 |
|
|
|
|
Subscriber pages
 News Desk
Columnists
Editorial
Readers comment
Tenders
Demo pages Here's a sample of what only subscribers see Subscribe now Subscribe to both hardcopy or internet editions of NNSL publications Advertising Our print and online advertising information, including contact detail. |
A strong fight for a good cause Yellowknifer - Wednesday, June 22, 2011
More than $213,000, a record amount for our city, was raised for the Canadian Cancer Society through the Relay for Life last week.
The 12-hour overnight event is more than a fundraiser, but an opportunity to raise awareness about cancer, the leading cause of death in Canada.
Those who participate gather to cherish the memories of loved ones lost to cancer and continue to build financial aid to find a cure, in addition to walking or running around a track.
In 2004, Yellowknife held its first Relay for Life cancer fundraiser, raking in close to $60,000 by 21 teams. Seven years later, almost double the number of teams participated, 43 teams with 463 participants.
The relay came shortly after Stanton Territorial Hospital Foundation's Protecting the Jewels of the North fundraiser, which raised money for prostate and testicular cancer services and programs at the hospital.
According to the Canadian Cancer Society, it's estimated that between 10,000 and 15,000 deaths could be prevented if 80 per cent of Canadians aged 50-74 were screened over the next decade.
With more than 40 survivors taking part in this year's relay, came stories of diagnosis, hospital gowns, conversations with doctors, hugs from family and tears of confusion, pain and after some excruciating journeys, tears of success and triumph in conquering cancer. Their stories are powerful.
We just want to hear fewer such accounts as this dreaded disease is overcome.
Yellowknife's skateboard park is better off elsewhere.
The rolling of wheels on concrete, metal grinding on rails, the pop of the deck's tail when it strikes the ground to lift the board into the air - this is the inherent ambiance of the sport. Unfortunately, these sounds are echoing into the homes of families living around St. Joseph School, where the skateboard park currently exists. At times, there's also the voices of the skaters, sometimes unnecessarily loud, sometimes using foul language late into the evening.
In an effort to reduce the noise, the city has surrounded the park with trees and a fence, but this shroud leads to other problems. Serious skateboarders go there to practice, but it's also been, throughout the years, a hangout for kids to go and drink or smoke marijuana, and a place where a rougher crowd has gone and started fights; unfortunately this is what can happen when an unsupervised area frequented by youth is shielded from the public eye.
City council is discussing several options for a new location, but the best choice is a lot near the Fieldhouse. It's far enough away from any residential area that noise will be less of a concern, and a relatively constant flow of traffic down Kam Lake Road will deter the park from being used by partiers, which would make it a more inviting and a safer place for skateboarders of all ages.
While the skate park is important to maintain for well-intentioned youth looking for a healthy pastime, the $500,000 minimum price tag attached to the project by the department of community services should be thoroughly vetted. The park ought to be moved when the city can afford it, so it won't accelerate the city's constantly increasing property taxes.
Skateboarding is a popular sport in the city. If our municipal politicians get the opportunity to invest in sporting facilities, this relocation should be a top priority.
The Kivalliq was awash this past week with the e-mail activity that always follows the battle for Lord Stanley's mug.
It was the usual hodgepodge of material, with some being downright stupid, some nonsensical and some just plain weird.
But the vast majority sent out over cyberspace were in good taste and really quite funny, including one from a dedicated Bruins fan declaring himself sovereign over the secessional state of Boston 2.0.
Irritating, however, were those trying to belittle people who cheered for the Bruins over a Canadian team.
Now let's get serious here for a moment, shall we?
To do that, we'll even forget the fact every Kivalliq fan reading this who cheers for the Toronto Maple Leafs would never root for the Montreal Canadiens, supposing they were the last Canadian team on the planet, let alone in one series against an American-based team.
The majority of players on every NHL team are still Canadians, and there was no shortage of good Canadian boys in Bruins jerseys hoisting Lord Stanley this past week.
I was pretty much ambivalent when the final series began.
I had no real affinity for either club and was just hoping the games would make up for what I found to be a playoff year devoid of much intensity.
This year's playoffs seemed to feature more soccer guys than hockey players, the way they were dropping to the ice as if shot every time an opponent touched them.
As the final wore on, I found myself cheering more and more for Boston.
