CONVERGENCE

Witness the latest news. Is it all of a piece?

Item: Many millions of tax dollars (upwards of $90 Million) are given to social services agencies for child welfare and not even one file is opened. Mary Ellen Turpel-Lafond is B.C.’s fearless child and youth advocate. Her latest findings verge on the criminal. Committees were struck, meetings were held and deeply concerned people talked. Travel and accommodations and meals were covered. Aboriginal children in particular remain completely “under served.” Try at mortal risk.

Item: A second major long-serving doctor has resigned from Surrey memorial Hospital because he has no faith in the hospital’s ability to respond to Code Blue alerts, such as cardiac and respiratory emergencies.

Item: B.C. Government orders review of Fraser Health Authority.

Item: A full page - reprinted no doubt in its entirety from a pharmaceutical PR kit – report in the paper tells us that pediatricians are endorsing Prozac for kids. We are supposed to be cheered by this horror. It is, of course, a monstrosity and a huge public scam, but we are being conditioned to buying in to the madness. We are being convinced that it is good for us and for our children to get all doped up at the age of 5.

Item: The largest convention ever held in this city will occur when 48,000 come to Vancouver for the 2025 International Convention of Alcoholics Anonymous. But wait. How can this be? I have been in public meetings and heard with my own ears from officials and experts that A.A. doesn’t work. The man, who for two City of Vancouver mayors, was the drug czar at $100,000 a year and who has been showered with many civic and national awards for his contributions to the field, said in plain English that everyone knows that 12-step programs do not work. He was inviting us to join in on the mayor’s latest plan to give prostitutes free heroin and heroin substitutes. The czar and the mayor felt it was important and humane to keep prostitutes comfortable in their chosen field of work. Many experts have told me with complete knowing conviction that A.A. - and Narcotics Anonymous, Cocaine Anonymous, Overeaters Anonymous, Emotions Anonymous – that none of these programs is really effective and that only a handful of people ever profit from them and then only for a short time. And that therefore, we ought to be giving people free drugs and alcohol to make their hopeless lives more tolerable and keep the poor slobs from braking into our cars and homes. And all of these people who have told me these things over the years are experts and doctors and psychiatrists and political leaders. 

But this all leaves me terribly confused because if 48,000 people are coming here for an A.A. convention and each of those delegates represents 1,000 or more clean and sober members who will not be making the trip, that’s a lot of clean and sober people who seem to have got that way by walking into church basements and saying, “Hi. My name’s Jenny and I am an alcoholic.”

It leaves me even more confused because of the thousands of people that I know personally who are clean and sober A.A., N.A. and C.A. members, and the many millions of people worldwide who claim similar status. Why are all those people trying to fool me when the experts have told me that this stuff doesn’t work?

I’ve called this little rant “Convergence,” because I believe there is a pattern here.

In this province, the Health Authorities are powerful, distant, dictatorial and combative with the very people they are meant to serve. They have sets of frozen ideas and they are determined that constituents will march in step to their drum beat. The monies wasted are gigantic and appalling. Bad programs are supported because they toe the line, good programs are refused because they don’t fit The Master Plan and the bureaucracy increases in direct proportion to its inefficiencies.

Never forget that the single consistent operating principle of all bureaucracies is Cover Your Butt.

Maybe we have become a nation of mandarins. Maybe we are already China. Maybe this is the result when half the available jobs in the country are with a government.