HomeMy WebLinkAboutThe Citizen, 2003-04-23, Page 5THE CITIZEN, WEDNESDAY, APRIL 23, 2003. PAGE 5.
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Heroes are
Heroes come in different shapes and
sizes and they come to us by different
delivery systems.
Mario Lemieux arrives on skates. Rick
Hanson rolls up in a wheelchair. Roberta
Bondar shows up with an astronaut helmet
under her arm. Silken Lauman glides to the
dock in a sleek racing shell, her hands on the
oars.
Then there’s Mary Helen Moes. She appears
in your e-mail inbox and wants to know what
you’re going to do to help her Emergency
Paediatric Campaign.
She’s never played in the NHL and doesn’t
use a wheelchair. She’s not an Olympic celeb
like Silken, nor has she orbited the planet like
Roberta.
She’s a shy suburban housewife with three
kids and a dog. She’s a different kind of hero.
Mary Helen Moes lives in Peterborough,
Ontario. She grew up in the area along with
five other kids.
One of whom almost didn’t. Twenty years
ago, her brother was bom with only one-
quarter of a kidney and a blocked bladder.
Medical technology being what it is, the boy
was saved and eventually grew to be a healthy
adult.
And Canada’s tattered and threadbare health
care system being what it is, Mary Helen
Moes’ parents were ruined in the process. It
wasn’t the cost of the surgeries that did them in
- that was covered. No, it was the unexpected
expenses.
The medical expertise was far away, in
Toronto. The countless trips to the city and
long recuperations in hospitals meant
expensive stays in city hotels and pricey
restaurant meals, not to mention precious time
away from a working dairy operation.
Mary Helen’s brother needed dozens of
operations. The experience sucked up every
penny the family had saved — and all they
could borrow.
Eves seems to have lost his road map
Premier Ernie Eves keeps asking people
to follow him, but one problem is they
have no idea where he is going.
They also must be beginning to wonder if the
Progressive Conservative premier knows
himself. His latest appeal to the electorate was
to help him “stay the course.”
But Eves has steered left and right,
detoured, zigzagged and reversed - his course
is about as straight and easy to discern as the
tracks around the average Ontario lake.
Eves started by claiming he would be more
moderate than his far-right predecessor, Mike
Harris, and postponed tax cuts so he could
spend more on weakened services.
Eves dropped plans to sell the provincially-
owned hydro transmission network and allow
the cost of hydro to rise and fall with the
market, saying he was more concerned
whether consumers could pay.
Eves delayed phasing in tax credits to
parents who send their children to private
schools, which helps mostly the better-off and
erodes public schools.
Eves spoke politely to labour unions, which
Harris never did. Eves chatted to striking civil
servants picketing a government building and
phoned their union to help settle the strike,
although he did have the incentive he was
running to win back a seat in the legislature at
the time.
Eves said he believed in listening to
divergent opinions including those of union
leaders and appointed a labour minister, Brad
Clark, who said Eves had assigned him to
make peace with the labor movement.
Eves also claimed he always had been a
made, not born
Arthur
Black
By the time Mary Helen’s brother was eight
years old and healthy, his parents had lost their
dairy farm.
Watching ones parents go through an ordeal
like that could crush a person, shatter their
will.
Or not.
Mary Helen Moes pretty much put the
nightmare behind her until, watching Oprah
one day, she learned of a program in the States
that helped American parents of children
facing extended hospital stays.
A bell went off in the back of her head. She
remembered what it was like, watching the
family cows being loaded onto a truck and
shipped away. She wondered if there was any
comparable program in her area to help out
parents of stricken kids.
She made a few phone calls. There wasn’t.
She asked healtlj care experts if they could use
such a program.
Sure could.
Nobody talks about it much, but if you add
up all the expenses parents or guardians face
when they have to stay with ill children who
are being treated at centres away from home -
the meals, the accommodation, the gas, the
babysitters, not to mention the lost wages - it
comes to about $10,000 dollars over three
months.
Ronald McDonald House in Toronto helps
people in need - but even they ding you $20 a
night. That’s 150 bucks a week.
And you can’t wave your health card to
make it go away.
Eric
Dowd
From
Queen’s Park
pragmatist close to the political centre and had
a lot in common with William Davis, premier
from 1971-85 and the most moderate Tory of
recent decades.
But Eves’s meandering toward the left did
not lift him in the polls as he hoped and he is
now off in a different direction.
Eves has resumed cuts in income tax that
will help particularly the better-off. He will
give a tax credit to over-65s, homeowners and
renters, that will reimburse them for the part of
their property tax they pay for education, and
those in more expensive homes will receive
most.
He has restored phasing-in tax credits to
parents who choose to send their children to
private schools and weaken the public school
system.
Eves says he is considering permitting
homeowners to deduct part of their mortgage
interest costs from provincial taxes, which
would help the better-off who already own
homes, and banning strikes by teachers, a
confrontation even Harris, despite his many
criticisms of teachers, shied from.
Eves also is back knocking unions. He
classed unions as a special interest group other
So Mary Helen Moes decided to create what
she called The Emergency Paediatric
Campaign. She made the rounds of local
businesses, trying to drum up money. She
called up radio talk shows. She wangled
interviews with local newspapers.
