Editor:
The repetitive messages from those opposed to the new seniors’ residential facility are like prayers to the Patron Saint of Lost Causes. The latest, from the Sunshine Coast Labour Council (“We feel betrayed,” April 27), gets a bit closer to the truth. This is about union politics not public health care. Their campaign has done real harm in our community. With the collaboration of the dogmatic, obstructionist Sechelt council, they’ve delayed the new facility for more than a year. Seniors who should be in the expanded facility will wait another year under deteriorating living conditions while their families struggle to provide care they are not equipped to give.
Let’s dispel some fallacies. The facility is a residence, not a hospital. Residents pay to live there, adjusted for income. They receive assistance in day-to-day living as well as medical care; only some of that is publicly funded. There is no reason these residential facilities need to be publicly owned.
Second, public health care is public because it is publicly funded, not because care is provided in a publicly owned facility. Most health care services, including physician care, are provided by for-profit businesses. The only government-owned facilities are hospitals and they are the biggest problem. Amongst other things, they don’t provide enough operating theatre time to surgeons. That’s the single biggest reason why Canada has the longest wait times for surgery in the developed world. And the hospitals run the emergency rooms where, again, we wait far too long for emergency care.
There’s no inherent virtue or righteousness in a government-owned facility. It just perpetuates the discredited economic and management models that inflicted so much misery on Eastern Europe for half a century.
It’s the public sector unions, not the community, who benefit from having publicly owned facilities. I see no merit in that.
Keith Maxwell, Sechelt
