ESTON, Sask.– Eston’s “Great Debate, Part II” March 23 started out as a debate on whether rural Saskatchewan should exist.
It turned into a discussion about the closure of Eston hospital.
Those in the half-filled Legion Hall heard Eston Press publisher Verna Thompson and Kyle mayor Ansgar Tynning debate the matter with Saskatoon StarPhoenix columnists Les MacPherson and Paul Martin.
Thompson said she’ll never forget Tuesday, April 13, 1993. At 9 a.m. she learned Eston would be losing its bus service. At 3 p.m. she was devastated by news that the hospital would be closed.
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Role in community
“We don’t want to do brain surgery in Eston. But that does not mean that rural hospitals don’t have a role to play.”
Thompson said Eston needs observation, restorative and palliative care beds for those who want to spend their last days near family and friends.
“I hate to tell you, right at this moment we do not have those beds and I think that’s a disgrace.”
MacPherson said it’s presumptuous to think the rural way of life can be preserved when everything else is changing at a “breakneck pace.”
He said people can’t expect the same level of services when the population of Eston has dropped by 30 percent in the last 30 years: “There should be fewer services when there’s less of a population to serve.”
MacPherson said he doesn’t think a hospital is the answer to Eston’s problems. People were leaving the community long before the hospital closed, he said, and he doesn’t know anyone who moved to Saskatoon strictly for its hospital services.
“What it is that attracts and keeps people in communities is opportunities. You have to find a way to create these opportunities because no one is going to do it for you. That’s the only way you’re going to get your hospital back.”
Paul Martin agreed. “If you want to save your hospital or your school, put people in the town.”
Martin said the biggest problem with Saskatchewan is that it’s a province of producers. It must become a province of sellers and innovators as well. He said Saskatchewan is full of opportunities, but people have to seize them. Now, the province excels at exporting its most talented people.
In an evening of polite discussion, debaters only came close to a heated exchange following this comment from MacPherson, directed at Thompson: “Wouldn’t you concede that you could have the best services in the world, but if there are no jobs there, it doesn’t matter? Nobody is going to come.”
Hospital paid for
Thompson responded, “The hospital is here, it’s paid for. Don’t make us waste our energy fighting for the damn thing. Leave it there, fund it for us, and we’ll go out and create the opportunities.”
Members of the audience also voiced concerns about hospital closure.
Ted Koester said the elderly built many of Eston’s facilities and now they are losing them.
“They’re going to have to go 100 to 200 miles away to die. Is this a government with a heart?”
Another woman accused MacPherson of attacking old people, who are pioneers of the province: “Doesn’t it matter what they are left with?”
MacPherson responded: “If what I said came off as denigrating old people, that certainly wasn’t my intention. I hope to be old myself some day.” But he added the town will have to attract young people to Eston if it hopes to justify an acute care hospital.
The entire debate failed to draw the same interest as the first one, held in 1993. It was spawned by a MacPherson column in which he wrote that farming appeared to be, “less to do with seeding and harvesting than with the collection of endless subsidies.”
