Park office, documents show. Ms. Kramer did not have to go through the normal channels government agencies use to find a chief executive officer. And Mr. McGuinty was directly involved in her hiring, according to sources close to the situation. The board of directors of a government agency typically appoints the top executive, following a competitive search that identifies a short list of candidates. But Ms. Kramer did not have to compete against others, and she was appointed directly by the premier through an order in council. Her appointment was requested by Dr. Hudson, a neurosurgeon and former hospital president renowned for fixing problems in health care, and Mr. McGuinty’s hand-picked choice for chairman of eHealth Ontario. Dr. Hudson told the Premier he would take the job on one condition: if he could hire his protégé as chief executive officer, according to the sources. Dr. Hudson had worked with Ms. Kramer at Cancer Care Ontario, where he was president and she was the chief information officer. He was under enormous pressure to fix the province’s medical records and he wanted someone he could trust to get the job done, the sources said. “Hudson made it very clear to all kinds of people that it was a two-for-one deal,” said a source close to the situation. Jane Almeida, a spokeswoman for Mr. McGuinty, declined to discuss the Premier’s involvement in the matter. Ms. Kramer could not be located for comment. http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/politics/mcguinty-had-hand-in-hiring-former-ehealth-ceo/article1248569/
Opposition wants answers after learning eHealth review never started Toronto Star – Romina Maurino – The government has some explaining to do amid revelations that a promised, and then cancelled, independent review of scandal-plagued eHealth Ontario never got underway, the opposition parties said Monday. Documents obtained by the New Democrats under Freedom of Information laws show no contract was ever signed for PricewaterhouseCoopers to begin a third-party review of the agency – a fact verified by both eHealth and PricewaterhouseCoopers.
Premier Dalton McGuinty is denying he intervened in the appointment of Sarah Kramer as the CEO of eHealth Ontario over the objections of some civil servants. McGuinty’s comments come after a Globe and Mail report that the premier had a hands-on role in appointing eHealth’s leaders and appointed Kramer through an order-in-council despite objections from Ministry of Health officials. New Democrat Peter Kormos says McGuinty has no credibility when it comes to eHealth, and that it’s clear the premier’s office was consulted before Kramer was hired and should be accepting responsibility. http://www.cbc.ca/canada/toronto/story/2009/08/12/mcguinty-ehealth.html
Inside Queen’s Park: ehealth boondoggle is sick theatre The malodorous issue is that of eHealth and more precisely what’s been spent in untendered contracts and related expenses. All this first erupted last spring with former eHealth CEO Sarah Kramer’s resignation followed shortly by board chairman Dr. Alan Hudson, after the opposition parties howled about lavish spending and $2,700 per diem payments as part of $5 million in untendered contracts awarded to consultants which has since been revised to about $15 million. Health Minister David Caplan exacerbated the mess by stepping deeper into it even as he tried to stomp out the fires burning around his bailiwick. First, it was just isolated, then eHealth announced it would have PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP review its spending. Then Caplan called off PWC saying the auditor general would take the lead in the investigation. The opposition knew from the first whiff they were onto something and at the end of last month the government tried to bury its scent under a tsunami of paperwork, releasing six thick binders with hundreds of pages of receipts, meeting minutes, and other documents. That’s when it really hit the fan because on a slow summer’s day with nothing else of much importance going on and with the imminent settling of the Toronto city workers strike at hand, everyone could smell a good story fermenting despite the rotting stench of piled up garbage outside the leafy confines of Queen’s Park. Politics is optics and when it comes to government spending, it doesn’t get much better than this. Between 2007 and 2008 eHealth Ontario spent $82 million. We know now at least $15 million was untendered and went to a company with close political ties to the Liberal Party. That’s probably not a surprise. One of the perks of office is doling out contracts and work to the people who helped get you there and will help keep you in power. It’s the nature of the spending which is starting to look awfully ugly. With a recession killing jobs and shrinking household incomes, the McGuinty government is up to its neck in embarrassing material. Aside from the $400 limousine rides Kramer took from Toronto to London, Ont.; aside from eHealth board member Khalil Barsoum’s $2,400 round-trip flight from Florida, associated car rentals, and road tolls so he could make it to a Toronto board meeting; and aside from paying other board members to fly to Toronto or in some cases, $380 a day to “prepare” for said meetings, the real stench here is that after spending something in the region of $650 million, the agency and its predecessor have almost nothing to show for it. There is no plan in place. There is no privacy legislation model such as British Columbia’s eHealth (Personal Health Information Access and Protection of Privacy) Act to look at. Nada. Zilch. What we have instead is a consultant paid $2,700 a day who then bills an extra $5 for tea and cookies.
