One of the many things I have never questioned about politics as they’re practiced in Saskatchewan has been the need for farmers’ voices, particularly those who choose to practice their art within a small but family-based enterprise, is for these entrepreneurs to have a voice in government.
Moreover, the voice must be provided the courtesy of such individuals occasionally waxing nostalgically as to the hardship of their toil, so that the general public actually understands how difficult a task it is for them to come to an agreement with Nature to assure there is food on the table, a task which no one who’s never tried to work a garden in their back yard will never in their lifetime understand.
For the past fifteen years or more, the Saskatchewan Party has taken ownership of that voice. They have done so by taking full advantage of the suffering inflicted by cutbacks and economic restructuring as the Romanow government attempted to resurrect the province’s economy after the Devine Comedy’s governance. Were it not for the fact that the delivery of health care and educational services to rural Saskatchewan were the priorities driving this period of realignment of services, voters may well have accepted the NDP’s cryptic explanation of blaming the procedure upon Devine’s neglect of these tasks and stayed loyal to the NDP. However, when educational reform led to the elimination of numerous small school boards and it became necessary for hard decisions to be made with respect to which schools would have to be closed, the government, rather than laying that task at the feet of newly elected school board trustees, decided to take the heat for making these choices, again without providing the public their reason for making such choices.
Seeing that weakness in their message, the Saskatchewan Party began their campaign to further denigrate the NDP agenda, combining half truths with the pain and suffering within communities from the government having to rebalance our provincial economy to produce a propaganda epidemic that only further agitated voter feelings towards an NDP that really hadn’t the time to tell the whole story as to “why” things had to happen the way they were.
Health care became the SP’s favourite target. Suddenly a local clinic, having been built earlier through the community’s strong desire to have health care close and available to their families, were regaled with the “horror stories” of their former “hospitals” having been subjectively closed by the NDP, only to be reopened and now also providing supplemental government programs such as mental health care or senior citizen home aid, only then to receive the downgrading of their previous “hospital” designation to one of “clinic”.
In all, the Saskatchewan Party labeled some 50 communities with having been plagued by this affliction. It never seemed to occur to voters that the reasons for having made such changes – laying off of kitchen staff, as an example, because there were no longer a large number of patients in the “hospital’s” beds, and a clinic 20 clicks down the road could handle any recently bedridden patients with minimal strain on family being able to visit the infirm.
That the Sask Party during this period of their political reign may now be criticized for never having bothered with these same 50 communities to reverse the “trauma” unleashed upon these small rural setting might be a good rejoinder to parry the same blithering nonsense they have propagated over the past fifteen years; however, the weight of any Official Opposition’s rebuke would be underwhelming, especially if the public, particularly in rural Saskatchewan, were made aware of the forces driving the need for reform of health care funding in the very near future.
By now the public is all too aware that small rural hospital outlets cannot afford to employ highly skilled professional specialists such as endocrinologists or paediatric heart surgeons – or child psychiatrists, for that matter, as Prince Albert is all too aware. Even so, their sudden realization to these facts were tempered by an almost ten year delay wherein Saskatchewan’s doctors, responding to the need for reorganization provided their own “fix” to the negativity generated by the Sask Party in denigrating the seeming “disappearance” of hospitals by establishing physician teams that could function as intermediate surgical providers utilizing the “specialist” component of their G.P. training to reduce the workload on the province’s eight true hospital centres.
Were it not for the Shaunavon – Eastend – Climax area being able to utilize the surgical training and expertise of Eastend’s Dr. Anthony Price, or Loon Lake and Goodsoil benefiting from the orthopedic and anesthesiologic skills of Doctors Frank Scott and David Morton, many rural support systems would have collapsed much earlier than now.
What reform to health care practice now required is even more staggering and complicated than what the Romanow government faced in 1991. The federal component of the government, whether under Liberal or Conservative leadership, still treats health care as the newborn baby still screaming for breast milk mere minutes after nursing.
Here in Saskatchewan, we allow health care staff shortages to reach crisis mode before freaking out, relying on Third World nations to bail us out of crisis mode, as they have done to the Philippines in nurse recruitment. As for working with our people “resources”, especially those in the north, we have yet to even consider implementing newer training methodologies as are being tried (and working well) in northern Ontario.
Rural readers shouldn’t get upset at the manner in which I’ve described how the Saskatchewan Party has convinced rural Saskatchewan residents to believe that the NDP “destroyed” their local health care options, because that never happened. Our grandparents responded co-operatively in providing for a community need, but the Sask Party government, rather than committing monies to continue such reform, chose instead to concentrate on what they really wanted, that being for their supporters to benefit from the future exploitation of our natural resources and emerging “green” technologies they currently ridicule as being wasteful.
Even now, however, the Moe government is focusing upon policies that will next dupe rural voters into believing that the NDP’s progressive ideas in the areas of food sustainability, “job killing” regulation, land management and addressing climate change will restrain the province from becoming the economic powerhouse that it potentially could be. How this manoeuvre will eventually create permanent harm for our farming communities I will leave for next week’s column to address.