The feeling reached its peak near the end of game six when Brad Marchand gave Daniel Sedin a series of love taps to the lips which garnered no response from Sedin or any other Canucks player.
By this point, the Bruins had put fear into the hearts of the Vancouver stars and it was no surprise when Daniel and his twin, Henrik, were both on the ice for every Boston goal in the final game.
There is a very vocal segment of the population who shake their heads at the Bruins' intimidation of the Vancouver stars on their way to victory.
If given their way, they would remove physicality from the game forever.
It makes me laugh when these same "fans" point to Wayne Gretzky's time with the Edmonton Oilers as a shining example of how the game should be played, based on the number of goals they scored.
Could you imagine the aftermath of a rival player punching The Great One in the mouth several times back then?
Thankfully, NHL owners need their teams to be successful to make money.
So as long as teams keep winning Cups with a physical brand of play, the march towards removing physical play from the game entirely will remain fairly slow.
One of the NHL's all-time builders, Conn Smythe, once said, "If you can't lick 'em in the alley, you can't beat 'em on the ice."
While those days may be gone forever in their purest sense, the waning hearts of the Canucks stars showed there's still a place for toughness at the game's highest level.
Toughness, skill and determination have long been the mantra of Canadian hockey.
And the Bruins' Stanley Cup win may have preserved that Canadian style in the NHL for, at least, a few more years to come.
Graduating 10 to 14 nurses each year, the program's results are easily visible in the territorial capital. Nursing vacancies are low in Yellowknife as new grads enter the workforce, bolstering the expertise at both the Stanton Territorial Hospital and Yellowknife Health and Social Services.
As the ranks of nurses swell and fewer position become available in Yellowknife, however, the health department must find creative ways to ensure that success remains a boon to the North.
The goal is to entice them to remain in the NWT rather than go south.
News/North has previously called for improving working and housing conditions as well as retention policies. While those privileges are essential to keeping nurses in Northern communities, solutions are needed to find ways to get new grads working outside of Yellowknife.
Understandably, new graduates don't necessarily have the expertise to fly solo at a community health station, which is why mentorship programs exist to prepare them with the needed skills.
The challenge is the lack of mentors in small communities. It's asking a lot to mentor a new grad while performing regular duties.
One solution would be to utilize the wealth of experienced nurses in Yellowknife. As capacity builds in the capital, seasoned nurses could become community mentors on a rotating basis, spending a couple months in the communities helping to bring new grads up to speed until they are ready to work on their own.
According to the Department of Health and Social Services, it takes about 18 months - depending on ability - to train a new grad for a community health nurse position. It may be unappealing to some nurses to give up a year and a half of their lives to train grads, but some may be willing to mentor for 12-week shifts. In the long run, it might mean filling the existing 16 vacant community health nurse positions with long-term, Northern-trained staff.
Marketing the communities for new nurses should be easy. There is no better environment for a fledgling nurse to develop a plethora of skills than in a nursing station, where duties will vary compared to specialized positions in Yellowknife.
MLAs often maintain two residences, one in their home community and one in Yellowknife, where they attend sessions of the legislative assembly.
Surely, none of the MLAs come home to mould in their walls, plumbing that doesn't always flow and heat that isn't always reliable.
Yet, that's the reality of some residents in NWT public housing.
Tu Nedhe MLA Tom Beaulieu said housing has been the number one issue in his home community of Fort Resolution since he was elected four years ago; it remains atop the list of problems today. He mentioned an elder who complained of a leaky roof in 2007 but it was only being fixed this year. Even worse, the delay caused mould to form and the house became uninhabitable.
That's unacceptable.
The GNWT is reducing its home repair budget to $5.6 million from $8.5 million in 2011-2012. How many more leaky roofs and mouldy homes will go neglected due to the fewer funds?
While some tenants in public housing are, unfortunately, guilty of damaging their homes and not paying rent, there are policy changes that can be made to address those issues. Leaving homes in an unsafe or unhealthy state is not right.
Beaulieu is a former president of the NWT Housing Corporation. He knows that of which he speaks. For the sake of his constituents in his riding and across the NWT, he must make the case for housing improvements with such conviction that his fellow MLAs cannot turn a deaf ear - and he could use the backing of people across the territory who are not going to stand for it any more.
The death of a family of four in what appears to have been a murder-suicide in Iqaluit has set off a chorus of calls for grief counselling, mental health services, and more support for child and family services.
