- The Conservative Government in Ottawa likes to regale us with tales of how much they are doing for Aboriginal people in Canada. They tell us that accountability and health care are their big priorities.
- In fact they have colluded with Big Oil and the Alberta Government to attack a Whistle blowing doctor.
- A doctor who works in one of Canada's poorest first nations regions, on the edge of the Tarsands.
- The unplanned, unorganized, rapid expansion the Tarsands, is an ecological threat to the North, to Saskatchewan and to the whole of Canada.
Health Canada officials have filed a complaint against Dr. John O'Connor.
O'Connor alerted the media last year to what he believed was a disproportionately high incidence of colon, liver, blood and bile-duct cancers in patients who live in Fort Chipewyan, a small community downstream from major petroleum refineries.
In filing the complaint against O'Connor with the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Alberta, Health Canada did not explain the action, but said the doctor was causing undue alarm.
Meanwhile, physicians who work alongside O'Connor in Fort Chipewyan believe officials are targeting their colleague because his comments potentially threaten billions of dollars of investment in the province's oilsands.
Dr. Michel Sauvé, who heads the intensive care unit in Fort McMurray where O'Connor is based — he flies in to Fort Chipewyan on Tuesdays and Wednesdays — said doctors who identify potential public health problems should be protected rather than punished.
"Obviously, we need some whistleblower protection, some laws that will banish these kinds of repressive censorship. Punishing and trying to single out a physician to shut him up is not in the public interest," he said.
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Eugene, do you think that if this was happening to the unmarked bodies of white, middle class people that there would have a different response? To be sure, there would have been a large sprinkling of money.
ReplyDeleteIf one chooses not to know one does not have to do anything.
Last I heard, O'Connor was talking again. Also, they discovered it is not the tar sands but a uranium mine.
ReplyDeleteHowever, to me it seems that the government's complicity in cover up is obvious and intentional, at the expense of people's health and lives.
There are words for that crime: Ethnic cleansing ... genocide.