How to Improve Health Care

 

My remarks from a recent all-candidates meeting in Beaches-East York.

The question was what I and New Blue would do for health care in the province.

First and immediately, we need to rehire all the health care professionals laid off because of their vaccination status. It is not a good idea to fire doctors and nurses in the middle of a pandemic. 

And it is not following science to insist that health professionals are not qualified to make their own health decisions. We should be listening to them, not firing them.

We have known since at least September that vaccines do not prevent people from getting COVID. They only reduce symptoms. We cannot achieve herd immunity through vaccination. 

There are only two possibilities here. If vaccines work, there is no need to care whether someone else get vaccinated. You’re vaccinated, and you’re safe.

But if vaccines do not work, there is no case for forcing others to get one.

Vaccination is a personal choice.

New Blue wants an end to all vaccine mandates. It wants to prevent vaccine passports. Both are violations of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. Brian Peckford, one of the authors of the charter, is suing the government now over this.

There are other steps we could take to ease the shortage of workers in health care and in long term care. 

There are many dedicated, well-trained nurses and medical technicians in the Philippines. They all speak good English. Back in Saudi Arabia, Filipino nurses and medical staff saved my life when I came down with encephalomyelitis. Something most people my age do not survive.

But they all wanted to come to Canada. 

We need to actively recruit them, and make that easier, by more readily accepting foreign credentials and qualifications.

This is a general problem for immigrants. We bring them in, then won’t let them make a living. 

Again, the problem is red tape. The arbitrary restrictions we now have on foreign professionals is a cartel in restraint of trade.

You asked specifically about mental health. Everyone is alarmed by the opioid crisis.

Mental health is a special concern of mine. 

I once served as the assistant director of The Gathering Spot at Walmer Road Baptist Church, a multifaith outreach to discharged psychiatric patients. 

I was on the Board of Directors of Poverello Charities, which ran a drop-in centre and safe group homes for the mentally ill. 

I was Toronto organizer for Grow International, a faith-based community mental health movement.

I have too much to say about the matter for this brief meeting.

We can’t just throw money at mental health. What we are doing currently is not working. Current psychiatry essentially declares all mental health problems incurable. We’ll just give them safe injection sites, and let them kill themselves. Or we’ll actively kill them, through assisted suicide.

Two centuries ago, we had cure rates of 80 or 90 percent. High cure rates are still found in parts of the Third World.

We are not curing these people, perhaps, because there is no money in it. 

We need to get sufferers out of the city, to a place where they are not anonymous. Mental illness comes from a lack of social supports.

We need, frankly, to evangelize. What do you think that was all about in the New Testament, that healing of demoniacs and driving out devils? Mental illness comes from a lack of meaning in life.

The government can fund faith-based initiatives, so long as it does not play favourites. The Canadian constitution does not recognize any wall of separation between church and state.

And we need to encourage mutual aid and community, such as we see in AA. I am encouraged to have encountered an AA meeting in progress in this church basement.

Safe injection sites are not an answer. Would you treat alcoholism by giving out free booze?

Here again, Critical Theory or postmodernism or cultural Marxism is against us. It alienates us from our neighbours and strips our lives of meaning.

The way to prevent mental illness is to strengthen the family, strengthen religion, and strengthen community.