Iqaluit city councillors have gone so far as to say Nunavut is in a mental health crisis.
According to the Nunavut Suicide Prevention Strategy released in 2010, RCMP responded to 983 incidents where people were reported to be threatening or attempting suicide in Nunavut in 2009. The suicide rate for Inuit is 11 times the Canadian average.
Meanwhile, in the recent session of the legislative assembly, Health Minister Tagak Curley stood up to dispute how he was quoted in the The Globe and Mail in April downplaying the severity of Nunavut's suicide rate, and came under fire for the lengthy delay in tabling an action plan to implement the Suicide Prevention Strategy released last October.
Iqaluit city council is not alone in wondering what could be done on their part to speed things along. As Coun. Joanasie Akumalik puts it, "When the government tries to do things, it's a bit slow."
These concerns are voiced in the Suicide Prevention Strategy document itself, which reports that during the community consultations, "informants spoke at length about the lack of implementation of government strategies, and were concerned that this one too would 'sit on a shelf and collect dust.'"
When released in October, the parties involved - the GN, Nunavut Tunngavik, the RCMP and the Embrace Life Council -- committed to drafting an implementation plan within 90 days.
Almost eight months and two sessions of the legislature have since passed without an action plan being tabled.
The basic tenets proposed in the strategy are to ensure mental health services and supports are in place, to introduce interventions that have been proven in other jurisdictions to reduce the number of suicides, and to foster community-development activities that promote mental wellness.
Suicide prevention is ineffective without mental health services, and mental health services include treatment for substance abuse.
In January, the Department of Health and Social Services put out a request for proposals for two residential treatment centres that would open this spring in pre-existing facilities already furnished and equipped. But then spring came and the department backpedalled, saying it would take years rather than months to do the planning and get the funding to get the treatment centres up and running.
These delays in getting badly needed mental health services to Nunavummiut are costing lives.
If the strategy is going to be put in place, the pressure has to come from people in every community telling every MLA that suicides have to be stopped and action has to be taken now.
Without that public pressure, the only thing the Suicide Prevention Strategy will do is what it has been doing for the past eight months -- collecting dust.
These include the homeless day shelter on 51 Street, Somba K'e Civic Plaza, and the redevelopment of a one block section of 50 Street on the west side of Franklin Avenue, completed in 2009.
"Streetscaping" of 50 Street was all the rage three years ago when the city's now defunct downtown enhancement committee held public meetings and bravely suggested the infamous "Range Street" be closed to traffic and spruced up with new paving, sidewalks, planters and decorative garbage bins.
It was even proposed the Gold Range Hotel be designated as a heritage site to lend a more trendy and tourism-friendly aura to the old rough and tumble saloon.
The original plan was to complete this portion in 2010 but it has since been bumped to 2012. In the meantime, the southern-based owners of the lower level of Centre Square Mall have barricaded its 50 Street entrance and the city's dream of bringing back the boutiques remains just that.
It's strange to think that just a few short years ago, this one block stretch was home to several successful stores: Langlois, Chic Chik, Wolverine Sports Store, For Men Only, not to mention the Bank of Montreal - despite the regular and common complaints about loitering, drunkenness and litter.
Not much was done to encourage new businesses to move in when these ones left and now more than ever this street is ground zero for all complaints businesses and residents have about downtown.
Part of council's solution, if we are to judge the amendments proposed to the city's zoning bylaw which passed first reading last week, seems to be more rules.
These rules would require larger, new developments to have pedestrian-friendly "amenity spaces" outside and other open or retails spaces on the ground floor for those on Franklin Avenue. It also calls on new buildings to have at least two complementary colours and no reflective windows.
Some of its contents seem reasonable enough, but considering the difficulties the city has faced selling land at Niven Lake and the Engle Business District in recent years, would not an encouraging carrot be more effective than a stick in attracting developers?
But more than that, the bylaw amendments are pointless if revitalizing downtown is what council is truly after.
The city points to the lost opportunity with the Gallery building replacement on Franklin Avenue, where some of its new schemes could have been applied had these amendments already been in place. But even if that opportunity has passed, the new building is better than the derelict structure that stood there before. Now that it's almost complete, we are not aware of a whole lot of new development plans in the downtown core to hyper-regulate.
