Hallway medicine is hitting new highs in congested Lower Mainland hospitals, as was demonstrated Monday night when Royal Columbian Hospital was forced to use its Tim Hortons outlet as an overflow ward.

Fraser Health officials say a combination of multiple trauma case airlifts earlier in the day and heavy pressure on the emergency department led staff to put patients in the hospital coffee shop.

It’s an unusual example of what has become a routine problem across the region: too many patients and not enough beds.

“Last night the hallways were two and three stretchers deep with patients,” said Dr. Sheldon Glazer, an emergency physician at Royal Columbian, the region’s trauma centre.

“This is just a natural progression of what we’ve been dealing with for a long, long time,” Glazer said. “We are forced to see patients in waiting rooms, in hallways and, now, in the Tim Hortons.”

The veteran ER doctor says halls jammed with stretchers are both inefficient and dangerous – particularly if a fire broke out.

Whenever the inevitable topic of wait times comes up in a discussion about healthcare, proponents of the socialist system will say, “Well, no system is perfect.” They’re absolutely correct. So assuming that the private and public system both have their flaws, which is preferable — having to spend money on insurance or medical care instead of having it for free? Or, dying while waiting for ‘free’ medical care? Seems like a simple decision to me.

Regarding my recent hospitalization, I stated — and still maintain — that I am not going to engage in a debate about healthcare, because my opinion still holds. However, despite the extraordinary emergency care I received, follow-up wait times were unacceptable. In the internal medicine unit, patients were being admitted who had been waiting in the emergency room for upwards of three and four days. Were they dying? No, but they certainly weren’t getting any healthier.

The Tim Horton’s spin on this story makes it more amusing, but being so backed up that you can’t even have patients in the waiting room is a serious problem that needs to be addressed. Even under perfect circumstances, the province of British Columbia considers it a success if patients are admitted with less than 10 hours of waiting.

Remember, I had a stroke in a waiting room. But hey, at least I didn’t have to pay anything (just ended up hobbling around like an old lady with a walker, but whatever.)

H/T KonReport

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Prime Minister Stephen Harper has to make a choice: cash for Quebec or an election, says Bloc Quebecois leader Gilles Duceppe.

“I am now challenging Stephen Harper to respond to Quebec’s expectations,” a pumped Mr. Duceppe said Sunday in a speech closing a party general council meeting. “We are asking for simple fairness, elementary justice.

“Mr. Harper has a choice. He can respond to Quebec’s expectations or he can spark elections. For our part, we will not fold. We are going to stand up for Quebec. We are not going to give up, we are not going to be quiet.”

Apart from being pathetic losers, the Quebec nationalist movement — led by Gilles Duceppe’s Bloc Quebecois — is forgetting one important fact: You need to have something the Conservative Party needs before you can start giving ultimatums. The Bloc is in a similar boat to the New Democratic Party: They will always be ready for an election because the outcome of said election doesn’t matter to them. As perpetual opposition parties, they don’t need to play the numbers to figure out when the time is right for an election, they’re ready to go whenever. As such, those two parties have very little bearing on votes in the House of Commons given that they’re diametrically opposed to any Conservative bill.

That being said, it’s not unlikely that they will attempt (yet again) to form a coalition government with the Liberal Party of Canada after the next election comes. For them, that’s their only hope of being anywhere close to governance, so sooner is rather than later. Duceppe can threaten the government all he wants, but the decision lies with Ignatieff. Scary, huh?

After much pondering, I have come to the conclusion that if we do have a federal election this spring, the result will be a Conservative majority.

Now I realize this forecast goes against conventional political wisdom.

Many pundits, using current public opinion polls as evidence, are arguing no party currently has enough voter support to win a majority.

Columnist Lorne Gunter has written, “Party standings would probably end the campaign at more or less their current levels. There is almost certainly no majority available to any party.”

And former Liberal strategist Warren Kinsella has declared, “Harper is still far from a majority.”

Really?

Gunter and Kinsella are forgetting one simple fact: Canadians are not yet politically engaged.

The Liberals recently released a poll, for instance, which showed only 15 per cent of Canadians are even paying attention to federal politics. (By the way, that’s completely normal. The average person rarely cares about the goings on in Ottawa. They would rather watch American Idol than The National. And who can blame them?)

But once an election is actually called Canadians will get focused on politics. They will start paying attention.

And what will these focused Canadians see when they start paying attention?

Well for one thing they will see a Prime Minister in Stephen Harper who is at the peak of his political powers.

A battle-hardened veteran of three national election campaigns and two leadership races, Harper is a wily political tactician who leads a united, well-disciplined and wealthy party.

The Liberals, on the other hand, are in a sorry state.

Their leader, Michael Ignatieff, is intelligent but a rookie when it comes to running a national campaign. He has only one national race under his belt, a Liberal leadership contest, which he lost.

Nor has he shown any evidence that he is a good campaigner or that he possesses good political instincts or that he can come up with a message that will resonate with Canadians.

His party is also demoralized and cash-poor.

[...]

However, all things being equal, we should expect 2011 to mark the true beginning of the Harper dynasty.

A couple in Laval, Que. has sparked a fierce debate over how far schools should go to teach children about environmental responsibility after their six-year-old son was shut out of a kindergarten draw to win a stuffed animal because he had an environmentally unfriendly sandwich bag in his lunchbox.

Marc-André Lanciault said he hadn’t heard of the school’s draw or any environmental policy until his wife, Isabel Théorêt, was making their son Félix a sandwich and he begged them not to put it in a plastic bag.

“He said, ‘No mommy, you can’t do that. Not a Ziploc,’ ” Mr. Lanciault said.

