HomeMy WebLinkAboutThe Citizen, 2011-04-28, Page 12PAGE 12. THE CITIZEN, THURSDAY, APRIL 28, 2011.
Continued from page 11
United States.
Over five million Canadians are
without a family doctor and yet
Ottawa continues to offer half-
measures.
I’ve talked to many people in
Huron-Bruce who are without a
doctor and have been for some time.
Not having a family doctor means
that illnesses can go undetected too
long and early actions cannot be
taken to deal with those illnesses.
Not only does this mean people
become sicker than they need to be,
but it costs us all more. We must
deal with the doctor shortage.
The Canadian Health Accord is
coming due for re-negotiation in
2014. Jack Layton is the person we
want and need as Prime Minister to
be at the head of those negotiations.
A new 10-year NDP accord will
have a clear commitment to public
health care that reduces creeping
privatization that costs you more and
reduces your service; makes
progress on primary care; takes
appropriate steps to replace fee-for-
service delivery; takes first steps to
reduce the costs of prescription
medicines for Canadians, employers
and governments; extends coverage
to out-of-hospital services like home
care and long-term care.
The NDP will also train and hire
1,200 new doctors and 6,000 nurses
to re-build the neglect healthcare has
received under successive Liberal
and Conservative governments. In
collaboration with the provinces and
territories, we will establish
programs aimed at recruiting and
supporting rural and low-income
medical students so they can return
home to practice and help keep their
communities healthy.
ES: Maintaining funding for
health care is essential to keeping it
public and accessible. We will stand
against any efforts to privatize our
system and we firmly believe the
five criteria of the Canadian Health
Act, public administration,
comprehensiveness, universality,
portability and accessibility are non-
negotiable.
But funding for our hospitals is
only one half of the health equation.
We must also work to make our
health care system more prevention-
focused. The Green Party would
work in co-operation with the
provinces, territories, and
indigenous governments to ensure
stable and increased funding for
preventative health programs. We
would also work to drastically
reduce the usage of chemicals
known to have a significant risk of
human cancer, immuno-suppression,
and endo-crine disruption.
DV: Health care is a provincial
responsibility, and for the federal
government meddling would just be
duplication and that is wasting tax
dollars.
The only thing the federal
government should do is ensure that
every Canadian is treated the same
by their respective provincial
governments.
5. The largest economic driver in
Huron-Bruce is agriculture. In
recent years, factors such as the
higher Canadian dollar have made
it difficult for our farmers to
compete internationally. Diseases
like H1N1 and BSE have put
livestock farmers in a financial hole.
What will your government do to
make sure agriculture thrives in
Huron-Bruce?
BL: Over the past five years we
have worked hard for farmers by
delivering the right tools and
programs to help farm families deal
with environmental challenges and
uncertainties.
We have helped to secure the
health and integrity of Canada’s
food supply. We have strengthened
opportunities and lowering the cost
of doing business for Canadian
farmers here at home, and we have
worked hard to expand markets for
farmers by putting more of Canada’s
food and agri-food products on
tables around the world.
We have worked to secure free
trade agreements with the EFTA
(Switzerland/Liechtenstein/Iceland/
Norway), Panama, Peru, Columbia
and Jordan. The Canada-European
Union and Canada-India agreements
will provide tariff-free access to
nearly two billion people. This will
also allow Canadian products to be
sold to these markets at competitive
prices. We are also currently
working to negotiate free trade
agreements with many additional
trading partners across the world.
While there is always more work
to be done to ensure that Canada’s
farm families are getting the tools
and the support they need to keep
putting food on the nation’s tables
and driving the economy forward,
the Harper government is proud that
we are continuing to deliver real
results for Canada’s farm families.
CB: See answer to question one.
GR: When the original Risk
Management Program was
introduced in Ontario, I was the first
Ontario politician to publicly
endorse it and work for its
implementation. My leadership
pulled other candidates and parties
in the province to support its
implementation.
That leadership continued when
in my role as the Ontario head of the
National Farmers Union (NFU) I
lobbied government, attended and
spoke at rallies and educated urban
MPs and MPPs on the program so
they could begin to understand the
foundation it would create for
income stability for Ontario’s
farmers.
If there was federal leadership on
this issue, instead of the excuses of
the current government, it could be
achieved. For those farmers who
want a Risk Management Program,
that includes the needed federal
portion of funding, the first step is to
defeat Stephen Harper in Huron-
Bruce and elect someone who has a
longstanding and public track record
of having farmers’ backs and who
has a history of never giving up for
farmers.
But Risk Management is only the
first step. We need a government that
will enforce the rules we already
have and stop food coming across
our border that does not meet our
health, food safety, environmental
and labour standards. As an
example, we continue to allow
apples from China that are grown
with a known carcinogen that has
been banned in this country.
Meanwhile we are paying apple
growers to rip out their trees because
they can’t compete against these
imported apples. It makes no sense.
I have been to Ottawa on behalf of
farmers and have spoken in front of
a number of Parliamentary
committees on this issue, yet the
government refuses to do anything.
Meanwhile Canada’s farmers have
to take off-farm jobs just to get by.
