The O.K.Corral Has Arrived

Speaker of the House Peter Milliken has delivered an historic ruling spelling out that Parliament and not the Prime Minister has the power.

The issue arose over endless requests and refusals for information on Afghan detainees.

How Stephen Harper responds to this ruling will define his leadership.

And how the leaders of the three opposition parties respond will similarly define who they are and the stuff of which they are made.

The only reasonable next step for all concerned is to cooperate and map out a plan for immediately opening some of the contested documents.

If these politicians do not compromise, the government could collapse at once, forcing a general election.

If that's not bad enough - and it is, it truly stinks - the whole issue could be sent to the Supreme Court, which would make that body and not Parliament the ultimate decision maker in all things Canadian.

No.

Let us see know if the secretive Prime Minister and the slavering at the bit opposition leaders can get off their posturing and show some real style and primary dedication to basic democratic principles and ideals.

It is time for these babblers to get real or get lost.

CONFLICT, CLEAR AND SIMPLE

I'm a snob.

I admit it.

A reverse snob.

I grew up in a lower middle class (That was our way of avoiding the next-to-poor designation.) immigrant neighbourhood in the North End of Winnipeg.

I went to school and my grandmother stayed home.

Everybody else in the house worked 5 and a half days a week for not very much money and even less thanks.

The first rich guy I caddied for when I was ten tipped me 10 cents for 18 holes. I was always a loudmouth. I looked at the coin he so proudly dipped into my little tired palm. looked up at him and asked, "Who do I have to kill?"

You may understand how I have had a life long discomfort with men and women "of privilege" running public policy.

They may or may not know the south end of a profit and loss sheet, but what they know about everyone else's life and its attendant difficulties you could put in a thimble and have room for a revolution.

Horrified, therefore, might be the word to describe my reaction today on learning that Kip Woodward (Yikes! Kip...and Woodward. The very names shriek British Columbia, old money, golf clubs, memberships...) is the chair of the Vancouver Coastal Health Authority.

And why am I not surprised to also learn that Kipper, that good old boy, has been advocating with Kevin Falcon, our warm and cuddly Health Minister, some of the following lovely ideas for our health care:

- services be contracted out to private clinics
- leasing of MRI capacity to private insurers
- a private eating-disorder clinic
- the sales of medical procedures to U.S. citizens
- a large addiction treatment centre modelled on the Betty Ford Center
- the provision of for-profit elective surgery.

When lobbying openly for the contracting out of services to private clinics, he was an investor in the province’s most prominent for-profit surgical centre.

Woodward was an original investor in the Cambie Surgery Centre, run by leading private health-care advocate Brian Day, which opened during the mid-1990s. Woodcorp, a family investment firm, maintains a stake in the clinic.

Can Kevin Falcon or anyone over there in Victoria spell CONFLICT OF INTEREST?

This is an egregious misuse of position.

Send the Kipper and his Keeper out to pasture, please.

It is also one of the many clear indicators of how The Granite Premier, the Monumental Premier wants to change public health care into a Mienike Car car Centre.

Do not allow him to do so.

Stop him and the Captains of Industry at every turn from creating the Wal-Mart Costco Superstore of Health.

Early Appointment

Blog posting a little later this morning...

Don't Try This at Home