-
-
America needs to acquire Canada and Greenland for world security reasons. Lets face it, America is the only country in the world capable of defeating Russia and China. Canada can't even pay it's bills for defense. There's many advantages for Canada becoming the 51st state. And you're living on stolen land anyway and don't have a problem with it. Why not be part of our stolen land? Think about it.Adversity temporarily visits a strong man but stays with the weak for a lifetime.Comment
-
Also, we need to rename the moon. It belongs to America. It's our moon. We put a flag on it.Adversity temporarily visits a strong man but stays with the weak for a lifetime.Comment
-
Canada's family doctor shortage: 10 million will soon lack access to primary care
It’s a question Dr. David Barber gets asked all the time by neighbours knocking on his door and Uber drivers delivering coffee to the clinic: Could he take them on as patients?
“It feels awful to turn them down, it’s a terrible feeling,” said Barber, chair of the Ontario Medical Association’s section on general and family practice and a family doctor in Kingston, Ont., which last summer lost six family doctors to retirement over a span of six months, leaving 7,000 people suddenly “unattached.”
A colleague of Barber’s in Gananoque, Ont., would also like to retire but can’t find someone willing to take over his practice, “so he’s going to keep going, because he would feel too badly to abandon his patients” Barber said. “He just doesn’t feel he can do that.”
Family practice has become “unsustainable,” Barber and other doctors said at an OMA virtual press briefing Thursday. Family doctors are retiring, exiting early or moving into other areas of medicine. Many are abandoning the “cradle to grave,” comprehensive approach to family medicine and are focusing on one specific issue, such as chronic pain or sports medicine. “Ridiculous” and crushing amounts of paperwork and administrative loads, pre- and post-pandemic burnout and demoralization, physician fees not keeping pace with inflation, rising overhead and labour costs, inefficient referral systems — “the pressures are many” and making things worse on the ground, Barber said.
In Ontario, more than 2.2 million people are currently without a family doctor. Another 1.7 million are looked after by a doctor who is 65 or older. The Ontario College of Family Physicians predicts more than four million Ontarians will be without a family doctor by 2026, as more doctors narrow their scope or leave their practice entirely, and fewer young medical school graduates choose to opt in. The number of grads choosing family medicine is the lowest it has been in 15 years.
Without a family doctor, people fall of the radar, Barber said in an interview with National Post. Poorly controlled diabetes, poorly controlled hypertension, fewer cancer screenings, delays in cancer diagnoses, missed vaccinations. “There’s no doubt some people are dying because of this,” he said. The lack of access is driving people to retail walk-in clinics and emergency departments because there’s nowhere else to go, or they forgo care entirely. People who need care the most — Indigenous, racialized, and low-income communities — aren’t getting it, research shows. By some estimates, 10 million Canadians will be without any source of primary care within three to four years, a “disaster” for a country with universal health care, experts said at a national primary care crisis meeting in November.
It’s opening opportunities for private and for-profit medicine for people who can afford it. Barber has had patients travel to Montreal to spend several thousand dollars on tests that had a months or year-long wait in Ontario. “We are heading towards the American model,” he said on Thursday’s call with reporters.
Family doctors are spending up to 20 hours a week, the equivalent of more than two days of full-time work, on the paperwork burden — filling out lengthy disability and insurance forms, writing unnecessary sick notes for employers — time that eats away at the amount of time doctors can spend with patients who, because of an aging population, have more complex health problems. “It takes more time today to look after a patient than it did 10 years ago,” Barber said, including time spent managing patients as they linger on wait lists for specialist care.
“The reality is that family doctors are businesspeople and right now they’re in a failing, or failed business model,” he said. “Over the last 20 years there has been a 20 per cent cut in the funding that goes to a family doctor to run that business.
“That’s why they’re looking to get out.”
The OMA is currently in negotiations with the province for the next physician services agreement. “The government is pushing for zero per cent increase in pay this year … that’s just going to demoralize every single family doctor on the ground,” Barber said. The doctors’ group has said it wants expanded access to team-based care — surrounding patients with different health care providers — and a centralized referral system and reduced paperwork (more streamlined forms, fewer sick notes, paid staff to take over the administrative load) to keep doctors considering retiring early from leaving. “The resources need to go to the people who are already on the ground,” Barber said. “If every family doctor took on another 220 patients, then the issue goes away.”
On Thursday’s Zoom call, Dr. Natalie Leahy, a family physician now practising as a general practitoner in oncology, described closing her family medicine practice in Oshawa in September. She had just under 1,200 patients. “It was a big decision for me to close, and I can tell you there were a lot of tears shared amongst my patients and myself in those months leading up to my final day.”
Over the years, doctors’ fees have been capped, cut or increased at most by one per cent a year, she said, while expenses, with inflation, have increased upwards of 10 per cent per year. During the pandemic, Leahy couldn’t find anyone to temporarily take over her practice when her father was dying of metastatic cancer and her eldest child was dealing with a significant medical issue. “At a time when I should have been caring for my family, I was still responsible for my office expenses, those 100 messages a day in my inbox, all the paper work.” One form, the Canada Revenue Agency’s disability tax credit form, has grown from six to 16 pages over the last few years. Leahy was also spending an “inordinate” amount of time figuring out which specialists were taking on new patients. “It was not unusual for me to have to try three or four different specialists, multiple referrals, before I found someone that would see my patient.”
That business model isn’t appealing to new graduates leaving medical school with hundreds of thousands of dollars in student debt, she said.