Through tears, the boy told his parents that the school had held a draw to win a stuffed teddy bear and only children who didn’t have any plastic sandwich bags could enter. The family normally uses Tupperware, but it was all in the dishwasher, and so they had packed their son’s ham sandwich in a plastic bag.

When Mr. Lanciault questioned his son’s teacher, she confirmed the school had staged the draw at a lunchtime daycare and that any student with a plastic sandwich bag was excluded. “You know Mr. Lanciault, it’s not very good for the environment,” the teacher told him. “We have to take care of the our planet and the bags do not decompose well.”

Every do-good leftwing fad is followed up with another equally pointless save the planet craze. The left whined that too many trees were cut down to make paper products, so plastic bags were created. Now, the left has some dupes in a tizzy over the alleged harmfulness of plastic bags.

Here’s a secret: your grocery bag makes no difference to the planet. In fact, just about everything you do has no effect on the planet.

Hyperventilating hypochondriacs have claimed that the human population is exhausting the earth’s resources. They claim that the ‘population bomb’ is ready to explode. In reality, overpopulation is another myth. The simple truth is that every person on the planet could live, comfortably, on a piece of land the size of Texas.

Of course, the crown jewel of enviro-lunacy is the hoax of global warming. Charlatans on the Left have convinced people that the very act of breathing pollutes the planet. Anthropogenic global warming is an outright lie built on junk science, intimidation tactics, and a suppression of countervailing data. The acts of human beings, over very short period of time that we have existed, have not effect our planet.

However, environmentalist proselytizers have demonized any who dare oppose them for decades. Instead of examining contrary arguments, the environmentalist Left casts aspersions on their enemies. Due to their campaign of intimidation, today, children are indoctrinated at every stop, forced to sing from the green hymnal. When it has gotten to the point where children are afraid to bring plastic bags to school, perhaps the Left has taken this latest nonsensical fad a bit too far.

Charlton Heston put the entire environmental movement is perspective in this great reading from Michael Crichton’ Jurassic Park:

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Ian Thomson moved to a rural homestead in Southwestern Ontario to lead a quiet life investing in a little fixer-upper. Then his neighbour’s chickens began showing up on his property. He warned his neighbour, then killed one of the birds.

The incident began six years of trouble for Mr. Thomson that culminated early one Sunday morning last August when the 53-year-old former mobile-crane operator woke up to the sound of three masked men firebombing his Port Colborne, Ont., home.

“I was horrified,” he said. “I couldn’t believe it. I didn’t know what was happening. I had no idea what was going on.”

So Mr. Thomson, a former firearms instructor, grabbed one of his Smith & Wesson revolvers from his safe, loaded it and headed outside dressed in only his underwear.

“He exited his house and fired his revolver two, maybe three times, we’re not sure. Then these firebombing culprits, they ran off,” said his lawyer, Edward Burlew.

His surveillance cameras caught the attackers lobbing at least six Molotov cocktails at his house and bombing his doghouse, singeing one of his Siberian Huskies. But when Mr. Thomson handed the video footage to Niagara Regional Police, he found himself charged with careless use of a firearm.

The local Crown attorney’s office later laid a charge of pointing a firearm, along with two counts of careless storage of a firearm. The Crown has recommended Mr. Thomson go to jail, his lawyer said.

[...]

“I hear some people, some being police officers, some being Crown attorneys, some being ordinary people, say we don’t want vigilantism, to which I can only give an emphatic pardon me?” Mr. Burlew said. “When you’re under attack, it’s not a vigilante act. Vigilantism talks about vengeance and retribution. This is about saving your life and saving your property.

“I’m sure that will be recognized at trial, but why would a citizen, where it’s so obvious that what he was doing was protecting himself during a continued attack, be put to the expense of a trial? It’s demeaning.”

The worst part about this case is that Canada actually does allow for the use of “reasonable” force to defend ones self if being attacked. Should you bring a shotgun out to shoot an unarmed person? Perhaps, perhaps not, but the fact remains that Thompson did nothing wrong — both morally and legally.

This isn’t the first time that gun owners have been targeted by authorities, and I fear it won’t be the last either. Unfortunately, property rights are not something entrenched in the Canadian “constitution,” nor are they valued by the average Canadian simply because of a lack of knowledge. Ultimately, if so much as an obnoxious salesman comes onto your property you should have the right to kick them off; firebombers don’t even seem like a gray area. If someone throws a Molotov cocktail at your house, the police seem to think a strongly worded letter is the best response.

Attention all kindergarten to Grade 8 students: Cross-dressing day is now cancelled.

This was the news given to students of King City Public School on Thursday after the school pulled the plug on holding an “Opposite Gender Day” on Friday, where kids as young as six would be allowed to come to school dressed as the opposite sex.

According to Ross Virgo of the York Region District School Board, King City PS officials cancelled the day following an outcry of opposition from parents.

“Opposite Gender Day has been cancelled in the wake of concerns of parents,” said Virgo. “The idea of (kids) experiencing being people of the opposite gender has offended some people in the community, and the school does not want to do that.”

Virgo said the chance to dress as the opposite sex was voluntary to students from junior kindergarten to Grade 8. He said it was proposed by the school’s student council and approved by the principal.

First off, I didn’t think that student councils existed to actually do anything. That said, this pushes the boundaries of accepting “alternative” lifestyles by actually encouraging students to participate in it. I don’t see what’s to be gained by pretending to be another gender for a day because, well, boys will always be boys and girls will always be girls (ideally.)

There’s an agenda in the public school system whether you like it or not, and it’s one that has always attempted to push acceptance over competence — both in academics, and now lifestyle. Keep in mind that in most jurisdictions, it’s virtually impossible for a teacher to fail even a high school student, let alone an elementary school student.

All we can be thankful for is that the parents stood up against this. Hopefully people will start to realize that parents can accomplish more than teachers and bureaucrats.

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