There have been complaints in some quarters in Saskatchewan lately about a lack of democracy.
The complaints centre around health minister Pat Atkinson putting a gag order on the province’s health boards, telling them not to reveal details of their health plans or budgets until they have been approved by the government.
In Atkinson’s view, I’m sure, her aim is to avoid the release of any unfavorable details such as hospital closings (which was leaked in one health district) and thus public concern and controversy.
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Several rural weekly newspapers in the province took particular issue with Atkinson’s actions. It’s the country that is going to be adversely affected by more closures, after all.
In the end, all Atkinson did by her gag order, as one paper called it, was to remove any doubt about who is in charge of the province’s health boards.
The minister of health, that’s who.
The reasoning is this: health board members are elected in each health district ward. The members are there to represent and to answer to those who elected them.
Atkinson by her actions has prevented those elected representatives from doing two things: consulting those they were elected to serve and informing those they serve about plans.
According to Atkinson’s edict, residents of the province are being denied information about changes until the government has approved them and until it is too late to do anything.
Health is an emotional subject. It has become much more emotional, and more to the fore in the public, since health reform was instituted in 1993.
At that time, 52 hospitals were closed with no prior warning or consultation.
Public outcry was deafening and the government admitted mistakes.
Apparently it has not learned from those mistakes, or if it has, it is not prepared to rectify them.
The worst mistake was not in closing the 52 hospitals but in the way it was done, with no chance for people to internalize what was about to happen, to get past it and to plan for the future.
History repeats.
But the gag order and its denial of democracy is not the worst aspect of this scenario.
The most troubling aspect, as the Kindersley Clarion pointed out, is that local board members have gone along with “this complete reversal of the democratic process. In doing so, they seem to have acknowledged what most have suspected since health reform was instituted in 1993 – they are mere puppets, dancing to the strings being pulled by politicians and bureaucrats in Regina.”