The new Shopper's Drug Mart is done, and the federal government's building spree is over. It will likely be many years before any major building activity takes place downtown, which takes us back to streetscaping and the successes already evident.
People may say attempts to beautify Range Street will be thwarted by drunks and vandals but there is no hope to revitalize this street as it stands now. No business is going to build facades and patios unless there is the potential for pedestrian traffic.
More streetscaping will take place this summer on 52 Street adjacent to the new Gallery building and on Old Airport Road. We say the more the better, especially downtown.
It's a better remedy than focusing on bylaws for buildings that aren't being built.
For the past approximately five years some Fort Providence residents have been growing increasingly concerned about the amount of sports fishing taking place in the waterways around the community. The problem isn't local residents but rather tourists and visitors who either bring along their fishing poles for fun, or arrive with the express purpose of going fishing.
Local residents are worried about over-fishing and damage to spawning areas that could affect the catches some of them depend on as a seasonal food source. While the problem isn't great what's being done about it is.
Deh Gah Got'ie First Nation has listened to its members' concerns and has taken action. In partnership with the Fort Providence Resource Management Board, the band has hired six residents to act as monitors.
The monitors are creating a local presence on the waterways and using video cameras to record possible illegal fishing activity. The footage will be turned over to the Department of Environment and Natural Resources, or Fisheries and Oceans Canada for further investigation.
This is a clear example of self-determination. The First Nation has chosen a course that will allow it to have a measure of control over activities on its traditional lands.
The band could have chosen to ignore the issue or depended on the government to deal with the problem.
Instead local residents have been given the chance to participate in the reaction to an issue that directly affects them.
The First Nation's initiative is being noticed. Staff with Fisheries and Oceans Canada (DFO) will be holding a meeting in the community on Thursday, in part to listen to residents' concerns and possible solutions.
The options for more permanent solutions, however, make it evident that there is a need for more room for First Nation self-determination.
DFO has a number of ways it could restrict fishing in the areas the First Nation is concerned about if it becomes apparent there is a conservation issue. The problem is the restrictions would be applied equally to everyone.
The fish population would be secure from over-fishing by non-local anglers but local residents who were previously practicing sustainable harvesting would also have their catches limited. In helping to preserve fish, community members would be penalized.
A third way is needed to would allow Fort Providence residents to continue to fish in their traditional lands while the activities of non-residents would be curtailed.
After Deh Gah Got'ie Koe First Nation deals with the initial problem of over-fishing, this may be the challenge they have to tackle next.
However, in the rest of the communities there is only one permanent doctor and Inuvik is lucky enough to have her. There are 25.5 funded positions for the Beaufort Delta, Fort Smith, Hay River and Sahtu Health and Social Services Authority and only one is filled.
Yes, all these communities are served by locum doctors, doctors who stay for six weeks and then return to their southern homes.
None of them stay.
And why would they? Locum doctors get free flights to and from Inuvik and free accommodations during their stay. Permanent doctors receive a salary, health benefits, moving expenses, special allowances, but no extra perks.
How does this make sense? Why would the GNWT put its energy into providing perks for the temporary doctors and not the permanent doctors? Is it no wonder that locums, no matter how much they love the North, aren't willing to stay? The freedom and benefits they have now can't compare to a permanent position, which seems almost like a punishment in comparison.
The GNWT is relying on the love of the lifestyle and not acknowledging the competition of other jurisdictions doctors could work in. They are recognizing the challenge, but not acting on it.
The government should look at other Northern jurisdictions in the provinces and territories and see how they are recruiting doctors. What perks are they offering? Take the benefits they offer and one-up them. Offer more holidays, a number of free flights out per year, housing costs and even bonuses to keep doctors in the territory. It's basically what the government is offering locums, so why not offer it to the doctors who choose to stay in the territory?
Residents of the North need permanent doctors. With continuous care from one doctor, they will be healthier because the doctor knows their conditions, will have knowledge of their history and gain their trust through regular checkups, allowing the doctors to catch minor health problems before they become huge issues.
This will save the government money, too! –fewer medevacs from smaller communities, fewer specialists needed, reduced health care costs all around.
It's time for the GNWT to look outside of Yellowknife, notice the smaller communities and compare them to and compete with other jurisdictions. Bring doctors to the rest of the territory. We need them.
|