We have lost 80,000 farmers in
Canada in the last decade. In Ontario
alone, we have lost 62 per cent of
our farmers under age 35 in the last
two decades and that loss is
accelerating. We are approaching a
demographic crisis that will threaten
our very ability to feed ourselves,
never mind the devastation it causes
to our local communities.
Without young farmers to shop in
our local stores and send their kids to
our local schools, our communities
will continue to struggle.
Jack Layton has a plan that starts
with a national food strategy. Other
parties are trying to copy this plan,
but I can tell you as a farmer and the
former head of a farm organization
that the NDP plan is the most
comprehensive and the most likely
to achieve results that will get to the
farm gate. We will also streamline
Agri-stability to make it more
affordable, understandable and
predictable. And we will make
family life better by ensuring
flexible childcare, mentoring
programs for young farmers and
helping with succession planning.
And we’ll take steps so that your
family can actually purchase local
food grown by your neighbours.
My record of working in Ottawa
and across Canada for farmers is
long and it is clear and I won’t give
up until the job is done.
ES: For far too long, agricultural
policy has been focused on the
consolidation of farming into fewer
and fewer “mega-farms” and favours
large, cheap cash crops grown with
ridiculous amounts of fertilizers and
pesticides. Most people no longer
know who grew, harvested and
processed the food that they eat
every day and that needs to change;
our current method of food
production needs to re-localize.
I am totally supportive of getting
more value-added industry related to
food (and other goods) back into the
area; though there is some
infrastructure such as train system
that makes areas much more suitable
for said industry to set up.
Additionally, enabling local areas
without industrial-scale agriculture
to develop area-specific food safety
regulations meeting national
standards without placing undue
financial burdens on local farmers
and food processors is another goal
that would make agriculture a more
viable occupation. Encouraging and
supporting the consumption of
locally-grown food by promoting
adequate shelf space in grocery
chains for products from local farms
and local food processors is another
important part of developing and
sustaining local agriculture.
DV: I believe in free enterprise. I
Agriculture, health care on candidates’ lists
Ben Lobb
Conservative
Dennis Valenta
Independent
Eric Shelley
Green Party
Charlie Bagnato
Liberal
Grant Robertson
New Democratic Party
I know it’s tempting fate but I
think spring is finally here.
Hopefully we can now begin to
interact with our environment
without the aid of a snow shovel.
Last weekend saw people out
conducting that age old rite of spring
– cleaning up a winter’s worth of
garbage from their lawn. The old
leaves that should have been
composted, the pop tins that should
have been recycled, the cardboard
that should have been put in the bin
up the street.
This got me to wondering how
much we really honour the ideal of
environmental protection and how
much we simply pay lip service to
the idea.
I could sort through plenty of
statistics about recycling or perhaps
count the number of low flow toilets
per thousand of population to get an
answer. But the first is probably
fueled by the cost of bag tags and the
latter didn’t seem very practical. A
poll might be a possibility but I’m
too cheap to pay for one. Besides, if
you look at the news media you
could be forgiven for believing that
every pollster on the planet is
working for a Canadian political
party, newspaper, or television
station at the moment.
With polls and statistics
eliminated, I decided to go with that
font of reliable knowledge –
television advertising, more
particularly televised motor vehicle
advertising. Besides helping to
answer my question it gave me
something to do between periods of
playoff hockey played by teams in
which, I have very little real interest.
This approach is not as strange as
you might think. Advertisers spend
millions trying to determine what
their customers are thinking and
what motivates them to buy one
product over another. What they
choose to emphasize is a pretty good
indication of the public’s state of
mind, and by that measure we seem
to be rather conflicted.
One of the most prominent
advertisements this spring is for a
plug-in hybrid electric car. It
emphasizes both the environmental
and financial aspects of a car that has
a combined city/country rating in the
60 mile-per-gallon range. However,
the observer could be forgiven for
concluding that the price of gas is
at least as important as the lack
of emissions when enumerating
the reasons for buying the v
ehicle.
On the other hand we have the
sarcastically-voiced pitchman letting
you know that only a wimp would
buy any pickup truck but the one he
is flogging, with its humongous
engine equipped with a conveniently
environmentally-sensitive name.
I won’t even discuss the print
advertisement I saw for a car with
another environmentally-sensitive
name conveniently added to its 470
horsepower engine. Does the world
really need a 470 horsepower street
car?
The one thing that is really
interesting about vehicle
advertisements on television is the
number of times advertisers deliver
the mixed message that they have
made it more powerful and it gets
better gas mileage. The fact that it
would get even better mileage if they
hadn’t made it more powerful
doesn’t tend to carry much weight.
Like politicians who promise better
services and lower taxes, car
manufacturers know we still want to
have everything without paying the
price.
Perhaps all the advertisements are
saying with certainty is that our love
affair with the automobile has made
us schizophrenic.
If that upsets you, then I guess you
can take the advice of another major
sponsor of playoff hockey –
everything looks better through a
beer.
The Forest & The Trees
By David Blaney
A highly personal and idiosyncratic commentary on whether we are
going to hell in an environmental handcart
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