Democracy Gone Astray

Democracy, being a human construct, needs to be thought of as directionality rather than an object. As such, to understand it requires not so much a description of existing structures and/or other related phenomena but a declaration of intentionality.
This blog aims at creating labeled lists of published infringements of such intentionality, of points in time where democracy strays from its intended directionality. In addition to outright infringements, this blog also collects important contemporary information and/or discussions that impact our socio-political landscape.

All the posts here were published in the electronic media – main-stream as well as fringe, and maintain links to the original texts.

[NOTE: Due to changes I haven't caught on time in the blogging software, all of the 'Original Article' links were nullified between September 11, 2012 and December 11, 2012. My apologies.]

Tuesday, August 23, 2011

Ford likely to accept nurses this time

Councillor Doug Ford signalled Tuesday that Mayor Rob Ford will accept a second provincial offer to pay for new public health nurses even though he rejected the first.

In a motion he presented at a meeting of council’s budget committee, Doug Ford endorsed the hiring of three new nurses on the condition that the city eliminate their jobs if provincial funding ever expires.

The motion was an implicit acknowledgment that his brother made a mistake in opposing the hiring of two new nurses in June. Rob Ford had justified that decision by arguing that the city would eventually have to pay the nurses’ salaries.

Health board chair John Filion and others said Ford was wrong. Regardless, Ford could have addressed his concern with a motion like Doug Ford’s rather than rejecting the nurses outright.

“I think a motion like this would have been probably more helpful,” budget chief Mike Del Grande said after the meeting.

Del Grande said the public outcry over the rejection of the first offer, and the criticism of the mayor from Premier Dalton McGuinty’s health minister, factored into the reversal. He suggested that Rob Ford had made a political miscalculation when he angered McGuinty’s government.

“I think if one is politically astute, when one is asking maybe for other things in the future, that you’d want to be on more friendly terms with the province,” Del Grande said.

Doug Ford declined to speak with reporters after the meeting as he walked briskly away with Rob Ford’s press secretary, Adrienne Batra. Batra did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The three nurses, which will cost the province $255,000 this year, will be allocated to the city’s understaffed fight against bedbugs. Dr. David McKeown, the city’s top health official, said the nurses are badly needed.

“The people who have the most severe infestations, whose infestations are causing the biggest problem, particularly in multi-unit dwellings, are people who have mental health problems, disabilities, substance abuse problems, and aren’t able to deal with the infestations themselves,” McKeown said at the meeting.

“What the nurses do is clinically assess those issues, gain trust and form relationships with the individuals, so they can actually play some role in dealing with the infestation, and try and deal with the underlying problem that leads to the infestation in the first place.”

Doug Ford appeared unconvinced. “To get down to the root of the problem, wouldn’t we want to hire more exterminators than nurses? Exterminators get rid of these bedbugs,” he told McKeown.

The offer of the three nurses will now be contemplated by Rob Ford’s executive committee, which rejected the province’s first offer, of two nurses, after the budget committee approved it. Doug Ford’s specific endorsement of the second offer at the budget committee likely indicates that Rob Ford will also support it; if he does, it will certainly be approved by council.

The two nurses would have worked with new immigrants on disease prevention and to connect residents of a poor neighbourhood with health services. Filion said he will now attempt to come up with a procedural tactic to get council to approve their hiring after all.

He said the mayor had seemed to realize that he would have faced a losing battle if he had tried to reject the second provincial offer.

“I’m guessing they would have had a mutiny of councillors on the bedbugs issue, because virtually every councillor has a bedbug problem in their ward, many of them severe bedbug problems. So it was politically unsustainable for them to oppose the bedbug nurses,” Filion said.

“But then that just blows away their rationale – blows away their spin; they didn’t have any rationale – for not hiring the other two. So I’ll certainly be bringing that back again.”

Origin
Source: Health Zone (Toronto Star) 

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