Blue Like You

Archive for August 29th, 2008

While Liberals and MSM are gleefully pointing fingers at the federal Government for the current listeria problems, Ontario NDP France Gelinas is honing in on the McGuinty Liberals.

Gelinas was on 570’s Jeff Allan show this morning and blamed the Ontario Health Minister for his slow response to the crisis, even though the story is national in scope. She is demanding a full review of the matter and says the Health Minister has been  ‘missing in action’.

Strategists like Warren Kinsella should be careful about attempting to taint the current Federal Government with a Walkerton-type stigma.

There will be plenty of blame to go around for the industry and all levels of government.

In fact Gelinas also points out that the current Ontario Government has been negligent in an area directly related to the Walkerton scandal:

…New Democrats also accused Queen’s Park of ignoring recommendations made by the Walkerton inquiry to fill vacant medical officer of health positions. (That inquiry looked into tainted water.)

Questions were also raised over the dates when alerts were issued about listeria.

NDP health critic France Gelinas issued a statement saying, "over one-third of Ontario’s public health units lack permanent full-time medical officers of health.

"Especially in light of questions surrounding the public reporting of this listeriosis outbreak, the McGuinty Liberals need to properly support our public health units."

Instead of politicians desperately trying to cover their behinds here, perhaps they should be working together to try to prevent a recurrence of this tragic situation.

Let’s see less finger-pointing and more action. Gelinas has a right to critique Ontario Government response and suggest improvements. But there is a fine line between what she is doing and using the situation for political gain.

Anyone trying to score cheap political points on the backs of dead Canadians should be ashamed of himself.

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Update: This is an unrelated Ontario issue, but I didn’t want it to slip by and I don’t have time to delve into it right now - Choices for our future (Expositor).

It seems that MPP Toby Barrett has been on the receiving end of a lot of pressure - including from Julian Fantino. Democracy in Ontario is in a very fragile state.

Late afternoon update re: Listeriosis outbreak -  Finally we hear from a Conservative MPP!  Bill Murdoch speaks out (via a faithful reader.) Link found at CKNX news.

Oh, and it’s called ‘posturing’.
Apparently Stephane Dion is outplaying Harper (according to Steve.)