Under British Columbia’s new family doctor payment model, instead of a flat fee per visit, family doctors are paid based on the number of patients seen in a day, time spent and the complexity of problems, the number of patients “attached” to their practice and overhead costs. Over 4,000 doctors have switched from fee-for-service to the new payment scheme since it was introduced a year ago, Dr. Tahmeena Ali, president of B.C. Family Doctors told CTV News Vancouver. It’s “avoiding the exodus of many family doctors leaving practice” and has attracted 700 new graduates to family medicine, she said.
Advertisement 8
Story continues below
Adversity temporarily visits a strong man but stays with the weak for a lifetime.Comment
-
Businesses plan move out of Canada to America due to Trump Tariff.
But any significant tariff on Canada will do long-term damage, according to Dawson, who says this is the case even if the tariffs are only briefly in place.
"It moves investment south. It stops production decisions," she said.
She's already hearing international companies mull shifting some production from Canadian facilities to their U.S. ones. Honda has mused publicly about production cutbacks in Canada.
Countries around the world are bracing for an economic bruising on Monday. And few have more at stake than Canada.
That's because three-quarters of everything Canada sells into the world, it sells to the United States, and U.S. president-elect Donald Trump is threatening trade penalties the day he takes office.
Adversity temporarily visits a strong man but stays with the weak for a lifetime.Comment
-
Canada slides further into the abyss.
Amazon to close 7 warehouses in Canada and eliminate 1,700 jobs
Online retailer Amazon said Wednesday that it's closing all seven of its warehouses in the Canadian province of Quebec in the next two months.
The e-commerce giant said the move would provide “even more savings to our customers over the long run." However, a Canadian union that successfully unionized one warehouse accused the company of closing its sites to fend off organizing efforts in the region.
The closures will eliminate about 1,700 permanent full-time jobs in the greater Montreal area, Amazon said. The warehouses also employ 250 temporary employees.
Amazon said it would enlist local, third-party companies to deliver packages, reverting to a business model it used in Quebec before 2020.
“This decision wasn’t made lightly, and we’re offering impacted employees a package that includes up to 14 weeks’ pay after facilities close and transitional benefits, like job placement resources,” Amazon spokesperson Barbara Agrait said in a statement.
Agrait said the decision was made following a “recent review” of the company's operations in the province. The closing sites include one fulfillment center, two sorting centers, three delivery stations and a facility Amazon dubs AMXL because it aids in the shipment of large goods such as TVs and furniture.
Canadian Minister of Innovation, Science and Industry François-Philippe Champagne wrote on the social media platform X that he had contacted the head of Amazon's operations in Canada to share his objections.
“I expressed our dismay and frustration after learning in the news that they intend to let go of 1,700 employees and close all seven of their warehouses in Quebec,” Champagne said. “This is not the way business is done in Canada.”
About 240 Amazon workers at a company warehouse in Laval, a Montreal suburb, unionized in May, becoming the first of the tech company’s Canadian warehouses to do so. Amazon challenged the union's right to represent the workers but lost at a provincial labor tribunal in October.
Caroline Senneville, president of the union involved with the organizing in Laval, said she has “no doubt” that Wednesday’s closures, which she called “a slap in the face for all Quebec workers,” were part of an anti-union campaign.
Adversity temporarily visits a strong man but stays with the weak for a lifetime.Comment
-
How does this show the disgustingness of Canada?Canada slides further into the abyss.
Amazon to close 7 warehouses in Canada and eliminate 1,700 jobs
Online retailer Amazon said Wednesday that it's closing all seven of its warehouses in the Canadian province of Quebec in the next two months.
The e-commerce giant said the move would provide “even more savings to our customers over the long run." However, a Canadian union that successfully unionized one warehouse accused the company of closing its sites to fend off organizing efforts in the region.
The closures will eliminate about 1,700 permanent full-time jobs in the greater Montreal area, Amazon said. The warehouses also employ 250 temporary employees.
Amazon said it would enlist local, third-party companies to deliver packages, reverting to a business model it used in Quebec before 2020.
“This decision wasn’t made lightly, and we’re offering impacted employees a package that includes up to 14 weeks’ pay after facilities close and transitional benefits, like job placement resources,” Amazon spokesperson Barbara Agrait said in a statement.
Agrait said the decision was made following a “recent review” of the company's operations in the province. The closing sites include one fulfillment center, two sorting centers, three delivery stations and a facility Amazon dubs AMXL because it aids in the shipment of large goods such as TVs and furniture.
Canadian Minister of Innovation, Science and Industry François-Philippe Champagne wrote on the social media platform X that he had contacted the head of Amazon's operations in Canada to share his objections.
“I expressed our dismay and frustration after learning in the news that they intend to let go of 1,700 employees and close all seven of their warehouses in Quebec,” Champagne said. “This is not the way business is done in Canada.”
About 240 Amazon workers at a company warehouse in Laval, a Montreal suburb, unionized in May, becoming the first of the tech company’s Canadian warehouses to do so. Amazon challenged the union's right to represent the workers but lost at a provincial labor tribunal in October.
Caroline Senneville, president of the union involved with the organizing in Laval, said she has “no doubt” that Wednesday’s closures, which she called “a slap in the face for all Quebec workers,” were part of an anti-union campaign.
Don't tell me you've run out of material! Come on man!
Comment
-
Adversity temporarily visits a strong man but stays with the weak for a lifetime.Comment
Comment