Like the Ontario school children currently banned from using cellphones in class, Premier Ford can’t put it away.

I think it was during the NHL hockey playoffs last spring that they first appeared. The PC television ads. They start with a peek inside somebody’s house, into his den. Then, we hear the voiceover of Ontario’s premier.

“Well, it’s the people,” Doug Ford says as he buttons his shirt and knots his tie. And he continues chatting on his cellphone, saying “Really busy, busy … for the people.” And he’s on his phone going out the front door, climbing into his car, going into businesses and on and on.

Did you ever stop to ask yourself who those people are he’s talking to? (more…)

In his 2009 book “Tainted,” Canadian author Ross Pennie explores the hypothetical likelihood of a regional health facility facing a sudden outbreak of mad-cow disease in a small Ontario community without any apparent explanation. The book is a thriller, an entirely fictionalized depiction of a system facing a medical crisis and widespread public panic right in our own backyard.

But Dr. Pennie admitted to me – and the audience watching our interview at the Whitby Pubic Library, Monday night – that he didn’t write this medical mystery as a slam against doctors or Canadian health facilities. No, he said, it was, in a way, medical teaching universities he was decrying.

“I’m not criticizing doctors or the medical system,” he said, “but I am knocking those in academe who would rather drag each other down than see any one individual scientist get credit for advancing the cause of medicine.”

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Ted Barris

author | journalist

Posts with the University of Ottawa tag

Is Ontario premier really listening?

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