Now *that’s* different!
It was utterly shocking to turn a corner in Montreal’s Chinatown and see the new University of Montreal hospital complex (Centre hospitalier de l’Université de Montréal) rising high where there used to be only sky. I’ve seen it slowly built on my visits over the years but this is the first time the structure’s seemed so in-your-face.
The building is clearly going to dwarf the entire neighbourhood around it. (For the sake of perspective, I was a bit shy of 500 metres from the building when I snapped this shot.)
There’s a website for the new hospital, en français bien sûr!
In my Calgary Sun column Tuesday morning, I decried the attitude of Alberta Health Services president and CEO Stephen Duckett as he was being scrummed by reporters in Edmonton on Friday.
In short, he avoided media questions for three minutes, repeatedly saying he was too busy because he was eating a cookie. For the incredulous, here’s video via CTV Edmonton’s YouTube page, which has already been seen by more than 124,000 people as of Tuesday night:
This clip has spawned a number of mash-up videos, with each of those registering thousands more hits on their own.
Meanwhile, there was word late Tuesday that Duckett’s future employment with AHS will be reviewed by an emergency meeting of its board on Wednesday.
Ever since this controversy broke out on Friday, a few voices in the wilderness have come out in Duckett’s defence — saying in effect that this entire story has been a result of media manufacturing.
I can’t disagree more.
Reporters are doing their jobs when they pose questions to public officials.
It’s one thing to hear a second- or third-tier official explaining things in a press conference.
It’s a whole other thing to hear from the top dog of any organization — especially from someone who draws hundreds of thousands of dollars a year in pay and perks from the public purse. EDIT: In annual terms, that would be $575,000 in base salary, $10,000 in professional development, $15,000 for variable allowances including tax tips and club memberships, $18,000 for vehicles, health benefits, plus a variable bonus.
We’ve had people who’ve been so fed up with emergency rooms that they’ve dialled 911 from a hospital to see if they can hurry things along.
We’ve had an MLA (who happens to be an ER doctor himself) booted from the government ranks for speaking frankly about the state of things in our hospitals.
Clearly, these events are not manufactured by the media. The problems are real.
Which brings us back to Duckett.
If he understood how dire the situation seems to Albertans, he would have put the cookie down to reassure Albertans that things are being done to correct the situation.
Or he could have stopped to say he disagreed with Albertans’ assessment of the state of the health-care system.
Whatever. The point is, he should have stopped.
He is the boss of Alberta’s health-care bureaucracy.
No one else can tell us what he thinks — not AHS staffers closest to him, not the people at the legislature.
Media people are paid to extract facts and answers from the likes of Duckett.
After all, most Jane and Joe Albertans don’t have the time to quiz public officials every day.
Likewise, Duckett and others are paid to run our public services and as such, they are accountable to the public — sometimes through media questions.
The members of the Edmonton media involved with the Duckett affair were doing their job.
Stephen Duckett, on the other hand, wasn’t doing his.
Ricky Leong 