PING!
Posted on 02/23/2006 10:27:49 AM PST by GMMAC
Diagnosis: Vous n'etes pas francais
Non-francophones turned away at Ontario clinic
Don Martin
National Post
Thursday, February 23, 2006
OTTAWA - Only in painfully correct Ontario could someone stagger into a health clinic, ask to see their family doctor and be turned away without so much as a hand placed on their forehead to check for a fever. Not because they didn't have an appointment. Not because they weren't sick. But because French wasn't their first language.
Cornwall is a small city perched on the northern shore of the St. Lawrence River near the Quebec border. It is officially and proudly bilingual with roughly a third of its population claiming francophone roots. But for the last 15 years, one linguistic solitude has enjoyed exclusive access to a trio of health clinics that has been denied to the other.
The three-unit Centre de Sante Communautaire de l'Estrie provides nutrition advice, pre-natal care, weight, stress and "foot" management, abortion counselling and mental health treatment amid all the usual services provided by family physicians.
But there's a catch. You need two pieces of paper to become a patient. An Ontario health insurance card AND a francophone name on a birth certificate.
Global TV's Hannah Boudreau found a Cornwall resident by the name of Shirley Ravary, who was feeling lousy a couple weeks ago and went searching for her regular doctor in the clinic.
When addressed by the receptionist in French, she delivered the same blank look I do when confronted by someone speaking Canada's other official language and stammered an apologetic reply in English. That was enough for the front desk to declare their services off limits to her kind. Without so much as her pulse being taken, she was told to find somewhere else -- where ailing anglophones were welcome.
But, but, BUT, Ravary protested in English, she wasn't feeling well and the doctor she hoped to see was her regular family physician. Her husband is a francophone, if that helps. It matters not, she was told. Perhaps Ravary should henceforth get sick on days when her doctor was working his English language shifts in another clinic.
The Canada Health Act doesn't appear to allow language to serve as a government-sanctioned barrier to treatment. It forces provinces to provide publicly administered health care under the sacred pillars of accessibility, portability, universality and comprehensiveness. Somehow, turning away sick people on the basis of language limitations must violate one of those provisions, if not the Hippocratic Oath for patient care doctors took upon graduation.
That's probably why local politicians have been pleading ignorance of the clinic as media coverage intensifies, even though it has been around since 1991.
But Ontario Health Minister George Smitherman declares such discrimination okeedokee with him. Presumably the federal health minister, Tony Clement, will not object either given that he also served as Ontario's health minister while the clinic was operating.
Strange, but I can find no similar provision in Quebec for the 25% of its population whose mother tongue is English. There are clinics and hospitals that bill themselves as bilingual or French only, but nothing exclusively English.
The Cornwall clinic's executive director, Marc Bisson, was sounding a bit weary of the controversy when we chatted this week. He patiently explained there are five Ontario clinics mandated and financed to serve francophone patients to the exclusion of all others and even those speaking the proper tongue require an appointment to see one of his three doctors.
It's just another specialty service that limits patients to a specific group, he argues. Ravary being turned away at his door is like a male trying to get treatment at a women's health clinic.
Sorry, Marc, bogus argument. Women have distinct health care needs that justify gender discrimination.
Last I looked, francophones are not a distinct biology. French blood isn't any bluer than English. A crise cardiaque is the same as a heart attack. And being a sick Canadian should mean never having to look elsewhere for a doctor when a docteur is in the house.
© National Post 2006
PING!
When is Canada going to start ratioining band-aids?
C'est degoutant.
Reminds me of when my father's prostate cancer was only diagnosed in a terminal, metastesized state and he was not medicated before a biopsy (imagine that for a moment). This occured in Northern Quebec in 1991 and, incidentally he spoke approx five languages including French, when all the doc had was French and some expletive English. He just couldn't make that four consonant combination in the surname sound French.
Sometimes, the only solution is revolution.
".....This is precisely the state-sanctioned & cost-ineffective hypocritical nonsense Mrs. Clinton remains convinced is needed in America."
She tried that bag of dead fish on us once before, (when the MSM could claim a monopoly without hearing a laugh track or crickets) and got stuffed in her own hat.
I don't think she could sell that program today to a majority of her own base, and even the hard core of that group are beginning to wonder if hillybabes wouldn't trade them AND socialized medicine for chump change and a two-point swing in the polls.
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