By Michael Regenstreif
There was a report, June 10, in the Ottawa Citizen that said “elderly residents in Eastern Ontario wait the longest of anyone in the province to be admitted to nursing homes.” Province wide, the report said, waiting times have doubled in the past two years.
A month before that, in the Federation Report of the May 11 Bulletin, Jeffrey Miller, president of the Bess and Moe Greenberg Family Hillel Lodge, wrote about the long waiting list and waiting time for admission to Hillel Lodge. He also noted that Hillel Lodge continues to pursue and wait for Ministry approval to open up 21 additional long-term care beds.
Two years ago, when Ontario waiting times for nursing home admissions were half as long as they are today, long waiting lists were already a problem. In the October 1, 2007 issue of the Bulletin, Barry Fishman wrote an article about the Lodge waiting for approval for those beds and about the space – the Joseph and Inez Zelikovitz Pavilion – that was reserved for them.
That issue came out just before the provincial election held on October 10, 2007 and I reported on the meeting the Federation’s Communications and Community Relations Committee held with Liberal candidates Jim Watson, then minister of health promotion and now minister of municipal affairs and housing; Madeleine Meilleur, then and now minister of community and social services; and Yasir A. Naqvi, who became the MPP for Ottawa Centre, the riding in which Hillel Lodge is located.
The 21 additional beds being proposed for Hillel Lodge was discussed at the meeting and all three candidates voiced their strong support for the proposal. Watson enthusiastically said he’d undertake to have the government act on the 21 new beds for Hillel Lodge within the first six months of a new Liberal mandate. We are now 21 months into that new mandate and Hillel Lodge is still waiting for the go-ahead to proceed with finishing the pavilion and setting up the beds. Watson and Naqvi, I would note, remain in the Lodge’s corner. They brought Health and Long-Term Care Minister David Caplan to the Lodge on January 16 to tour the facility and meet with Lodge officials.
For the past six months, the minister whose signature will allow Hillel Lodge to proceed, has had first-hand knowledge of the Lodge, what it does and what it could do to help alleviate the critical shortage of long-term nursing home beds in this community.
Waiting times for long-term care beds were problematic when the Bulletin reported on this issue almost two years ago and, as noted, have doubled since then. Will they double again over the next two years? Further delays make no sense. Minister Caplan should act now.
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This issue, we introduce a new monthly column, World Affairs, by Oliver Javanpour. Well known in the community, Oliver is an Ottawa-based public policy and international relations consultant. Oliver was born in Iran and his first column deals with the internal challenges to the Iranian regime since the election there last month.
As Oliver notes, such entities as Hamas and Hezbollah, and many other organizations and schools around the world, are beholden to the Iranian regime for their funding. One such organization, funded by the Iranian government, is its English-language satellite news channel and website, Press TV.
It turns out that one of Press TV’s weekly program hosts and commentators is none other than George Galloway, the fringe British MP who was denied entry into Canada earlier this year because of the very public financial aid he delivered to Hamas, an organization banned by Canada because of its terrorist activities.
While you’d be hard pressed to find any commentator in the western media who thinks the Iranian election was an exercise in democracy, Galloway assures us, in his Press TV program available via a series of videos on YouTube, that the Ahmadinejad victory was completely legitimate and that Iran is the very model of pure democracy.
According to Galloway, it’s the western media that has fuelled the massive Iranian protests that erupted after the election. Western media commentators, Galloway tells us, “hate the Islamic Republic” and they “hate President Ahmadinejad – not for any bad things he’s done, or any mistakes he’s made … It’s because Iran will not bow the knee to western power … [and] to the Zionist settler State of Israel, which is an apartheid state.”
Galloway’s Press TV commentaries reveal him to be nothing but a paid propagandist for the brutal Iranian regime. It’s so very sad that many Canadian leftists – including some Jewish leftists – see Galloway as some sort of revered truth-teller.
