"I'm not in favor of abolishing the government. I just want to shrink it down to the size where we can drown it in the bathtub."
Mr. Norquist is a long time US'ian Republican operative going all the way back to the days when he helped Oliver North raised the funds to supply arms to the Contras.
Norquist is also the person most responsible for pushing the Republican mantra of tax cuts and austerity designed to shift government resources from the public to the private realm.
This is a doctrine that has spread throughout the Western world as a tsunami of so-called public-private partnerships in which the public takes on all the risk and private companies rake in all the profit, often with cronies standing just off stage as they fill their boots.
But what does that have to do with current day Saskatchewan?
Well, it turns out that the province has a real problem with surgical backlogs.
As you might expect, a lot of that is due to the shifting of resources away from elective surgeries, especially knee and hip replacements, during COVID times.
However, after getting to a really good place in 2015, backlogs in Saskatchewan have been increasing steadily since 2016:
Link
And what happened back then?
Well, in 2016 Premier Brad Wall signalled that huge cuts in government spending were coming before he unveiled a budget of extreme austerity in early 2017.
Mr. Wall promptly quit and Scott Moe became the premier that oversaw all the bathtub drowning to come.
So...
How does Mr. Moe plan to deal the backlog program that he and his helped generate over the last six years?
I think you already know the answer to that one:
Saskatchewan’s government plans to hire a private company to help clear a backlog of surgeries that ballooned during the COVID-19 pandemic.
The Ministry of Health confirmed it’s in talks with the Saskatchewan Health Authority on hiring a new third-party provider, days after Premier Scott Moe hinted the government wants to pay a private company to perform procedures such as hip and knee replacements for people on the long public waiting list...
{snip}
...Moe alluded to an “active” formal procurement offer for such a service. A government spokesman confirmed the government has actually yet to launch such a bid and said Moe was referring to a different, less-formal document. The Ministry of Health confirmed that a formal procurement offer is coming this summer...
{snip}
...The province already has an agreement with Calgary-based Surgical Centres Inc., which performs cataract, ear, nose, throat and other surgeries at facilities in Regina and Saskatoon. The SHA paid that company more than $10 million in 2021, according to public accounts.
The company has hired a consulting firm to lobby Saskatchewan’s government with a stated goal of “work(ing) with the Ministry of Health to assist in the surgical backlog.”
Kevin Doherty, a former Sask. Party cabinet minister who currently works for Prairie Sky Strategies in Alberta, registered as a lobbyist for SCI last Friday...
{snip}
...The government has indicated it’s interested in a dedicated private facility for orthopaedic surgeries like hip and knee replacements, which make up a disproportionate share of the more than 35,000 surgeries on the waiting list as of late April...
It's all there...Austerity that cripples the public system which justifies the need to go private aided by cronyism followed by a guaranteed market share for the favoured saviour(s) with little or no risk.
A sweet deal, indeed, for the chosen few that, in the end, is doomed to go sour for everyone else.
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The piece quoted from above is really an excellent one, with a sharp-eyed look at the issue from all angles, by Zak Vescera in the Saskatoon StarPhoenix.
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2 comments:
Creeping anisocialiam, as in further fencing in of the commons, and it seems a general phenom in many parts of our fair land, including right here in the land of rampant incursions of Telus and a government that can't seem to find a model to accommodate primary care providers. Strange that we can't seem to leverage a system of community clinics, but we have yet another Pattison Pavilion in the new edifice in Burnaby and constant hands out for lotteries and flat out donations to support services that might be better supported by a more rational scheme of both collecting and spending tax dollars. Doug Ford's re-election does not bode well for the overall Canadian body politic and looks something like a harbinger of a coming Horgan/Falcon tilt where there can be no wins for most voters. The Narwhal sent me a missive this morning that speaks of hope being hard work, and it seems stiffening as time goes on. Here is a link to one the source articles: https://theintercept.com/2021/03/17/intercepted-mariame-kaba-abolitionist-organizing/?utm_campaign=theintercept&utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=social&utm_source=The+Narwhal&utm_campaign=6f471088f0-June+4+2022+—+election+newsletter+members&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_f6a05fddb8-6f471088f0-108490491
Let’s just call it sabotage.
The real questions are: at what point do these incremental privatizations offend the Canada Health Act? And at what point do such breaches of public duty and trust become indictable?
I’m afraid we become more permanently disappointed the more blatant breaches of trust and offences to federal and constitutional law are not prosecuted. We had the corrupt sale of publicly-owned BC Rail—but the prosecution was incomplete, apparently by design.
Somewhat more difficult to prove (Campbell got more careful) are the sabotages of publicly-owned BC Ferries and BC Hydro. The BC Liberals even sabotaged our ability to see fact: it’s astounding how they got so many citizens to believe—still, to this day—that BC Ferry Services Inc (or whatever the Monsanto-like camouflaging calls itself now) is privatized or partly privatized: it is not, both the fleet, faculties, and the ‘private-like’ service contractor are 100% publicly owned—we just can’t see the books, as if it isn’t our own company, as if there’s something to hide. How much more blatant does it get?
The BC Liberals quite openly planned to privatize BC Hydro until Gordo’s hero Mike Harris and his Ontario conservative government was wiped out at the polls for attempting a whole-hog privatization of Ontario Hydro—might be one of the biggest, most egregious breaches of public trust in Canada since bad-faith treaties, de facto expropriations, disenfranchisement, and cultural genocide of British North America’s—thence Canada’s—indigenous nations. Independent Power Producing crony friends of the BC Liberal government were touted as environmentally appropriate, and prudently economical for BC Hydro when, in fact, IPPs are —and cannot be otherwise—a parasite that can only hurt the venerable public enterprise. The prosecutorial case is thin (the scheme was masterfully perpetrated and armoured by legislation which forces BC Hydro to buy exorbitant IPP electrify at many times the cost it can make it itself, but encumbers the lousy deal for the province with contractual law), and it’s also hard to prove that stashing general debt (to claim balanced budgets) into BC Hydro, misinforming citizen-owners of projected power requirements and rationalizing the dubiously feasible Site-C Dam with false information are really co-ordinated to bankrupt BC Hydro —a breach of public trust if ever there was one—presumably to sell it off at pennies on the dollar to favoured friends—that they are, in aggregate, intended to bankrupt BC Hydro.
Or are they simply unrelated coincidences? What are the odds? Doesn’t at least civil law specialize in probabilities?
The same can be said about BC Ferries, but less dramatically, accounting for its relatively small size compared to BC’s premier public enterprise—our giant electricity monopoly which used to pay a several-hundred million-dollar dividend to public coffers while providing residents, businesses and industry power at about one-third the average North American cost—the difference being the privatizers’ desire (effectively tripling consumer electricity rates on false pretences).
Forgive me, but isn’t the court of law specifically designed to sort out forensic evasion and judge whether these sabotages are, in fact, breaches of public trust that somebody has to be held accountable for?
Is it just too big? Is that a reason to allow this perfidy?
The other remedy is, naturally, throwing these economic charlatans out—like we did in BC in 2017. Like Alberta did in 2015 and, because the reunited Conservative party proved such a disaster, the NDP will probably become government again. Like Canada did in 2015. But one of the things I would dearly love these clean-up-the-mess governments to do, as wel,l is make an example of the most easily proved and convicted breaches so we don’t get whipsawed every time voters are fooled into electing neo-right governments
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