Understand that Mary Helen Moes had no
experience at any of this. She knew from
diddly about public relations, fundraising,
health-service liaison or any of the nuances of
running a sophisticated public service.
She just did it.
One mother, Stacey Bondy, remembers what
it was like when her newborn son came into
the world with five holes in his heart.
“He didn’t come home for a month,” she
recalls.
Stacey and her mother stayed at the hospital
virtually day and night. “It makes you crazy”
she says.
Then someone told her about the EPC. The
Bondys phoned to see if they qualified for
help.
“Mrs. Moes just came right up to the room
after his surgery and handed us money” says
Stacey.
She also brought advice and encouragement.
She knew what Stacey was going through.
She’d been there.
So far, the campaign has helped more than
70 families facing the nightmare of nursing a
child through a critical illness in faraway
hospitals. And it’s all thanks to one woman
who didn’t want other families to go through
what her family suffered.
Funny thing about heroes — they’re not
always larger than life. Sometimes they look
just like your next door neighbour. Like Mary
Helen Moes.
Will Rogers once said: “We can’t all be
heroes. Somebody has to sit on the curb and
clap as they go by.”
Put your hands together for Mary Helen
Moes.
citizens have to beware. He claimed unions
support the Liberals because they feel they
could control a Liberal government, but know
a Tory government will not allow them to
domineer.
Trying to split teachers from their unions, he
said he never equates teachers with the union
heads who claim to speak for them.
But despite his new drive to the right there is
no sign Eves is rising in popularity and he now
has mailed a survey to residents asking them
where he should go next.
Voters usually have chosen leaders who had
a clear view of where they wanted to go. Harris
had an image of never having the slightest
doubt.
Bob Rae, the New Democrat premier before
Harris, had policies well-established and all
written down as a result of votes at conventions
-just turn the pages and you would find them.
Liberal David Peterson exuded change,
although he never kept the promise to allow
beer to be sold in comer stores that most
exemplified this, and Davis could be relied on
always to be moderate, not switching from one
extreme to the other.
But Eves with his twisting and turning has
the most indistinct image of any premier m
memory. He looks like a motorist who.has lost
his road map and this does not encourage
others to fall in behind him.
Final Thought
The price of greatness is responsibility.
- Winston Churchill
Bonnie
The short of it
Inhale spring
What a day last Tuesday was. The
warmth, the sunshine, all there to be
soaked up, to soothe our chilled
souls and revive our dozing spirits.
It’s no surprise to anyone by now when 1
sing the praises of spring. The dirge I chanted
throughout that miserable winter made my
view on that particular season well-known.
But, this ode to spring is by no means a solo
I perform. There’s a whole chorus of folk
rejoicing with me. Even the nasty downturn
things took at the end of last week, failed to
flatten our enthusiasm. We had been given the
hint of spring’s promise and it would be
enough to hold us for awhile at least.
Certainly, such enthusiasm is warranted.
Everything about spring is cheery, from the
return of our bird friends, to the brightening
colours, the lengthening days. Even winter
lovers surely can’t begrudge this awakening.
However, what I also always notice about
spring is its inspiration, not just for pleasure,
but work. Balmy breezes beckon us outdoors.
Strengthening sunlight summons us to tasks at
hand. Springtime is no time to sit inside.
So, with a vengeance that afternoon 1 went
to work indoors, opening windows, washing
fabrics to hang on the line. I scrubbed, scoured
and scraped, never sitting down until it was
time to prepare supper, barbecue of course,
which was done book in one hand, wineglass
in the other, for my time to savour Mother
Nature’s rebirth.
Even my dinner dishes, a job I must get
to with obsessive compulsion almost
immediately after the last swallow, were left in
favour of some yard work. (Though I will
admit my approach by this point was neither
quality nor quantity.)
All around my husband and I, people were
doing the same. As always, the warming
weather inspired.
Now some might say that so does a
snowstorm. Raking is a must-do just as
shovelling is. But onerous labour that would
have me grumbling in winter, I approach in
spring with a level of cheerfulness I don t care
much for the job, but at least this lime of year
it’s great to be outside.
As we worked a passer-by commented on
how everyone she had met that day was
smiling. I thought back to a conversation I had
had recently, during which I had mentioned
how good the previous week had been - then
remembered that it, like any other, had had its
share of unpleasantness and trials. The
interesting thing was that with the arrival of
sunshine and spring, these matters were
appropriately labelled as inconsequential in
the big scheme of things. Things which would
have seemed insurmountable just months ago
were now trivialities. And the serious were not
given greater weight than they deserved.
Oh, I know that come summer, we will begin
to hear our first discords Our conversations
will gradually become less chipper as certain
topics insinuate themselves into our lives. We
will most assuredly whine about mosquitoes,
the heat, the humidity.
So for now it’s time to enjoy ourselves as we
continue to shake off the last vestiges of
winter. Burrow into those closets and drawers
and dig out the spring clothes. Open the
windows and let the outdoor freshness in and
the indoor staleness out. Give those windows a
scrub and put some sparkle in your life. Rake
the green into your lawn and watch tiny
blooms burst from your flowerbeds.
And don’t forget to take a deep breath and
inhale spring. It’s good for the soul.
J