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Weekend Newsstand: March 12, 2011
Illustration by Jeremy Kai/Torontoist.
It’s Saturday—Canadian Music Week Saturday, at that. Be warned: tonight the clocks move forward and a precious hour is gone until fall. Today: more casualties in the TCHC scandal, a health clinic chooses an executive suite over patient care, people with rare diseases lose treatment options, and there are more subway closures to contend with. Boo. Hiss.
In more purges-in-Rob-Ford’s-Toronto news, Build Toronto CEO Derek Ballantyne announced Friday that he plans to leave the land-development agency. Ballantyne was head of the beleaguered Toronto Community Housing Corporation from 2002-2009, before current CEO Keiko Nakamura took over. His resignation came (surprise!) under pressure from the mayor’s office, and is the latest casualty in a host of house-cleaning measures related to misspending at TCHC. Ballantyne leaves Build Toronto on “mutually agreed terms in accordance with his employment contract.”
In more spending news sure to ruffle a few paper hospital gowns, a Brampton health care centre may have diverted money from patients to build a four-hundred-thousand-dollar executive suite. The Toronto Sun report is based on unnamed “insiders” at the Central West Community Care Access Centre, who say CEO Cathy Hecimovich scaled back patient care to deal with a deficit, then used the surplus her spending cuts created for the renovations. Hecimovich says the money wasn’t diverted from patients, but came from the administrative budget. There’s no doubt that it’s getting harder to explain certain spending in this era of service cuts: “You can buy an awful lot of home care for four hundred thousand dollars,” notes the local MPP.
Patients with rare diseases say OHIP is turning them into “guinea pigs” by preventing them from seeking expert treatment outside the province. Currently, patients must apply for funding to leave the province to seek care that isn’t available here. The Orwellian-sounding Excellent Care for All Strategy will prevent them from appealing if their request for this funding is turned down, health lawyer Perry Brodkin tells the Globe. He says that, as of April 1, Ontario surgeons will be expected to perform procedures within their “scope of practice”—even surgeries they may have only done once, or not at all. The plan is expected to save the province $28.5 million a year, and will have the long-term effect of giving Ontario surgeons more practice at rare procedures. And I mean, really, that’s what I would be after if going under the knife. Giving a doctor more experience. Yeah. The public has until March 13 to voice concerns.
In what seems like the millionth in a never-ending series of track-work weekends, the TTC’s University-Spadina line will be closed between Wilson and Downsview stations all weekend, until first thing Monday morning, and between St. Clair West and St. George on Sunday only, until 2 p.m. The construction is part of the effort to build a subway line to York University and is expected to continue until 2015.
And, just when you were really catching your show-going stride for Canadian Music Week, you get to lose an hour of sleep tonight when you turn your clocks forward. With luck, bars will stay open until the old closing time, but that won’t help you much when you finally flop into bed. Just sleep wayyyy in. That will solve things.