eHealth third-party review was never started CTV.ca TORONTO — The opposition parties are asking for answers amid revelations that a promised, and then cancelled, independent review of scandal-plagued eHealth Ontario never got underway. Documents obtained by the New Democrats under Freedom of Information laws show no contract was ever signed for PriceWaterhouseCoopers to begin a third-party review of the agency.The government has said it cancelled the review because it would have duplicated efforts by Ontario’s auditor general, who is also probing the agency. But NDP critic France Gelinas says the newly released documents show that the government never planned to go ahead with the independent report. She says Health Minister David Caplan and Premier Dalton McGuinty have some explaining to do after suggesting in the legislature that the review was underway and that results could be expected by the end of the summer. Progressive Conservative Lisa MacLeod says the lack of any contract shows the whole process was a smokescreen and wants to bring eHealth in for all-party questioning to get some answers. Lying “Their line of defence was always: `We will go to the bottom of this, we have retained the best third-party, PricewaterhouseCoopers,” Gelinas said. “Then, in the middle of the summer, we learn that basically, it was all empty – they haven’t done anything, they were not going to expect anything out of them, it was all empty rhetoric.” Gelinas said Caplan and McGuinty “needed to defend themselves so they used those lines, but those lines misled us in the house, they misled Ontarians, and they misled all of the taxpayers.” McGuinty had also fended off questions in the legislature, saying in June: “I think we need to wait for the report coming from PricewaterhouseCoopers. We need to wait for the information and the advice to come from the auditor.” Progressive Conservative Lisa MacLeod, who wants to bring eHealth in front of a sub-committee for all-party questioning, said the lack of any contract showed the whole process was “a smokescreen to save the minister’s job.” The latest details are just the latest of a series facts about the scandal that led to the resignation of former eHealth CEO Sarah Kramer and former board chair Dr. Alan Hudson in June, after the Conservatives and New Democrats complained the agency gave out $5 million in untendered contracts to consulting companies. Documents released by the government since then showed the value of those untendered contracts was closer to $16 million, with the biggest ones going to companies the opposition parties say have ties to the Liberal government. EHealth was set up last year to create electronic health records after the first provincial agency given that task, Smart Systems for Health, spent $650 million but failed to produce anything of lasting value before it was quietly shut down last September.
Quebec “Finance Minister Raymond Bachand suggested clients of disgraced investment adviser Earl Jones should take some of the blame themselves for losing tens of millions of dollars in what police say was a Ponzi scheme” and he had “scolded the alleged victims of Earl Jones for not having reported their financial adviser to the government’s Autorité des marchés financiers. some of the same elderly people who must turn to food banks after, it is alleged, they’ve been swindled out of their retirement savings. Humility would have been more appropriate on Bachand’s part, considering how badly the government in general and he in particular have handled also the Jones affair. Saturday was the first time since the scandal broke a month earlier that Bachand even acknowledged that he is the minister responsible for the financial sector by saying something about the affair.” The Quebec chief also next did not approve of it too. “It’s such a cruel story,” Quebec Premier Jean Charest said. “They were not very rich people.” Premier Jean Charest has been chosen to preside at a celebration marking the 25th anniversary of the election of the much hated ex Conservative Canadian Prime Minister Brian Mulroney’s first majority. How approriate now as well? Early Jones was charged July 28 with four counts each of fraud and theft. He was freed on $30,000 bail and is living in an undisclosed location following threats. While clearly pervrse Brian Mulroney is still a free man. Jones clients furious following minister’s comments Ottawa Citizen Quebec “mean spirited”: Jones victims The Gazette (Montreal)
In reality too many of our politicians still do lie too often as well..
“Canadian politicians of all stripes lie when they spout such nonsense as: “In Canada, we believe you should get the medical treatment you need with a government health insurance card, not a credit card.”
Really? Try paying for your medical treatment by waving around your health card when you need (a) prescription drugs (b) extra nursing care (c) physiotherapy (d) timely post-operative rehab (e) a nursing home bed or (f) a growing number of medications, tests, treatments and procedures which our governments are delisting almost daily in a bid to cut costs. Wasteful spending in both the public and private sectors plagues both countries.
In fact, 30% of Canadian health care is privately funded while almost half of the U.S. system is publicly funded — for the poor (medicaid), seniors (medicare) and U.S. military. Neither system is purely “public” nor “private.” In Canada, these are excessive wait times for treatment and the continual delisting of drugs and services from medicare. ( particularly true as you next get older too, I am waiting months for a knee specialist)) http://www.torontosun.com/comment/columnists/lorrie_goldstein/2009/08/12/10434126-sun.html
Conservatives maintain slight poll lead Reuters Canada – – OTTAWA (Reuters) – Canada’s governing Conservatives are still slightly ahead in public opinion polls over the main opposition Liberals, but would have no …
One hour later..
Liberals lead Tories 36% to 33% Vancouverite – A majority (55%) ‘disagrees’ (28% strongly/27% somewhat) that ‘the Liberal Party is ready again to govern Canada’. However, 45% ‘agree’ (12% strongly/33% …
Pathetic, awful liars. Recall the liars.
The non conformer's Canadian Weblog 
You must be logged in to post a comment.