As everybody knows by now, Roy Romanow is heading the $15-million Royal Commission on Health Care. Roy Romanow is not an innovative man and he has been known not for his democratic style of governance but for his abilities to govern by consensus, that is by making public decisions based on the minimum common level of intelligent information.

Roy Romanow is expected to have about three dozen staff, including a research team, a consultation team, media services, correspondence clerks and offices in Ottawa, Saskatoon and Regina. Further, Roy Romanow will be assisted by researcher Steven Lewis, an avowed proponent of a publicly funded, publicly administered, universally accessible system. Steven Lewis was one of the key health researchers in Saskatchewan to design the downsizing of the health care system by cutting beds, cutting staff and by increasing the productivity of health care workers with the implementation of new technologies provided by the transnational global corporations SAIC and SAP. In particular, the implementation of these technologies would have provided savings in the order of some dozens of million dollars per year, but I never received any public acknowledgment of these savings either from Saskatchewan Health or from the Saskatchewan Association of Health Organizations (SAHO).

Our health care system cannot be reformed recycling the consensus mentality of Roy Romanow or the research expertise of our linear thinker Steven Lewis. And when I hear that Honourable Brian Tobin wants to implement further new technologies to increase productivity and to further downsize our health care workers, I can really understand the constitutional fiber of our present leadership. I maintain my opinion that a change of mentality, that is shifting the focus to people rather than to legislation and technology, is better than any effort provided by our present Romanows.

Terminology

Productivity is defined by our unimaginative laissez fair economists as the Gross Domestic Product per worker (GDP/worker)

Transnational corporation is different from the traditional multinational corporation. The multinational corporation retained the respect of the economics within national boundaries; instead, transnational corporations are a form of stateless corporations whose only loyalty is to maximize their money without regard to the local economies or countries.

References/Endnotes

General reference: political and economic articles at Ensign http://www.ftlcomm.com/ensign

Romanow: Ottawa's spoonful of sugar. The difference between a cheap Senate committee and a $15-million commission investigating health care in Canada comes down to PR. Justine Hunter, National Post, July 7, 2001 http://www.nationalpost.com/home/story.html?f=/stories/20010707/612709.html

Technology can heal health care: Tobin, Jill Vardy, Financial Post, July 5, 2001 http://www.nationalpost.com/home/story.html?f=/stories/20010705/609572.html